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Final Thoughts on ARK: Survival Evolved
In short, I gave it a shot.
Ark takes the bold choice of being a game that offers persistent survival. I first became aware of this as I was combing a beach near my house on the PVP server that attracted me to it in the beginning. I kept finding all these vagrants passed out on the beach and I couldn’t manage to revive them, at which point more experienced players told me they were offline players and would only wake up when their players arrived.
The next time I logged in, I was naked, a hole had been bored into my hut, and all of my possessions stolen.
Okay, thatch hut, my bad. I guess next time I’ll know better than to do that.
I moved to a PVE server and this time I built my house inland a bit, away from likely spawn points, made it from wood, built a second floor, and used several walls and doors as security, because after all even if the players aren’t going to grief me in this PVE world, there were still occasional raptors about.
I logged in, respawned- because I was dead- and found my house demolished and once again all my possessions gone.
ARK: Survival Evolved suffers from the same level of griefing you would find in any persistent survival game, because after all, why put in the 2-3 hours gathering wood and building something for yourself when the games rules make it easier to steal from others?
This is actually an easy problem for a game like Ark to solve. Minecraft doesn’t distinguish one voxel from another, if you put a block down it’s a block like any other end of discussion. In Ark, the game knows who put down a building element and will tell you who did it when you mouse over it. Since the game can tell who owns a structure, it doesn’t strike me as a stretch to add a rule that grants an armor bonus to a structure when it’s owner is offline.
Not so much of a bonus that griefing or raids against an enemy team would be impossible, but enough that the griefer would likely starve to death in the attempt- enough that gathering resources yourself would be the sane decision to take.
That they clearly have the systems in place to recognize who is on and offline and what structures belong to whom and have not implemented such a mechanic is a huge miss for Ark. They claim to be “survival evolved” but the devs have actually done very little to expand upon and correct the weaknesses of the genre, tempting one in with additional resources to manage and a robust tech tree but ultimately failing to “evolve” the survival genre beyond hybridizing it with the WoW-type MMO.
If the devs really wanted to evolve the genre, they’d address its weaknesses, like its high susceptibility to players who literally just want to watch the world burn- always at the cost of the intended audience of hunter-gatherer-architect-farmers.
The experience was sufficiently frustrating and disappointing that I don’t intend to return to the game. I have a couple friends who want me on their server, but that calls for installing a 20 dollar DLC, which after my experience with the Vanilla game I’m in no way shelling out for.