Fantastic dinosaurs and where to find them
Ark: Survival Evolved was released in 2015 and is an open world, sandbox survival game developed by Wildcard Studios, set in a land of virtually-simulated dinosaurs. It’s a vast world where you can explore anywhere, tame dinosaur friends, and build almost anything. At the same time, it’s an unforgiving world. Venture off too far while being even the slightest unprepared, and meet giant carnivores who will pounce and ensure your demise. Ark paints a beautiful and lively atmosphere. However, 5 years later, Ark: Survival Evolved in 2020 is unfortunately still hindered by clunkiness and an overall lack of polish.
As soon as you enter the game, you are cast onto the outskirts of an island right on the shore. You look at your arm and notice a stone embedded in your wrist. It itches. You scratch it. This is your first clue of the overarching story, which is surprisingly complex, but only if you actively seek it out. Otherwise, the lore starts and ends with that rock.
You look around, wondering where to begin. Immediately, you see some dinosaurs walking around. You get a little peckish, wondering if they are friendly, but you soon realize they have no interest in you. Okay. Only 30 seconds in, and it is time to start carving out your personal adventure.
As is the case with many survival games, there are a ton of ways to play. There’s multiple maps. You can play by yourself, with friends, with strangers, in PVP, PVE, modded, official, or unofficial. For the purposes of this review, I played on the default map “The Island” and I stuck with only a select few people in an unmodded PvE server; the barebones basics to get a pure feel of how the game was designed to be played.
Starting out was a bit tricky. It usually is for sandbox survival games. But after a bit of a learning curve, you figure out the basics. Gathering plants and punching trees gets you started with the most basic materials. Soon enough, you’re drinking water, eating (berries), crafting simple tools, stuffing your own poop in your pockets, and wondering why on earth you just did that last one.
Crafting
Crafting is one of the few main mechanics and it’s your way of progressing through the game, so you will spend much of your time doing this. Like most progression-based survival games, you craft basic tools with basic materials, and you use those tools to more efficiently gather more materials to craft more advanced tools, and so on. When you level up, you unlock more recipes (called engrams), which you can unlock with points you acquire by leveling up. Learning new recipes this way at first seems kind of silly. Why not just have everything available from the get-go, like in Minecraft?
But after getting to the higher levels, you’ll realize the sheer amount of recipes you’re able to learn, and you’ll be glad you weren’t overwhelmed with the hundreds of possible recipes all at once.
The crafting progression and design is one of the game’s strongest points. It’s simple enough where you can break down the main crafting in 4 parts: Crushing in a mortar and pestle, melting in a forge, crafting at a workbench, and cooking in a pot. As you level, you unlock more efficient machines to accomplish these 4 things so it never feels overly complicated. The things you can craft via these 4 actions do get substantially more interesting, however. At level 10, you can craft the most cutting edge bow & arrow. At 38, you can craft the most cutting edge longneck rifle. It gives you a glimpse of how it feels to advance technology and to craft the latest things from it, from the eras of cavemen to modern soldiers.
The crafting works fairly well; however, it’s just slightly clunky enough to detract from the whole experience. You open the inventory with the I key, which is far from the WASD position your left hand lays on. The game doesn’t remember what item you searched for in the crafting menu, so going back in to re-check what materials you need means you have to retype the item every time.
There’s so many items to craft though, you almost have to rely on typing in the search, otherwise you will spend far too much time scrolling and looking for the tiny icon of the item you want. Double-clicking to transfer from your inventory to an item’s inventory doesn’t work, so you have to drag the item. And dragging the item out of your inventory doesn’t drop the item. Instead, you have to right-click it and select Drop, or you have to press the O key. Which, again, is far away from the WASD position so it’s very inconvenient.
I’m being a bit nitpicky. But it’s the little things that matter, and all these little things add up to make crafting and inventory-management a more clunky experience than it should be. Especially since it’s one of the game’s biggest mechanics, behind building and dinosaur taming.
