ARK: Survival Evolved has recently transported over a million Xbox gamers to a land filled with dinosaurs, mammoths and other ancient creatures. Following Steam’s Early Access success, ARK recently released on the Xbox One via the Xbox Game Preview Program, which works in a very similar way.
ARK: Survival Evolved
Developer: Studio Wildcard
Price: $34.99 (Preview Price)
MonsterVine was provided an Xbox One code for preview.
Image taken from: http://articles.gamerheadquarters.com/impressions46arksurvivalevolvedxboxone.html
Before I get into this, remember that this game is in the early stages of development and is more akin to a pre-alpha than a full game. As such you’ll find half-baked features, unstable gameplay and graphical glitches. You’ve been warned.
If you dilute ARK to its most basic elements it’s comparable to Minecraft and DayZ, if you swapped zombies and skeletons for an ever-expanding list of prehistoric creatures. Since its release on PC half a year ago, ARK has added new snow and swamp biomes and with them a whole slew of new creatures to run from. The Xbox version of the game was just updated to version v730.1, which is on par with the PC’s v231.9, bringing along over 100 much-needed servers and giant kangaroos.
In ARK: Survival Evolved you’re thrown into a world of mystery, with a clash of sci-fi and prehistoric elements, although mostly the latter. Survivors initially wake up on a beach with an odd metallic gemstone lodged into their forearm with a lot of questions. After some time in the world you’ll learn the ropes, and eventually dominate over even the most powerful of foes, theoretically.
I was one of the original players on the PC, so I knew what was going on for the most part. Some of the controls are different and they definitely aren’tas intuitive as the drop and drag system of the PC inventory, but they’re also much better than the original gamepad layout. After a bit of fumbling about, I managed to learn the controls and my experience excelled from there.
Like Minecraft you start with nothing, and must rely on the environment for everything. To start I punched some trees and gathered some stones so that I could make myself a pickaxe, which allowed me to quickly develop a hatchet and gather some more advanced materials. Unlike similar titles, ARK takes on a more common RPG-style of character advancement. As you gain levels you’ll have the opportunity to upgrade a variety of character stats, and learn how to build new things. Like most RPGs, you can not learn everything on your own, which is where the robust tribe-system comes into play.
ARK heavily encourages player cooperation, and most servers you’ll land on have multiple distinct tribes of real players. This is probably one of my favorite elements of the game as each tribe will be composed of various types of players. In tribes I’ve been a part of we had people specialized in certain roles. We had hunters who leveled combat stats and learned how to build weapons, builders who mainly focused on crafting stats to construct structures, and a final group specializing in the creation of clothing and armor. Each of these roles are insanely important, but no one player can do it all. Outside of your own individual tribe, nearly every server I’ve been on has fallen into a state of equilibrium. Entire tribes will specialize in specific resources, trades will commence, alliances will form and eventually wars break out. It sounds too good to be true, but it can really happen and it’s great. You’ll often find fortresses filled with a small community of members and their pets.
All of this is enjoyable largely because of the unique world it all takes place in. The beautiful island that ARK takes place on is full of absolutely expansive natural vistas. Everywhere you look you’ll see some ancient animal, all of which have purpose. Most animals are tameable and while at first this amounts to riding short elephant-like creatures and herbivorous dinosaurs, you can eventually command T-Rexes, Triceratops and the long-necked Brontosauruses. Most of these animals can be ridden with pricey saddles, but even when not ridden they’re incredibly useful and dynamic. In my travels across the prehistoric island I’ve met nomadic tribes who travelled on creatures similar to Ducky from A Land Before Time, war-waging tribes (like mine) who commanded Carnosaurs and T-Rexes and raided others, and aerial groups who did pretty much whatever they wanted from the backs of giant eagles. In my most recent expedition across the island my tribe and I, called Sanctuary, stuck to our naval raft-base.
