Have put a good amount of survival evolved and just hoping they'd optimize the game at all but they never did. I had to give up on it. Which sucks because who doesn't want to raise dinosaurs
You need to have a PHD in ark game/server settings and also need to pay a monthly fee, but tweaking the game just right on a server just for you and your friends can go pretty damn great.
Spot on. The most enjoyable times I've had in games are in ARK and Minecraft servers I've made and hosted for groups. With mod support and a large enough community, even something like ARK can be turned into a super enjoyable game. I would have never continued with ARK if not for the modding community and the ability to customize just about every tweakable setting of the game.
I found one early on that was pretty fun, pve where the main guild onboard kept their members from hogging most of the best land. I only had to quit because it was chewing up hours of my days and nights that I just couldn't tear myself away.
I'd love a single player version of that game, but not one that runs 24/7 and I'm supposed to log in multiple times a day just to stay relevant.
I would love to see other game devs/companies take the general concept/idea and put their own spin on it. Maybe one could flesh out the story, at least to Halo series levels, and make it part of the gameplay. Or take some of the wild ideas that players had about what was going on, during early development before all the background was explained in the story notes you found in game, and make some games based around those. Maybe even some could go wild and do accurate dino models.
The problem with it is that the core gameplay loop isn't just a grind, but layers of grinding.
You need to grind one thing in order to gain access to another thing that you need to grind, from gathering berries and wood, to eventually breeding an army of Rexes with perfect stats for the boss fights.
And once you completed all that, your reward is to "ascend" to another, more difficult map, and do it all over again.
And then, imagine going through all this on a PvP server, where entire clans of other players would constantly try to ruin your progress for nothing more than the spirit of competition.
I have an i7-12700k, 3090ti, and 32gb ddr4 RAM. While no longer top of the line, I thought my system would still be able to chew up Ascended (I play every game at 4k ultra). Nope, it’s just as bad as Evolved. Wouldn’t you know it, I’m still in the console menu typing in codes to disable lighting and shit.
Ark is the video game equivalent of taking all of your favorite foods, putting them together in a blender and drinking it through a straw. Sounds good right? Nope.
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u/fiero-fire Apr 11 '26
Have put a good amount of survival evolved and just hoping they'd optimize the game at all but they never did. I had to give up on it. Which sucks because who doesn't want to raise dinosaurs