Jump to content

ARK REVIEW!


prodigy1202

Recommended Posts

Before you say anything, yes, I know you can make reviews of Ark on Steam, but I may have kinda hit the character limit. So in order to do a true in depth review of Ark I'm gonna post it on here!

So here it is:

Whether I would recommend this game to somebody is a complicated issue. I know for a fact that I would never recommend Ark on PC unless you have one that has literally never dipped below 60 fps in its lifespan. I recommend above all that you ONLY get this game on either Xbox One or PS4. Unless you have an extremely expensive and powerful computer this game WILL NOT RUN. Whenever I open this game on my computer it's as if I'm watching a slideshow. The devs say that they're working on optimizing the game, but they've been saying that for two years, so just save yourself the time and get it on console. The devs have more control over hackers and cheaters on console anyway. As of now I'm going to go through every aspect of Ark Survival Evolved to list the pros and cons of the game.

When you enter the player world you will be met with a character creation screen. Despite this, the character creation is cartoonish and really unnecessary. Because of the lack of ability to sculpt the player face at all, you end up looking like one of two people, the skinny guy, or the roid rage guy. Even the female character has this problem. It's on a slider based system, which you'd think would allow for some creativity, but it really doesn't. I'm not sure that this is very high on the developer's fix list, but I would rather have no character creation whatsoever in this game than have whatever THIS is.

Now although that last part was pretty scathing, Character creation is an incredibly small part of the game. Once you finish creating your character and actually get onto the solid ground of one of the four currently available maps, you will find that this game can be fairly nerve wracking for somebody who has never played or seen gameplay. Many of the creatures will be unfamiliar and you may not know what is aggressive and what isn't. That's not really the problem though. If there is one thing that Ark requires, It's  PATIENCE (this is one of the reasons that you should not really listen to the people who played 7 hours of this game and wrote a bad review on it). It will take you a long-ass time to progress, and that, to me, just made it all the more satisfying when I did. I played on the hardest difficulty and got killed a double digits amount of times before I managed to build myself a wooden house that could stand up to the attacks of a midsized carnivore. If you're a patient person than this game is for you. I definitely recommend starting off on Singleplayer to get your sealegs before getting onto multiplayer (we'll talk more about multiplayer later)

The progression system in the game is truly unique and will be the template for many more survival games in the future. When you level up you gain "Engram Points" which you both use to upgrade your players stats and to unlock more crafting recipes. The player level goes up to 100, with one exception, which I will once again go over later. The interesting thing about the Engram points is that there is not enough of them to unlock every recipe. You need to decide what's necessary to you and what isn't. The other option is that you can invite friends over to play on a regular basis or set up a private server for all of you to play on as a tribe. The more players means the more engram points for the tribe and therefore means that this game HIGHLY RECOMMENDS TEAMWORK. However, in my opinion, the game is just as fun alone. I think this is a creative way to build up a tightly knit community.

Progression and the constant threat of death are not actually the main reasons that this game requires a lot of patience. One of the most slow parts of the game is when you're taming an animal. You tame different animals in different ways, but the main parallel between these different strategies is that you need to feed the animal until their "taming bar" is full. For smaller creatures this may just take a couple of minutes, but for the larger animals on the island, this can take HOURS. The longest tame in the game will take 28 hours. Yeah...it's that extreme. While on the surface this is absurd, it does encourage players in different timezones to work together and make sure that there's somebody on the server to work on the tame at all times, and in a single player world, time doesn't pass when you log out so you just need to be patient enough to do it. The other part of this is that in the main menu for the game you can turn up the multiplier on taming speed and make the process take far less time. This kind of tame took me 6 hours. It's a long time, but it's way more reasonable now. It's just one day's work as opposed to a full week. 

Surprisingly enough there is yet ANOTHER  reason that this game requires a lot of patience. The grind. Players will spend a large amount of the time in game grinding away for resources, however, like how you can decrease taming time, you can also increase the amount of resources you get. I have done this so that I can have more fun building than gathering. If you're playing the game without any multipliers than you're going to want to have a fairly large group of friends all around the world to help you tame and gather resources if you want a truly impressive base.

Now let's say you can deal with all of that and you have a hundred hours logged into the game. You have some big creatures tamed and you're proud of it. Good for you! Now is when you begin to notice all of the incredibly inconvenient bugs and glitches in Ark Survival Evolved. Don't get me wrong, I do love this game, but these bugs and glitches have not changed since it first dropped on Early Access two years ago, and the game was released just a few days ago, with the developers knowing that these bugs and glitches were there. I am going to list a few of the more infuriating bugs:

Getting stuck on dinosaurs or groups of dinosaurs. If you walk into a dinosaur while riding another dinosaur it is extremely likely that you will get stuck. You won't walk though them, you won't get stopped by them, you'll actually get your dinosaur's hit-box stuck in the other creature. This can only be fixed by getting off your dinosaur, whistling for it to follow you and walking in the other direction. You can imagine how impossibly aggravating this can be if your fighting a large group of dinosaurs. It's an easy way to lose tamed dinosaurs.

Items falling through the world. There are some areas of the map (very small areas, but very numerous) where if you drop items, in order to arrange your inventory, they will fall out of the world never to be seen again. I lost 400 Metal Ingots this way. I thought it just glitched through the ground when in reality there was a constant hole that only items could fall through.

Animals falling out of the world. If you tame any animal and use a rock or cliffside as leverage, if you ever go out of render distance that animal will fall through the floor of the world never to be seen again. This happened to me with a Spinosaurus. It was a lvl 145 which is incredibly hard to come by.

Now there are other things that you'll notice that are not necessarily glitches with your tamed dinosaurs that will drive you insane. First off, if you put your dinosaurs in passive mode because you don't want them attacking anything that hits you (like it would in Neutral mode) if your dinosaur is attacked it will simply stand there and die. I have lost numerous dinosaurs this way as well. It would be far more productive for the animal to at least run away from whatever was attacking it. 

