Is Ark really as horrible as people make it out?

[Al Gorefiend]

Been eyeing this game for a while. Creative sandbox survival game is a favorite genre of mine and Minecraft turned into garbage. The download is pretty long right now, and as I look at reviews and testimonials for the game many people are commenting that it's a pretty poor-quality game. I've watched some Let's Play videos and I liked what I saw, but these videos are of course edited and the best parts usually selected.

All the reviews seem to gravitate on a few major gripes:
- The multiplayer is resolutely horrible in this game. Many people saying entire 100-200+ player tribes from Russia, Asia and the likes hop server to server, obliterating and griefing it to hell, destroying everything you built and killing your Dino's, then leaving the server or taking it over.

- Inexcusable customer support. Bugs from beta still not fixed, then they just rolled out an expansion with even more bugs. Basically, customer retention not being the company's marketing strategy - once you buy their subscriptionless game they got all the money they need from you (bogus?)

- difficult and unforgiving gameplay. Not really a big deal to me. But things such as Dino's dying, your base getting destroyed and such while you're OFFLINE??

- screenshots of the game are stills taken in the max possible graphics setting and resolution and the graphics need to be set to min-med depending on your machine to have playable framerate. Some people listing out specific specs for their gaming rig and still commenting they get less than 20fps?

If you've played it and want to snuff out the negatives and bring in some positives, would love the friendly gesture. Just wanting to get veteran opinions before I base one on the first few hours of playing.

[Deleted]

I believe the most interesting question is if the game is fun for you. I myself enjoyed the 200+ hours i played that game.

[Gray]

I played the game a couple of weeks ago with some friends from work, i did enjoy it, but i found the game incredibly tedious (Especially as i've been in WoW for 10 years) some of the functions where really grinding my gears.
I noticed the game has been in the Alpha/Development stages for something like 2-3 years now, i find that incredible that they are charging people for a non-fully released game yet.
I know one of my biggest pet hates wasn't so much the grinding, but how controls to gather materials were all linked to the combat functions, felt like a sure fire way to end up with wrist/finger problems from the amount of bashing you had to do. I've tried it though, decided it wasn't really for me at least in it's current iteration.

/edit
Slightly coming back to me now... The durations on your corpse runs, and potential loss of all your backpack/gear meaning you have to start from scratch again. The lack of a decent map to provide you direction on outpost/friends/corpses.
Combat/lag

[Super Kami Dende]

Been eyeing this game for a while. Creative sandbox survival game is a favorite genre of mine and Minecraft turned into garbage. The download is pretty long right now, and as I look at reviews and testimonials for the game many people are commenting that it's a pretty poor-quality game. I've watched some Let's Play videos and I liked what I saw, but these videos are of course edited and the best parts usually selected.

All the reviews seem to gravitate on a few major gripes:
- The multiplayer is resolutely horrible in this game. Many people saying entire 100-200+ player tribes from Russia, Asia and the likes hop server to server, obliterating and griefing it to hell, destroying everything you built and killing your Dino's, then leaving the server or taking it over.

- Inexcusable customer support. Bugs from beta still not fixed, then they just rolled out an expansion with even more bugs. Basically, customer retention not being the company's marketing strategy - once you buy their subscriptionless game they got all the money they need from you (bogus?)

- difficult and unforgiving gameplay. Not really a big deal to me. But things such as Dino's dying, your base getting destroyed and such while you're OFFLINE??

- screenshots of the game are stills taken in the max possible graphics setting and resolution and the graphics need to be set to min-med depending on your machine to have playable framerate. Some people listing out specific specs for their gaming rig and still commenting they get less than 20fps?

If you've played it and want to snuff out the negatives and bring in some positives, would love the friendly gesture. Just wanting to get veteran opinions before I base one on the first few hours of playing.

My best friend as of last sight had 768hrs spent in ARK so far and raves about it constantly. Anecdotal to say the least but as someone who plays primarily Sandbox games him putting that much time into it made me think there must have been something good.

[Lightning-]

It's a fun game, specially if you play with friends. It's worth the price.

[WintersLegion]

The reason I stopped playing is even after you log off people can still kill you and steal all your stuff so pretty much everytime I logged back in I pretty much had to start over.

[Deleted]

It's a fucking survival multiplayer game, they're all fucking garbage.

[jakeic]

The game is a bunch of power creep non-sense.

