The first episode of Night City Wire is now available!

https://youtu.be/ToWfeUEAeeQ

Join Hollie Bennett on a 25-minute trip to Night City involving the reveal of a brand new trailer, a fresh look at gameplay, plenty of developer discussion about the game with Paweł Sasko (Lead Quest Designer) and Patrick Mills (Senior Quest Designer), and the first look at a never-before-seen feature: braindance!

Last but not least, direct from Tokyo, Saya Elder (Producer) together with the team from Studio Trigger unveil CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS — an all new story set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077.

You don't want to miss it!

Break out your shades and catch some rays in the 2020 Summer Bash event. If you ever needed an excuse to celebrate summer and soak in some sun, we've got you covered. From June 25th to July 14th the second Summer Bash event will be underway. Spend your time relaxing by the beach in the new Hawaiian shirts or have a fight your tribe using the new water-gun skin. However you choose to spend your summer in ARK, Summer Bash is bound to cook up a lot of entertainment.



Server Settings
-activeevent=Summer

Event Start
PC: 10AM PDT
XBOX & PS4: 1PM PDT

Rate Boosts

• 3X Breeding (mating interval, egg hatch speed, and maturation)
  
• 4X Player XP
  
• 4X Harvesting
  
• 4X Taming

New Emotes

• Guitar Riff
  
• Drum Solo
  
• Head Banger

New Skins

• 4 new Hawaiian-style shirt Skins
  
• 3 new Swimsuit Skins
  
• BBQ-themed Grilling Spatula (Club Skin)
  
• Frisbee Skin (Boomerang)
  
• 1 Sunglasses Skin w/ customizable lenses
  
• Super Soaker style Squirt Gun Skin (Flamethrower)

New Chibi Pets

• Manta
  
• Ammonite
  
• Cnidaria
  
• Plesiosaur
  
• Astrocetus

Event-Colored Wild Creatures

• Dino Dark Blue
  
• Red
  
• White
  
• Dino Sky Blue
  
• Dark Red
  
• Blue
  
• Light Grey
  
• Cream
  
• Cammo
  
• Orange
  
• MediumTeal
  
• DarkBlue
  
• LemonLime
  
• Peach
  
• Coral

The event kicks off at 10AM PDT.




With the start of the 5th Anniversary event, we implemented some changes to the way our servers calculate growing baby dinos. By distributing these calculations we can recover some of the performance costs related to breeding calculations, which is quite cost-intensive.

In more technical terms, we have done this by measuring the stress on a server with each tick and batching the actors to process their breeding calculations over the course of several ticks rather than all of them on every tick. For a server that is already in a stable state not much might be noticed, but for a server under intense stress players may notice that breeding calculations, and the initial start of mating may be a little delayed.

The good news is that players should notice less performance issues during boosted breeding rates. Servers will always be put under extra strain during event rates, especially so in regards to breeding rates but we've sought to minimize that with these changes and we've noticed some positive improvements.

If you are on a busy server and experiencing some delays, this is why and we're currently iterating on this so these response delays don't feel like as much of a disruption.



We're moving the Community Crunch back to Friday's! In addition to moving the Crunch back to Friday's, we'll start to feature community content in the Community Crunch rather than its own separate day. If you are creating or sharing ARK content, be sure to tag it with #playARK for a chance to be featured!



Kick back enjoy a great start to your summer with the ARK Summer Sale. For a limited time, ARK will be up to 80% off!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/346110



While Summer Bash is active from June 25th to July 14th, there will be no special EVO event rates.

Summer Bash Rates

• 3X Breeding (mating interval, egg hatch speed, and maturation)
  
• 4X Player XP
  
• 4X Harvesting
  
• 4X Taming

Crystal Griffin by @bluedragonark


Fire Reef by @ProjectTiamat


ActualBlack Megatherium by @TiiaAurora


Argentavis on Genesis by @PicturesofArk


Epic Viking Longhouse by @ThePilgrimz


Wyvern Drawing by @RunsWithPencil



See you next week!

Studio Wildcard

Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark
Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark
Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark
Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark
Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark
Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110
Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark

The world of Reisum is deceptive in its nature. From the frost covered mountain peaks to the snowy tundra, it is a thing of beauty. The ice and snow sparkle as they reflect the rays of light from the world's distant sun. However, the bitterly cold temperatures and almost unrelenting winter makes life on the surface of Reisum nearly unbearable. Prolonged exposure to the surface temperatures has been known to take the life of even the most unwavering and resolute warriors.

The only thing deadlier than the temperatures of Reisum is its inhabitants. The most brutal are known as Urikki, giant warlike creatures baring a slight resemblance to the rodents of earth. The Urikki have become the dominant force on this world due to their strength and ferocity. The Urikki descended from the more numerous and smaller creatures known as the Emin. The Emin still exist, living much as they always have, below the surface in networks of tunnels known as Warrens. Many years ago, the first and greatest of the Urikki, Magir, swore a blood oath to his dying mother that the Emin would pay for their misdeeds. To this day, the Urikki's vengeance often takes the form of raids on Emin's Warrens in the middle of the harshest winter months.



