KEEP AN EYE ON THIS ONE
Ark, with its multiplayer option, survival strategies and reflection of the Jurassic World, seems to be a game to watch out for
Every now and then an amazing game comes out of nowhere and creeps into my list of anticipated games of the year, the last one being Adr1ft. And now we have a wicked game (at least in theory) with Ark.
Imagine DayZ but with dinosaurs and bows and arrows. Now add multiplayer, crafting, base building into the mix and you should have an idea of
what to expect. The game starts off like most survival games — with you waking up on a strange beach with no information and no tools with one goal: Survive by any means necessary.
It seems to have your standard survival RPG mechanics; crafting, base building, food, water and temperature needs to keep yourself alive but the interesting part has to be hunting and taming dinosaurs. Admit it, ever since you saw the Jurassic World trailer with Chris Pratt hunting with raptors you wanted a pack of your own. Well, Ark will let you do that. In theory you must knock out a dinosaur and then nurse it back to health and over time teach it skills and ride it into battle. The trailer showed off multiple tameable dinosaurs including ones that can fly!
The game will also focus on a lot of social interaction with over 100 player maps being announced along with ‘Tribes’, pre- sumably the games clan/guild system for sharing items, xp etc. Not only that, Ark also has an offline single-player mode with mod support, so knock yourself out with some over the top community creations, when they get here that is.
Up until now the game does sound pretty awesome but with these sort of survival games that go into Steam early access (did I forget to mention that?) there’s always that element of risk. Look at the likes of The WarZ and H1Z1 that were total disasters to say the least and of course DayZ standa lone where the concept is definitely sound, but the gameplay is anything but good. The game is set to go into early access on June 2 and is also set to launch on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But there is no concrete launch window so it might even be next year though a Q3 2014 punt wouldn’t be too far off the mark.
It has your standard survival rpg mechanics but the interesting part has to be hunting dinosaurs