ARK: Survival Evolved

Mostly PC, but console and mobile too
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Post by Stranger »

I saw something about this a few weeks ago and just happened to run across it again. I must say, it looks interesting and i'll be keeping an eye on it.



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At first glance Ark: Survival Evolved looks like another online, open-world survival game. That’s because it is. But it’s also a game in which you can capture, train and ride dinosaurs. And then fight other dinosaurs. How are there not more games around that allow you to do this?

Ark was announced yesterday by newcomers Studio Wildcard, who promise that it will include all of your favourite survival game features like crafting, hunting, building and waking up naked. Build a tribe with your friends, then fight your other friends. With dinosaurs.

You’ll be able to try all this out for yourself when it lands on Steam Early Access on June 2nd, before its official launch in 2016.

The trailer footage looks visually stunning and the whole game seems to have just the right level of tongue in cheek. Triceratops and Pterodactyls mixed with giant scorpions and… dragons? Underneath the whole prehistoric, land before time feel (we’ll just forget we saw someone firing a machine gun in the trailer) there’s an even more intriguing sci-fi story going on. Beams of light and floating structures and what’s that embedded in the player’s wrist?


Yeah, okay. Definitely going to be checking this one out when June 2nd rolls around.
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Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

Image
Dino Riders the MMOG.
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
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Troy
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Post by Troy »

Interesting, and I had mad Dino Riders when I was a kid. Double bonus.

Things look very pretty in the trailer, wonder how good the day-to-day gameplay actually looks like.




Edited By Troy on 1431535149
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Post by Stranger »

As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements. Use your cunning and resources to kill or tame the leviathan dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roaming the land, and team up with or prey on hundreds of other players to survive, dominate... and escape!

The following features are in the game on its Day-1 Early Access release. We have many more aspects and refinements planned for the long-term development roadmap, and here's what you get to experience right now in ARK:



Dinosaurs and creatures -- over 30 at Early Access start and 70+ planned for final release -- can be tamed using a challenging capture-&-affinity process, involving weakening a feral creature to knock it unconscious, and then nursing it back to health with appropriate food. Once tamed, you can issue commands to your Pet, which it may follow depending on how well you’ve tamed and trained it. Pets, which can continue to level-up and consume food, can also carry Inventory and Equipment such as Armor, carry prey back to your settlement depending on their strength, and larger pets can be ridden and directly controlled! Fly a Pterodactyl over the snow-capped mountains, lift allies over enemy walls, race through the jungle with a pack of Raptors, tromp through an enemy base along a gigantic brontosaurus, or chase down prey on the back of a raging T-Rex! Take part in a dynamic ecosystem life-cycle with its own predator & prey hierarchies, where you are just one creature among many species struggling for dominance and survival.



You must eat and drink to survive, with different kinds of plants & meat having different nutritional properties, including human meat. Ensuring a supply of fresh water to your home and inventory is a pressing concern. All physical actions come at a cost of food and water, long-distance travel is fraught with subsistence peril! Inventory weight makes you move slower, and the day/night cycle along with randomized weather patterns add another layer of challenge by altering the temperature of the environment, causing you to hunger or thirst more quickly. Build a fire or shelter, and craft a large variety of customizable clothing & armors, to help protect yourself against locational damage & extreme temperatures using the dynamic indoor/outdoor insulation calculation system!



By chopping down forests full of trees and mining metal and other precious resources, you can craft the parts to build massive multi-leveled structures composed of complex snap-linked parts, including ramps, beams, pillars, windows, doors, gates, remote gates, trapdoors, water pipes, faucets, generators, wires and all manner of electrical devices, and ladders among many other types. Structures have a load system to fall apart if enough support has been destroyed, so reinforcing your buildings is important. All structures and items can be painted to customize the look of your home, as well as placing dynamically per-pixel paintable signs, textual billboards, and other decorative objects. Shelter reduces the extremes of weather and provides security for yourself and your stash! Weapons, clothing & armor gear can also be painted to express your own visual style.