"Remember the great deeds of those long-forgotten; for their lessons are hard won. The blood of the few are too often spilled for the many. Let not their bones turn to dust and presume ourselves courageous… yet live timid beneath their shadows." - Atul, Speaker for the Dead

Urikki tribes often employ ice skiffs to ply the vast distances of the open steppes. These long, slender vessels are adorned with runes and pictograms exalting the clan's greatest deeds and celebrate its bravest warriors. The tribes of the Black Tundra have even been known to live on larger versions of these graceful vessels. A caravan of these ships skating across the frigid ice floes is truly a sight to behold.



"We gather stones to commemorate our glorious dead. Each stone used in the afterlife to build the Great Hall of Varussk. Each stone to mark a single tear for their passage from this world to the next. Like stone, their deeds remain unbroken, like stone their memories everlasting. We, the Urikki, remember… and follow in glory!" - Osvek, Hakun of the Northern Steppes

Next week we plan to deploy Patch 3.11.1 and will preview its patch notes next week. In the meantime, we wanted to provide some general indication of what we're working on in the immediate future. While not all of these changes will be in next week's patch, we'll aim to get as many of them in as possible.

In case you missed them, we've already released several small updates with improvements to Harvest. You can find them here[www.pathofexile.com], here[www.pathofexile.com], here[www.pathofexile.com], here[www.pathofexile.com], here[www.pathofexile.com] and here[www.pathofexile.com].

• We're working on a new reward item that can drop from both Harvest monsters and the Final Boss. There are several variations of it that you can receive randomly. It has a limited number of uses and can be placed within your garden to produce more Lifeforce from nearby plants, create luckier crafting outcomes, or provide a chance to generate additional crafting options for each of the ones you planted. We're brainstorming other stuff it could do also.
  
• The colours of growth meters on plants have been improved so that it's easier for colourblind players to differentiate between Wild and Primal plants. We are also investigating changing the UI artwork of these so that you can tell the difference more easily without relying on colour.
  
• We've added stairs to the terrain around the Sacred Grove's portal to improve its accessibility.
  
• Increased the number of seeds that drop in maps, particularly mid-tier and rarer seeds. You now receive a lot more seeds from the highest-tier maps.
  
• Harvest Crafting options will be sorted by their tier rather than their Lifeforce cost and will also be grouped together by their crafting type.

• The final boss fight will guarantee that you receive a few of the new reward item mentioned above.
  
• Improved various mechanics to enhance the feeling of the fight.
  
• Adding debuff icons to signal when the boss' debuff has been applied to you.
  
• Adding a progress percentage value that indicates how close you are to the next boss respawn.
  
• Improving various visual components of the fight.
  
• Improving the boss' AI so that it's less likely to move onto ground effects and more likely to leave them.
  
• Fixed various bugs associated with this fight including the boss being able to get stuck within vine walls.

We're continuing to steadily improve the Vulkan Renderer and would ideally like to get it out of Beta prior to our September launch. Please continue to send reports to us on the bug report forum and we will continue to fix them as soon as possible.

Thank you for all of your feedback since Harvest's launch. We really appreciate it.

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/1091500/announcements/detail/2532660999948124250]here[/url].

Watch the brand new trailer showcasing the world, characters, story, and action of Cyberpunk 2077!

https://youtu.be/ixl31324UxE

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/238960/announcements/detail/2540542299294311934]here[/url].

Now that we've launched the Harvest expansion, we have completed two of our four expansions scheduled for this year. As many of you know, Harvest's expansion deployed a week later than our usual schedule and we want to outline what this delay means for the rest of the year.

Normally we operate on a 13-week development cycle, launching one expansion per season. These expansions always occur in March, June, September and December. Since Harvest required 14 weeks of development, this means that if we do not adjust our schedule, the September and December expansions would hit quite late in these months. For the September expansion, this would likely be fine but for the December expansion, it would be dangerously close to Christmas when many of our staff would be taking time off to spend with their families. Fewer developers would be on standby to help out if any issues arise.

Our plan to mitigate the potential impact of a late December launch is to launch our 3.12 September expansion just 12 weeks after the launch of Harvest. It's a much larger league than Harvest, so we had to begin work on this expansion about a month early. We believe we can successfully launch within this time frame. This would also mean that if everything goes well, our December expansion can also occur earlier and leave more room prior to the holiday period.

This is all still subject to change so don't book your time off until we can confirm the launch date more firmly, but we're hopefully looking at the middle of each launch month.

At some point this year, we're also hoping to make a Mac OS port available! The release of Vulkan on the PC version has been necessary for us to get the testing required, as Vulkan will be the renderer we use on Mac OS.

When we announced Path of Exile 2 last year, we mentioned that the earliest an early Beta could occur might be late 2020. This is definitely not happening this year, due to significant schedule delays due to the pandemic. We have been focusing on keeping our leagues coming out as close to on time as possible, and this does mean some delays for the sequel. We are looking forward to our next announcement about its upcoming content, and we'll keep piling on any technology improvements we can make into the existing Path of Exile client.

We are very excited about the year ahead. The difficulty of developing Harvest from home was immense but culminated in a league that we are very proud of. This makes us extremely optimistic for managing the year ahead and continuing to deliver on the high standard of Path of Exile expansions that you've come to expect.

Thank you so much for all of your support and patience while we've worked through the challenges of this year. We really appreciate it!