Is this game worth buying in 2019?

[Night FM]

I saw that most of the recent feedback was negative, so I just wanted to hear some opinions on it:

1. Is the game a grindfest? Is the level progression reasonable , or do you have to invest hours in mindless repetition just to gain a decent level? Is the gap between low-level and high-level players modest (like in Dark Souls 3), or is it a rigged deck like an old school MMORPG, where you either have to grind to win, or pay for overpowered items to win?

2. Is it playable solo, or are you more or less forced to join a guild or clan in order to play?

3. Players were saying the public servers are dead, and now the only multiplayer is in private servers with overpowered clans that leave no chance to play for a newbie.

4. Players were saying the game is a bugfest, and may not run at all, or require you to invest hours in debugging just to play the game, and that the developer is apathetic about it.

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Thanks for the feedback.

[JDaremo Fireheart]

the game is a lot of work, but the grind isn't that bad. the worst part about the game is that with all DLCs it uses 130Gb+ of space on your hard drive. That's before even adding mods, and you need about 100gb free for updates to unpack and install.
public servers are only dead because of alpha tribes and the general toxic environment. as for private servers, it all depends on what server you go to. a lot are just for the owner and their friends, but there are some really good ones out there.

[Charcharodonto]

1 The game is grindy, but it is not all you have to do. it depends on what you want/need, if you plan to PvP be prepared to grind a lot, same when you are a builder.
If you are happy with a modest house and wall to keep bad things out, then you won't spend time grinding a lot.

Level progression is reasonable, Goes very fast at first, goes a lot slower at endgame stuff. However lvl matters in PvE for just unlocking stuff while in PvP it means better guns/armor and the like.

yes and no, in terms of between established high tier player and beginner at the beach is it MMORPG get ganked style on a pvp server

Level itself isn't as big a difference then tames. a Lvl 1 dude on a imprinted rex will generally do a lot more then a lvl 100 guy with a rifle roughly speaking.

Meanwhile a guy in flakarmor can be suprise clobbered on the head and lose to a low level, but generally the better equipped player wins.

2. Depends, PvP? You can do the lone wolf style, but don't expect to hold a base, eventually it will be found and raided/demolished. being a migrant with stashes will increase your odds.

PvE? Whatever floats your boat. More fun with friends but on a busy, friendly server there is plenty fun to be had solo or in a tribe.

3. Public has no rules for the most part, so everything goes. Unofficial depends on which you join, if you join a random server it is a cointoss between a nice server or a badly moderated one. hence why most stick on servers hosted by friends or well moderated ones.

4. Most of those complaints are computer issues, not a game issues. ARK is a heavy, demanding game. And to many people either expect their game to run on to high settings or have insufficient RAM or GPU power to handle the game well.

Does that mean ARK is bugfree? Hell no. But gamebreaking bugs? No. Some persistent bugs even after years? yep. but considering the engine ARK runs on. It is a wonder how much they did with it anyway.

[Saramis]

if you dont play the game with 3x harvesting taming expect to commit 1,000 hours to do anything, and i mean anything. Its a great time sink like all survival games but best played with friends, also singleplayer crashes waaaay too often so host a server

[Valdar]

this game is awesome. dont listen to the negative people they probably got their butts handed to them one to many times. go join an unofficial server official servers are cancer.

[Night FM]

Thanks for the feedback, are there any good servers anyone recommends?

[zerassar]

The recent feedback is overwhelmingly positive. Averaged out over 1037 recent reviews at the time of writing. Not sure where you are getting it that the recent reviews are negative?

[Night FM]

The rating dropped from positive to mixed in recent months, with a lot of players saying that recent updates and bad management was ruining the game.

[streetcloud]

if you want to enjoy the game play unoffical officals are living hell ive played the game for 4 years now even in beta theres alot to like but alot of bugs that ruin the game

[Uueerdo]

There were a lot of people that misremembered what the original season pass promised, and thought the season pass should have guaranteed them everything Ark for life, and were upset when the new Genesis stuff was announced.

[SideWinder]

i just started back up on ark a week ago and i have a tribe of a few and we are doing fine. the taming is kinda long but if you do it on the weekends or just do a bunch of dinos at once then its not so bad. i recommend trying to start a tribe with a few friends because its alot easier. the game is VERY fun to play and there is SO much to do in it. there is also an end goal to the game so its not just mindless grinding for nothing. 10/10 would recommend

[Phidyx]

Hi,

I bought Ark in the beginning of july 2019 (including the first season pass). I don't regret it because of four hundreds hours of playing already. Just by discovering the first map (on the first map called The Island), building houses, taming creatures, always something interesting to do, of course I meet bugs sometimes not fixed until 2016, but we can play Ark with no problem. But two things are very important if you want to play this game :

1 : do you have an enough powerful computer to play it ?