What is probably the most complained-about part of the game is the frames per second. Now Ark runs absolutely atrociously on PC. If you get more than 30fps regularly then you must have one of the most advanced gaming computers known to man. The game runs far better on Xbox One and PS4, which is why I recommended that you play it on those consoles at the beginning of this. Even so, there is one large area on the map that I play on that I cannot enter, solely because there are so many entities being spawned in at once, that I cannot get more than 1fps or sometimes less. Typically, if I avoid this area, the game runs at a smooth 30+ fps.

Now let's talk about my least favorite part of the game. You have a massive dinosaur army and a few friends and you're ready to take on a boss. You take your entire army to where you get teleported to the first boss chamber, only to find out that that Bronto with machine guns mounted on its back that you worked so hard for cannot come with you, nor can the massive and insanely powerful Giga. The Giga is the strongest carnivore in the game and because it cannot be used in boss fights, it is essentially overkill and therefore useless in single player. You may not think this is a big deal, but it actually manages to exclude a fairly large amount of creatures from being brought into boss fights, forcing the players to only ever be able to use the same strategy over and over for fighting each boss (with the possible exception of the fourth and final one in the main game.

First let's talk about the list of animals that cannot be brought into the boss chamber: Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, Giganotosaurus, Megalania, Paraceratherium, Rock Elemental, Thylacoleo, and Titanosaurus are all excluded from all boss arenas for varying reasons. Brontosaurus, and Paraceratherium both have platform saddles, which means that you can mount weapons and other defenses on their back. This, in my opinion, would make for a fun and interesting battle strategy in any boss arena, but I can see why it would be a problem, if players were bringing hundreds of machinegun turrets into boss arenas and absolutely smoking the bosses.  Titanosaurus has a platform saddle, but I believe is also restricted for entering because it's basically as strong as some bosses in its own right. This is the same problem that Giganotosaurus has. It's attack damage is so insane that bringing in more than one or two Gigas would be overkill for a boss arena. The same goes for a Rock Elemental. Thylacoleo and Megalania are both restricted from entering the boss arena because they are 'too mobile.' The player can climb out of the range of the boss and its minions, allowing the player to heal up before going in for round two. Personally, I don't think this is a very good reason for these two animals to be restricted, since all of the bosses have ranged attacks for enemies that they cannot themselves reach.

Those are not the only creatures that are prohibited, however. You also may not bring in Argentavis, Dimorphodon, Icthyornis, Lymantria, Onyc, Pelagornis, Pteranadon, Quetzal, Tapejara, and the Wyvern. It should be noted that all of these creatures CAN enter the Manticore DLC boss arena, but cannot enter any of the main boss arenas. The thing that they have in common is that they're all fliers. I can see how having the ability of attacking the boss from above would be a bit unfair in the boss arena, but I don't see how having a Dimorphodon, Icthyornis, Onyc, or Pelagornis in the arena would help you at all since you can't fly on any of them. Hell, the Dimorphodon is small enough to be carried around on your shoulder!

Now that you've read over all of the creatures that cannot be brought into the boss arena I hear you saying "But, Prodigy! It sounds like all of these are valid reasons to have these creatures banned from those arenas...well except for the small unrideable fliers thing..." And yeah, they are all valid reasons to do that, and I definitely see the problem that the developers had with allowing a Giganotosaurus into the arena. The main problem that I see, however is that instead of changing their boss fights to make them harder, they limited the amount of strategies that the players could use. In case you didn't know, the bosses in Ark, don't actually get that much harder from one to the next, not compared to how much stronger the player might become between those bossfights. Here is what I would recommend to the devs. Think about the kind of army that a player might bring into the broodmother fight. Since the broodmother is the earliest boss I'd say that the player has maybe a few Rexes, and a platform-saddled Bronto or two! So make the broodmother able to stand up to an army like that. Sounds easy enough. Then make the Megapithecus much harder. I know that the Megapithecus has more health and has stronger minions, but that's not really enough. For this boss fight let's say the player has a small army of Rexes around the ankles of two Gigas with a high level bronto being used as artillery fire in the back with lots of machineguns. That can be what the Megapithecus is able to go up against. Now obviously you would need to make the Dragon boss much harder. At that point, the player may have a small Army of Gigas and a couple of battle brontos, with players with rocket launchers on the back, and let's now say that some of the players have some smaller pieces of tek armor. That would widen the power gap enormously between the Broodmother, Megapithecus and Dragon. As for the fliers, just give the bosses some new attacks that are good against fliers? Idk really what the problem would be with doing that... By the way, what I just described would be the bosses on the easiest difficulties. I think this would make the boss fights way harder, but also way more exciting. 

TL;DR: Developers, instead of limiting the ways that a player can enter a boss battle, make the bosses stronger and increase the variability in their attack strategies to deal with different player strategies. As it stands, the boss AI is kinda predictable and repetetive. (Also, I don't really care if you allow the Titanosaur in the arenas. I get that that's more of a Siege Dino, and since it's a temporary tame I don't really find it to be worth my time to try and tame)

So now I've pretty much competed my review of the singleplayer. Time to deal with the Multiplayer...oh boy.

Ark can be kind of paradoxical when it comes to multiplayer. The game very much encourages multiplayer interaction and cooperation, as I previously stated, however this is not the case with multiplayer servers. The servers differ between Official Servers and Unofficial Severs. Both have their problems. Let's start with the Unofficial servers:

Unofficial servers often have server admins that used console commands to get their tamed dinosaurs and their entirely tek super base. This is, however one of the more benevolent ways that they may use their unlimited power. Sometimes a server admin might say "hmm...I'm feeling like an asshole today! I'm gonna summon the Dragon on the head of this noob with a wooden house and two raptors!" which, yes, they can do. This happens more often than you might think on Unofficial servers. The admins become incredibly drunk on power and basically take away all of the fun in Ark for the sake of their own enjoyment. Surprisingly though, Unofficial servers are not really the problem with Multiplayer.

