Ark: Survival Evolved / Scorched Earth
Spend all your money! Get all the dinosaurs!
Thiswas inevitable, really. The way Steam works, with the Early Access and the DLC and the microtransactions and the rest of it. It was inevitable that I would one day have to review a good game that, because of the way it is sold and supported, becomes really difficult to recommend.
Ark is classic Steam. Archetypal, really. Because I’ve been playing the thing on and off for [checks library] good grief, two and a half YEARS? Steam don’t lie: it says I bought Ark in June 2015 and here we are with a full release at last.
Ark – it’s supposed to be spelled ARK but stuff that – was among the first of the “triple A indies”. The Alpha and Beta releases showcased amazing graphics (for 2015), and if the interface was hideous and the framerate woeful, well it was Early Access, wasn’t it?
Sadly, perhaps inevitably, Ark has only improved its performance marginally since then. How, you may think, can this possibly be? The GTX 980Ti has since been replaced by the insanely faster 1080Ti, so how can Ark still run the same?
The answer, as with most of the problems of Ark, is that developer Studio Wildcard has spent the last two years cramming the game full of more and more content. Technical enhancements – including DirectX 12 support – have been pushed ever-lower on the to do lists.
Things came to a head with the release of Scorched Earth. This full expansion pack, US$20, desert themed, came out in September 2016, which if you do a bit of maths you will realise is a full year before the actual release of the base game. H… how does that even work?
Oh, and there are Xbox and PS4 editions of the game too. Ark has done almost everything you expect from a modern AAA title, except actually get released. Day 1 patch? More like Day T-minus 224 patch.
So. Ark is a dinosaur-themed survival game where content is king, and performance is in the stocks having obsolete GPUs hurled at it by an angry crowd.
Players begin in their underwear on a beach, and must start punching plants lest they be nibbled to death by those dinosaurs that killed Newman in Jurassic Park.
Much like Minecraft, gameplay is slow and steady and driven mostly by the collection of resources from the world. And there are dinosaurs everywhere.
This isn’t Far Cry Primal though. The player begins with a mysterious “Engram crystal” embedded in their wrist. This allows them to learn (remember?) Engrams, which are in turn crafting recipes for everything from thatch huts to crossbows to shotguns to, perhaps most importantly, dinosaur saddles.
Dinosaurs can be tamed by viciously punching them into unconsciousness and then saying sorry in the form of their favourite berries. Or meat, or whatever.
Riding dinosaurs with decent visual fidelity is probably what secured Ark its five million sales before full release. Subsequent patches continued to boost the tech tree, so endgame now involves rocket launchers, ghillie-suits, plasma rifles, and more.
A modular construction system allows for sprawling, if somewhat
Dinosaurs can be tamed by viciously punching them into unconsciousness and then saying sorry
squarish, bases. From the aforementioned thatch huts to stone and then metal castles, it’s all in Ark. And so much more.
Progression is much like other survival/RPG hybrids. Tech up to defeat a selection of major bosses, access a final area, and be rewarded with Ascension, the Ark-equivalent of New Game +.
Ark’s overall visual style is… weird. Player models are grotesque, and the dinosaurs a mix of vaguely-scientific (a smattering of feathers on Utahraptor) and Jurassic Park (naked T. rex, human-size Velociraptor). And the interface is just… bad. Awful really.
As with all these survival games, real entertainment is emergent. Ark benefits enormously from playing with others. Well, there’s actually a “sociability inflection point” with this game. Servers can handle 100 players, but the older and more populated the instance, the more likely you’ll just get ganked over and over and over by bored highlevel veterans who have nothing else to, uh, “spend” their C4 on.
Since the game is persistent as long as the server is up, any base you might establish will probably get looted as soon as you log off. Players form groups for mutual protection, but the bigger a settlement gets, the more the whole thing feels like a job. Or even a cult.
Ark is plagued by so-called Alpha Tribes. High-level players who have been around since Early Access, who know every hollow and rill, every peak and every cave of the default map. Personally I don’t get the appeal of endlessly slaughtering new players and stealing resources which are all but useless to you at that point in the game, but this the reality of Ark online.
In our house, Ark’s popularity waxes and wanes with the release of new maps. Each time Studio Wildcard snaps up another modder and makes their map “official”, we get a few more hours out of it.
Look, riding dinosaurs will never get old, and if it does there are all the legendary beasts you can find in Scorched Earth or Ragnarok, or Aberration, or any other map in the presumably endless parade of expansions which continue to take precedence over that DirectX 12 update.
Recommending Ark is difficult. There’s something special here… deep down… but the graphics can’t make up for the focus on content over performance. Worse, while the core game languages in development hell, Wildcard keeps releases expansion packs at 20 bucks a pop. Players are starting to get really pissed. Sure, Aberration’s glowing crabs look cool, but how about we fix the way you can sometimes fall under the beach and end up in the sea?
Coming back to the game after a long hiatus gave me fresh eyes to observe Ark’s core problem. It is charmless. It has no heart. Its graphics are detailed, but the underlying art is… well it’s exactly like the kind of stuff you’d draw in Year 11 English instead of paying attention to Emma. It’s the gaming equivalent of random cartooning.
Still. Riding dinosaurs. You can see why I’m so conflicted.