Exploration
But when you’re not crafting, you’re exploring, and the world of Ark offers no shortage of places to discover. The default map “The Island” contains far richer lands than you would expect. Begin traveling inward from the shore, and meet the wet swamps, where giant aggressive crocodiles traverse the waters at breakneck speeds. Survive that and enter the jungle, where there are so many trees, you won’t even see the posse of raptors sneaking up behind you until it’s too late. Past that, a redwood forest, where the giant tree trunks stand home to a plethora of wildlife, including tree-climbing lions who wait to pounce on you if you dare fly through. Make it further north, and the temperature turns brutally cold. Wander through the snow, and wolf packs, T-Rexes, and gangs of smaller carnivores will show you no mercy.
If all these places sound really dangerous; they are. The further north and inland you go, the more dangerous it is. But this dynamic does wonders for feeling like you’re progressing. Once you make a low-level camp on the shores and get comfortable with where you are, you can push the envelope a bit as you venture a little further inward. As the new harsh conditions and creatures hit you, you can set up camp there while you get situated and prepared to venture further inward. By the time you make it to the north, you will be a prepared, hardened survivor, with contingency plans in place and a gang of trusty pet dinosaurs to back you up.
Building
When you’re not crafting or exploring, you’re likely taking part in the other two mechanical pillars of Ark: building and taming.
Ark’s crafting system gives you the blueprints necessary to craft your own structural creations and make your mark in the beautiful, vast world. Starting from a basic shed and building your way up to a homey home or a giant towering fortress is immensely rewarding… when it works.
Unfortunately, you are likely to run into frustrations which will make your architectural dreams much more difficult to achieve. Building on uneven ground is a nigh impossible task without researching online for some hacky workarounds. Foundations don’t stack on top of each other. Some pieces don’t snap. One side of a wall is uglier than the other. Or you have 30 seconds to pick up a piece if you place it improperly. That last one sounds like you have ample time. But if you have to place multiple items to make sure they all work together, you must place everything quickly else you risk losing building materials.
And then there are smaller things I’m surprised Wildcard Studios overlooked. Like how hard it is to make slightly complex roofing since everything has to snap to each other. There’s no corner pieces for pyramid roofs. You can’t fit a ceiling over double doors or else you can’t fit through it.
My tribe's base in the later stages of the game.
But then, in terms of detriments, there are the two big heavy hitters: Aligning and material management.
To build a structure bigger than one piece, you have to snap it in place. This is simple at first, but as your build becomes more complex, snapping things becomes more frustrating. You are absolutely working against the snapping system more than you’ll be working with it. And did you want to snap two of your separate builds together? Forget it. Because Ark doesn’t work with a grid system like in Minecraft, it’s impossible to connect two separate buildings unless you built them as one snapped structure in the first place.
Secondly, building material management is a cumbersome process when you want to create a medium to large build. It takes a lot of wood and stone to craft items in stacks. The problem stems from how heavy wood and stone are. When you’re becoming overencumbered to the point where you can’t move at all with only 150 wood in your inventory, enough to make only 3 walls, then there is something wrong with how the game’s building is balanced.
Finally, there’s Ark’s bread and butter.
Taming
Taming is the biggest part of Ark which separates itself from other survival games. Knocking out dinosaurs and other creatures in the wild then force feeding them for some reason makes them trust you with unwavering loyalty (there are other ways to tame without knocking your future friend unconscious, but KO is the way to go 90% of the time).
Once a dinosaur is tamed, you can set it to stay put, stand guard, fight with you, or simply follow you and be your companion. Once you get used to all the controls, each of your dino friends becomes a formidable, reliable companion much like how Pokémon are.
Dinosaur taming is without a doubt the best part of the game. You can only find new dinosaurs when they’re wandering out in the wild, so this makes going out and exploring a lot of fun.