Official servers ALWAYS have one tribe that is dominant over all of the others. These tribes are basically the fascist governments of those server! As rediculous as it may sound, these mega tribes do not like much (if any) competition for resources on their servers. If they see that somebody has set up a mining outpost somewhere that the megatribe likes to mine, that player is going to be killed, have everything they own destroyed, and all of their tames killed. It is incredibly rare that these megatribes are ever benevolent towards players just starting out. Basically the only way to survive on an official server is ask to be part of a megatribe and if they say no, then you're screwed, and if they say yes, then you're still just going to have immediately have progressed through the entire game with little-to-none of your own effort, which is just not fun. I must also adress the issue of "chinese hackers taking over Ark." This is an issue that I am very careful about discussing. If there's one thing worse than megatribes, it's hackers. And there are many players that claimed to have their bases destroyed by chinese-speaking players that were able to fly on their own and kill dinosaurs with their fists. I personally feel like if this was really a problem then the devs would have fixed it by now, but then again, there are plenty of problems with Ark that the devs have simply failed to deal with, such as the bugs and glitches that I mentioned earlier. 

There is one last problem with multiplayer, the ability to take creatures from one world and bring them into another one. Remember how I told you that there was a dominant tribe on every server? Well now imagine if those mega tribes had the ability to take all of their rediculously high-level dinosaurs and bring them onto another server to start wars with megatribes on other server. You may wonder why I'm asking you to imagine this. Well, it's because they can totally do that! This makes it even EASIER for hackers to bring their hacked dinosaurs across servers and kill everybody in sight, effectively wiping the entire server of life. This isn't even the bad part of this ability. Because of this ability players with certain powerful DLC creatures like Wyverns and Rock Elementals are able to bring said DLC creatures over to Vanilla servers and destroy the players that decided not to pay for a 20$ DLC. This turns some of Ark's servers into a Pay-to-Win or in some cases Pay-to-Play environment. I actually understand the utility of being able to transfer animals between worlds, and sometimes servers, but I do not think it should be allowed on Official Severs. Leave that to the Unofficial and Private Servers. That would make the game far more fair and playable for people starting off fresh.

This somewhat connects to my next problem with Ark. DLC. If there's one thing that the Ark Devs do well, it's digging their hands into your wallet. Upon official release Ark was turned from a 30$ game to a 60$ game. There are many people who hated that they did this, but I personally don't mind. With the amount of playing hours that Ark can provide in Single player alone, I think is worth 60$. The problem is that when the game was still in Early access the developers came out with a 20$ DLC, and now the developers have announced two more 20$ DLC packs. If you want the game plus all of the DLC's you would have to pay 120$! That's OBSCENE! The biggest problem is that all we have to compare these DLC's to is the base game. Let's do some math shall we?:

Ark base game: 

137 Creatures

4 Bosses

3 maps

330+ items

Value = 60$

Okay, looks fair. That's a lot of variety. Now let's compare that to the Scorched Earth DLC.

Scorched Earth DLC

+10 Creatures

+1 Boss

+1 Map

+50 new items

Value = 20$?

Umm....hmmm, okay more math has to be done. Let's say that maps are 40% of Ark's interest (I know this is high-balling it, but I'm giving Scorched Earth the benefit of the doubt)., Bosses are 20% since they're the motivation for playing Singleplayer, and the creatures have 25% and items are 15% of the interest in the game.

That means that 3 maps are worth 24$

4 Bosses are woth 12$

137 creatures, tameable and environmental are worth 15$

and over 330 items are worth 9$

Sounds fair to me! Now let's calculate what a single one of each of these things is worth in order to decide what the Scorched Earth, and through some extention the other DLC's are actually worth!

1 map = 8$

1 boss = 3$

1 creature = $00.11~

1 item = $00.03~

Okay...

8$ + 3 $ + 1.1$ + 1.5$ = 13.6$

Rounding up to 20$ from 13.6 might not seem to bad, but remember that that is assuming that the players are really paying in order to get the Scorched Earth map more than anything else (which they're really not). Also, players got maps like The Center and Ragnarok for free. What makes the Scorched Earth map different? If you assume that they'd give us the Scorched Earth map on its own to us for free then the value plumets to just over 5$. (Which in my opinion is a far more reasonable DLC price.

Idk why I really wanted to include that. Maybe to show the numbers about how much these DLC's are really worth for future reference. While I respect the Ark devs for coming up with the concept of Ark, it really sucks that they're trying to cheat players like you and me out of our money with DLC's that are not anywhere near as valuable or chock full of content as the trailers would have you believe. This wallet-opening style of videogame development along with the lack of bug fixes in Ark is it's biggest downfall. That being said, I suddenly feel like I owe it to the developers to talk about what I love about Ark, so here goes nothing!

Ark is a conceptually perfect game. It's the game that i've always wanted to exist. It has all of my biggest interests, space, dinosaurs, lasers, and of course dinosaurs wearing space lasers! I love this game! I have spent hundreds of hours playing on my single player world with my lvl 220 Rex (His name is King). I've tamed dozens of dinosaurs and have built quite the home base. The base building isn't original, but it works fairly well. The crafting system is creative and leaves room for constant additions to the game. The taming system allows for you to give specific orders to your dinosaurs, and since it takes you so much effort to tame one, you get connected to every single dinosaurs that you have in your pen. The fact that every dinosaur has its own use beyond just looking cool is GENIUS! And the fact that you have put human technology in the same world as dinosaurs without making it remind me of Jurassic Park is MIND-BLOWING. The idea of having dino dossiers with information about the dinos scattered across the map is extremely helpful to new players, and the fact that it is not an easy game makes it all the more satisfying when you progress at all. Another great thing about ark, is that almost no matter where you are in your progression, you can always get set back. The game never lets up, and as a hardcore gamer I appreciate that.