You missed the boat on Ark, it was fun for a bit when everything was brand new, but that time has passed. The game is tedious, punishing, and grindy, which aren't terrible things but it is at the same time buggy, laggy, and exploitable. Nothing quite like spending 4 hours of standing over a dinosaur taming it only for it to die as you try to walk it back to your base because the server crashed. Or taking your flying mount out to look for resources only to die to a turret that didn't render before you were in range. Or accidentally killing your own mount because for some reason when you use your pike it swings behind you.

The game does have some nice features in that you can fight anyone and basically build anything anywhere, however the building system is buggy and anything that is non-mount is basically useless while at the same time being ridiculously expensive. There is some satisfaction in building your base, but the system of gathering resources is fucking stupid as well, because as you reach the next "tier" of development your ability to gather materials increases exponentially. So stone tools are like a 1, metal tools are a 2, having the dinosaur that gathers what you are after is a 4, and having a Quetzal is a 12. This results in an inability to overcome a tribe that is ahead.

[Cyriaa]

sry to necro this but seeing so much hate for an amazing game especially coming from people who have no idea what they're talking about really gets under my skin.
If you play on official servers, chances are you're not going to have a lot of fun because what some of the people here are saying absolutely is true.
But play on unofficial servers, especially those that have mods, rules, and active admin.
There are mods that protect you from being killed and attacked while you're offline (ORP2 for example), there are mods that really help with certain aspects of the games and most unofficial servers have the rates boosted so it's reasonable to tame a dino. Some dinos can take multiple days on official servers, while on unofficial depending on how the admin set the rates up can take as little as instant. I think the longest tamed dino I have tested on the server that I host is a max level (240 for my server) Bronto and it only took an hour and a half.
I would say give the game a shot, don't listen to these haters. Find an unofficial server (you're welcome to come to mine if you like) and see for yourself. Yes the game is still "in development" but it's a very fleshed out game right now. The development side of things is adding more dinos, items, caves, etc and optimizing things. The most recent patch even completely overhauled the ui.
I personally enjoy ark more than I do wow. WoW (especially this expansion) in my humble opinion, is far more grindy than ark is.

[Tech614]

It's a fucking survival multiplayer game, they're all fucking garbage.

This.

Why people keep buying this garbage is beyond me. Early Access. Survival. These are key buzzwords that imply "shit product".

[Tech614]

Pretty amazing how different people like different kind of stuff o.o

I could care less what you like.

It's a fact it's a shit product with bugs, shit graphics, shit optimization, shit animations that make ME:A look good by comparison, and literally look like the lowest effort on the totem poll. This isn't exactly subjective things, the games are clearly at a very low quality at the gaming market as a whole. They lack the polish and effort of AA-AAA gaming and they lack the heart and soul of the best indy gaming. It's cheap cash in shit on a fad.

[endersblade]

I've played it both Solo and with two friends on a private server. It was fun, but eventually we 'did' everything and lost interest.

- - - Updated - - -

I could care less what you like.

It's a fact it's a shit product with bugs, shit graphics, shit optimization, shit animations that make ME:A look good by comparison, and literally look like the lowest effort on the totem poll. This isn't exactly subjective things, the games are clearly at a very low quality at the gaming market as a whole. They lack the polish and effort of AA-AAA gaming and they lack the heart and soul of the best indy gaming. It's cheap cash in shit on a fad.

Not a single one of your 'facts' are facts. Nice try being edgy though.

[Bloodydemize]

I bought into it early, got 1000 hours on it and spent many nights no lifeing till 10am. But the developers seemed to mess things up and never went back when I quit. Dinosaurs started to have insane amounts of health where they could takes hundreds if not thousands of bullets and still be fine, optimization was never really done, people would use the transfer system to quickly take over some servers and those in control of a server usually maintained it. the time commitment just kept going up as time went on forcing you to either take 5+ hours to tame the best creatures with the fastest method or play private servers where you risk a corrupt admin. I was a huge fan of Ark and DayZ but both after they got their fame really blew it imo. If you like the genre I definitely feel like you can get your moneys worth from buying the game and you wont be able to compare it to "what it once was" so you won't feel some of those negative aspects. Overall it's just another game that had huge amounts of potential but only turned out to be an okay game

[Tech614]

Not a single one of your 'facts' are facts. Nice try being edgy though.

Prove them wrong.

Compare them to whatever game of your choice released in the same quarter as them and show the differences in quality.

