Ark Xbox One Gets First Update, Adding Prehistoric Kangaroo and More

Studio Wildcard on Friday pushed out the first "major" update for the Xbox One version of dinosaur-survival game Ark: Survival Evolved. The update introduces a new creature, the hulking, rideable prehistoric kangaroo, as well as a number of changes and optimizations to the base game.

The kangaroo creature, the Procoptodon, is already available in the PC version of Ark. The beast can use its powerful hind legs to jump over elements in its way. In addition, one player can control the kangaroo while another can sit in its pouch and pop out to shoot enemies. Video games are great.

Ark launched on Xbox One in the middle of December and racked up 1 million downloads very quickly, though some of these were probably for the free, trial version. The full game, available in an unfinished state through the Xbox One's Game Preview program, sells for $35.

Studio Wildcard also announced today that it's added 100-plus additional servers.

Today's Ark Xbox One update brings the console version to content parity with the PC edition up to v231.9. This includes:

• Dino rebalancing
• The addition of a primitive cage and stone fireplace items
• Fixed Cave Loading crash/fall-thru
• Improved performance: better framerate, less stalls
• Fixed crosshair not appearing
• Fixed potential loss of character save data in local mode
• Fixed fur armor colorization
• Improved speed of server listing
• Fixed Taming Dinos losing Inventories/messed-up-Inventories upon reloading single player save game
• Fixed a memory leak that was typically causing crashes around the Volcano area

This won't be the last update for Ark's Xbox One version this year. Studio Wildcard plans to deliver split-screen mulitplayer support on Microsoft's console sometime early this year.

The full, finished version of Ark is scheduled to arrive this summer for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.