#aquatica

by Alexey Kruglov

Alexey Kruglov • "Акватика: Коралловые рифы (Aquatica - Corral reefs) board game"

Illustrator, concept artist

artstation vk facebook deviantart

like how do I explain that a "Pokemon x RUST" game came out that was in alpha for multiple years and that while in development they left like 90% of the bugs in the game because people were buying it anyway. it's still named the default name in unreal engine when it's running on your computer (shootergame). it's so badly unoptimized that people having trouble getting the settings right is normal. the audio files are uncompressed. it's a huge game that takes up a fuckton of space on your hard drive. the music plays at full volume when launched. it's deafening

the game itself is very unforgiving and difficult to introduce people to. the resource curve is brutal and on official servers, it was not uncommon for a beach bob (new player) to spawn in and be enslaved by the dominant faction on the map and made to farm tributes for them or get chained to a toilet and forced to shit for fertilizer

at some point there was a VR ARK game that was so bad i don't even know that much about it. there's also an ARK arena game (survival of the fittest)

instead of fixing bugs or making the game itself easier, they just kept releasing DLC and printing money. there was a DLC you had to pay for that gave you access to a map that had 2 dinosaurs on it you had to pay an extra 5 dollars each to tame one. and people actually tamed those.

at some point, the developer Wildcard got bought by SnailGames, this will be important soon. my understanding of the timeline is pretty bad, so i'm just inserting it here

every story map had a few hundred explorers notes to unlock and there's an achievement for getting all of them. genesis 1 & 2 (dlc) came out and those dlcs added more explorers notes to every previous story map that are invisible and accessible only by equipping a dlc-exclusive "pet" that can reveal them

they teased a "soulslike" sequel with Vin Diesel that was supposed to come out in 2023 (hint: it still hasn't)

the studio presumably needed money, so instead of releasing ARK 2, a new version of ARK was released called ARK: Survival Ascended. it's just Survival Evolved with better graphics and more dinosaurs but you have to pay full price for it and it can't run on most PCs due to the aforementioned optimization issue that the original game had. mod authors who'd spent years on ASE either quit making mods entirely for the series or moved exclusively to ASA due to the space demands of having both games and both separate mod development programs

the studio shut down all official servers, making it only possible to play ASE on a a public unofficial server or through private hosts so that they could artificially encourage people to buy the new one instead.

and then. ohhhh. and then Aquatica was announced.

Aquatica was developed by a separate team than Wildcard and it was going to just be an unofficial mod map with a separate mod for its creatures, but at some point it was decided to be released as a fully official DLC for Survival Evolved as a celebration of 10 years of ARK

So SnailGames releases a fully AI trailer. And it was so bad that Wildcard themselves had to post on social media "we didn't make this one guys" because the community blew up

the video was hid pretty much within a few hours of going up, but here's an upload someone put up for it

if you think it ends there, you're so naive and i love that

anyway so then the actual trailer drops months later and everyone's like "looks bad guys" because it's basically just an asset flip

so Aquatica gets released on July 15th, 2025 and overnight it killed Survival Evolved

every mod? broken

unofficial servers that had been up for years and years at that point were also broken. Anything that needed mods to function no longer could

it was a bloodbath. vitriol the likes the studio had never seen before came pouring out of the community and over the last few weeks they've been desperately trying to do damage control and personally "fix every mod" as most of the mod authors no longer play ASE or would care to fix the mods

i read somewhere that they went from like 17k players to under 100 overnight when the update went live due to how many people were effected

it's been weeks and they still haven't been able to get the game back into a playable state

the updates they post on steam don't even get upvotes any more, just hundreds of angry comments

ANOTHER DE OC?!? WHATT. she's an aquarium. I have no backstory or name for her...gulps. design suggestions are welcomed! She's very much a wip..

GIFs for art fight practice ^_^

Sinikka's World 88 - The Clown, The Mime and The Mermaid

Aquatica meets Candy's cousin, that of course being Daffodil.  Aquatica barely knows about clowns despite dating a mime.