There are very few things beyond bug fixes that could actually make Ark better, but I have a few ideas in mind. I would love for Ark to become one of those games that gets updated constantly, even post release. I know the Phoenix is supposed to be Ark's 'last dino,' but does it really have to be? Updating the game every now and then adds an interesting way to keep players invested in the game, as the dynamics of the world are constantly changing. Turning non-professionally made maps into official maps like The Center and Ragnarok allows for the players to occasionally migrate to new worlds, or to give room for new dinos that might not all be able to fit on a single island. There are so many creatures that so many people want added into the game. Just look at all of the fan-made dossiers! I have even made a couple! There's plenty of room for new creatures, and players would love it. I know they would. 

Comment down below what you like/dislike about Ark, and what you think would make the game better! I'm also really interested in seeing what you guys want to see added to the game. Also, let's try and see if the Devs can see this review! I worked really hard on it, and if they saw it it'd mean the world to me.

TL;DR:

Character creation sucks, and would be better if it weren't there. Don't buy Ark on PC unless you have an incredibly powerful one, buy it on consoles instead. Ark requires patience above all in the fact that you will die a lot before you gain any traction in the game, you are not invincible almost no matter how far you progress, the grind is real, and taming can take forever! The boss fights limit the player too much, and could be done much better. The multiplayer needs to be better regulated, and there should be a distinction between PVP and griefing (the latter of which happens more often). Megatribes suck. Hackers suck. Super expensive DLC sucks and isn't worth it. If you're patient, however you could grow to love Ark, as I have! I have spent hours playing it and I definitely don't think the developers develop all of the hate they've gotten. I have much respect for them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Askew said:

tldr

I agree, it's very long, but man this is a good review! I couldn't have said it better if I had all the time in the world and the best dictionary/thesaurus in the world. I agree with much of what prodigy said. He addressed every important aspect of ark and, in my opinion, described it perfectly. This is a great review and you did a great job, prodigy!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

59 minutes ago, prodigy1202 said:

Ark is a conceptually perfect game. It's the game that i've always wanted to exist. It has all of my biggest interests, space, dinosaurs, lasers, and of course dinosaurs wearing space lasers! I love this game! I have spent hundreds of hours playing on my single player world with my lvl 220 Rex (His name is King). I've tamed dozens of dinosaurs and have built quite the home base. The base building isn't original, but it works fairly well. The crafting system is creative and leaves room for constant additions to the game. The taming system allows for you to give specific orders to your dinosaurs, and since it takes you so much effort to tame one, you get connected to every single dinosaurs that you have in your pen. The fact that every dinosaur has its own use beyond just looking cool is GENIUS! And the fact that you have put human technology in the same world as dinosaurs without making it remind me of Jurassic Park is MIND-BLOWING. The idea of having dino dossiers with information about the dinos scattered across the map is extremely helpful to new players, and the fact that it is not an easy game makes it all the more satisfying when you progress at all. Another great thing about ark, is that almost no matter where you are in your progression, you can always get set back. The game never lets up, and as a hardcore gamer I appreciate that.

This is the relevant part, really. There is more information in this paragraph than all the rest, as it actually describes the experience of playing ARK.

As for the criticisms of the pricing and EA DLC... my retort: Commerce is a completely amoral enterprise. There is no good or evil in providing value for a price. The free market decides the 'right' price or the 'wrong' price, with the company's cost/benefit being realized or not. Turns out to have been a great decision for Wildcard and to the players that have enjoyed SE. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Ganelon said:

This is the relevant part, really. There is more information in this paragraph than all the rest, as it actually describes the experience of playing ARK.

As for the criticisms of the pricing and EA DLC... my retort: Commerce is a completely amoral enterprise. There is no good or evil in providing value for a price. The free market decides the 'right' price or the 'wrong' price, with the company's cost/benefit being realized or not. Turns out to have been a great decision for Wildcard and to the players that have enjoyed SE. 

I think I can understand that. And I definitely think that the 20$ DLC's was the right decision for Wildcard as I'm sure there are many many people who have bought Scorched Earth and many more who will buy Aberration, but what I don't understand is how 20$ DLC's are necessarily beneficial for the playerbase. I love SE, don't get me wrong, but I just think, with the recent price increase on Ark Survival Evolved, a significant price Drop even from 20$ to 15$ would be reasonable. Either way, I'm just stating my opinion on this kind of thing. I tried to make it as objective as possible, for the players that love the game and for those who feel scammed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You wrote a novel... completely unnecessary. The game is great or we obviously wouldn't be on this forum posting. The problem is the company who created ARK. WC doesn't have the best organization or priorities when it comes to game development. What kind of launch has a 11 total PVE servers for thousands and thousands of PC players... the problem is legacy servers imo. Why play on legacy? No CS... never was good anyways but still no CS period is no good. They will always be evaluated every couple of months and then if they are too low... which will inevitably will happen... they will become "repurposed". 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

44 minutes ago, prodigy1202 said:

I think I can understand that. And I definitely think that the 20$ DLC's was the right decision for Wildcard as I'm sure there are many many people who have bought Scorched Earth and many more who will buy Aberration, but what I don't understand is how 20$ DLC's are necessarily beneficial for the playerbase. I love SE, don't get me wrong, but I just think, with the recent price increase on Ark Survival Evolved, a significant price Drop even from 20$ to 15$ would be reasonable. Either way, I'm just stating my opinion on this kind of thing. I tried to make it as objective as possible, for the players that love the game and for those who feel scammed.

I think you state your opinion well. What I believe is beneficial to taking control of our minds by pushing away 'reactive' feelings and focusing on the logical constructs around an issue, and rationalizing them without the bias of such reactionary feelings. Why? Because feelings are not meaning, but we human animals habitually frame our feelings as having meaning. But, feelings about something are not truth. Let's say we have a headache, and something that would be innocuous to us in a normal state, would be enraging while in this other state of stress. Our 'feelings' would be elevated and would effect our interpretation. We then re-enforce is by choosing to perceive the event in a manner that agrees with our feelings, so as not to experience cognitive dissonance. The stoic, recognizes the feelings for what they are, chimera... and controls them by contextualizing them within the frame... so that he can use his rational power to direct them accordingly.

