Ark

[Taleric]

Any opinions on this one yet or players?

I have held off because everyone warns the optimization is horrible. Pretty much another rust, 7DtD looking game but I have enjoyed the videos I watched.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/346110/

[Gilberreke]

Holy crap. Yeah, I'm not going to be able to resist that.

EDIT: hmm, their sense of humor is in the right spot at least:

Apart from that you’ll also need to make a compost pot which will help to create the fertilizer necessary to grow your crops, this is created with the use of thatch from trees and poop, in a compost bin! Dinosaur poop tends to be higher quality but human poop can also be used to compost into fertilizer. Later on we intend for certain specific dinos to have extra high quality fertilizer-ready poop. We love poop and all that it provides.

The human poop is a nice touch

[DaveYanakov]

It looks quite similar to The Stomping Lands with guns as a reward for surviving for hours on end with one key difference. It is stable and has enough features right now to be a viable game.



Unless they royally screw the pooch in the meantime I'll be picking it up once my budget allows.

[Rawny]

I thought about it until I saw...

Looks great but I even have a friend that did a steam refund cus of performance.

[FaceFoiled]

Looks great but I even have a friend that did a steam refund cus of performance.

I always cringe a bit when I see things like this. "Early access". It's not the finished product. It's not a great way to publish games, but it's just something that's being done these days. People tend to see Early Access games as the "Closed/Open Beta" games from other major publisher (for example Blizzard), and the 2 just don't compare.

Early access indicates the game is far, far from finished. Yes, it has performance issues. It's not a game yet, it's an idea in the making.

[Gilberreke]

Early access indicates the game is far, far from finished. Yes, it has performance issues. It's not a game yet, it's an idea in the making.

Not this one. It's planned for console release and has a development budget of several million dollar. It's also nearly finished.

The fact that they have console release in a year basically guarantees that performance will massively increase, as no current gen console would get more than 15FPS running this I bet.

From what I've seen, it's really, really easy though. The guy I saw playing it was punching triceratops to dead before he got his first stone axe. That said, the modding tools are already released, so you can expect to see some hardcore mods. Don't buy this expecting a well-designed game, it's not survival, it's a building/dino riding simulator, which is fine if you go in expecting that.

It looks quite similar to The Stomping Lands with guns as a reward for surviving for hours on end with one key difference. It is stable and has enough features right now to be a viable game.

The Stomping Lands was abandoned. The dev basically ran off with the $100K from kickstarter. The main graphics guy already sold some of the Stomping Lands assets to another company. Sadness.

[Gilberreke]

K, so I bought it and tried it out. As far as performance goes, it's not as bad as made out to be.

I get about 20FPS on medium with a 6 year old graphics card (HD5850). Game looks about Oblivion-level at that setting. I can manage that for now.

On low, I get about 50FPS. So yeah, if you have any gaming rig at all, unlike me, you should be able to get around 30FPS on medium.

[DaveYanakov]

I hadn't realized that earned level and learned recipes are persistent through death. I still really like the decision to prevent one player from being able to learn all recipes but I've lost a lot of enthusiasm for it. I'll still pick it up but it has dropped way down the list priority-wise.

Spoiler

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[Gilberreke]

I hadn't realized that earned level and learned recipes are persistent through death. I still really like the decision to prevent one player from being able to learn all recipes but I've lost a lot of enthusiasm for it. I'll still pick it up but it has dropped way down the list priority-wise.

Yeah, game-design wise it's not really that interesting. It's moddable though, so especially easy tweaks like that might make an appearance eventually.

[Gears]

I've got this game, but I'm not gonna be able to play it on anything above 30fps until July.

However, this isn't on any fault of the developers. The GTX 275 wasn't really a powerhouse to begin with, and after 6 years it's starting to fail on me.

In terms of the game itself, I actually had a fair bit of fun playing it. The gratification when you build your first thatch house is fucking great, and there's just something so fulfilling about beating the shit out of a Carbonemy.

