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For most, the lore/story is somewhat light as most of your activity in game is doing activities to allow you to beat the bosses (taming, crafting, leveling, breeding etc). Other wise its as you said you dont like: building and sandbox playing.
Ark thus is arguably not a strong narrative driven game what so ever.
You can also learn more of such things via the wiki's too.
ARK didn't actually start out with much of a story that's why, it's something that came in much later.
The story notes are hidden items across all the maps, so it's very hard to just find all of them, and they aren't going to be discovered in order.
Gameplay is also designed for multiplayer and is not balanced for singleplayer. It can be done, but it won't be fun and will take forever. Experienced players can solo the game, but the average player likely can't.
You can use cheats and mods though to see a lot and I actually think that's worth doing. Get some OP weapon and armor mods, Inventory stacking increase mod, and cheese through just to see all the creatures and map locations.
However where Subnautica gave you a lot of hints as to where you could find PDAs (like large chunks of wreckage which would probably have some in), and also had the occasional cutscene sequence to progress it in some areas (like the Sunbeam sequence), Ark is much more sandbox. The notes you have to find are hidden very well, with few clues to point you to their whereabouts. And there are no cutscenes at all until you complete the map and switch to the next one (the last two story maps have some, but before that such scenes are very limited).
It is somewhat more survival-based, yes. However I would argue it's atmosphere can be quite similar to Subnautica in many ways, feeling alone in a dangerous, hostile environment that is also very pretty and enthralling, so it can suck you in if you allow it to do so. Exploring and discovering the various maps can be quite an exciting task. However if you are particularly drawn to the story and not so much survival, then it's possible Ark may not be as entertaining for you.
What little "story" involved is in the form of little tidbits of lore scattered around the map. They tell the story of different survivors that were previously on the island. There's sort of a central cast of characters, who lived in different time periods throughout history. A chinese female warrior, a modern day zoologist/scientist from australia, an ancient greek general, a scientist and weapon designer from the future, and a victorian scientist (who goes on the be the main big bad villain throughout the rest of the game).
When you do get all the information from these notes scattered around each map, and see the whole story, it's actually kind of crazy. No less then the fate of the entire human race at stake. Major galactic space opera.
This got a bit long, so I put a TL;DR summary at the bottom in case you don't want to deal with the wall of text.
The story is in snippits here and there which you can find or miss depending on your exploration.
In general:
This game is an adjustable grind fest with the VERY alluring promise of taming and riding dinosaurs. Exploring on a Baryonix or a Spinosaurus or even riding a raptor, leading its pack into battle against larger carnivors is VERY addictive and fun. You can take flyers when you just want to "go somewhere" without having to trot through the swamp, getting snatched of your saddle or poisoned to bits, or when you want to transport alot of material savely.
You can do most things in this game on foot, but usually there are dinos out there which do it better if you tame them and your ressource / combat turn out on foot is significantly lower than using one of those, leading into the game play loop of "oh, that looks cool! I want it! - figuring out how to get it - figuring out what to do with it once you have it and all that on land, the air and in the ocean.
The building mechanics are ... frankly bad. Almost everyone is using the s+ mod to make it bearable, if you do please be careful to actually build all of your crafting stations in the s+ version or you will end up with parts not quite fitting or doing what you want.
It is less about "building a cool base" more about having a place to store ressources and equipment, park dinos you aren't using right now and establishing an industiral base so you don't have to watch paint dry while your refining forges are smelting 1 piece of metal per year.
During exploration you may encounter specific points on the map where you can experience hightened to extreme danger but get unique items required to progress into the late game on each of the maps. That links with the story, but wether or not you find the relevant story notes is again a matter of exploration.