I say all that to contextualize this: In any free exchange of commerce, there is value brought to the table. Currency and product. Both parties get to decide the values they possess... and will freely exchange them as they see fit. As long as there is no deceit in the presentation of the values, they can be no valid idea of 'scam'. And if down the road, the the party offering the product raises or drops the amount of value they will except in exchange, that is totally governed and correct by what the market for that product will now bear... as time ALWAYS mitigates the market for said products. If a person, as the holder of value, has a 'feeling' about it... they would be wise to remember their equal place in the commerce contract. If they were happy with the price they paid when they paid it, then they got more than the value they exchange to achieve it. Move on and continue being happy. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, prodigy1202 said:

Before you say anything, yes, I know you can make reviews of Ark on Steam, but I may have kinda hit the character limit. So in order to do a true in depth review of Ark I'm gonna post it on here!

So here it is:

Whether I would recommend this game to somebody is a complicated issue. I know for a fact that I would never recommend Ark on PC unless you have one that has literally never dipped below 60 fps in its lifespan. I recommend above all that you ONLY get this game on either Xbox One or PS4. Unless you have an extremely expensive and powerful computer this game WILL NOT RUN. Whenever I open this game on my computer it's as if I'm watching a slideshow. The devs say that they're working on optimizing the game, but they've been saying that for two years, so just save yourself the time and get it on console. The devs have more control over hackers and cheaters on console anyway. As of now I'm going to go through every aspect of Ark Survival Evolved to list the pros and cons of the game.

When you enter the player world you will be met with a character creation screen. Despite this, the character creation is cartoonish and really unnecessary. Because of the lack of ability to sculpt the player face at all, you end up looking like one of two people, the skinny guy, or the roid rage guy. Even the female character has this problem. It's on a slider based system, which you'd think would allow for some creativity, but it really doesn't. I'm not sure that this is very high on the developer's fix list, but I would rather have no character creation whatsoever in this game than have whatever THIS is.

Now although that last part was pretty scathing, Character creation is an incredibly small part of the game. Once you finish creating your character and actually get onto the solid ground of one of the four currently available maps, you will find that this game can be fairly nerve wracking for somebody who has never played or seen gameplay. Many of the creatures will be unfamiliar and you may not know what is aggressive and what isn't. That's not really the problem though. If there is one thing that Ark requires, It's  PATIENCE (this is one of the reasons that you should not really listen to the people who played 7 hours of this game and wrote a bad review on it). It will take you a long-ass time to progress, and that, to me, just made it all the more satisfying when I did. I played on the hardest difficulty and got killed a double digits amount of times before I managed to build myself a wooden house that could stand up to the attacks of a midsized carnivore. If you're a patient person than this game is for you. I definitely recommend starting off on Singleplayer to get your sealegs before getting onto multiplayer (we'll talk more about multiplayer later)

The progression system in the game is truly unique and will be the template for many more survival games in the future. When you level up you gain "Engram Points" which you both use to upgrade your players stats and to unlock more crafting recipes. The player level goes up to 100, with one exception, which I will once again go over later. The interesting thing about the Engram points is that there is not enough of them to unlock every recipe. You need to decide what's necessary to you and what isn't. The other option is that you can invite friends over to play on a regular basis or set up a private server for all of you to play on as a tribe. The more players means the more engram points for the tribe and therefore means that this game HIGHLY RECOMMENDS TEAMWORK. However, in my opinion, the game is just as fun alone. I think this is a creative way to build up a tightly knit community.

Progression and the constant threat of death are not actually the main reasons that this game requires a lot of patience. One of the most slow parts of the game is when you're taming an animal. You tame different animals in different ways, but the main parallel between these different strategies is that you need to feed the animal until their "taming bar" is full. For smaller creatures this may just take a couple of minutes, but for the larger animals on the island, this can take HOURS. The longest tame in the game will take 28 hours. Yeah...it's that extreme. While on the surface this is absurd, it does encourage players in different timezones to work together and make sure that there's somebody on the server to work on the tame at all times, and in a single player world, time doesn't pass when you log out so you just need to be patient enough to do it. The other part of this is that in the main menu for the game you can turn up the multiplier on taming speed and make the process take far less time. This kind of tame took me 6 hours. It's a long time, but it's way more reasonable now. It's just one day's work as opposed to a full week. 

Surprisingly enough there is yet ANOTHER  reason that this game requires a lot of patience. The grind. Players will spend a large amount of the time in game grinding away for resources, however, like how you can decrease taming time, you can also increase the amount of resources you get. I have done this so that I can have more fun building than gathering. If you're playing the game without any multipliers than you're going to want to have a fairly large group of friends all around the world to help you tame and gather resources if you want a truly impressive base.

Now let's say you can deal with all of that and you have a hundred hours logged into the game. You have some big creatures tamed and you're proud of it. Good for you! Now is when you begin to notice all of the incredibly inconvenient bugs and glitches in Ark Survival Evolved. Don't get me wrong, I do love this game, but these bugs and glitches have not changed since it first dropped on Early Access two years ago, and the game was released just a few days ago, with the developers knowing that these bugs and glitches were there. I am going to list a few of the more infuriating bugs:

Getting stuck on dinosaurs or groups of dinosaurs. If you walk into a dinosaur while riding another dinosaur it is extremely likely that you will get stuck. You won't walk though them, you won't get stopped by them, you'll actually get your dinosaur's hit-box stuck in the other creature. This can only be fixed by getting off your dinosaur, whistling for it to follow you and walking in the other direction. You can imagine how impossibly aggravating this can be if your fighting a large group of dinosaurs. It's an easy way to lose tamed dinosaurs.

Items falling through the world. There are some areas of the map (very small areas, but very numerous) where if you drop items, in order to arrange your inventory, they will fall out of the world never to be seen again. I lost 400 Metal Ingots this way. I thought it just glitched through the ground when in reality there was a constant hole that only items could fall through.