[FlowerChild]

I've got this game, but I'm not gonna be able to play it on anything above 30fps until July.

As an aside, I always find it amusing how frame-rate sensitive people have become in recent years. Driving games aside (where I really find it makes a huge difference), I'm still happy if I get anything around 18fps, which used to be the old max on many games back in the 90's ;)

[DaveYanakov]

I'm with FC on this one. As long as I'm not getting hit with noticeable drop spikes I'm happy with a consistent low framerate. For me, the issue comes when a game will drop to 3 seconds per frame for awhile in an attempt to keep the average framerate high.

[Dralnalak]

I hadn't realized that earned level and learned recipes are persistent through death. I still really like the decision to prevent one player from being able to learn all recipes but I've lost a lot of enthusiasm for it. I'll still pick it up but it has dropped way down the list priority-wise.

There is an option for servers to set "hardcore" where you have to start a new character when you die. So, you can host a server with your friends pretty much however you want as far as hardcore, PVP, PVE, and a number of other options.


I have 27 hours into ARK. I'm having a lot of fun in it. There are definitely some areas that need work, such as dinosaur AI and the fact that performance varies widely even on similar machines. The developers have been patching constantly since release and have fixed a number of problems already. They have also added new content since release.

With the recent release of the source code and modding tools there will definitely be some interesting creations available in time. Right now, I don't expect much from mods because ARK is being updated too frequently to really make extensive modding worth it. Once the pace slows down, you won't be risking a mod breaking quite so often (they have sometimes released more than one patch in the same day).

Right now, the food and water aspects of survival are minimal. You can harvest enough berries alone to keep yourself going if need be. Not getting eaten by the dinosaurs is the harder part for me. For some species, you can unfortunately find ways to cheese your way through defeating the dinosaurs, such as jumping on the backs of the giant turtles so that you can hit them but they cannot hit you. The developers have promised improved dinosaur AI in the coming year.

Based on the insane number of total hours already played in ARK on the Steam chart, I am not the only one really enjoying this game. ARK is already in the top ten games for hours being played, and I believe they are approaching the top five.

However, don't buy it now if you're not willing to deal with some bumps. There are some definite performance issues, which seem to be kicking a lot of high end cards in the teeth. It may be a while before things smooth out.

[Taleric]

Sounds like we need a BTW Ark server after game is done so we can have rival tribes throw dung at each other :)

[MoRmEnGiL]

I've got this game, but I'm not gonna be able to play it on anything above 30fps until July.

As an aside, I always find it amusing how frame-rate sensitive people have become in recent years. Driving games aside (where I really find it makes a huge difference), I'm still happy if I get anything around 18fps, which used to be the old max on many games back in the 90's ;)

It makes a big difference in FPS and fighting games too! ;]

On the other hand, in turn based games, which is the only thing I really play the last few years, it doesn't make much difference, lucky me. :P


EDIT: I also find that when the average drops to around 16 frames or lower in minecraft, I get dizzy quickly :/

[Gilberreke]

I'd try to convince you guys that this game is fun, but I'm too distracted riding frigging dinosaurs :D

If only they'd stop eating me alive...

[Nyoike]

I also find that when the average drops to around 16 frames or lower in minecraft, I get dizzy quickly :/

I have basically the same problem, but I get a headache instead of getting dizzy. I can handle 30fps but below that I start to get a headache usually. And actually for Minecraft if I'm not getting a constant 30 or a constant 60 fps I get a headache.

I'm going to be keeping my eye on this game, it looks good and has a lot of potential, but I'll hold off for now.

[FlowerChild]

Someone was kind enough to gift this to me so I've been giving it a try tonight.

Really don't know about this one. The "Survival Evolved" title is bugging me more and more as I play, as to me it seems more like "devolved" given it seems to revolve around shoving a lot of old design paradigms, mostly RPG ones, into the survival genre. The "RPG elements" are already starting to grate on my nerves in 7 Days, but they're far less heavy handed than what I see in Ark.

