What is ARK: Survival Evolved like?
Ok, not exactly, but there are elements which remind us of this classic Doctor Who episode. There is a mysterious location, dinosaurs, and possibly aliens, and strange technology. The single biggest element, both early on and later, are the creatures.
ARK Survival takes place on an island which is a sort of Jurassic World environment — but with no safe zones for the visitors. It isn’t a natural island, and the mix of exotic creatures and environments is also not natural or historic. Check out the game encyclopedia site – http://ark.gamepedia.com/ARK:_Survival_Evolved_Wiki -, just see all the various creatures which populate this place.
The mysterious nature of the place is obvious when you first start playing, but quickly fades into the background as you struggle for mere survival. The exotic beacons, strange glowing columns of light, are fascinating landmarks which can help you keep oriented as you travel, as well as provide benefits once you learn to use them. But the more immediate threat of hostile creatures and acquiring the basics of food, water, and shelter, in order to stay alive, is the main focus of actual game play.
You appear, practically naked (you do have underwear, but it doesn’t offer much protection), without explanation at a random location on this mysterious island when you enter the game. You must gather resources and learn skills to help you survive, starting with just your bare hands. Over time, you learn more skills to help you build tools and equipment to help your deal with your situation, including some pretty advanced technology once you gain both the necessary experience (leveling up) and materials to make it possible.
As a survival game, this works very well. For something which is still classed as an Early Access game (http://store.steampowered.com/app/346110/), it plays very well and offers a lot of depth and challenges.
The game is due for general release this spring, around June 2016. But it is quite playable now in Early Access, which is quite nice.
The Jurassic World element: Many classic dinosaurs are present, along with other sorts of prehistoric, exotic creatures from multiple eras. Just watching them can be fascinating. Many are not overtly hostile, and will be safe enough unless provoked. But there are more than enough aggressive carnivores to make it far from just a beautiful tourist trap.
First thing, though, once you get a bit oriented, is gathering the basic resources and putting together tools to help your survive. It doesn’t take too long to pick up the basics, but just because you have your axe and spear, doesn’t mean you can rest. Even when you have better equipment, clothes, weapons, and a nice well-built shelter to live in, it always takes some work to both gather more materials and survive the threats present on the island.
You probably won’t get very far on your first attempt before you die. And you are going to die in this game. Even with the most advanced weapons and other resources in the game, the big, tough dinosaurs remain a threat. If not death from dangerous beasts, there is the environment. Excessive heat, lack of water, food, freezing to death, drowning, poison — a lot of threats, and they are frequently just as hard to manage as the hungry creatures living around you.
When you die, you are reborn quickly. You will reappear on the island at a random location, although you can try to select a region. If you or your tribe owns a Bed (an item constructed in your shelter), you can choose to come back there. You are resurrected, but not with your original body. That body, and all the items you had with you, will still be present whereever you met your demise. If you get back to it soon enough, you can recover your lost items. Get back quickly enough, and you can, in a very macabre fashion, harvest the meat from the bones of your own corpse (or others can do the same).
This resurrection is reminiscent of the Riverworld book series (by Phillip Jose Farmer). You can use your death as a method of travel. It is even built into the game mechanics, as a form of fast travel. Take off and store all your equipment in one shelter, go to a bed, then ask to “fast travel” to another bed. You will, effectively, die and disappear, only to reappear, again practically naked, in your new location.
Death thus isn’t a setback to your character’s progress or direct survival, as you will always come back into the game with the knowlege and abilities you’ve gained. Your equipment, on the other hand, can be lost or destroyed, as can be any structures you have built. As it takes quite a bit of time and effort in the game to build these things, major losses can be a significant set back to your progress in taming the game world.
It is easy to die, though. Even with care, you can run into dangerous predators and fail to escape. While out hunting, you might miss your target and accidentally hit a Brontosaurus, which will proceed to angrily stomp you to death. Fall in the water by accident? You could swim to shore, if it wasn’t for the piranhas and sharks and such. Then there is the dark. Even with a torch, you don’t have great vision at night, and can easily be surprised by things which wouldn’t be as dangerous in the daylight.
