ARK - team-oriented survival... with dinosaurs!

[max2go]

We (a few NOR members) are already involved with a similar game, 7D2D, but I'd like to introduce ARK a bit, I run my own server and it's been a great experience.

I'm also actively involved in 7D2D but I like to mix things up, to keep things interesting, plus ARK and 7D2D, despite at their core both being about survival, their overall theme is quite different - 7D2D is about surviving a zombie apocalypse, whereas ARK is about waking up on an island inhabited by various types of land/air/water based dinosaurs (which you can tame and most of which you can even ride). Another major difference is that in 7D2D you can harvest material by digging into the landscape, whereas in ARK you harvest resources only from plants and rocks to build pre-defined structure pieces (roof, walls, doors / windows and their framing, ...). So in 7D2D there's nothing like building the ultimate "base" / "bunker" and see how it holds up to hordes of zombies that suddenly are trying to get at you, and in ARK there's nothing like soaring through the air on the back of a flying dinosaur.

So there's plenty of difference, which makes both of them appealing in their own way. But now I'll get into ARK a bit more into detail and explain what else makes it so appealing to me:

ARK has a story mode (or rather, will be, that part is currently still being developed) that, although isn't as such required to follow, adds another dimension to it... why did we just wake up on some remote island, why is there some weird artificial thing implanted in our left hand, what are those "hovering" gigantic obelisks about that can be seen in the distance and how are they connected to each other or the whole place in general?

When it comes to your character, a more advanced RPG model is used in comparison to 7D2D - other than health, huger, thirst and stamina, when leveling up you can improve your resilience to weather conditions, how much weight you can carry (each item has a weight cost, next to taking up an inventory slot), your oxygen level and your movement speed. You also get "ingram" points at leveling up, which you use to unlock new items that you can then build / manufacture. Another neat aspect is that you can form a tribe, which is a collection of other players, their pets and structures.

I already mentioned prehistoric creatures (collectively I'm referring to those as dinos) - there are huge turtles and underwater creatures of various sizes (piranhas, dolphins, sharks, ...), brontos (the giant herbivores with the looooong neck), raptors and even T-Rexes, and so many more (each week, at least so far, several new dino types have been introduced). Each dino type has its own "psychological profile" - some are passive, some aggressive, some even curious, some hunt solo but some even call for reinforcement (pack mentality), some even provide you with stat boosts (you have to watch your body temperature and oxygen levels, or temporarily your health takes a hit if you get too cold / hot / run out of oxygen).

The default ARK map (supports the Steam Workshop, people make their own maps, dinos, items, ...) has various "biomes" (climate areas), for the time being those are the beach (where you start off), jungle (most of the map), swamp and snowy area. Each area is home of a certain collection of dino types, so for example giant turtles can mostly be found near water but rarely deeper into the jungle, giant snakes are usually only in the swamp, mammoths and saber-tooth tigers are usually up high on mountains / snowy areas, ...

Also worthwhile to mention is that dinos are either herbivores or carnivores, so it happens quite regularly that you can see fights among them. There are also genders in most cases and the female ones lay eggs - which are a good source of food, of course, but can also be stolen and hatched (or at least that's going to be implemented soon, doesn't work yet).

Another aspect, when it comes to the dinos, is taming. You can make tranq arrows and shoot a dino with those, or you can use a sling shot (or your bare hands, worst case) and hit dinos on the head to knock them out. This is called "force taming", but hand-taming (for passive ones) and other forms of taming (traps, for the more aggressive / evasive dinos) has been announced.

Once tamed, they can carry items around for you, you can give them orders / stances (passive / normal AKA bodyguard / agressive AKA attack anything that's not in the tribe / attack your target / follow / stay put / wander around). For most of them you can craft saddles and then ride them, which gives you a huge boost for harvesting resources or in combat. Also, each dino type has its own little profile, written from perspective of a survivor encountering each one for the first time and written down their experience, accompanied with drawings and you can see those either on the website or in-game - which I find really neat!

I mentioned before that the player character (survivor) gains experience and once that is at a certain point is then converted into a level (leveling) - the same is true for dinos, which have also stats (mostly the same as you do)! When it comes to taming, the dino's size but also level has a huge impact on how difficult it is to tame them, or in other words, how long it takes to tame them. Taming dinos and adding them to your tribe is a huge part of the game - sure, you can play the game without that, but it's very questionable how far you'd get. So, taming really is a huge part of the game and with larger and higher level dinos, should really be done as a group of players, because it can take from anywhere of a few minutes to several hours (that's not in-game but in real time!), not to mention quite a huge number of resources (there are ways to speed up the taming process, which requires advanced strategies such as narcotics and prime meat for carnivores, also force-feeding of spoiled meat). Which also means that you have to be very careful not to have your tamed dinos (especially the larger / higher level ones) killed or even stolen (by other tribes)! Each dino can level up a certain number of levels only (I forgot how many, but I think it's around 15), so once you're in a tribe with a few players, you can target the higher level (20+) dinos to tame, to later on getting them up to perhaps to level 50!

Last but not least, the items can be categorized into 3 eras: primitive (stone / wood), advanced (metal) and modern (electric). Even though the items are pre-determined and have to be unlocked with ingram points (plus, you have to be a certain level to get to the next set of items), there are quite a large variety of items and they are fairly customizable - you can make paint and then color your armor or structures. All of them have "color slots" to which you can apply a color each, so instead of having one color per item or manually moving a paintbrush over an item, you assign colors to color slots and that defines the color composition per item. Which allows for a decent amount of visual customization, but can also be quite a huge task, to color every single wall element of a huge structure - that is really where team effort comes in. About colors, ATM there are only a few colors available, you don't have the option to mix them, to create your own colors.

One last thing - if what I've told you so far does seem interesting / exciting to you, keep in mind that this is about survival and as a result ARK can be (and most of the time is) quite challenging! This means that there is a certain (frustration level) involved, but you just have to be careful - how you do things and who you trust! But IMO that also makes ARK special and super exciting and keeps it interesting for a long time!

I hope my "blurb" will be of interest to some and you give it a try - I'm quite excited about ARK and I hope to see some of you give it a go!

[max2go]

I actually decided to post an update - I took a break for about three weeks from ARK to do more 7D2D, two days ago I went back to ARK and realized that quite a bit has changed (new items, new dinos) and it's even more fun now than it was before. They just had a promo going on last weekend with reduced price (not much, after all the game is really not expensive at all and that being only a one-time fee and that includes running your own server free of charge on your own computer).

I hope to see some of you people around, for any questions just PM me on here or msg me via Steam and I'll be happy to answer there on discuss via TS3!