Ark: Survival Evolved (2017)

Ark: Survival Evolved is one of those sandbox games like The Forest, Atlas and Conan Exiles. While the concept of these games are fine and the survival element is surely present, it gets boring and repetitive really fast in my opinion.

In Ark: Survival Evolved, you start as an empty character without any skills. You collect stuff, build stuff and kill stuff to gather XP, level up, unlock perks and new skills and overall, just to be granted the right to do more advanced things in the game like tame a certain dinosaur or build a specific plank or wooden corner. Just go out into the wild and grind your way up.

The graphics are fair, although a little rough in my opinion. The lighting effects from the sun are great though. The animations of characters are stiff and lifeless, especially when doing things like sleeping or mounting your dinosaur pet. The music and sounds are blend and nothing special. They work and that is what matters.

But then, you got the controls and menu’s. My God, the overlay, GUI and skill tree system is so unbelievable confusing, it drove me mad sometimes. I constantly pressed the wrong keys to open or close menu’s, did not know where to find stuff, inventory management became a real chore sometimes, and I had the feeling that I was playing some sort of SQL database many times over. I sincerely did not like anything related to the controls or GUI.

The servers and matchmaking system in Ark: Survival Evolved are terrible. Many times, servers did not show up, games with friends were not visible and many times, the game got stuck in loading. I needed to search the deepest pits of the internet for all kinds of tweaks, fixes, startup parameters and more to finally get it working. And even then, one day it works fine, the day after one of my friends experienced the same issues out of the blue. I reinstalled the game three times over the course of a few weeks back then, because that was the only way that I could play with my friends.

The worlds are massive, which is normal for sandbox games like this. There are many forests, flowers, wildlife and rivers, which makes the game less hollow than Atlas, but it still feels blend and empty. You walk miles and miles through empty plains and forests before something of interest happens. Sure there are many dinosaurs in the vicinity, but most of the times, they one hit kill you so you avoid them like the plague. And although this is not necessarily bad, it was just tedious to walk and walk to a certain spot, knowing that every step could be your last. Sometimes, I got attacked by something that I did not even saw coming. One step was fine, the next I was dead. It was later revealed that this were some sort of very fast, tiny dinosaurs that ram and jump you when you get close. Maybe I am blind, but I still haven’t seen any of those motherf…. anywhere in the world.

The main reason I don’t like this game is because it is just one of the many games that follows the exact same play style and mechanics that become repetitive and boring so quickly. Make a character, collect plant fibers, build a tiny shack, level up, get more stuff, kill some dinosaurs (if they don’t kill you first), tame them, ride them and done. Although there is some kind of endgame by defeating or taming some almighty dinosaur, the game never really ends.

You can grind away until you become max level and tame all the dinosaurs in the world, but with this game, the purpose of doing this dies after taming your first dinosaur. Things feel pointless and I had the constant feeling that I can never “complete” this game. The same goes for games like Minecraft and Atlas. The main turning point is when I became so powerful that nothing is a challenge anymore and just grinding material.

Ark: Survival evolved can be tweaked in any way you like with mods or “legit” by server admin options, but that makes the game unstable sometimes and more importantly, it defeats even more purpose to play it. Don’t want to walk back to your corpse after dying? Just configure/tweak the game to keep all your stuff. Don’t want to walk? No problem, just activate flying. Your beloved dinosaur just died? No problem, bro; here I revived him for you. There are no clear rules, and everything can be avoided or made easier. Even when you play fair or vanilla, you constantly get the feeling that everything can be fixed or made easier later on when you encounter a difficult or tedious situation. There is no penalty and no consequence.

It is weird, but for me, only 7 Days to Die gets this survival sandbox genre right and keeps the game interesting for long periods of time. With Ark: Survival Evolved, I got three hours of fun before being bored out of my mind and I could not force myself to play it any longer.

Of course, this is still my own experience and opinion with the game, but personally I cannot recommend Ark: Survival Evolved.

A Word Of Warning

Look at this list:

• 31K
• 21K
• 20K
• 11K
• 11K
• 11K

I have never seen a game on Steam where people had over 10.000 hours in a game, let alone multiple players. This game has only been out for 5 years too, it's insane.

If you read reviews the game is actually even worse than you imagine, like a completely toxic version of EVE. There are some powerful clans on the official servers who completely ruin the game for new players - destroying their bases, killing their pets, blocking access to resources and even capturing them to use them as slaves (wtf). This is what Libertarianism would look like in real life. It's bizarre that this kind of thing is tolerated, because by the time you find out about you can't refund the game anymore.

