It pretty much is. They charged you for every new GTA didn’t they? Same with any number of games. It’s more then just transferring files. The game will pretty well have to be rebuilt from the ground up to work on the new engine. More over who would want to jump though the hoops necessary to convert 5 year old content to work on the new engine?
True, they are shutting down their officials. Knowing Wildcard they will likely make their save files available for people to transfer to private games. They did it with the legacy cluster servers, I can see them doing it again.
But, all games eventually die and are shut down.
True enough, but this clearly isn’t that. This is designed explicitly to push pre-sales of a new version of the game they had originally said would be out this year, and now won’t be at least until the end of 2024, possibly beyond. And because of how it’s being bundled, no refunds for you if it’s delayed again.
This is purely a marketing move to strong-arm players into rebuying what they’re playing now and locking them into an upgrade that is at least a year and a half away.
The upgraded game, Ascension is released in August of this year, the Ark 2, the new game is the one pushed to late 2024.
Sure, I could agree that packaging them isnt a great idea for exactly your reason - who knows when it will be released. But I kinda feel thats the way the gaming industry is going. Its not much different then buying into a game in “alpha” and waiting 10 years for it to be released (cough cough Star Citizen lol)
I think it boils down to how much a person loves a game and if they dont mind supporting it. Games with these “seasons” or “ages” and the “battle passes” that go with them to me are shady, so its up to each player to make the decision to spend money on a game or not. Yes I realize thats different then the Ark situation, but its still the concept of supporting a company for their change in minds.
I love Ark, love every aspect of the PVE side of that game. I got no problem buying it again with all the DLC’s for a better running, better looking and improved game (there is a list of upgrades to the game including its building!!). Id have to think the people that have sunk 5-10k hours feel the same too.
I think supporting a game is fine, and ultimately it centers around how much value you’re getting for what they’re providing. The bad aftertaste I’m getting is how they’re approaching it.
One approach would be “hey, we’re rebuilding the game to use UE5, and if you’d like to use a version with better performance and visuals, you’ll be able to buy this”. But by combining it with QoL and system changes, and shutting down existing servers, it feels more coercive than simply giving their loyal playerbase an opportunity to support them.
For me, that’s very different than “here’s this battle pass system that’s entirely optional, which offers nothing but cosmetics and if you want to participate, it’ll cost you 10 bucks, once.” But I realize everyone has different perspectives on what does and doesn’t push the envelope.
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I asked one of the developers about this when UE 5 was introduced. Yes, the UE that CE uses is heavily customized. You can say it is a cross between the UE 4 and UE 5. Some of the UE 4 components have been upgraded with ones from UE 5. You might say that they cherry-picked what they needed. In doing this, upgrading to a new version of the UE has since become impossible.
If Funcom does choose to release Version 2 of CE, it will be on a newer version of the UE.
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