#i think the whole message with the dlcs being about beginning again CAN apply to choosing independence because to me thats the ONLY

[lateviews]

ARK: Survival Evolved

I feel this review is more pertinent than ever due to the new DLC coming out a few days ago. I worry that I lot of people will see the DLC drop and decide to buy into the franchise because they want to ride cool mech suits. Let me give you a spoiler, that's not happening, at least not for a while. I've actually been sitting on this review for a long time but I've always put it off because ARK: Survival Evolved is one heck of a big game. Anyway, here goes. For the purposes of most of this review I'm going to ignore all the DLC but I will mention it in it's own section.

My time in ARK was mostly spent solo or with a singular friend I have. This is important to note because ARK is actually an MMORPG. Yeah, like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2, this is a game designed around having a large open world with other players in it that remains constantly alive so that things are happening even when you're not around. I do recommend you play with a small tribe though because I personally find the online servers to be a waste of time. This game has been out for so long now that every server is covered in forts and settlements that cover vast swaths of the map. If you're looking to start out by yourself, at best, large walls prohibit your movement and block access to areas while simultaneously tanking your frames due to the HUNDREDS of dinosaurs stored within. At worst, these forts kill you on site with unmanned laser turrets from a distance equal to 20 times the range of your wooden spear. If you want to play online, start in your internet browser. Find a tribe's website, ask to join and if you convince them you can successfully skip playing the game. You'll now probably find yourself with end game gear, dinosaurs and weapons and you can now stop playing because you win the game. I'm getting ahead of myself, let's pretend you're not using the online maps. What is ARK? Well it markets itself as a survival game and at least in the beginning it is. You start by picking up rocks and punching trees to make tools to help you pick up rocks and bash trees more effectively. Each time you level up you get a skill point to put into one of your stats and some points to put into “buying” engrams (crafting schematics). Now that you've unlocked an engram, you'll probably want to craft it. As you work on crafting that, you'll probably level up again. This opens up more engrams. More engrams means more things for you to craft. This is a very effective feedback loop and will keep you busy for hours. One of the big reasons it'll keep you busy is that one of the items you'll end up crafting is a saddle. Saddles can be used to ride dinosaurs. Now, not all dinosaurs can be ridden but all dinosaurs can be tamed so each time you unlock the ability to make a saddle, you'll now have two jobs to do: Craft the saddle, tame the dino it goes on. This gives the game an almost pokemon feel as you knock out Dodo's and convince them to be your friend by feeding them berries. Dodo's are as useless as you might think but other animals are actually exceptionally helpful and will expedite your progression. An early example of this is the Parasaur. Parasaur's are herbivorous animals that will harmlessly roam around the starting areas of the island and once you've learned how to craft a club and a bolas, you can stun and club one until it's unconscious (the majority of dinosaurs are tamed by knocking them out and feeding them). With the parasaurs saddle, you can now ride it. It provides you with portable storage and although it's run speed is slower than yours, it can run for much, much longer. It also can harvest berries for you. En masse! It can also harvest thatch and wood from trees although it's not very efficient at doing so but it does all this without using up any tool durability or consuming your stamina. The usefulness only goes up from there with some dinosaurs being able to uproot entire forests in seconds and others able to crush rocks in a single swing, spewing out many more resources than you would have been able to mine by hand. It's safe to say that taming is a huge part of ARK and it's one of the more enjoyable parts.

The “crafting, taming, levelling up” loop will last you quite some time but survival games need more than just surviving to be good. Eventually you'll be asking what's next. Now, you will notice foreboding alien pillars rising high into the clouds all across the island and you might think that this is where you need to go and indeed going there is a challenge but arriving is not as rewarding as you want it to be. Here is where the game falls down in terms of conveyance. So far the game hasn't needed to spell things out to you. There is no tutorial message telling you to punch dodo's or to make a house. You just did those things because they made sense. Same as you went to investigate the pillars because it made sense to go see them. When you arrive though you'll receive no instructions. The console in the middle of the obelisk will cryptically mention something about a broodmother and a dragon and offer no explanation. You'll return to your house lost and in a daze. What is your purpose? Well, you need to go to the wikipedia for the game. Turns out you've just started the dungeon grind and nobody told you. This isn't bad in and of itself but I would have enjoyed some booming alien voice telling me to seek the dungeons out. Anyway yes, the game has dungeons (remember, it's an MMO) and you will need to be prepared for them. The majority of caves (caves = dungeons) on the island will result in your death the first time you go in them. Some of them are especially unfair like the poison cave which will, well, poison you. But it doesn't say this it just makes your health go down and again, it won't tell you why so you google it and find out you need a gas mask. An item I still haven't unlocked after 360 hours of play. With heavy dose of googling, the dungeons are a fine challenge. They provide you with the drive to escape your manufactured comfort zone that all survival games need. Still though, what's after that? When does the game end? Well after doing a few dungeons and some more googling you'll find that completion of the island involves defeating every dungeon multiple times in order to farm the artifacts needed to summon boss fights who's items are needed to open the dungeon of the final boss atop a volcano at the centre of the map. Again, none of this is spelled out or explained in-game.