Additionally, while certain classes of dinos hang out in their biome counterparts, there is a considerable variety in the actual location of these dinos. In other words, I didn’t notice any obvious repetition of exactly where a dino is, compared to MMORPGs when the mobs are in an exact location at all times and you know exactly where to go to grind them. Adventuring always feels like a unique experience this way. My base was on the outskirts of a snow mountain. While I could never go far up the dangerous mountain, I still met plenty of dino friends and foes while lollygagging around the mountain base. It was much safer down there.
Like all the mechanics of Ark however, dinosaur taming is not without its faults.
At the lower levels, I set out to tame a bird. Those annoying birds who swoop down, peck at you and steal something from your inventory. Most players hate them, but I wanted one because I learned they can catch fish for you. So I looked online how to tame it (good luck finding out how without outside help) and after lots of time and a frustrating amount of trial-and-error, I finally tamed my first bird, Sheila.
I was so proud of myself. Sheila sat on my shoulder like a true companion. I felt like Ash with Pikachu sitting on his shoulder after a long, arduous day of bonding.
I rode a triumphant, short boat ride back to base. Sheila flew off my back to check out her new home. But not even 10 seconds later, I hear a commotion going on in the distance behind me. A fight had just broken out between a triceratops and a dilophosaurus one of my tribe members had tamed before. Sheila goes flying toward it.
No! She’s only level 12! She doesn’t stand a chance against a triceratops! I pressed the only button I knew that made me whistle, U (much later I would learn it actually means Unfollow).
Whistle Come back! Whistle Oh geez, she’s losing the fight. “Come back you dumb bird.”
She’s dead. All my hard work, gone in under a minute.
This paints the biggest issue with dino taming in Ark. Sure, technically her death was on me. But as a new player, I didn’t know freshly tamed dinos are set to Attack Your Target by default. Or that “Your Target” extends to tribe members’ targets too. I didn’t know I needed to whistle her to passive mode, and I didn’t know I then needed to whistle her to follow me. I didn’t even know there was a radial menu to change all these settings.
This is purely a game design fault, and it’s a big one. If you don’t arm your new players with text tips, tutorials, anything that will help them through your one and only big differentiating mechanic, they’re going to get frustrated like I did. Especially with how complex dino taming gets. “Congrats on your new tame! Hold T on it to adjust its behavior” would have been enough. It’s inexcusable there’s not a single piece of help. The complexity of taming is a double-edged sword at this point.
Otherwise, just like crafting, it’s the little things that hinder the experience of the taming/pet-owning system. The learning curve is sky-high. The whistle hotkey commands are far too numerous to remember. The radial menu settings on the dinos contain ambiguous wording.
Your dinos will run into battle when you don’t want them to. Jumping off your mount means you launch up and out the right side of it; if you’re standing by a cliff, you just killed yourself.
Dinos that follow you can get stuck behind a tree, and if you don’t notice they’ll be lost forever. Tracking them down is exceedingly difficult. Parking your dino in a crafted stable? Half the dinos don’t walk backwards. You’ll become stuck on the dismount. You’ll become stuck behind their tail because the tails for whatever reason have player collision (please remove this).
Don’t get me wrong. If you master the learning curve and look past the inconveniences (by strong-will or with mods that fix them), you’ll agree the dino taming is unlike what any game has ever achieved. Becoming a master of your dino companions is incredibly satisfying, and it may be the closest we get to having AI companions that feel real for a long time. It goes without saying, but the extra coolness factor is your companions are dinosaurs. Real-feeling human companions would probably be a bit too uncanny, but the prehistoric creatures we’ll never get to meet IRL make for a particularly unique and wonderful experience.
Verdict
Great
Ark: Survival Evolved has its flaws, but the surprising moments and fun factor more than make up for it. And past its slightly frustrating crafting and building, there is an immersive atmosphere, emergent gameplay, and an impressively complex taming system, which combine to create a unique flavor to make you feel like you’re a true citizen of the wild. Does it hold up in 2020? Definitely.