Animals falling out of the world. If you tame any animal and use a rock or cliffside as leverage, if you ever go out of render distance that animal will fall through the floor of the world never to be seen again. This happened to me with a Spinosaurus. It was a lvl 145 which is incredibly hard to come by.

Now there are other things that you'll notice that are not necessarily glitches with your tamed dinosaurs that will drive you insane. First off, if you put your dinosaurs in passive mode because you don't want them attacking anything that hits you (like it would in Neutral mode) if your dinosaur is attacked it will simply stand there and die. I have lost numerous dinosaurs this way as well. It would be far more productive for the animal to at least run away from whatever was attacking it. 

What is probably the most complained-about part of the game is the frames per second. Now Ark runs absolutely atrociously on PC. If you get more than 30fps regularly then you must have one of the most advanced gaming computers known to man. The game runs far better on Xbox One and PS4, which is why I recommended that you play it on those consoles at the beginning of this. Even so, there is one large area on the map that I play on that I cannot enter, solely because there are so many entities being spawned in at once, that I cannot get more than 1fps or sometimes less. Typically, if I avoid this area, the game runs at a smooth 30+ fps.

Now let's talk about my least favorite part of the game. You have a massive dinosaur army and a few friends and you're ready to take on a boss. You take your entire army to where you get teleported to the first boss chamber, only to find out that that Bronto with machine guns mounted on its back that you worked so hard for cannot come with you, nor can the massive and insanely powerful Giga. The Giga is the strongest carnivore in the game and because it cannot be used in boss fights, it is essentially overkill and therefore useless in single player. You may not think this is a big deal, but it actually manages to exclude a fairly large amount of creatures from being brought into boss fights, forcing the players to only ever be able to use the same strategy over and over for fighting each boss (with the possible exception of the fourth and final one in the main game.

First let's talk about the list of animals that cannot be brought into the boss chamber: Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, Giganotosaurus, Megalania, Paraceratherium, Rock Elemental, Thylacoleo, and Titanosaurus are all excluded from all boss arenas for varying reasons. Brontosaurus, and Paraceratherium both have platform saddles, which means that you can mount weapons and other defenses on their back. This, in my opinion, would make for a fun and interesting battle strategy in any boss arena, but I can see why it would be a problem, if players were bringing hundreds of machinegun turrets into boss arenas and absolutely smoking the bosses.  Titanosaurus has a platform saddle, but I believe is also restricted for entering because it's basically as strong as some bosses in its own right. This is the same problem that Giganotosaurus has. It's attack damage is so insane that bringing in more than one or two Gigas would be overkill for a boss arena. The same goes for a Rock Elemental. Thylacoleo and Megalania are both restricted from entering the boss arena because they are 'too mobile.' The player can climb out of the range of the boss and its minions, allowing the player to heal up before going in for round two. Personally, I don't think this is a very good reason for these two animals to be restricted, since all of the bosses have ranged attacks for enemies that they cannot themselves reach.

Those are not the only creatures that are prohibited, however. You also may not bring in Argentavis, Dimorphodon, Icthyornis, Lymantria, Onyc, Pelagornis, Pteranadon, Quetzal, Tapejara, and the Wyvern. It should be noted that all of these creatures CAN enter the Manticore DLC boss arena, but cannot enter any of the main boss arenas. The thing that they have in common is that they're all fliers. I can see how having the ability of attacking the boss from above would be a bit unfair in the boss arena, but I don't see how having a Dimorphodon, Icthyornis, Onyc, or Pelagornis in the arena would help you at all since you can't fly on any of them. Hell, the Dimorphodon is small enough to be carried around on your shoulder!

Now that you've read over all of the creatures that cannot be brought into the boss arena I hear you saying "But, Prodigy! It sounds like all of these are valid reasons to have these creatures banned from those arenas...well except for the small unrideable fliers thing..." And yeah, they are all valid reasons to do that, and I definitely see the problem that the developers had with allowing a Giganotosaurus into the arena. The main problem that I see, however is that instead of changing their boss fights to make them harder, they limited the amount of strategies that the players could use. In case you didn't know, the bosses in Ark, don't actually get that much harder from one to the next, not compared to how much stronger the player might become between those bossfights. Here is what I would recommend to the devs. Think about the kind of army that a player might bring into the broodmother fight. Since the broodmother is the earliest boss I'd say that the player has maybe a few Rexes, and a platform-saddled Bronto or two! So make the broodmother able to stand up to an army like that. Sounds easy enough. Then make the Megapithecus much harder. I know that the Megapithecus has more health and has stronger minions, but that's not really enough. For this boss fight let's say the player has a small army of Rexes around the ankles of two Gigas with a high level bronto being used as artillery fire in the back with lots of machineguns. That can be what the Megapithecus is able to go up against. Now obviously you would need to make the Dragon boss much harder. At that point, the player may have a small Army of Gigas and a couple of battle brontos, with players with rocket launchers on the back, and let's now say that some of the players have some smaller pieces of tek armor. That would widen the power gap enormously between the Broodmother, Megapithecus and Dragon. As for the fliers, just give the bosses some new attacks that are good against fliers? Idk really what the problem would be with doing that... By the way, what I just described would be the bosses on the easiest difficulties. I think this would make the boss fights way harder, but also way more exciting. 

TL;DR: Developers, instead of limiting the ways that a player can enter a boss battle, make the bosses stronger and increase the variability in their attack strategies to deal with different player strategies. As it stands, the boss AI is kinda predictable and repetetive. (Also, I don't really care if you allow the Titanosaur in the arenas. I get that that's more of a Siege Dino, and since it's a temporary tame I don't really find it to be worth my time to try and tame)

So now I've pretty much competed my review of the singleplayer. Time to deal with the Multiplayer...oh boy.

