I don’t think there’s a single Ark player in the world that doesn’t have a love/hate relationship with the game. I’ve played countless survival games, and none of them have ever inspired as much agony or ecstasy as Ark has. I’m talking about the highest highs and the lowest lows I’ve ever had playing a game. I have real trauma that I carry with me from some of the terrible things that have happened to me while playing Ark, but it was also an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Let’s start with the good stuff. What stuck with me the most across my 605 hours in Ark is how much it rewards the time and effort you invest into it. That’s 25 real-life days I’ve spent building bases, taming dinosaurs, and running for my life from giant pissed-off titanoboas (that’s a prehistoric crocodile-eating snake), and spending all of that time learning how to survive and prosper gave me a real mastery over Ark’s world. I’ve spent considerably more time in other games like Destiny 2 and World of Warcraft, but I don’t feel like I’ve achieved even a fraction of what I’ve achieved in Ark in those games. There’s a reason we temper steel by putting it through the fires of hell. We grow the most from overcoming the hardest challenges, and Ark gives you so much to overcome.
Beach Bobs are what we call new players in Ark. The beach is the safest place to start, so you’ll almost always find brand new players running around, naked and afraid, down by the water. On public servers you’ll find half-built shacks abandoned all up and down the coast, with sleeping bobs dotted along the beach - players who logged off and never returned. There’s a high turnover in the early (dozens of) hours of Ark. You’ll find no tutorials here, no low-level zones for newbies, nothing to ease you in. It’s kill or be killed from the jump, and you either rise to challenge or give up and find a less punishing game to play.
I can’t see myself committing to a game like Ark ever again, but I’m glad I had that experience. Every step of progression you make is hard won in a constant battle against the most hostile world imaginable, and it can all be taken away from you in seconds. You can lose the gear and structures that you spent days gathering resources if you piss off the wrong tribe (or dinosaur). Out in the wild, you can lose your tames in any number of ways, from falling prey to a hungry predator, to making a wrong turn and accidentally walking them off a cliff. Some creatures take a full, real life day to tame, and one careless move can set you back immensely.
It’s easy to look at what you’ve built in Ark and feel a real sense of accomplishment. When it’s so hard to do anything, everything you do feels like a big achievement. There’s a story behind every dino you tame, every structure you build, and every excursion you make out into the wilds - and those stories are even more meaningful when you experience them with friends.
One of my favorite memories is building my tribe’s trap boat. Back in the day, you needed a specific kind of kibble, made from the eggs of specific creatures, to tame each creature. We needed T-Rex Kibble to tame a Quetzalcoatlus - a giant flying animal that would allow us to build a mobile base - but the T-Rex was not native to our island, so it was time to venture out. Knowing we’d need to tame at least five rexes to get a good supply of kibble, we knew we would either need to build a new base where the T-Rex lived, or find a way to bring them back home. Considering they lived at the base of a volcano in what was essentially battle royale of dino carnage, we opted for the latter.
That posed a significant challenge. Not only are rexes way too big to transport on normal rafts, but it also isn’t safe to tame them on volcano island either, because we’d end up spending the whole time fighting off other dinos that wanted to eat ours. The solution was pretty elegant. We built a boat shaped like a cage, with a giant ramp built on one side. We’d sail the boat to volcano island and back the ramp up on the shore, then one of us would run out, get a rex’s attention, and lead it back to the cage. The rex would follow them up the ramp and fall into the cage, where the rest of the tribe was waiting to fire on it with tranquilizer darts. As soon as it was knocked unconscious, we’d sail back home while taming our new family member with delicious scorpion kibble.
Ark now has a universal kibble and taming doesn’t take nearly as long, or so I’m told.
Catching our first T-Rex was such a huge moment for my friends and I. We spent many nights designing the taming boat, gathering the supplies we needed to build it, and tweaking the specifications until it was just right. Building the mobile taming structure gave us access to so much more of the world and expanded what we could accomplish. When you play Ark, you have moments like that over and over, with each new challenge presenting a new opportunity to prove yourself and climb another rung on nature’s food chain.
Of course, setbacks are a big part of that experience too, and you just have to accept that major losses are going to occur. I never got too upset getting raided, or finding out one of my dinosaurs had been eaten, or dying to a surprise, tree-climbing-cougar attack and losing my precious metal tools. What really got to me, and what ultimately ended my relationship with Ark, were the setbacks that came as a result of bugs. The kind of setback that wasn’t nature taking its course, but the result of an unpolished, inadequate game.
There are countless issues, as any Ark player will tell you, but there were two specific ones that ended up being the last straw for my tribe, and they happened just a few days apart. The first involved a building bug. We had decided it was time to convert our stone walls into metal walls, and spent many nights doing nothing but taking laps to our metal outpost, caravaning tons of ore back to camp, and smelting it down into ingots until we had the thousands we needed for our wall. Placement is tricky, and refunding a misplaced structure only refunds you half the materials, so we were very careful about how we placed them.
After a week of grinding we had everything we needed and had built the full perimeter of the wall save for one last piece. The last section connected everything together and needed to be placed precisely between the two ends of the wall, but when my friend clicked to confirm the placement, the entire wall vanished. Every single segment, and the entire week of farming metal, was gone in an instant for absolutely no reason. I haven’t played Ark in years, but last I heard this was still a common bug.
Not long after, I was out looking for tames on our flying Quetzal base with a full fridge of kibble - since you never knew what you might find out there - and I encountered a perfect, level 150 bear. When I see animals of that size I would just pick them up with Quetz’s talons and carry them back to the base, then drop them in our taming pen. When I went to grab the bear, the bird clipped into it, locking them together. The bear then killed the Quetz, destroying the platform on its back, and taking the whole fridge full of kibble with it. I had bounced back from so many upsetting situations in Ark, but this was the last straw.
I had to stop playing to save my sanity, but I have no regrets about my time with Ark. It is a punishing, and often unfair game, but it’s also the most rewarding game I’ve ever played. I wouldn’t have spent 600 hours getting eaten by dire wolves if it wasn’t. Survival games may not actually teach you how to survive, but they will teach you how to endure.
Survival Week at TheGamer is brought to you by Nightingale -available on PC in early access February 20
Survival Week
Welcome to the home of TheGamer’s Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you’ll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