Leveling up to learn to make a campfire or cloth gloves feels distinctly unnatural to me. Working towards building better tools to harvest resources faster when the primary one used in crafting so far (fibers) needs to be harvested with your hands in massive bulk while simultaneously filling your inventory with more food than you need is a total "wtf?" to me. Giant shining beacons that draw you to them only to say "you need to be level 'foo' to access this" is fairly cringe worthy.

I've mentioned this before but I consider direct interaction with the environment to be a key strength of these kinds of games, whereas RPG elements represent abstractions in order to handle things that are too complex to simulate directly in a game. To me, they should never be a design goal onto themselves, but are rather a fallback when you can't reasonably do any better. When they get included in survival games like this, to me it essentially feels like you're breaking an aspect that made Minecraft great in attempting to "improve" upon it.

Guess the graphics are nice, but really doesn't feel like a survival game to me, or even like something that has the makings of one.

[DaveYanakov]

I do like the concept of a player having to focus their learned recipes in order to work with others. It seems like a good way to enforce cooperation but I would like to see it handled a little differently. Maybe a class selection system where what you choose determines which books you'll be able to understand sufficiently to be useful would have worked better. I can learn a lot from books but if I picked up an advanced chemistry textbook I wouldn't be able to decipher it without knowing the fundamentals. Time required to learn things might help as well. Learning to be a jack of all trades takes a lot of research and practice.

tl;dr I like the intent of the recipe advancement system even though the implementation leaves much to be desired.

[FlowerChild]

I do like the concept of a player having to focus their learned recipes in order to work with others.

One thing to note is that I'm approaching this from a single-player perspective as I don't have much interest in online game these days.

But regardless, yeah, I think there are much better ways to handle this than just reverting back to old RPG paradigms. I largely lost interest after a few hours as the thought of just hanging out and accumulating XP really didn't pull me in. As far as I could tell there wasn't really much incentive to explore or do much of anything really.

[Gilberreke]

As far as I can tell, the real pull to move is to find all of the dinosaurs, but even that's pretty weak. The tech tree is fairly comprehensive though, it's not just XP, it's also resources. The higher level items require rare resources that can only be found in caves or whatever...

...

Until they caved to peer pressure and also put those on most mountains. To be fair, those mountains are probably chock-full of T-Rexes and they did it because multiplayer allowed people to make a base in the caves, denying the rest of the server population half of the tech tree, but still.

Don't get me wrong though, I love the game, just not for the survival aspect. I just love building bases while I ride my triceratops.

[FlowerChild]

All right, so I've spent a lot more time with this game over the last little while and have been finding it quite addictive, so in all fairness wanted to make an addendum to my rather negative initial impressions above. For reference, I'm around level 35 now in my single player game.

-The sense of progression is pretty damn strong. Once I got over my aversion to the leveling system, I started having a lot of fun with it. Your initial options seem extremely limited which I think masked a lot of the depth of the game for me at the start. As I moved forward, I started to get more and more excited about my next level up (or major increment of 5 levels where new recipes tend to unlock). I may not like leveling systems in survival games, but once I got used to this one, and once I unlocked the basic recipes that felt like anybody should be able to figure out, it tended to fade into the background where it wasn't such a prominent nuisance.

-Death penalties are pretty darn harsh, especially for a game that allows you to set respawn points. I think the pet system really helps with this, as if you get yourself in over your head, there's not only the potential loss of all the equipment you're carrying (getting back to your stuff in time if there's a Tyrannosaurus lingering about is no easy task), but also the potential loss of a mount/pet that you may have a rather large investment in. Suffice it to say: death hurts, and I think that's a key ingredient for a good survival experience as without the fear of death the struggle to survive largely loses meaning.

