How is this game? I've been thinking of buying it.
First things first, you've probably heard the game has bad optimization and it does, there's no denying that, hopefully the work from the Xbone version helps them. But beyond that, it's probably the best early access game I've ever played, compared to Rust, DayZ, the Stomping Lands, and all the other survival games.
It definitely feels more like a complete game since 8 months ago when they released it, and they don't show any signs of slowing down. An update gets released either every few days or once a week either adding new content or fixing bugs.
I will say that without the dinosaurs, ARK would be nothing more than any other survival game, but the dinosaurs really make it one of the best dinosaur games out there. Official servers are ass and should be avoided at all costs, play an unofficial where people are chill, a much more relaxing game.
I highly recommend that you grab a friend or two and rent a own server. Its really damn fun to play together that way, super comfy going on adventures together and having your own little dino family.
>>320616049
>the dinosaurs really make it one of the best dinosaur games out there
>>320614440
WOOD?
>Tediously grind for shit unless you join a huge clan
>Get fucked by most of the dinosaurs
>Slowly manage to make progress
>Some cunts completely destroy it and set you back to square 1 every night
>Bought ARK for me and my brother as an early Christmas present during the last sale.
>I can run it alright on medium/low. Still looks okay.
>Brother starts game, has to set everything to low.
>Game crashed for him every five minutes anyway.
I'll probably just wait for release unless you have a decent computer. I got a refund and I'll probably pick it up again once they optimise it better or my brother buys a new graphics card.
>>320614440
You'll either like it or love it and you'll play it for a very long time... Providing you can run it well enough. Offers a pretty deep experience and community is such a heavy aspect that it can feel like you live in this place and that the other players are your actual neighbors.
>>320616537
Yeah it's a retarded statement, sorry, really tired. The point I was trying to make is that it's a great dinosaur game, and not just because there aren't that many out there.
I like that the world is fairly large with travel being a fairly large deal, especially if you do it on foot. Walking from the south end of the island to the north took me about the span of one in-game day, took a little longer when I sailed around the coast to get there, and about half the time when I used a Raptor for fast travel. In my opinion, the flying dinos sort of ruin this though, since you can quickly relocate yourself and smaller amounts of gear within the span of a few minutes.
Building is sort of ok, but fairly rigid in how you can construct things. Because bases first need to be functional, you'll usually wind up making things as compact as you can, with as many layers of walls and gates as you can, and tend to have your structures looking like a giant cube. Fancier designs tend to be too porous and easy to breech, and more difficult to have defenses cover all their angles. I built a large tower out of stone once, which I knew was a terrible idea because destroying a wall or two at the lowest level can send the thing tumbling down, and I did manage to deter attackers for a while but it was eventually destroyed by a more determined force.
Dinos can be fun, but ultimately wind up rendering humans obsolete for the most part. The sheer amount of damage a T-Rex or similar beast can put out puts even the highest tech human weapons to shame. Likewise, the dinos are so tough when trained for war that using shotguns and even siege weapons designed to kill large targets like balistae aren't effective. Tribes on my server would build large structures to house T-Rex/Spinosaur taming/breeding and crank out a force of level 200+ creatures to rain terror on everyone with lesser strength, and it was hard to develop any sort of counter to them. It would be nice if humans could overcome larger targets with traps and tactics instead of simply trying to overpower them. The beartraps were nice, but most people just walked around them when they saw them.
>>320617910
I don't like how easy it is to attack and demolish other tribes' stuff in such a short span of time. Currently, the standard way of attacking advanced endgame installations would be to spend a few days farming up some C4, get a very tanky dino or two and use them to drain out the ammunition from defense turrets, mop up any remaining automated defenses or ignore ones that aren't in a position to hurt you, then use your C4 stockpile to blow through walls and doors very quickly. While I don't mind that people can attack while you're offline, the idea should be that your defenses could provide enough strength to prevent players from immediately breaching into your inner sanctum and looting everything you own. EVE handles this by providing player owned structures with a forcefield that must be depleted once before it goes into an invulnerable state, and then again when it comes out of invulnerability -- the idea is that the first battle happens on the attacker's terms, and the second on the defender's. While forcefields don't exist in ARK, simply requiring other forces to set up and use static siege weapons like catapults and trebuchets or even artillery would probably be a good alternative. Structure cost and design would have to be rescaled to make that work though.
The survival aspect is pretty good, though after a while you cease to be in any danger from the environment. Simple thatch structures is enough to keep AI dinos from attacking you since it blocks line of sight from them, while stone provides invulnerability to damage from all dinos. Food can be difficult to gather very early in the game when you have no tools to hunt and no way to effectively store it. I'd like to see the island beset by natural disasters such as hurricanes, forest fires, torandos, seasonal things like snowstorms in colder climates, floods and raising tides making beech and river construction difficult, and droughts that cause heat waves and dying vegetation.
>>320614440
It's really fun. Dinosaurs are dank. I need friends though because u can't solo level the entire research tree.
Also i hate how slow of a care the game is until you hit like level 30 and then suddenly you're Jesus with turrets and metal bases and vaults and shit.
A lot of your time is spent in that u and wood houses getting fucked by carnos that randomly spawned next door.
But once you clear that its a ton of fun.
I'd wait till the winter sale because the game has a 99% chance of going on sale.
>>320614440
I bought this full price and rocket meme at like 9 dollars. And I've pumped far more time into rocket meme than ark. It's a fucking grind
