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Studio Wildcard has partnered with Epic Games to bring the full power of Unreal Engine 4 tools and development resources to the Ark: Survival Evolved modding community with one of the first custom mod editors. The open-world dinosaur survival game achieved wild success in just 30 days of Early Access on Steam, selling more than 1m copies.
“Ark provides a brilliantly creative universe for modding, and a wealth of beautiful environments and dinosaur content to build upon,” says Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic. “Many of us here began in the mod community, so we’re grateful to see Wildcard open up their creative work to a new generation of programmers, artists, and designers.”
Anyone who has purchased Ark can begin modding immediately with the free UE4 mod editor. Wildcard offers a “How To Mod” tutorial, and both Epic and Wildcard support the Unreal Engine Ark Modding forum. Videos about the process can be found on youtube.com/unrealengine. Devs can find content in the Unreal Engine Marketplace, and then share their creations with the Ark player community using Steam Workshop.
“As we’ve opened up the world of Ark to everyone, we’ve been seriously on the edge of our seats with anticipation. The amazing gameplay ideas lighting up the forum conversations can be turned into reality right away,” remarks Jesse Rapczak, co-founder and co-creative director of Studio Wildcard.
“The UE4 mod tools that we’re providing are phenomenal, and we can’t wait to see the limitless creativity of our fans come to life in fantastic new ways.”
A thriving mod community can act as a force-multiplier on a game, often going far beyond the original developer’s creation both in size and scope.
UE4 has been designed with modding in mind. As such, anyone can access the complete UE4 source code, easy-to-use tools, tutorials and documentation for free.
Devs can distribute their games, and mods for them, to anyone and through any channel. They can redistribute customised versions of the Unreal Editor, and, if desired, UE4 source code freely to the UE4 community through Epic’s GitHub repository and the Marketplace.
It is up to the developer of each moddable UE4-based game to decide whether and how mods may be sold for that game.