So let's move right along into the first of the negatives about the game. The fact that it's designed to be an MMO. In an MMO, when you go to bed for the day or while you're at work, people in your tribe across the world are waking up and logging on for a session. It doesn't even matter what they do, the point is that they'll be progressing your tribe in some way. The game is balanced around the fact that multiple people, 24/7, will be working on these goals. It's just such a bizarre and disheartening change because up until this point you have felt like you're progressing at a normal rate. Imagine any other RPG you know, and then imagine that at what should be the halfway point of your progression, the game suddenly multiplies the amount of time it'll take for you to achieve your next goals. You will go from needing 50 metal to make an axe to 200 metal to make a gun and 1000 metal to make a more advanced gun. Once you complete a few dungeons and start eyeing a boss, the progression hits a ramp that's so steep it feels like a wall. You might log on and play for an hour and only make a dent in the task that's in front of you.

The other big problem with this game is how buggy it is. On the low end is predators being able to climb walls and cliffs that should be completely impassable. Also on the low end is how predators aren't smart enough to go around walls and cliffs that are completely impassable. On the high end, dying inside a cave will cause you to lose all your items permanently unless you know a very specific method for breaking the game. Skip this paragraph if you don't care for the example: I believe it has to do with the fact that the game will unload the cave once you die (because nobody is inside it) and since there is no more cave, your dead body will fall into the void below the kill plane. Even if you turn on the hax and noclip down to the void, the kill plane will respawn you above ground. You need to combine console commands to turn off the kill plane just to get your stuff, and now you'll fall forever if you don't teleport yourself above ground. Oh, but the ground doesn't exist for you anymore and you need to log out of the game and log back in just for physics to resume working again. All of this was because you died in one of the hardest parts of the game.

Alright, here's my bit about the DLC. The three paid maps are Scorched Earth, Aberration and Extinction. These are all fine additions. I haven't played extinction yet but both Scorched Earth and Aberration add many new engrams and entirely new worlds to explore. Aberration in particular has a whole new set of rules that you need to follow and I feel safe in saying, do not attempt to play these before putting a lot of hours into the island. Aberration will chew you up and spit you back out, again and again. It was kind enough to include a “starter” area but there's no water source in that area so... whoops? Scorched Earth would feel mostly normal if it weren't for the fact that you'll be dying of dehydration in seconds. Let me put it this way, I played Aberration with a new character and it was really hard and not entirely enjoyable for a long time. Do you remember everything that I mentioned above about dodo's, taming and a general sense of progression brought about naturally by the levelling system? Yeah that doesn't really apply in Aberration. The game asks you to have items you don't have yet constantly and if you do manage to get yourself set up you feel trapped because your safe space only goes so far and the area outside of that is so hostile that you feel you'll never be able to go out there. For Scorched Earth me and my friend tried something different. We ported our characters over from the island (this is a mechanic of the game. You can port dinosaurs over too) and thus while we still had no items we at least had enough stats to survive and the engrams to make the tools to survive. Even when I ported my character back across I could then start a new character to inherit all the equipment and the shelter my high level character had made and it made the game so much more enjoyable. In short, the DLC should be treated like an expansion pack. Something to do AFTER the island. This is why I mentioned that you shouldn't expect to play Extinction right away. Ideally, you'd want to have completely finished the island, Scorched Earth and Aberration before attempting Extinction but if you're impatient you'll still want to spend a few hours on the island to get some experience. One quick thing to mention, even if you don't buy the DLC, the game will install it for you in case another player does (remember, MMO). At least on my PC the game is now a whopping 150gb. Just something to keep in mind.

So why do people play ARK? I've been very negative in this review thus far and with 360 hours there must be some reason why I'm still going. I spoke about hitting that wall when you attempt to fight a boss but, up until that point the game is engrossing to no end. Everyone I've talked to who has played it has either given up very quickly or not wanted to stop playing for many hours. When you're not frustrated at a glitch the game is a joy to play. The sheer amount of different activities you'll be doing ensures that you'll never be bored. At any point in time, you could go mining, wood-chopping, hunting. What about fishing instead? How about heading off on an expedition to the next dungeon? What about trying to tame a particular dinosaur you once saw? Or maybe you want to set up an outpost in a strategic area so you'll have a safe place to go? Why not just go out exploring, try to find some encyclopedia pages left behind by survivors who were here long ago? Or you can head out to the ocean because you heard that there's a rare material that spawns there. So many possibilities await you. The world is a playground and you have your best mate and your pet dinosaur to take along with you. ARK has a retail price of $60 for just the base game which I think is a lot to ask for a game, even one with this much content. That said it's on sale right now (until 5th of Novement 2018) for $20 ($30 with DLC) so go buy it, that's an amazing price.