The creatures on the island are probably the most immediately engaging part of the game, and they’re already surprisingly fleshed out. Each creature exists in different habitats, has its own level and stats, exhibits unique behaviors and possesses niche abilities as expressed in each animal’s in-game dossier. Taming usually involves knocking a creature out and nursing it back to health while keeping it unconscious, requiring anywhere from a 30 second to a 20 hour process and a lot of food and narcotics. If riding around on dinosaurs sounds fun to you, it’s because it is. Hunting on the back of a T-Rex, picking up and interrogating players with Giant Eagles and scouting out tunnels while riding raptors are just a few experiences in ARK that aren’t present in any other game I’ve played to date. There are so many more animals than what I can list here, but they’re all incredibly unique. Dung beetles help collect feces for fertilizer, mammoths bring down trees and carry wood, and Ankylosauruses ease the process of mining metal. Most tribes won’t be able to utilize all creatures, especially because they live in vastly different regions, which adds to the natural economy of the game.
Most of the gameplay involves grinding of some sort, which is largely foraging for berries, hunting for hide and chopping down wood. As you advance these processes become more efficient, for example brontosauruses sweep entire fields and gather all of its berries in one go, and begin to crave more advanced materials like chitin or metal. If you really stick with it you’ll be able to build modern technologies like turrets, elevators and scuba suits, which require incredibly rare resources like diamonds and oil. If you’re lucky enough to find a good group of players who play long enough, you might be able to tame enough animals and build strong enough weapons to take on the end-game bosses, which currently include Giant Spiders, Dragons and a creature that is practically King Kong.
While ARK is incredibly enjoyable, its gameplay style and current level of completion spawn some inherent issues. ARK: Survival Evolved is largely unplayable alone. In tribes it is much easier to defend yourself against carnivorous creatures or aggressive players, you gain experience exponentially faster and you can develop many more advanced technologies by splitting tasks and specializations. Another issue in the process is time. At first levelling comes easy, but after level 20 it can take hours to level up, and even longer to complete tasks like taming at this point. For example, taming a T-Rex can take anywhere from 25 minutes to 14 hours depending on the taming efficiency achieved and level of the creature. On average our tribe took around 2 hours to train any T-Rexes we found, which were usually around level 30.
Image taken from: http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/attachments/gaming/54173d1441599180-ark-survival-evolved-slurvivors-arksluservertamerex.jpg
I get the sense that Studio Wildcard erroneously underestimated how many players would pick up ARK on the Xbox One. In just over a month over a million players had bought and downloaded the game, only having a few hundred servers containing 70 players each. Without a queue system and persistent players at stake, my play sessions mostly consisted of trying to get into my home server to no avail, leading to me and my tribe members abandoning multiple high-level characters. In Studio Wildcard’s defense they have been quickly adding servers, and have provided other ways to play. The alternatives to Studio Wildcard servers are solo-play, an online co-op mode and the ability to host your own dedicated server if you’ve got another Xbox to do it at no additional cost (other than the cost of another Xbox). All of these options allow for customization of the island, creature and player traits although the co-op mode currently has an annoying tether system which forces players to remain within 200m of each other.
Graphically, ARK: Survival Evolved and its modified Unreal 4 Engine runs better than I expected it to on the Xbox One, as it is incredibly strenuous on the PC. While it’s clearly not at the quality of a AAA title, the frame rate resides at a somewhat stable 30fps and it has slightly surpassed the “low” settings of the PC variant. It has a ways to go, but it’s definitely more-than playable.
What also surprised me was just how many features there are in this title while it is relatively bug-free for a game at this stage of development. You can build incredibly complex structures and do amazing things in a persistent server setting without a lot going wrong.
Ultimately, I highly recommend that you try ARK: Survival Evolved. The Xbox Game Preview program gives you an hour of playtime without buying it, and $34.99 nets you access to the game as it is updated and eventually fully released with no additional charges. As of right now it can be difficult to play consistently, and you really need to put in long periods of time to fully experience it, but it is enjoyable and I’d argue that even if you wait to play it’s worth the money.
