A quick critic

[Arcanis]

Hey guys,

i bought the game a week ago for the switch and played it for many hours every day now. I played Ark on the PC for quite a long time some years ago, so i got some experiences with the game already.

Besides the awful graphics, that i can ignore to some point due to the gameplay i have some major issues with the game, that make playing it annoying to the point where i got so frustrated, that im actually thinking to stop playing it until those issues arent fixed:

- server crashes every 1-2 hours: i get disconnected from the server or the game shuts down completely due to a fatal error. this leads to the death of my character and/or the mounts i am riding. f.e. i lost a spino today, because the game kicked me out in the middle of a fight with an alpha carno, yesterday i lost a high level therizino that took half a day to tame because of this. also many flying mounts are missing without me knowing why, because of the next point:

- the tribe protocoll doesnt work: it resets with every server crash. my tribe gets raided every 2nd night and we dont know who it is. when the game crashed where i was in the fight with my spino, the protocoll was blank when i reconnected. i dont know if hes still alive running around somewhere or if hes dead. you get raided, dinosaurs get killed while you are offline and you dont even know when or by whom. this makes it extra frustrating.

- the ground textures disappear and dont reload into the game. i have to restart the game once this happens.

- the texture of the trees that are clunky as hell. you cant even see whats behind it, because they look like green pixelled rocks. try to ride through the woods on the back of a rex or spino, you will start hitting trees in anger

- no private servers: actually im playing official and i want to have offline protection, faster tames and resource mining, because of the first two points above, that make the game literally unenjoyable and playable. if i have to survive not only the game mechanics, but the game performance itself, i atleast want to build up fast enough again.

Also i was reading through the posts in this forum and i have the feeling, that the palyers dont get supported. I hope some of the devs take these critics seriously and start fixing those issues. Otherwise i have to say, that this is a poor port and not worth the almost 60 euros i spend on this.

 

Have a good day and pray to the server gods not to dc you in the middle of the action!

 

[sevzirfo]

 

Some problems solved with the latest patch. For the day of the game there were no server shutdowns and the texture of the earth did not disappear as before.

[Mausery]

All of your criticisms are things people are talking about on our server as well. The ground seemed to go invisible all the time and would indicate that a crash was imminent. Since the patch I have not experienced frequent fatal errors like before, but I have been disconnected once and the ground is still disappearing.

 I am still having to attempt multiple times to log in, despite rendering in briefly on my first attempt. The biggest issue this is causing is that my character becomes active on first log in attempt and is then vulnerable to the elements/rendered local angry dinos until my log in is successful.

The combination of these failures vastly increases the difficulty involved with breeding and logging in in a timely manner to feed young babies. Only really frustrating when I get 3+ failures at a time as each load in attempt takes over two minutes so even just one failed attempt sets you at about 5 minutes of waiting to get in. At least now the crashing is happening less, I am not as afraid to leave my base with anything of value. 

I have mentioned the tribe log reset on login issue multiple times, and WC Chris replied on Reddit /r/playark that it was not as intended and would mention it to their partners. As I play pvp, I am curious to know who is destroying my stuff and kiting my dinos, but the real big question is are my dinos alive or dead? If there is no way to get the tribe log functioning as we are used to, I recommend that it be replaced with a list of current living dinos so we at least know to go hunting for them or not.

My final criticism which I noticed you didn't mention, is that flyers TAKE OFF if you tell them to unfollow before putting a saddle on them. Because of this, my first two pteras may be alive somewhere in the atmosphere, but with the tribe log malfunctioning, I have no way to tell. This could probably be fixed fairly easily, and may have been since the patch drop, I am not brave enough to test it on my dinos. My work around for this has been to always have my flyers following either myself or one of my dinos until I get a saddle on them.

 

Any one of these issues is minor on its own, but they sometimes happen concurrently and cause headaches. All in all I am personally very much enjoying myself and am hopeful that many of these will be resolved!

[Arcanis]

i kept playing and i found some new issues:

-when you are shooting with a bow or a crossbow, sometimes when the weapon gets reloaded, you are unable to shoot again. you have to re-equip the weapon to reload it and be able to shoot again.

-the game doesnt show blood and plays no hitting sound in melee fights very often. i often dont know if i actually hit the enemy or if theyre just backpeddling

- the server always crashes some minutes after 2 a.m. due to an unknown error. i just lost another archie today because of that

 

[Coachbrian]

Good luck getting a dev response, GM Argosy told me to post here specifically(as a solution for my ticket)for the devs and not a one has acknowledged anything. Enjoy your proof of concept.

[Arcanis]

Yeah, ill just keep posting, maybe someone reads it:

 tamed some megalodons today. i went exploring the sea with one and two things happened:

- i spotted another megalodon and wanted to fight it, suddenly, like 4 meter away it switched to an alpha megalodon, so i started escape.

- i swam around a swarm of cnidarias. i payed attention not to swim into one, suddenly one spawned right into me, shocked me off my megalodon and killed it. i swear, this thing came out of nothing.