Much like Halo: Combat Evolved reinvented the first-person shooter, Studio Wildcard looks to reinvent the survival simulator with ARK: Survival Evolved. Although it’s been out for a while on PC, ARK recently came out for Early Access on Xbox One. I don’t normally take part in early access games, getting burned on promises in the past but some good gaming friends of mine assured me it was worth the $30.
What really stands out to me in this game is the blatant mortality of all things living. You need to eat; your pets need to eat; everything shits constantly. I booted into a friend’s server and they had already been playing for quite a few weeks. It was a PVE server, and we were the Super Saiyans — noted for our bare chests. The tropical climate was a little damp what with the rain and all, so I put together a full cloth outfit immediately. I really was feeling the beach bum vibe as I went about punching Dodos back into extinction. Their current base was a bit south off the coast, and the Super Saiyans used various pterodactyls to fly to the island. However, they planned to move soon to occupy an area in front of a cave, deep enough to fit a wall and gates in front of while keeping a good amount of room to house the beasts tamed. I didn’t know much about the leveling, but knew crafting was integral.
I was really psyched about getting my club, but on the chat a fellow Saiyan was stoked about fitting a scope to its rifle. I had to get started somewhere, so I cleared the walled off area clean of all its resources, freeing it up for building. As a reward, my clan was pretty cool and gave me an old simple pistol and some ammo for it. I swear I leveled up by loading it. I set up a trailer of thatch and kept a bed in it, but it didn’t make a save point. I couldn’t go too far in the cave because everything in the cave was strong as fuck and would beat my ass right back out of it. Actually, that’s how I found that the beds in Ark are respawn points. It’d be interesting to see if they had a sleep meter you had to follow. But I guess it’s bad game design to make your players do nothing for hours when they could just be playing. Satisfied with my progress with my trailer and using a mortar and pestle to make some tranquilizer arrows, I logged off for the night.
I got back on the next day and the Saiyans had gone ahead and dwarfed my trailer with a full metal tower. They had gone past sniper rifles and had developed full laboratories, machine fabricators, industrial metal forges. I rode the elevator in the tower up to the top, laughing at my beach bum cave man as he shat on the elevator as he rode up. I checked the skill tree and am shocked that there’s no toilet that you can pipe into the compost bin. It’d be nice to at least get a warning before I shit my pants. I chucked my poop off from the top of the tower, and checked out the fly guys we had. I was admiring our neon green “Secondborn,” because I thought its name was “Stormborn.” I was bummed I didn’t get to ride a lightning dragon, and then we had the residual disappointment that we didn’t have access to Pokémon to train and that we had to settle with T-Rex’s. Secondborn had fulfilled its purpose and the Saiyans all had new flying mounts, so I got to take Secondborn for a spin. Ark’s flying is amazing overall, there’s a real feeling of danger in the swoops and I love the impressive about of control over your flying mount. I lived a sheltered life in my trailer by the tower, and it was humbling and startling to see how vast the island really was beyond the Saiyan’s beach area. The biomes were a lot more varied than I guessed, and my first fly also brought my attention to the massive floating crystals spread out across the island. These held the world “bosses,” per the Saiyans, and activating and then killing them got you some cool loot. Neat.
My crafting tree called for some metal ingots, but I wasn’t getting a good amount of metal from the rocks on the beach. The freedom of movement I had with the flying mount made it easy for me to fly to the mountains where metal was supposedly everywhere. I found one in no time, and went to work on those ore veins. Immediately over-encumbered. It turns out stacks of metal are extremely heavy. I thought I was stuck going back to the base with one load at a time, but Secondborn happened to be 10 times stronger than me. Why would you make resources that you need a ton of so heavy? It made my metal hunt an ordeal, having to transfer the metal off my mount.
This definitely would not have been possible on my own and without the infrastructure the Super Saiyans had built. It made me appreciate the grind Ark offers to get the good stuff, knowing that it took a team of 5 middling in commitment players to get the resources together to build up what we had. I’m interested in playing more this week, and jumping on a PVP server and seeing how players compete with one another. I think it’d be smart to just back off and build up, but I can see players rushing to get some weapons early or planing a trap against a player. I’m psyched to try it out and will post my PVP impressions and my overall recommendation of the game soon!
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