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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Turret_Run on 2024-09-07 12:27:21+00:00.

Game development has changed. Games used to be static, what you picked up at Gamestop was it, any complaints or ideas saved for sequels and remakes. Then came the internet, Early Access and Open Betas, allowing developers to radically change the game over time.  While this can do things like breathing life into failed games, more often it allows companies to chase trends or go back on promises, sacrificing their game and community in the process.  It’s a latter case we’re here to talk about, with one of the most successful games to come out of Steam’s early access program, Ark: Survival Evolved.

Welcome to Jurrasic Ark

Ark: Survival Evolved, is an open world PvP/PvE  Sci-Fi survival game, in which you play as a Survivor, who for the sake of not truncating a beautiful, sprawling story, we’ll say has been dropped into a hellish scenario by cosmic circumstance and no clue what’s going on. 

Your goal is to survive on one of several Arks, developer-made maps based on ecosystems from multibiome islands to scorching deserts to radiated undergrounds. These are split into story Arks, which progress the game’s story, and custom Arks, which are designed toward multiplayer and general free-play. In all of them, you survive by managing your physical condition, gaining levels so you can craft new objects, and taming/ battling a diverse array of (mostly) dinosaurs, which all have unique abilities. It’s well loved for two reasons. First the gameplay is a perfect middle ground between solo, story driven- survival games like Raft  and 7 days to die, PvP heavy games like Rust, and open creativity like Minecraft allowing for you to play pretty much however you want and still have a fulfilling, rich experience. The other reason is that it’s hard as shit. 

Under default conditions, Ark is a brutal slog.  Resource gathering, taming dinos, and building out your base all take a ton of time and effort, and all it takes is a surprise alpha or a player with the jump on you to set you back hours. Even  the lore was a laborious task to learn, but I’ll get to that later. Sure you could mess with the server rules and add mods to make things easier, but they never removed the ardor of the game, just made it feasible for an individual/someone on a schedule.  There was always a rush as you worked out solutions to problems,and transitioned from a caveman to Iron Man riding a lazer-shooting t-rex.

The Tek Tier

Tek represents the highest tier of items and ark, and were unique both in terms of style and mechanics. You get the ability to craft most things in Ark by purchasing engrams with skillpoints or finding blueprints in the wild.  However tek tools have Tekgrams, which are unlocked by defeating bosses. A surprising number of players don’t even know those bosses exist, much less fight them. Fighting bosses is a time intensive task, requiring you to delve into  lethal caves to get the artifacts to fight them along with killing the deadliest creatures on the ark. Then you have to breed, train, and equip an army of high level tames to fight them get them to all fit on the goddamn tiny ass staging platform and then actually fight the boss.Here’s a guide video but it doesn’t really encapsulate the time it takes to tame, breed, and find saddles, which serve as armor. 

Once you’ve beaten them, you then have to scour the island for the rare resources to craft the tek items, and then continuously fight the bosses to grind element, which the tek tools run on.  You also couldn’t use Tek items without having the Tekgram, meaning it was only available to those who put in the effort or learned how to cheese the boss of Aberration (spoilers)

Setting the stage

Over the course of 4 years Ark released four story maps, along with several  customs ones. Each one was more exciting than the last, introducing new creatures and biomes and expanding gameplay. They focused a lot more on expanding rather than fixing issues, so there were always bugs, but the quality of the game made it worthwhile. 

In 2018 they released the Extinction Story map,which many players thought was the end of Ark’s story mode. Not only did it wrap up the Survivor’s journey, the map serves as a sort of retirement location for players, providing multiple options for biomes, introducing creatures that provided quality of life improvements, and ways to grind for endgame resources that, while still laborious, were much more convenient. However while Ark was potentially winding down, Its developer, Studio Wildcard, was heating up. 

The popularity of Ark had exploded. Many youtubers have found their niche just playing Ark.  They were planning a star-studded Ark anime, and somehow, Vin Diesal had become one of the company’s executive officers. There was still a problem however.  Ark was a success but it was also their only success. They had attempted a battle royale called survival of the fittest in the games engine, but they dropped it as soon as the playercount dipped. They announced a pirate MMO called Atlas in 2018, also using Arks engine, but it was as buggy as Ark with none of the charm and they abandoned it a year and a half later.  If they wanted to ensure the survival of the studio, they needed to draw in a wider audience and make some cash at the same time. And thus came Genesis. 

A New Genesis, but not a good genesis

If Extinction is Deathly Hollows, Genesis is Cursed Child. Released as two maps dubbed Part 1 and Part 2, it was a significant departure from the Ark the community had come to love. Instead of a continuous vast ecosystem, you instead had several smaller biomes you fast-traveled between. Instead of prioritizing base building and survival, you now undertook “missions” which gave you hexagons, a new ingame currency. You spent these hexagons at the Hexagon exchange for resources, which was run by HL-NA, who is a sentient spoiler. The story was also now in your face, with the map having the express goal of having you complete missions to fill the mission meter so you could take on the boss (Spoilers) Rockwell, who you apparently didn’t kill in Aberration. You also couldn’t build on much of the map, as they were marked as “mission zones”. 

Suffice to say it was not well recieved. At all. Along with the fact none of this is what players wanted, The mission structure didn’t work with Ark’s game engine and design. Some of the “easy missions” were impossible due to the system, random bugs, or requiring groups, and some missions labelled as difficult were a breeze thanks to bugs in the players favor.  HL-NA was also not well liked, as she was chock full of MCU-style quips,in particular when you died. Having this quipping in your ear while  watching 12 hours of progress  and your favorite vanish does not spark joy. Half of Ark is about basebuilding, so not being able to build was frustrating and confusing. The map offered an alternative  in a creature you could build a base on, but it was a rare spawn and came with its own challenges .  Most importantly, it completely removed the grind. 

Items that you would spend hours grinding to craft were available as rewards for missions, or the resources to make it were available for cheap. For example , black pearls are required for most tek items, and on most maps require you to go down to the depths of the ocean or kill the most powerful creatures on the map to obtain a handful. On Genesis, they’re 300 hexagons, with the cheapest missions paying out a thousand plus item drops. Even If the quest didn’t get you what you wanted, you could just get them from lootcrates! Because what does a survival game need but lootcrates? Part two of genesis made things worse, with the map being even more sparse, the missions more frustrating, and giving you essentially a full Tek suit, the ultimate weapon of ARK, in the opening cutscene. 

It was also obvious the developers were trying to funnel new players into these maps and away from everything else they’d built. When you start the game, the Genesis maps are at the top of the story map list, while the rest are in release order. If you used HLN-A in the earlier maps she would make remarks at that not only truncate/spoil  Ark’s lore,  but also feel like they’re urging the player to skip these maps and head to genesis while it’s still hundreds of hours away.  Even the st…

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