Ark can be kind of paradoxical when it comes to multiplayer. The game very much encourages multiplayer interaction and cooperation, as I previously stated, however this is not the case with multiplayer servers. The servers differ between Official Servers and Unofficial Severs. Both have their problems. Let's start with the Unofficial servers:

Unofficial servers often have server admins that used console commands to get their tamed dinosaurs and their entirely tek super base. This is, however one of the more benevolent ways that they may use their unlimited power. Sometimes a server admin might say "hmm...I'm feeling like an asshole today! I'm gonna summon the Dragon on the head of this noob with a wooden house and two raptors!" which, yes, they can do. This happens more often than you might think on Unofficial servers. The admins become incredibly drunk on power and basically take away all of the fun in Ark for the sake of their own enjoyment. Surprisingly though, Unofficial servers are not really the problem with Multiplayer.

Official servers ALWAYS have one tribe that is dominant over all of the others. These tribes are basically the fascist governments of those server! As rediculous as it may sound, these mega tribes do not like much (if any) competition for resources on their servers. If they see that somebody has set up a mining outpost somewhere that the megatribe likes to mine, that player is going to be killed, have everything they own destroyed, and all of their tames killed. It is incredibly rare that these megatribes are ever benevolent towards players just starting out. Basically the only way to survive on an official server is ask to be part of a megatribe and if they say no, then you're screwed, and if they say yes, then you're still just going to have immediately have progressed through the entire game with little-to-none of your own effort, which is just not fun. I must also adress the issue of "chinese hackers taking over Ark." This is an issue that I am very careful about discussing. If there's one thing worse than megatribes, it's hackers. And there are many players that claimed to have their bases destroyed by chinese-speaking players that were able to fly on their own and kill dinosaurs with their fists. I personally feel like if this was really a problem then the devs would have fixed it by now, but then again, there are plenty of problems with Ark that the devs have simply failed to deal with, such as the bugs and glitches that I mentioned earlier. 

There is one last problem with multiplayer, the ability to take creatures from one world and bring them into another one. Remember how I told you that there was a dominant tribe on every server? Well now imagine if those mega tribes had the ability to take all of their rediculously high-level dinosaurs and bring them onto another server to start wars with megatribes on other server. You may wonder why I'm asking you to imagine this. Well, it's because they can totally do that! This makes it even EASIER for hackers to bring their hacked dinosaurs across servers and kill everybody in sight, effectively wiping the entire server of life. This isn't even the bad part of this ability. Because of this ability players with certain powerful DLC creatures like Wyverns and Rock Elementals are able to bring said DLC creatures over to Vanilla servers and destroy the players that decided not to pay for a 20$ DLC. This turns some of Ark's servers into a Pay-to-Win or in some cases Pay-to-Play environment. I actually understand the utility of being able to transfer animals between worlds, and sometimes servers, but I do not think it should be allowed on Official Severs. Leave that to the Unofficial and Private Servers. That would make the game far more fair and playable for people starting off fresh.

This somewhat connects to my next problem with Ark. DLC. If there's one thing that the Ark Devs do well, it's digging their hands into your wallet. Upon official release Ark was turned from a 30$ game to a 60$ game. There are many people who hated that they did this, but I personally don't mind. With the amount of playing hours that Ark can provide in Single player alone, I think is worth 60$. The problem is that when the game was still in Early access the developers came out with a 20$ DLC, and now the developers have announced two more 20$ DLC packs. If you want the game plus all of the DLC's you would have to pay 120$! That's OBSCENE! The biggest problem is that all we have to compare these DLC's to is the base game. Let's do some math shall we?:

Ark base game: 

137 Creatures

4 Bosses

3 maps

330+ items

Value = 60$

Okay, looks fair. That's a lot of variety. Now let's compare that to the Scorched Earth DLC.

Scorched Earth DLC

+10 Creatures

+1 Boss

+1 Map

+50 new items

Value = 20$?

Umm....hmmm, okay more math has to be done. Let's say that maps are 40% of Ark's interest (I know this is high-balling it, but I'm giving Scorched Earth the benefit of the doubt)., Bosses are 20% since they're the motivation for playing Singleplayer, and the creatures have 25% and items are 15% of the interest in the game.

That means that 3 maps are worth 24$

4 Bosses are woth 12$

137 creatures, tameable and environmental are worth 15$

and over 330 items are worth 9$

Sounds fair to me! Now let's calculate what a single one of each of these things is worth in order to decide what the Scorched Earth, and through some extention the other DLC's are actually worth!

1 map = 8$

1 boss = 3$

1 creature = $00.11~

1 item = $00.03~

Okay...

8$ + 3 $ + 1.1$ + 1.5$ = 13.6$

Rounding up to 20$ from 13.6 might not seem to bad, but remember that that is assuming that the players are really paying in order to get the Scorched Earth map more than anything else (which they're really not). Also, players got maps like The Center and Ragnarok for free. What makes the Scorched Earth map different? If you assume that they'd give us the Scorched Earth map on its own to us for free then the value plumets to just over 5$. (Which in my opinion is a far more reasonable DLC price.

Idk why I really wanted to include that. Maybe to show the numbers about how much these DLC's are really worth for future reference. While I respect the Ark devs for coming up with the concept of Ark, it really sucks that they're trying to cheat players like you and me out of our money with DLC's that are not anywhere near as valuable or chock full of content as the trailers would have you believe. This wallet-opening style of videogame development along with the lack of bug fixes in Ark is it's biggest downfall. That being said, I suddenly feel like I owe it to the developers to talk about what I love about Ark, so here goes nothing!

Ark is a conceptually perfect game. It's the game that i've always wanted to exist. It has all of my biggest interests, space, dinosaurs, lasers, and of course dinosaurs wearing space lasers! I love this game! I have spent hundreds of hours playing on my single player world with my lvl 220 Rex (His name is King). I've tamed dozens of dinosaurs and have built quite the home base. The base building isn't original, but it works fairly well. The crafting system is creative and leaves room for constant additions to the game. The taming system allows for you to give specific orders to your dinosaurs, and since it takes you so much effort to tame one, you get connected to every single dinosaurs that you have in your pen. The fact that every dinosaur has its own use beyond just looking cool is GENIUS! And the fact that you have put human technology in the same world as dinosaurs without making it remind me of Jurassic Park is MIND-BLOWING. The idea of having dino dossiers with information about the dinos scattered across the map is extremely helpful to new players, and the fact that it is not an easy game makes it all the more satisfying when you progress at all. Another great thing about ark, is that almost no matter where you are in your progression, you can always get set back. The game never lets up, and as a hardcore gamer I appreciate that.

