1 person found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 4,032.1 hrs on record (737.6 hrs at review time)
Posted: 8 Apr, 2017 @ 7:42am
Updated: 31 Jul, 2018 @ 7:54am

Ark is a game that will make you feel many things. Initially you will feel frustration at your helplessness as you spawn nude on a beach at level one and can barely fend off the smallest of dinosaurs. Then you will meet people, these people will either be total jerks and just kill you over and over, or they will be really chill, and you'll form a tribe with them. You will spend countless hours with these people: farming materials, taming dinosaurs, and build bases. You will grow more and more in power. You will be meeting other players either passing through the server or settling down. You will know all the other tribes on the server that are worth knowing (i.e. the big tribes or friendly tribes). You will come across numerous other cultures as you find Chinese tribes and Spanish tribes, French and German, all while growing more and more powerful. You will on occassion have a set back, but at this point you're on a roll and now the games mechanics, have a good group of friends, and objectives that you have given yourself. You will feel happy with what you have accomplished.

But there is a downside. There must always be conflict, while it can be delayed for long periods of time, it will eventually come. And so another tribe will pick a fight with you. Your tribe will fight their tribe, and you may lose or you may win. Either way you've invested a lot into this server and these friends, so you'll never give up. Some other tribes will jointhe fight, picking sides. The winning side will probably kill all the dinos, take all the mats, and kill everyone on the losing side. Thus you have won your first war. You are now a power on the server worth being reckoned with. Soon enough, you'll get in an even bigger war as the losing side draws more and more people to aide them and you respond by getting more as well. Now the entire server is split 50-50, and a great war mars the server for days as both sides are constantly wiping one anothers bases. Eventually you'll win though, and the other side will leave the server. They'll be fed up. As the enemies are now gone, you are happy once more. You hated them just as they hated you.

Now a long period of peace has passed, a couple weeks. There is trouble brewing as a few of your allies are begin to grow wrestless and have infighting. Peace will try to be maintained through talks. But it will fail in the end, and more war will arise. This cycle will continue until only 2 tribes remain. These two tribes will be dominant in every regard: leadership, tactics, dinosaurs, and materials. Pitted against one another to see who will rule the server. You will fight your heart out against your former allies. You will destroy bases you'd once entered as a friend, now as an enemy. You will kill dinos whose names you helped come up with. You and your tribemates will be cycling out who gets to sleep because the battle will last over 24 hours. The fight will go on and on and on and on with no end. It will be exhilerating.

Then you win. Then you are the supreme ruler of the server. You are standing over the ruins of your former allies as you have proved yourself to be the mightiest. But then it will hit you. The sadness. As now all the people you had once known, months ago when you were just a little tribe starting out, will all be gone. Everyone you'd ever fought with and fought against are gone. While there is some joy in victory, it is very bitter as there is no one left to share it with. Your tribemates will still play, but it's not the same. Even if not in your tribe, you had a community. Friends. Foes. Maybe even lovers. Now all that is gone. You will pass the ruins of these once great tribes and feel a hole in your heart. New people will always arrive to challenge you, but you'll always beat them down. Destroying any hope they had. You'll build fortresses that'll reach the Heavens and have so many dinos it'll cause server lag. You'll build Great Walls across vast territories in order to denote your power. Finally, you'll get bored and leave.

Months will pass, and one day you'll see Ark still in your library and hop back on. You'll log back into your old server. Everything is different. New names, faces, bases, everything. Not a single structure you had built is left standing, not a single ruin. All of it is gone. The people on this server see you log in and ask if you want to join their tribe saying that 'Ark can be harsh for noobs', but you could never tell them. You could never tell them an entire servers history. The hundreds of thousands of hours of work you'd seen put in by that ancient world. The structures they couldn't ever even imagine. The wars you'd fought and people you'd met. You could never explain to them what it all had meant to you, for it is all now gone. In it's place is a new world, completely distinct from the original while maintaining a strong similarity. You will be both extremely happy at this new world, and profoundly sad about the world that was lost.

Ark Survival Evolved will demand dozens of hours to just get the basics down and get priorities straight. To become a power on a server will take about a hundred hours. To conquer a server will take a couple hundred hours. To realize everything you lost and destroyed that you once held dear will take thousands of hours. To atone for everything you'd done to those you once called friends will take an eternity.

If you'll pour time and effort, no game will ever make you feel as strongly about the decisions you've made than Ark: Survival Evolved. Beware that you may get addicted and lose your real social life and ambitions in exchange for this game. But you'll meet people you'd never have met otherwise, see things you never thought possible, commit acts that would make tyrants think you're true evil or saints believe you are the second coming of Jesus Christ. In the end, you'll feel stronger emotions then any you've ever felt from playing a game.

10/10 Masterpiece.
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