Either way, your gameplay looks roughly like this:
Foot harvesting -> first tame / tames and makeshift base (likely just a foundation in the middle of nowhere where you can place a campfire, morta and pestle, maybe a crafting station .. ) -> tames help with transportation and harvest allowing for limited exploration for more ressources / more useful dinos to tame -> eventually you reach a point where you can and should set up a proper base for which you can once again explore so you can find a good spot. -> base set up -> ressource harvesting trips -> base expansion -> taming specialist dinos for the mentioned high threat areas (I am beeing vague as to not to spoil too much.) -> getting the late game required items out of there -> breeding and army for the last challenges of the map -> cutscene and next map (linked by the story)
This process can take anything from 20 to 200 hours - depending on how much of it you want to do unguided, how much you enjoy exploration, how adapt you are at understanding the games systems and most of all: The settings you use for your world (freely adjustable every time you log out as long as you are playing single player, non dedicated as host or dedicated with the server running on your end. Settings explenation videos and written guides are freely available, but you can always tailor it to your liking once you understand what the sliders are doing. General warning: The difficulty slider determines the level of dinos you can find in the wild and the difficulty of the final challenges, but the scaling between the two is off making a medium or high difficulty setting advisable, a low one can result in you having very underpowered dinos for the task ahead.)
If you decide to get into this know that you are likely in for the long run, which is good if you enjoy the gameplay loop. My brother and I are on our first run through at ingame day number 135, we could finish the map within the next 1-1/2 hours but there is more difficult stuff left to do if one wants to and we want to at least try.
135 ingame days means we have been playing for 117 real time hours. He knew the basics of the early game, I was completly fresh..just so you know what you are in for. Faster is very possible, much slower is just as possible.
lastly:
I already mentioned the s+ mod, which makes building and in parts crafting more tollerable, but sadly there are significant issues in this game.
Namely: Your corpse or the loot bag left over when your corpse is destroyed can glitch into the mesh of the world at which point it is lost. Even no clip mode can't get it back to you, because the stash becomes uninteractable. To deal with that you can either cheat back the items you lost (it is easy and relatively quick but annoying) or use the
Death Helper mod
It allows you to teleport the items from your corpse / loot bag back into your inventory once you have arrived at the corpse location. It also provides you with indicators leading you towards the corpse (when they work as intended..) wether you want to use that functionality or not is up to you, the game uses a pillar of light and marks your death site on the respawn map (once and only on the respawn map, not the ingame one.)
There can also be an issue with ressource spawns, especially with giant bee hives, but sometimes with the before mentioned high threat enviroments as well, in order to solve these issues you have to wait for 15-20 minutes for the area to populate correctly (high threat enviroment) or wipe all non tamed dinosaurs (bee hives).
Apart from these we have not encountered anything game or experience braking, though smaller issues do pop up from time to time.
TL;DR:
-Apart from a few cutscenes at the beginning and end of the map, the story is found in specific locations found to via exploration (think bioshock audio tapes). Not knowing what is going on is part of the story, discovering what is happening is your journey, though the gameplay loop is more survival game than story hunting.
-Duration is probably around 100-200 hours on the first map, unless you make heavy use of guides, but can be significantly faster if you have a general idea about what you are doing and don't plan to take on the "ending" of the map at its maximum difficulty (not a setting, but a choice in game).
-The gameplay is mostly exploration / combat / ressource gathering - if you can't look at a strange dino and be like "oh I want to ride that and see what it can do!" than you might not enjoy the loop much, for that is the primary draw of the game next to exploring the different biomes. (on servers you may add PvP to it if you are so inclined)
-S+ mod for building and Death Helper for corpse recovery from glitched places are HIGHLY adviseable, loot can vanish into the abyss, DH helps you get it back and your loot is usually a lot of work, so losing it to a bug is extremly furstrating.
-Settings sliders allow you to tailor your experience, guides are freely available. Difficulty should be set to 1 (max slider) or 5 (numeral input), it actually makes the game easier outside of the first hour or two. The "single player settings" check box caused alot of issues in the past and I do not know if those are fixed, I would cautiously advice against using it. Most of the adjustments happen through the sliders anyways.
Hope you enjoy.
Speaking of updates, what do you guys think about the Ark remake or remaster on UE5? Since I didn't play the original, maybe it would be better to go for the updated version. From what I understand, it includes all the DLCs and has stunning visuals.
I won't deny that the graphics and unique landscapes were what initially drew me to the original game. So the visual part is pretty important to me.