There are very few things beyond bug fixes that could actually make Ark better, but I have a few ideas in mind. I would love for Ark to become one of those games that gets updated constantly, even post release. I know the Phoenix is supposed to be Ark's 'last dino,' but does it really have to be? Updating the game every now and then adds an interesting way to keep players invested in the game, as the dynamics of the world are constantly changing. Turning non-professionally made maps into official maps like The Center and Ragnarok allows for the players to occasionally migrate to new worlds, or to give room for new dinos that might not all be able to fit on a single island. There are so many creatures that so many people want added into the game. Just look at all of the fan-made dossiers! I have even made a couple! There's plenty of room for new creatures, and players would love it. I know they would. 

Comment down below what you like/dislike about Ark, and what you think would make the game better! I'm also really interested in seeing what you guys want to see added to the game. Also, let's try and see if the Devs can see this review! I worked really hard on it, and if they saw it it'd mean the world to me.

TL;DR:

Character creation sucks, and would be better if it weren't there. Don't buy Ark on PC unless you have an incredibly powerful one, buy it on consoles instead. Ark requires patience above all in the fact that you will die a lot before you gain any traction in the game, you are not invincible almost no matter how far you progress, the grind is real, and taming can take forever! The boss fights limit the player too much, and could be done much better. The multiplayer needs to be better regulated, and there should be a distinction between PVP and griefing (the latter of which happens more often). Megatribes suck. Hackers suck. Super expensive DLC sucks and isn't worth it. If you're patient, however you could grow to love Ark, as I have! I have spent hours playing it and I definitely don't think the developers develop all of the hate they've gotten. I have much respect for them.

I'm surprised you didn't hit the character limit here! ?

Couldn't read it all. Glad you like it. Can't believe you recommended console over PC... It's the other way around. Also character creation rocks! ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, prodigy1202 said:

Don't buy Ark on PC unless you have an incredibly powerful one, buy it on consoles instead.

But before buy a good TV 800-1500$ worth and Console 400$ worth. And ARK 60$ worth.

Oh wait... you didn't knew that not all in the world have a 60" plasma tv on a wall and a console in a living room? :)

I don't have "incredibly powerful one PC" but i achieve 40fps on High-Epic (without Distant Field Shadowing thou). 10fps more than on consoles, huh?

"This statement suck"©

Link to comment
Share on other sites

51 minutes ago, Arkonautalus said:

Bro, what PC are you using. I can get 60 fps on low settings in multiplayer with a 1000 aud computer.

Not sure how 1000 aud converts, but I have one PC in the house from 2009 that runs ARK on medium around 30fps. My main system is worth about $1500 CAD and runs 45-60 on high. Both in 1080p... That's actual 1080p, not Microsoft or Sony 1080p, which is actually between 600p and 900p... Bdumbum! ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

44 minutes ago, LameoveR said:

But before buy a good TV 800-1500$ worth and Console 400$ worth. And ARK 60$ worth.

Oh wait... you didn't knew that not all in the world have a 60" plasma tv on a wall and a console in a living room? :)

I don't have "incredibly powerful one PC" but i achieve 40fps on High-Epic (without Distant Field Shadowing thou). 10fps more than on consoles, huh?

"This statement suck"©

Actually no one runs DFS now... Devs disabled it, even on Epic. Cause it Kills frames! ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, LameoveR said:

Really? There is a checkbox for it.

What ini file specifically?

Yeah even with the check box unchecked medium settings for post process still used some AO. You had to go into ini and set to zero to completely disable. 

Think it was Game.ini, could've been gameusersettings... One of them stores all the graphics settings, can't remember which.

Point is, even the devs accepted they did a crap job with AO implementation. 

The proper way is apparently to create AO data built into each mesh individually. This causes very little performance impact. Not surprised they didn't do that though... For ARK that's probably thousands of man hours for one type of lighting effect.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, HalfSlabBacon said:

Yeah even with the check box unchecked medium settings for post process still used some AO. You had to go into ini and set to zero to completely disable. 

Think it was Game.ini, could've been gameusersettings... One of them stores all the graphics settings, can't remember which.

Point is, even the devs accepted they did a crap job with AO implementation. 

The proper way is apparently to create AO data built into each mesh individually. This causes very little performance impact. Not surprised they didn't do that though... For ARK that's probably thousands of man hours for one type of lighting effect.

AO=Ambient Occlusion? It's not Distant Field Shadowing.

I play with PostProcess Low, cause High-Epic eat 5-7 fps on itself without DFS.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, LameoveR said:

AO=Ambient Occlusion? It's not Distant Field Shadowing.

I play with PostProcess Low, cause High-Epic eat 5-7 fps on itself without DFS.

 

DFS is a form of ambient occlusion. Ark uses 2 kinds Distance field & screen space. Both have to do with how shadows on objects appear & give depth based on lighting angles... All 3 options in the settings are related to these 2 AO profiles.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, LameoveR said:

Well, ok. DFS is DFAO. It kills fps.

SSAO on other side don't kill fps so hard.

 

Actually both impact about 5-20% depending on hardware in various testing done.

DFS, is the minimal shading in the DFAO profile.  It's stuff like background trees, so it gives very little impact. Both together kills frames big cause it's literally shading everything in the distance in a 3D aspect.

But SSAO is just as bad, you'll notice it more so as lag and studder because it deals with the 3D shadowing on things up close. Therefore when you're still, it's pretty easy on the system. When you're say flying, it eats vram like crazy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...