Last week we reported on the news that Early Access hit Ark: Survival Evolved had received its first expansion 'Scorched Earth'. One that provided a new area, new creatures, new items, and new challenges. The only real question, and one that many had, was why were they releasing an expansion when the core game wasn't even finished? A natural response, and one that in the ensuing days led to Ark: Survival Evolved's community rating on Steam go from 'Mostly Positive' to 'Mostly Negative'.

People were upset. And to make matter worse, in a response that has since been deleted, a member of Wildcard basically verbally disseminated a fan's reaction and disappointment with a barrage of words that more or less boiled down to, "Hey, we're allowed to do this and charge people" and "You all just want things for free, that's why you're upset."

Yeah, that didn't go down well. You can see the exchange here.

And so now we have the official, level-headed response from Wildcard.

We'd also like to provide our official take on the Scorched Earth Expansion Pack, and the future of ARK. Put simply: we are absolutely committed to driving aggressive development towards a solid, feature-robust game launch for ARK: Survival Evolved. Everyone at Wildcard wakes up every day thinking about how we can make ARK into a better game today than it was the day before. It’s not always easy, but our intent is ever-forward progress towards a retail release that will be far more ambitious in scope and features than our original vision when we launched ARK into Steam Early Access in June 2015. Your feedback enables us to continually expand the game to become better than ever!

Scorched Earth: Our original vision for ARK always included the creation of Expansion ARKs, along with the infrastructure and technical systems to transfer data dynamically between live ARKs. We determined that it is more sound to iterate on these systems during Early Access than after retail launch, given the significant risks involved if we didn't "get it right". While that meant unveiling the first Expansion early, it also means an easier time integrating further post-launch Expansions into the ARK network. We understand that this isn't everyone's cup of tea, and we appreciate the enjoyment people seem to be getting out of this initial view of how Expansion ARKs can work. Now that we have the systems in place to support them, we can ensure minimal integration issues with subsequent releases after ARK: Survival Evolved itself has launched.

Yeah, that sounds good and all. But the question remains, when will it be finished?