You will recover, though, after deaths, and continue to develop. At some point, you will get into building up your base. First just a thatch hut, then wooden walls, stone, bricks, even metal. You can build a fancy house, a castle, fortress, bunker, and whatever else seems to make sense for your mission of survival here.
You get to exercise your creativity here. While basic functionality is of course important, the game offers a lot of nice design choices, and the ability to paint/color/reskin things to make them more personal and artistic. At this point, you are fairly well beyond merely trying to survive. You are trying to be civilized, in a very dangerous world.
ARK offers a rather unique element in your rise to civilization. You can actually tame and domesticate many of the creatures on the island, including things like the Tyrannosaurus Rex. You do have to subdue them first, which becomes much easier once you learn how to make the Tranquilizer Arrows to knock creatures out. Before that, you must try to hit it with less lethal weapons, and hope it doesn’t die from the attack or become too weak to tame. It isn’t easy to convert a wild dinosaur into a tame pet, requiring resources (food and medicine) and time — real time, not just game world time.
Once you have a tamed dinosaur, the game changes a lot. While it can take a while to learn the skills and get the materials to make a saddle for your big pet, once you have that, you can ride them. That can improve your mobility a lot. Even without that, they are great pack animals and let you carry around a lot more equipment and resources, making the task of gathering and crafting items much easier. Many can gather resources themselves, which also can make your life easier.
The best thing is that they can fight for you. While best handled with you as a rider directing them, adding the power of a dinosaur on your side can make a lot of dangerous dinosaurs easier to manage, albeit not risk free. You can still run into something too tough for your mounted pet, and losing it in combat means losing the value of all the time and resources you spent training it.
Tamed dinosaurs level up through experience just as your character does, which makes keeping them alive even more valuable.
Then, there is the one big key element of life in ARK: The clock never stops. The game runs continuously, even if you log out. When you leave the game, your character merely goes to sleep, remaining present and vulnerable. Making sure you are in a secure location before leaving is an important survival skill in the game. You also want to make sure that food and water are stocked up and you are healthy, and if you have animals, a secure place with food and water for them is needed as well.
Building your base is not just to keep your character safe, but also any of the animals you’ve tamed. You also can build lots of equipment to help craft and store resources, and farm plots to help grow crops. Especially the rare ones which are hard to gather in the wild.
But wait! This isn’t just a solo game, but an online server-based multiplayer world. You can join other players, and work cooperatively — PvE, or players vs environmeent — to develop secure civilization and survive in the world. Or you can play antagonistically, and build up your base and resources in order to fight other players. Different worlds may impose their own “rules of war” to limit the sort of tactics which are considered acceptable. Honorable fighting rules may prohibit attacking sleeping characters, or restrict combat to special regions rather than an all-out attack to destroy the enemy base — and thus their civilization.
For PvP, or player vs player, this game is not truly balanced by its nature. Starting characters are pitifully weak, and essentially helpless against experienced players. You can’t take on someone with body armor and an assault rifle, riding on a tough dinosaur like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, with your bare hands. Or even an axe or spear. Heck, even a bow and arrow doesn’t really cut it. Not only that, but the fortified base built by such a character is essentially invulnerable to low level players as well. This is why worlds (game admins) may impose rules to prevent high level characters from simply devastating any new players before they can get established.
When Two Tribes Go To War
One exciting possibility which does deal with the balance between players is essential organized warfare. Players can join tribes — cooperative groups — on a server, and then engage in competitions between the tribes. At times agreed on by the players in each tribe, they can form teams who then engage in combat, with whatever rules in place they want. This avoids the problems of random secret attacks, while allowing players to engage in epic dinosaur-riding warfare.
The game also works perfectly well as a purely cooperative venture. Or even a solitary survival game, the challenge to make it completely on your own is daunting. By working with a group, you can always have someone on who can keep guard over your camp, tend the pet dinosaurs, and help maintain your home.
A wonderful, large part of the game is crafting and construction. It isn’t just about building and making functional things, either. You can be creative and colorful in your designs, allowing you to express yourself in many ways. You get to use working mechanisms, and later, electrical devices and electronics (if you progress that far), to build your own version of civilized life among the dinosaurs.
That is the ultimate appeal of this game — living a life as a virtual survival among actual dinosaurs. It is hard to beat that.