Oh wait, you won't do that because you know what the results will be. Just another person mad because they got addicted to a cheap cash in game.

[Cyriaa]

Prove them wrong.

Compare them to whatever game of your choice released in the same quarter as them and show the differences in quality.

Oh wait, you won't do that because you know what the results will be. Just another person mad because they got addicted to a cheap cash in game.

Lol why are you so mad? Srsly though you haven't given any facts of the game, just your very VERY skewed perception of the game which you obviously haven't played in a long while. Considering it's "early access" (and btw, it's getting ready to be a full release at this point), the amount of changes they've put in the game is insane. It's not the same game it used to be, it's so much better. Optimization has been done. Is it FULLY optimized? No, but guess what, neither are many games out there. Conan recently came out, it pulled a lot of people from Ark, but guess what many of the people that I know that left ark for conan came back saying that conan isn't nearly as good as ark. And that's for a reason.
Ark is constantly being updated and improved. All of the problems you listed are problems on official servers. Many of which were fixed. Still though, stop playing on official and look at the unofficial servers. Imo, they're so much better.

[Jtbrig7390]

Yes ark is a shit game and the price of it on consoles is bullshit.

On PS4 the base game is $55 if you want the expansion with it its $60 total. This is something they didn't tell anyone and lots bought the base game and have to froke out like another $30 for the expansion.

On top of that it cost nearly double what the PC version cost. The game barely runs even on a PS4Pro and even on high end PC's it runs like shit.

[Tech614]

Lol why are you so mad? Srsly though you haven't given any facts of the game, just your very VERY skewed perception of the game which you obviously haven't played in a long while. Considering it's "early access" (and btw, it's getting ready to be a full release at this point), the amount of changes they've put in the game is insane. It's not the same game it used to be, it's so much better. Optimization has been done. Is it FULLY optimized? No, but guess what, neither are many games out there. Conan recently came out, it pulled a lot of people from Ark, but guess what many of the people that I know that left ark for conan came back saying that conan isn't nearly as good as ark. And that's for a reason.
Ark is constantly being updated and improved. All of the problems you listed are problems on official servers. Many of which were fixed. Still though, stop playing on official and look at the unofficial servers. Imo, they're so much better.

When you're using another shit cash in game to try to defend a shit cash in game you know you lost the debate.

"Game isn't fully optimized" Yea I know, optimizing a game that has animation work that even makes PS1 game animation look good is hard work breh.

Looking at your sig it's no surprise you're trying to defend something you're invested in. You can't disprove any claim I made. Ark and every early access survival game is a steaming pile of garbage that twitch flavor of the month kiddos eat up. That's all they are, that's all they will ever be. Keep enjoying paying money for games that do the bare minimum to function at a basic level because you have some needless addiction to a shit genre that has nothing but shit games in it.

[Cyriaa]

lol invest? I only invested in this game the same amount as you.
I run my server off of my computer so it's entirely free on my end.
Perhaps you shouldn't base your arguments off of assumptions that are completely wrong.

I actually have disproved pretty much all of your claims already, you're just too blinded by your anger to see it.
It's ok, have fun playing whatever it is you play. Just not sure why you're so caught up in a game you apparently hate xD

[Jtbrig7390]

So optimized lol.



(PC isn't much better unless u got a beast of a rig).

Facts.
1) They ripped off PS4 users on the price. ($55-$60 for PS4/PC is $30)
2) The game runs like shit on PS4 and any PC that isn't high end.
3) The animations are shit on PS4/PC (no opinion of XB1 haven't seen it)
4) Graphics are shit compared to many games of this gen.
5) Buggy as fuck.

If someone likes the game then fine, but the above are facts.

Edit: Also for bonus points the company itself is shit, Selling DLC while still in early access and holding DLC hostage. If they didn't get votes or some shit awhile back they wasn't going to release some DLC as well.

[Tech614]

lol invest? I only invested in this game the same amount as you.

Considering I have invested a whopping 0 $ and 0 time into the game, sure thing guy.

Oh wait you didn't honestly think I was referring to investment as only monetary either did you? How shallow can you be?

I actually have disproved pretty much all of your claims already

"I disproved your claims because I say their false"

Yea, that doesn't really work either guy.

Let me save you some time because we all know what your next reply is going to be. "You haven't played the game so you can't judge it!". People like you are pretty easy to read and call out when trying to justify your own purchases. You can enjoy the game all you want, that doesn't make truth magically turn false.