I have 244 hours in this game, I will base this review on those 244 hours and not base it on the opinions of other people nor the developers (unless something I mention is a direct cause of their attention (or lack thereof)).


My experience is a rather limited one despite having 244 hours. Partly due to the fact I have no patience that can match this game and it's demands of time, or because of simple restrictions imposed by the games design and the people who use the games design.

So to get a few things out of the way:

• I have never been part of an "Alpha Tribe".
  
• I HAVE been part of a "Zerg Tribe".
  
• I have NEVER tamed a titanosaur, be it on custom servers with VERY high taming rates, or an official server with base x1 rates - I never even tried.
  
• My experience in Combat is a disaster, I will explain this later.
  
• I don't have the time to experience everything there is in the game. However, when I DO have the time I do not have the patience the game requires.
  
• I have played both; vanilla ark clusters and scorched earth ark clusters.
  
• Many of my friends are the same exact way.
  
• Most of my experience comes from custom servers, and a few bit from official
  
• I have equal experience when it comes to the pre-nerf dino leveling stats and post-nerf dino leveling stats

So what happened? Well, me and my friends started off by finding eachother with spawn points that aren't exactly precise to everyone as you are actually spawned in multiple different areas within the spawn regions you select. (I personally liked this as it prevented immediate zerg rushing on a single individual with no consequence.) After we all found eachother we began to run around and see what was possible for us at the time - which was absolutely nothing! Shocked, we all decide to go around and level up to level 15 (so we could get wooden building materials) after we achieved level 15 it was time to get the resources to build the base.


First we decided to start small, 3x3x2 would be fine to start with as it would allow us to expand upon it quite easily. Upon first getting the engrams needed, we would need a lot of wood more than the trees around us would give. After dying around 20 times between the 6-7 of us, we finally have our crowded 3x3x2 wooden house and we went to sleep.

Upon waking up and getting on the ARK server, there was a giant hole in our base along with everyone but me dead. "Fair enough" I thought to myself, I've dealt with this before in other survival games, its just how people can safely play. With that being said, I was very VERY angry about what just happened, as all of the time we spent (about 40 min-1hr) was just invalidated.

We got to level 25-30 amoung the group, and prepared to make a stone hut instead. After spending what felt like an hour and a half of pressing E we finally got a 3x3x2 stone hut prepared, went to sleep after doing some taming, and woke up to an even bigger hole in the wall.


lmao taming

Taming takes forever, we tried taming a level 32 trike only for it to take well over an hour of waiting and spamming narco berries to have a mediocre dinosaur whos intended purpose (gathering berries) is far outshined by any other herbivore that comes after it with barely any more effort put in to taming them.

Now when you're taming higher level creatures? Thats where it can be fun to tame. Taming titanosaurs have completely different mechanics - you need cannonballs or rockets to hit their head to get them to be knocked out. But when you tame things like Giganotosaurus'? it's just flat out painful and tedious, you have to get well over 200 narcotics worth of tranq darts, and keep the shots up quickly because its torpidity drains extremely fast! The worst part is that if it knows its gonna go down soon it'll get a speed and damage boost on top of its already extremely high speed and damage!

Now the AI itself can only be described as a "dumpsterfire fueled with gasoline soaked pinecones that's about to fall into a pit of lava, de-stabilizing the volcano and causing an erruption"-esque catastrophe, it's that bad. Tamed dino's are EXTREMELY stupid and don't do what you intend them to do with the commands you're given. Wild dino's are EXTREMELY stupid and get themselves stuck because they dont ever jump over obstacles that causes the problems.

After we tamed many creatures on land, we decided to tame a few water mounts, this is where things got real fun;


Optimization in this game is terrible, and if you go deep enough into the ocean you'll see why I say that.

If you move - you freeze for a second - if you dont move - you freeze for a second - if you do anything - you freeze for a second. There's no winning strategy here, the game has no compression of files, no optimization of graphic detail, and the folder size in your hard drive is 92.5gb. (to be fair, that is with scorched earth) Downloading even basic patches will take forever due to their size (once again - lack of compression) yet this is not the worst of its optimization.

If you thought the FPS lagging behind was a problem, what if I told you that ARK can let you DoS yourself? I have a 150 mb/s connection, and my modem/router combo can handle up to a gigabit per second of data if set up for it. (set for 450 mb/s at the time this happened) Do you know what happened? I refreshed the server browser, and my entire internet crashed, LAN, WAN, you name it - it crashed and stayed down for a good 5-10 minutes.

My build is a VERY POWERFUL build[imgur.com], and i can barely muster a consistent 60 FPS at even medium settings and will occasionally struggle to go above 30 fps at high settings.



BOY HERE WE GO

Combat in ARK survival evolve is done with many different weapons that range from spears and swords to rocket launchers and laser helmets on dinosaurs, providing a very diverse set of options for combat.

Well thats what Wildcard and the community would have you believe. Actual combat goes one of two ways:

1. Wait for victim to go offline
   
2. Blow open base
   
3. Take everything and kill everything, salt the earth if you have to but make sure that everything is gone and dead.

OR

1. Have a giganotosaurus or T-rex that was tamed at 150 then leveled to the max with melee damage and health with a small amount of speed
   
2. Find victim (anyone at that point)
   
3. Kill them with no fear of consequence because you are part of Alpha Tribe

Gunfighting is a laughable statement, as it never actually happens because guns are too weak to deal with the dinosaurs/creatures because the damage to them is pitiful, or someone dies in one shot because longnecks deal incredible damage (a longneck headshot deals over 170 damage on a person with full chitin armor) and all other guns are useless except for maybe the fabricated pistol.

Combat with dinosaurs is just a statcheck between the two combatants, theres no actual strategy or thought put into the fights just a ton of mindless LMB spamming and maybe the occasional RMB tap if your dino has a different function.


The biggest thing you will notice in ARK is the power difference of a level 15 character and a level 80 character, and I am not talking about stats. The options available to the two characters are on a difference by an order of magnitude; level 80s can have plesiosaur and giganoto saddles, guns of all kinds, c4, pikes, swords, metal shields and turrets while level 15s can get screwed with only a trike or parasaur saddle, spears and bows.


Theres more I'd want to talk about, but I'm at the word limit.

Thumbs down, not full release worthy at all.