Pick seeds from the wild vegetation around you, plant them in plots that you lay down, water them and nurture them with fertilizer (everything poops after consuming calories, which can then be composted, and some fertilizer is better than others). Tend to your crops and they will grow to produce delicious and rare fruits, which can also be used to cook a plethora of logical recipes and make useful tonics! Explore to find the rarest of plant seeds that have the most powerful properties! Vegetarians & vegans can flourish, and it will be possible to master and conquer the ARK in a non-violent manner!



By bringing sufficient rare sacrificial items to special Summon locations, you can capture the attention of the one of the ARK’s god-like mythical creatures, who will arrive for battle. These gargantuan monstrosities provide an end-game goal for the most experienced groups of players and their armies of pets, and will yield extremely valuable progression items if they are defeated.



Create a Tribe and add your friends to it, and all your Pets can be commanded by and allied to anyone in your Tribe. Your Tribe will also be able to respawn at any of your home spawn points. Promote members to Tribe Admins to reduce the burden of management. Distribute key items and pass-codes to provide access your shared village!



All items are crafted from Blueprints that have variable statistics and qualities, and require corresponding resources. More remote and harsh locales across the ARK tend to have better resources, including the tallest mountains, darkest caves, and depths of the ocean! Level-Up your player character by gaining experience through performance actions, Level-Up your Pets, and learn new "Engrams" to be able to craft Items from memory without the use of blueprints, even if you die! Customize the underlying physical look of your character with hair, eye, and skin tones, along with an array of body proportion modifiers.



Everything you craft has durability and will wear-out from extended use if not repaired, and when you leave the game, your character remains sleeping in the persistent world. Your inventory physically exists in boxes or on your character in the world. Everything can be looted & stolen, so to achieve security you must build-up, team-up, or have pets to guard your stash. Death is permanent, and you can even knock out, capture, and force-feed other players to use them for your own purposes, such as extracting their blood to for transfusions, harvesting their fecal matter to use as fertilizer, or using them as food for your carnivorous pets!



The mysterious ARK is a formidable and imposing environment, composed of many natural and unnatural structures, above-ground, below-ground, and underwater. By fully exploring its secrets, you’ll find the most exotic procedurally randomized creatures and rare blueprints. Also to be found are Explorer Notes that are dynamically updated into the game, written by previous human denizens of the ARK from across the millennia, creatively detailing the creatures and backstory of the ARK and its creatures. Fully develop your in-game ARK-map through exploration, write custom points of interest onto it, and craft a Compass or GPS coordinates to aid exploring with other players, whom you can communicate with via proximity text & voice chat, or long-distance radio. Construct & draw in-game signs for other players to help them or lead them astray... And yet.. how do you ultimately challenge the Creators and Conquer the ARK? A definitive end-game is planned.



On the 100+ player servers, your character, everything you built, and your pets, stay in-game even when you leave. You can even physically travel your character and items between the network of ARK's by accessing the Obelisks and uploading (or downloading) your data from the Steam Economy! A galaxy of ARKs, each slightly different than the previous, to leave your mark on and conquer, one at a time -- special official ARKs will be unveiled on
the World-map for limited times in singular themed events with corresponding limited-run items!
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Post by Stranger »

Sorry for the wall of text, I just copy and paste from their webpage.

It looks like it has all the makings of a good survival game, but I think many of them have a hard time making it out of early access (Day-Z, Rust).
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Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

50 Shades of Dino. It has add-on potential.



Edited By Malcolm on 1431541395
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC: "Better dead than smeg."
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Post by Troy »

Heard that, among the many controls this game is going to have, one button will make you poop. I assume it takes food. At any rate, you can then throw said poop, or use it to fertilize a field, or whatever else it is that poop does.

I think this is coming out on early access in June. Assuming a bug-ridden launch.
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Post by Stranger »

I think this is coming out on early access in June. Assuming a bug-ridden launch.


Early access is tomorrow June 2nd for $25 I believe. I'm strongly considering this game, because evidently I buy all of the early access survival games but never play them..
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Post by Leisher »

Hmmm.

If you decide to buy, talk me into it.
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Post by Troy »

It was on sale, I have no willpower. It's happening.

e: It made my computer cry. I may need to upgrade video cards for this,




Edited By Troy on 1433396421
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Post by Troy »

Update: replacing my video card from like 2011. Will give this another go then.



