While I’ve just spent a few dozen hours playing Studio Wildcard’s dinosaur survival simulation, Ark: Survival Evolved, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. At one point, I was overjoyed at how quickly I was capable of building a beach hut and making a fire to stay warm during such a long and eerie ancient night. As soon as a Dilophosaurus roared out of the bush for another meal, I started cursing till I was breathless. This is a pure, intense survival game in which you are dumped in your given string of whities on something like a beach by mysterious creatures (UFO-like monoliths hang in the air) with the sole purpose of finding out how to survive. 

Ancient Species Of Reptiles

These ancient species range from the mild-mannered Dodos, Moschops, and Spinosaurus, to the vicious Spinosaurus, Megapiranha, and Raptors. In addition to being practically naked and relying on your skills to keep you alive, just about everything that is trapped here with you has large pointed fangs and no qualms regarding using them to tear you apart.

Nothing Out Of The Ordinary.

However, there isn’t a steep learning curve. In a hunter-gather system, you acquire resources by hunting animals for their skins, flesh, and other delicacies, and by cutting down trees, smashing rocks, and foraging in the jungle for materials like wood, stone, pebbles, berries, fiber, and much more. When levelling up, which occurs periodically throughout the quest to keep things fresh for you, it is possible to buy engrams that act as blueprints for all of the possible survival gear. 

You begin with simple caveman tools such as stone tools, thatched homes, torn clothes, and campfires, but quickly advance to compass, spyglasses, bows and arrows, wood buildings, gunpowder, and other items. If you stick with it long enough, you’ll find yourself armed with weapons and radios.

Train Your Dinos.

The ability to raise and train dinosaurs is another key feature. When hunting and feeding your prey together, you may create tame animals that can be ridden and even reproduced across the countryside. 
To subdue a dinosaur, you put it out of its misery by knocking it unconscious and feeding it till it recovers. It’s a lot of fun to train your first pet. Even though seeing a dinosaur awaken is tedious, it only takes a few minutes. 

The pet system in Ark works pretty well, and I’m amazed at how fast I formed a close attachment with my dino-pals. The raptor and I went hunting after I trained him and named him after my dog. When I shot my prey and saw my raptor pursue and kill it, I felt a surge of pride and accomplishment. It’s a time-consuming process that requires a lot of food collection and waiting, but the payoff is worth it since you’ll end up with horses that are considerably more effective in combat than your tiny fists and weapons. If you add in a vast variety of crafting options and the ever-improving engram technology, you’ve got yourself a pretty cool game world.

Solo vs. Multiplayer

Solo or in teams, players may experience this either in PVE, where they are not allowed to kill each other or in PVP, in which they can and there are no restrictions whatsoever. In terms of gameplay, Ark has been built around the idea of tribes, where playing together is the norm. Single-player has numerous advantages, including the fact that you don’t have to deal with other people’s messes.

Going solo, on the other hand, comes at the price of increased difficulty and the need to do everything on your own. If you want anything done, you have to form a one-man squad to get it done, and I found the tedious process of cutting trees, chipping stones, or collecting random items in the bush to be tedious. In spite of the fact that you level up very quickly, it’s not very fun to spend most of your time just clicking buttons to get more and more stockpiles.

Bad Performance

When it comes to performance, I’m not sure if it’s because the game has too many features or because of poor optimization. The only graphics that take a long time to load and dinosaurs appearing in front of me are problems I’ve encountered while playing a single-player game locally. When playing online, I experienced lengthy lag periods from moving an item and seeing it change dramatically in my inventory, as well as dinosaurs that actually take many seconds to detect that I’m attacking them, even on central servers with decent connection speeds. 

There are normally just one or two sections of wall loaded at a time by strong tribes, with the texturing appearing much later. When I woke up one morning, I found all of my furniture cemented to the floor of my farmstead. If I wanted to relocate my bed or add a work table to a different location, I’d have to completely demolish everything and start from scratch, which would cost a lot of money and resources. Because there are no in-game tutorials and all information is managed by players, I was certain I was missing an easy answer, so I turned to Ark’s community wikis for help. I discovered that this feature has been requested by players since at least 2015!

Conclusion

It’s simpler for me to comprehend Ark as a platform that can house everything gamers might imagine rather than as a game itself. Ark, as a video game, is a disappointment. However, as a platform, it’s rather challenging. Ark has a massive community of modders that help to improve the game’s focus and quality. Ark games also have a lot of choices to choose from. It is unlikely that most individuals would operate their own little servers, but for those who do, almost everything is up for grabs. Animal taming is possible in a matter of minutes, and resources are abundant. Certain technologies may even be restricted.