The Actual Game Itself

ARK starts out pretty wonky. Nothing is explained so you either have to spend lots of time figuring it out or read the wiki. Especially the taming dinosaurs part is insane, as many of them require specific items and methods.

You start naked on a beach, punch a branch, pick up rocks and create a pickaxe. From there you learn new schematics as you level up and get more stuff. It's actually pretty interesting but it takes too long and you can easily lose all progress if you get killed and can't reach your corpse.

Everything takes too long because of the amateurish design. You can only move things you've built for like 60 seconds. After that you can only destroy them, losing all resources. Crafting is also clunky. If you want to cook meat you have to put them meat in the campfire inventory. And there's no button for this, the inventory button (E) defaults to "turn fire off" after you turn it on. Instead you access the inventory by holding E. This reminds me of how you had to jump through hoops to bind Workshop Mode to a separate button in Fallout 4.

Oh yeah, and while crafting you can't use items in storage - even if you opened the crafting menu while in their inventory. So you have to manually move items back to your own inventory. It's easy to see how people can get hundreds of hours on this game if you make everything clunky. And i haven't even gotten into how you apparently have to hand-feed dinosaurs every 8 hours to prevent them from dying.

Conclusion

This game is basically gives players the middle finger. There's the potential of a really cool game (a la Dino Riders) but it's buried under a thick layer of dino poop. Not to mention how unfinished it is. Textures popping in, dino's moving like stop-motion figures, bugs - they're too busy pumping out DLCs to actually get this out of beta.

I've quit Ark. This game is a lot of things and I had a great time playing it, but enough is enough, for me, this was an MMO addiction. However, my reason for quitting wasn't the addiction, it also wasn't a catastrophic in game event (liek a raid), but the increasing fear of it is why i quit.

I started solo player and then played with a friend. then we thought, 'hey lets join a public server with other people' So, we did that.

My friend found the game too time consuming, I however enjoyed it enough and decided to dedicate my time to it. I built a nice house, a base, got industry going (it's a bit like minecraft) and defended the place. I had another person help, but there was only so much we could do. It became almost like harvest moon in that we had constant chores to do every day. Very much like raising a farm.

So I got an offer to join an expanding tribe/guild. Four members. In the time I spent with them (about a week) they grew by two more members, and get assistance from another tribe. I seriously can't believe how much expansion and construction we did in a week, lol. Tribal relations and trade are a core part of this game. It's very difficult to make ends meet in it, very easy to die, and have things lost, so people tend to ask for help and assist aid as needed. It generally pays to do favors for people in this game. It's very rough and very unforgiving. And even when you figure it out, what tends to be dangerous and how to avoid making mistakes. There is always something that seems to go wrong in the game. It keeps you on edge constantly.

And when you are part of a bigger group? Well, there is just more work to do. Bigger groups should be more organized but its still constantly a chore to play this game. the resource gathering is just so grating:

The map isn't dynamic in every respect. It's more like skyrim, certain things tend to be in certain places. If there are camps around that metal ore that only grows in certain areas? Well, too bad. some of the resources are rare too. This is how the big tribes stay big and enforce their power. So, you might play for a bit only to realize you can't develop further because the powers that be control the caves, or certain areas (like beaver dams) Fortunately on my server, this wasn't an issue, and the bigger tribes were actually more like community vanguards than fascists... for the most part. I actually like the way they did this. I think SW paid careful attention to a lot of details and deliberately made the game hard and challenging. It has a very unique flavor. However some things are just absurd.

Taming and raising beasts is insane. High level creatures require people to feed them constantly and it's a huge project for multiple people. Someone has to get hte meat, someone has to hand feed it. This has to be done for like 6+ hours for a newborn baby. (hatching) some of the taming is just as bad. you will let your guild down for having to go to sleep at night. That's how nutty this game is if you want to get to the top in it. Ultimately this game asks a lot of people but it does that to provide a kind of balance. People will do a lot in this game to get ahead, so i guess this is how they provide some balance. The problem is:

ITS TOO EASY TO LOSE PROGRESS.

Most people don't really play this game for long. They build a house made of straw solo or wiht a buddy saturday night, log out and find it wrecked the next day. Or if they are particularly unlucky, also find themselves locked in cages unable to get out, and are told that they are slaves and have to do something for another tribe/player to get out (I have seen people beg for help in the public chat, yet they have no way of knowing where they are) Think of this game as a hardcore roguelike MMO. no, your character doesnt have permadeath but often the time you spend doing things DOES. And this is why i decided to quit the game. I dont want to deal with the emotional truama of loss when it comes. OMG. And with the latest pathc, I crash like crazy. The game logs me out, and sometimes my video card will just hang. This also happens only when I am flying my mount... The worst time to log out, because what happens? You get thrown of the mount, and that means you will die, even with a parachute, you will die...and your mount will, at some point eventually die if it's not set to auto attack or follow you....