2 : Ark and its first Season Pass takes 190Gb on the hard disk drive !

Originally posted by Uueerdo:

There were a lot of people that misremembered what the original season pass promised, and thought the season pass should have guaranteed them everything Ark for life, and were upset when the new Genesis stuff was announced.

Sure but in all my gamer's life it's the first time I see a Season Pass where everything is not included ! if they had, for exemple, said there will be a 50% or more discount for people already owning the first Season Pass, I think the pill will be better passed :)

[burningmime]

Others have covered it, but here are my 10 cents:

Originally posted by Bishop Black:

1. Is the game a grindfest? Is the level progression reasonable , or do you have to invest hours in mindless repetition just to gain a decent level? Is the gap between low-level and high-level players modest (like in Dark Souls 3), or is it a rigged deck like an old school MMORPG, where you either have to grind to win, or pay for overpowered items to win?

Different servers have different multipliers. If you play single player or host your own server, you can set your own multiplier. A 10x multiplier means you get resources/XP 10x faster. There are actually different multipliers for different aspects (XP, resources, taming, etc), so you can customize your experience.

If you want to PvP, it's going to be a grindfest regardless of the multiplier (since if you have 10x the resources, the enemy also has 10x the resources).

2. Is it playable solo, or are you more or less forced to join a guild or clan in order to play?

I don't crash playing single player, that dude just has a bad computer. Anyway, single player works fine, there are also solo/small tribe servers if you want to play multiplayer but still play alone, or with a small group. You can even solo PvP, which I find the most fun way to play (raid tiny bases, hide in ratholes, etc).

3. Players were saying the public servers are dead, and now the only multiplayer is in private servers with overpowered clans that leave no chance to play for a newbie.

There are lots of private servers. Check MTS out if you want to play small-tribe or solo PVP; you have loads of chance as a newbie (the beginner servers are reset every 2 weeks, so everyone starts at the same place, then you can transfer your char at the end of 2 weeks to the main cluster).

Public is 1x multiplier (so grindy, even just for PvE). Public PvP is awful, because players abuse bugs like undermeshing. Good servers have plugins to detect cheaters using meshing, and responsive admins to ban them. If you want to PvP, don't bother with official (regular PvP or small tribes; it's all the same), just find a good unofficial. If you're dead-set on playing public PvP, you basically need to learn all the glitches in the game and how to abuse them -- which might be fun for some people, but I'd rather play the game how it was intended.

4. Players were saying the game is a bugfest, and may not run at all, or require you to invest hours in debugging just to play the game, and that the developer is apathetic about it

That one's true. I rarely crash outright, but I've lost stuff to bugs, and stuff like clipping is so ingraied into gameplay that it's actually a game mechanic.

[Uueerdo]

Originally posted by Phidy:

Sure but in all my gamer's life it's the first time I see a Season Pass where everything is not included !

For a high profile example off the top of my head, Borderlands 2 had many things not included in it's season pass.

The only game I actually recall explicitly promising all future content was Fallout 4, which ended up having to raise the price later (and caught flak for that even though they gave tons of advance notice) when they decided develop more DLC than originally planned.

Originally posted by Phidy:

if they had, for exemple, said there will be a 50% or more discount for people already owning the first Season Pass, I think the pill will be better passed :)

I'm not sure why they should be expected to do that. It's not like with the first season pass where Scorched Earth was released before the season pass was announced; which they handled rather magnanimously with a proportional discount on the season pass for people that owned parts of it already.

It isn't like new purchasers get the content from the first pass included in the new Genesis pass, so there is no portion of Genesis users already own, let alone a 50% portion.

I can understand being disappointed, especially if you didn't read what you were buying, or in your case buying in so late you didn't see the store page actually transition over time from "Scorched Earth and two future DLC" to "all three DLC we have released"; but to expect them to give new content away for free because some buyers misunderstood or made wrong assumptions, and post bad reviews over that sense of entitlement is just wrong in my book.

For anyone actually following the game, the idea of a second season pass should not have been a surprise; some of the community managers, or whatever you call them, mentioned the possibility of a second season pass shortly after Extinction launched.