ARK: Survival Evolved
As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing & starving on a mysterious island, you must hunt, harvest, craft items, grow crops, & build shelters to survive. Use skill and cunning to kill or tame & ride the Dinosaurs & primeval creatures roaming the land, & team up with hundreds of players or play locally!
“ARK is a huge game, in terms of geographical space, scope of content, features, technology, and just about every other metric. We’re a veteran team with some major hits behind our leads, and much of the core challenge is already met, but this is still an ambitious one for us.
We want the player community’s help to ‘evolve’ ARK into the dinosaur world game that we’ve been dreaming about since the days we played with plastic green T-Rex toys during elementary school recess, since we shed a tear to ‘The Land Before Time’, since we wistfully imagined the towering cities of ‘Dinotopia’, and since we nearly choked on our popcorn to the thrills of ‘Jurassic Park’. We love games, and holy smokes do we ever love dinos (along with all sorts of other extinct creatures/natural sciences), and through interaction and iteration with the ARK’s community, we think we have the best shot at creating the be-all, end-all long-term prehistoric universe that we want to live and thrive in.
We have a great start, and with your valued input and contributions, we will take it all the way together!”
Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
“Approximately 1 year, with a full release planned for June 2016 coinciding with the console versions.”
How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“While we have the foundation of our game at Early Access launch, there are many currently-planned features and content additions we will be adding over the year from EA to full release.
Beyond such planned features, will be adding TONS of aspects suggested or iterated on by the community, hence the point of Early Access!
Planned Core Features include, among many other things:
- Mac and Linux versions
- Procedurally Generated ARK’s
- 40+ more creatures to reach over 70, with essentially every major category of extinct animal represented in some way
- More saddle types including saddle armor tiers and saddles with powerful weapons mounted on them
- Gas-powered Vehicles
- Human/Dino Body-Paints
- Enhanced building mechanics to evolve ARK into one of the best straight-up builder games out there
- More underwater biome/ecosystem complexity, including support for vacuum-sealed underwater bases
- Lots more items, weapons, armors and further advanced tech tiers
- More item skins, limited run event skins
- More bosses and the end-game cycle including the Ultimate Life Form & Ascension
- More biome types, including deserts, snow regions, swamps, and more.
- Steam Economy Support for Statistical Items (Need some Steam API functionality for this from Valve!)
- Way more plants and more detailed plant biology systems/farming systems
- More statistical modelling of status illnesses/diseases (both player and creature)
- Better SFX, more Music, Better UI’s, Better Gamepad support (i.e. UI button shortcut callouts), Better VR support (i.e. HMD gun-aim option)
In addition to zillions of bug fixes, intensive performance improvements, mega iterative polishing, and what have you.
The game will sparkle like a shiny diamond before it is considered ready for Full Release, and even then we plan on a long-term post-Release content lifecycle, with specialized ARK’s on the drawing board.”
Comments
ARK Expansion Follow-up
The ARK Community Forums have a post following the recent announcement of plans for an ARK: Survival Evolved expansion (thanks GameSpot). This upset some customers of the game itself, since it remains an early access title. Here’s a bit:
We’d also like to provide our official take on the Scorched Earth Expansion Pack, and the future of ARK. Put simply: we are absolutely committed to driving aggressive development towards a solid, feature-robust game launch for ARK: Survival Evolved. Everyone at Wildcard wakes up every day thinking about how we can make ARK into a better game today than it was the day before. It’s not always easy, but our intent is ever-forward progress towards a retail release that will be far more ambitious in scope and features than our original vision when we launched ARK into Steam Early Access in June 2015. Your feedback enables us to continually expand the game to become better than ever!
Scorched Earth: Our original vision for ARK always included the creation of Expansion ARKs, along with the infrastructure and technical systems to transfer data dynamically between live ARKs. We determined that it is more sound to iterate on these systems during Early Access than after retail launch, given the significant risks involved if we didn’t “get it right”. While that meant unveiling the first Expansion early, it also means an easier time integrating further post-launch Expansions into the ARK network. We understand that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and we appreciate the enjoyment people seem to be getting out of this initial view of how Expansion ARKs can work. Now that we have the systems in place to support them, we can ensure minimal integration issues with subsequent releases after ARK: Survival Evolved itself has launched.
ARK: Survival Evolved Update Adds Grappling Hook
A new update on Steam for ARK: Survival Evolved updates the early access survival game to build 235, adding new content, including the Phorusrhacidae Rapidesultor, aka the terror bird, and the grappling hook, described as a game-changing game mechanic. You can get a look at the newness in this trailer, and here’s a bit:
The Grappling Hook is a game-changing tool enabling Survivors the ability to scale cliffs, hitch a ride by attaching to a flying creature, wrangle other players/prisoners, or even small creatures to drag along (“Get over here!”). Learning how to regularly use this tool will alter the nature of your attacks and dramatically expand the range of your travels with greater ease and fun!
Today’s ARK update also includes:
Tribe Alliances (PvE and PvP): Yes, finally, small Tribes can band together against larger ones!
Fishing Upgrade: Coelacanth Nutritia, common name Coel, are now different sizes (and give different amount of resources depending on the fish size…gives the rare chance of a super-large catch!)
Fully Localizable Game Text: Now you can crowd-source translation and dynamic fonts for any language without Modding/TC’s!
All Current Items added to the Master Items ID array
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