Ark: Survival Ascended sets you loose in a dinosaur-heavy world, either solo or with other online players. But can you also play it in couch co-op mode? If you’re wondering is Ark: Survival Ascended split-screen, I’ve got the answer.
Does Ark: Survival Ascended Have Split-Screen?
Ark: Survival Ascended is split-screen, supporting two players on the same platform. From my experience there are a few issues with it. This might be down to the game being in Steam Early Access on PC though, curiously, it’s not marked as Early Access/Game Preview on console.
Firstly, when you’re playing in split-screen mode, the text on the inventory menus is really, really small, so small as to be hard to read. Secondly, you might have issues with actually getting the second player to join, which I’ll discuss below.
How to Play Ark: Survival Ascended in Split-Screen Mode
The steps to playing Ark: Survival Ascended in split-screen mode are as follows.
- Start or continue a game, in single-player mode.
- Have the second player pick up or plug in a joypad and hit Start (the screen should split in two horizontally.
- Have the second player make their character.
- When they’re done, they’ll be playing in the same world as you are.
This method works whether you’re online or offline. Except, on the Xbox at least, I had problems. Sometimes this would work right away, other times I had to manually add a guest. To add a guest manually, do the following:
- Hit the Xbox button to open up the guide menu
- Go over to Profile & System on the far right
- Go down to Add or Switch
- Choose Add Guest
Your second player should now be playing. This will let you have two players playing locally, though there doesn’t seem to be a way to also go online with split-screen. But if you want some serious split-screen dino-riding, crafting or both, that’s how to do it.
So the answer to is Ark: Survival Ascended split-screen is yes, but since it’s an Early Access game you may run into the odd issue or two.