Edited By Troy on 1433430042
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Post by Stranger »

I did some poking around and am finding that the devs said the game needs a lot of optimization so that it runs better on normal video cards, they are making it a priority to fix that asap. But yeah, a lot of people are saying that they have had to turn down to medium and low video settings to get any sort of playable FPS.

I'm going to keep an eye on this because my GTX 660, while I have no problem running every game ive played so far, its far from top of the line. Keep us posted as to how it goes.
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Post by Leisher »

I am strongly debating purchasing this today...
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Post by Stranger »

I'm probably going to pick it up sometime in the next week or so, not sure how playable it will be for me though. So far the biggest gripes from the people is the optimization and finding an open server. Here is dev post commenting on that:
Optimisation

This is one of the key issues that has been often raised all over the discussion boards and different social media platform. We can say that optimisation is the top priority for us, initially during the development phase most of our time was spent on content and game systems, giving players the opportunity to have things to do when they play the game. Now that there’s a solid amount of unique content in the game, hundreds of hours or more, we’re going to shift that technical focus onto optimisation. We have a team of very skilled and equipped engineers ready to perform their necessary updates and changes to ensure that we’re able to get the most FPS and PERFORMANCE out of all your hardware!

Through the coming days and weeks ahead you will all see a steady improvement in how well your computer is performing when running ARK: performance will go up, memory will go down. Also we have DirectX 12 to look forward to which will further increase the amount of performance in game by an approximate 25-30%, and on top of that with the introduction of DX12 and Windows 10 we plan to create functioning SLI which will make full use of your blinged-out gaming rigs.

The game isn’t capped at 30FPS. We want players to get as high as they want, it just hadn’t been optimized and this is what we’re tackling now. You’ll also see steady improvements made to the visual scaling employed by the lower graphical settings -- the high-end will look even-better as we integrate new rendering techniques, and so will the low-end!

Server Connection Issues

This has been a major problem since we launched as we initially did not expect the sheer amount of players that would be picking up ARK. We had thought we were handily prepared but turned out to be the opposite. This mass influx of players seems to mean you guys like our game and we’re incredibly grateful for that, but this also means that work needs to be done to setup much more servers, as well as provide you guys with the tools to set up your own to better host and maintain your custom ARK’s. We’re currently working on miscellaneous the other server issues that exist on top of that so hopefully everyone will be able to log on soon -- until you are all in the game, we will be working on it and at the fastest pace we can!
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Post by Troy »

I think they released Single Player today.

This is not me, but this is what Rust needed, finally I could let my guard down a tad at a campfire because my DINO BUDDY is watching my back:
Giant Page-Breaking Image

I've heard other players are still very likely to kill you and take your stuff.




Edited By Troy on 1433446194
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Post by Troy »

Fuck those giant scorpions. I was all set up with a campfire, barely surviving the cold in the mountains on my first run through and I started hearing this weird tapping noise. I can't really see anything since I'm crouching near the fire just to keep the sliver of health I still had, and then this giant insect face and claws appear through the flames right in front of me. I killed it somehow before dying (still died from the cold later), but holy shit.


God, did this game HAVE to have sharks?




Edited By Troy on 1433446361
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Post by Troy »

Got an ATI r9 coming Friday. ARK will wait until then.
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Post by Leisher »

Purchased, but I'm leaving town and probably won't really play it until next weekend when I return.

Talked to Cake/Scooty (they're here repairing a fiber cable) about it too so I hope this game is good as we may be able to get a full crew playing it.
“Every record been destroyed or falsified, books rewritten, pictures repainted, statues, street building renamed, every date altered. The process is continuing day by day. History stops. Nothing exists except endless present in which the Party is right.”
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Post by Troy »

Seemed useful, and cool

probably won't play until Sunday at least
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Post by Leisher »

Make sure we're all getting on the same server. I'll be on next weekend. Probably Saturday as I get home late Friday.
“Every record been destroyed or falsified, books rewritten, pictures repainted, statues, street building renamed, every date altered. The process is continuing day by day. History stops. Nothing exists except endless present in which the Party is right.”
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