-While I found resource gathering at the start to be rather messed up with the whole emphasis on fiber/berries as pretty much the primary resources (this bothered me because you'd work on getting your initial tools only to be spending most of your time gathering by hand anyways, nullifying the sense that the tools had any significant meaning), this shifts quite heavily as play proceeds and actually gets quite interesting. I particularly like what happens with metal and chitin later on. Metal can be found almost anywhere, but significant quantities can only really be gathered on mountain tops, pushing you to move into rather dangerous areas to get the quantities you need, leading to a nice difficulty progression, and additional gameplay diversity. Chitin finds you going out on hunting expeditions to find insects so you can make/maintain your armor, which while not particularly difficult, also leads to gameplay diversity. Hunting insects also motivates you to make use of the "potion" system to avoid getting knocked out in the middle of a fight. Good stuff there.

-I find the pets bring an interesting tactical element to the table as different creatures prey on different other ones. For example, there's these giant eagles that won't prey on humans, but may very well decide to try and eat your mount, so you may decide to go on foot in areas they tend to frequent, which leaves you vulnerable to ground based predators as you won't be able to get away from them as fast.

-There are some truly terrifying moment in the game when the big carnivores take notice of you. The sense of scale in this game is pretty damn impressive in a crap your pants manner, and I love the overall tension that being a relatively small mammal in a world dominated by gigantic lizards that could easily kill you if you're spotted brings to the table.

This is probably highly system dependent, but I do find this one is pretty rough on an aging system. I suspect most of that has to do with the amount of foliage involved, as the jungles are probably the densest I've ever seen in a game. I managed to get playable frame rates by setting everything to the lowest settings (with the exception of view distance which I bumped one notch up from bottom), and setting my resolution to an extremely blurry 720p, but even then, I'm probably only topping out at 20fps at the best of times with periodic spikes into low single digits. With that frame rate and the overall blurriness I suspect this wouldn't really be playable in MP (at least with me being even vaguely competitive), even if I were so inclined.

I think the primary bottleneck there is probably my video card memory. My card only has 512megs of ram, and I know that also really hurts in 7 Days unless I have the texture resolution set to minimum (there doesn't seem to be such an option in ARK). That probably should be the next thing I consider upgrading if/when I have some spare cash :)

Until they caved to peer pressure and also put those on most mountains. To be fair, those mountains are probably chock-full of T-Rexes and they did it because multiplayer allowed people to make a base in the caves, denying the rest of the server population half of the tech tree, but still.

Ah! So that was what those weird crystals were on top of the mountain I was mining. I had no idea wtf was up with that as it didn't relate to anything I could build or was aware of in the tech tree.

Too bad about the caving to peer pressure, as like I said above, that progression (at least what I've seen of it) is probably one of the things that's impressed me the most. It pushes you in so many ways to explore other systems like my current drive to setup a dodo farm for eggs to make kibble, to feed a planned pet Pteranodon, so I can more easily fly to my mountain top mining camp for more metal, and more easily access some of the juicier (in terms of loot) islands I've found without getting eaten by giant prehistoric sharks :)

Now that I know the above though, it occurs to me this might just be a temporary situation given what I've seen of some of their planned features. Like I know they're working on more biomes, one of them being a swamp, which I could see lending itself very easily to being a high-danger environment similar to the mountain tops. Right now, the mountains seem like excellent gating for the metal resource alone, so maybe they just crammed the late-game resources in there as well until they add in other locations for them.

EDIT: Weeeeeeee!

Spoiler

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[Gilberreke]

I'm waiting a while before playing again, but yeah, I think this game is going to be worth it. I'm just waiting for mod support to pick up a little, as there a bunch of minor inconveniences I'd love to get out of the way, mostly the fact that you can't unlock all recipes in single player (unless they fixed that now?).

At the end of the day though, even if the only decent part of the game was riding a T-Rex, it would've still gotten a sale from me. I just like dinosaurs and have been looking for a dinosaur game with proper scale for ages.