The game punishes you even when you take precautions and play things safe like this. If the world of ark doesnt kil you, players will, if you have the strenghto f your tribE watching your back? well you're still gonna get glitched.

i'm making a delivery to a another tribe. Some dinosaur they want. (it's some trade the guildmaster setup. I don't know the deatils) I get logged out. I'm flying my clanmaster's level 50 quetz. (a high level mount) well, its too much for my card. the view distance or whatever, and i get logged. STrangest thing: in this game when you get logged on a flying mount ,and it's not set to follow you. The mount will fly to the very edge of he map. Fortunately hte beast was found by someone else in the tribe who went looking. and it didnt die. But if it did? That could have been a days worth of progress. gone. on a technical mishap. These arent rare occurences they happen constantly. And they Will happen. I dont want to play the game with them being made worse for me by the patch, and its also gotten me to think about the nature of losss in the game, and how i'm not emotionally prepared for it. SW is spending time on that free to play version 'survival of the fittest' i'd reccomend that instead. There is a rumor that when Survival evolved gets 'publicly release' (it's in alpha or something) they will wipe the servers and start fresh anyway. I might come back then. Might.I don't like the cost of this game, and if they wipe servers i dont really see that as attractive either. There are other rumors about serve shut downs from intellectual property, lawsuits, etc... hmm.

All that said. This game is pretty amazing. in both waht you can do in it and how it is designed. Some technical issues make me very uncomfortable investing my time in it though... I came across a thread on reddit called 'survival game genre' https://www.reddit.com/r/SurvivalGaming/comments/2... and thought it was cool its a thing. The game feels more like STALKER than anything else i know of to compare it. I didn't like DAyZ or h1z1 so much, but this game feels like a breathing ecosystem. It feels like a real place. If you clear cut the forest down, the trees grow back slowly. Sometimes you will see certain animals breed in season, if you kill them off, they wont come back as quick. Weather affects the player. What you are wearing determines your hunger/thirst and things like that. For me though, what i loved about this game was, I could build something in a persistent world. I made a raft, made a few things on top of it (fallout 4 lets you build stuff like this) then made it a house boat of sorts. Then i had plans to turn it into a full blown pirate ship. I took it raiding (at night under cover of darkeness) and would break into peoples houses on adjacent islands and take their stuff. I'd drag the bodies of the logged out players and put them in each other's houses to start drama and avoid the heat. I don't know of another game where you do things like that in an online world. I've stalked people in the game, followed them around and spied on them to see their routines and routes. I've looked around my area to see who lives where, dismantled some of the bigger infra of some of the guys i thought were getting 'too big too quickly.' Low level raiding helps a lot early in the game, because essentially other players do the work you yourself would have to do, but at higher levels, you can't be as discreet, and its much harder to break into places and get good loot. This is where diplomacy and people skills is handy. There are a lot of ways to play this game. And when you get a decent dinosaur mount? and hunt with it? like a carno a rex or a high level flyer? OMG that is a lot of fun just going around and hunting things, pacing yourself and levelling up your mount's stats and looking for a bigger dinosaur, as you go from carno to rex, to giga... It's an extremely adventurous game. Most satisfying is just wandering deeper into the island, in a new place and building a small house, then moving somewhere else. Seeing how far you can get with just basic things and moving from palce to place is quite a challenge. the endless gridning and building of infra though and actually 'estabilshing' yourself as a miltary force to be reckoned with iis made extremely taxing to anyone who actualyl wants to develop, and its absolutely impossible to do it on your own. the actual placement of structures is VERY finnicky and its easy to build things 'wrong' and have to start all over. Your investment is also at constant risk by acts of nature, acts of the the other powers that be, or acts of god. The risk dynamic is very unusual in the sense it is beyond your control, but I explained how i felt the bugs (acts of god) in the game were the straw the broke the camels back for me, because they seem to amplify the risk just too much. And with the recent patch, god has become very active in the game, and he has vengaeance for my sins from my days of raiding... and I just am not comfortable with the risk anymore. And now, some prior examination makes me leery of jumping back in due to the very high investment cost. The game is really cool but the game just asks too much of people.Survival of the fittest is not the same experience but it is still cool.