[Dralnalak]

I'm waiting a while before playing again, but yeah, I think this game is going to be worth it. I'm just waiting for mod support to pick up a little, as there a bunch of minor inconveniences I'd love to get out of the way, mostly the fact that you can't unlock all recipes in single player (unless they fixed that now?).

It is a relatively quick adjustment to get enough points in single player to gain all of the recipes. You can override how many engram points are given out by modifying the Game.ini file.

The file:
\Steam\steamapps\common\ARK\ShooterGame\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\Game.ini

Here is a thread explaining what to paste in. It seems to be the same ones I was using:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/di ... 879271179/

As the devs add more levels, add additional lines of "OverridePlayerLevelEngramPoints" to the file. It is not a bad idea to have a buffer in total points on the last level for when new recipes are added.

Last time I played, the numbers in that thread gave me enough points that by the end of each five level block, I could buy all of the recipes that had been unlocked. (i.e. Buy all the level 5 recipes by level 10.) I'd still skip recipes to save the points for ones I wanted at the next tier of unlocks.

[FlowerChild]

At the end of the day though, even if the only decent part of the game was riding a T-Rex, it would've still gotten a sale from me. I just like dinosaurs and have been looking for a dinosaur game with proper scale for ages.

Yeah, the sense of scale is pretty damn awe (and terror) inspiring. That was particularly true when I was flying around on ManBirdLizard (my pet names tend to be a tad tongue in cheek ;) ), as even with my crappy graphic settings soaring over waterfalls with huge dinosaurs doing battle down below me had some heavy duty "ow wow" factor. If you haven't tried out a flying mount yet, I highly recommend it, as it really changes your perspective on things (although I did find taming that mount to be pretty much the end of game for me in terms of it bringing an end to anything else I wanted to do and just turning the game into a mildly amusing prehistoric flight sim where I had no more desire to move progress beyond that, and didn't really have anything that could threaten me in a meaningful manner anymore).

I don't share your dinosaur fetish mind you, and it occurred to me that might be a generational thing given the popularity of the whole Jurassic Park franchise starting in the 90's that I suspect may have had a more profound impact on kids growing up then. I've always found dinosaurs to be cool (more in a "skeletons in a museum" way though), and they were a lower-key thing when I was a kid as well, but I think I might of missed out on a certain part of the cultural phenomenon that occurred there not having grown up during that time. Things that are a thing when you're a kid tend to speak to you at a level that really just doesn't occur as an adult, and I think those early fascinations tend to stick with you to varying degrees throughout your life once they imprint on you at an early age. When I was a kid, media involving dinosaurs tended to be cheesy as fuck (think Godzilla, Land of the Lost, or what have you), which I don't think helped there either in establishing them as credible antagonists for games. I know there's still a part of me that tends to associate dinosaurs with cheese right out of the gate, and that's probably the reason why. You'll notice that up until a few years ago, that games were almost entirely dinosaur-free, and I suspect that's largely because the industry was dominated by people my age that had similar associations between them and "B-movies", whereas I think the younger people taking over now have an entirely different perception of them and saying "let's make a game about dinosaurs!" doesn't cause the same kind of snickering, rolling of eyes, and mumbling of Barney references that it used to ;)

So yeah, for me, the fact that they're dinosaurs doesn't really hold any draw beyond what say any other game "monster" might, but I've always loved the whole epic-sized monster thing in games, so that doesn't fail to impress.

One thing I do find though is that the epic feel tends to dwindle for me with the very largest dinosaurs, particularly the quadrupeds. This could be a graphic settings thing I suppose (although I doubt it), but seeing massive creatures like a brontosaur spin with mathematical precision around their center of mass tends to really break that whole epic feel and mess heavily with suspension of disbelief for me. Stuff like the Tyrannosaur don't suffer as badly from this mind you given they're bipedal and thus tend to have a more natural pivot point.

I think this ties in with why we don't see more epic creatures in games though: getting them to look right is rather difficult.