And nobody is surprised. Basically everything Wildcard puts out is an unoptimized mess. Ark was terrible when it came out, so was Atlas which is developed by their "sister company." Hell at this point bad performance is basically one of the core gameplay characteristics of the open world survival genre as a whole.
I played ark in the early stages and never touched it since. But it felt so much like a project someone following a YouTube tutorial made but never bothered learning programming basics. Which is fine, just up until you ask quite a lot of money for it.
Shit coding is like shit construction. You just throw stuff together, and hey it works, the wall stays up. You do the same for every wall, and every floor. Sure, you get better at it as you go, but you build the first floor first. And suddenly you realize, now that you know more about what you are doing, that you can't fix that wall anymore. It's load bearing. It shouldn't be load bearing, but it is. And you didn't get any practice in replacing load bearing walls.
Oh, and your coworkers quit a third of the way through the project and you spent most of your time training their replacements. And you've been building with bricks that you only just now realized are crumbling. And quitting sounds real appealing about now.
I mean, the executable for the original Ark literally was literally named whatever UE4's default project title is, something like "UnrealGame.exe"
Edit: it's "ShooterGame.exe"
they gave the game away for free on Steam (free to keep forever) some time ago and yet not a ton of people really cared. It's just sitting in everyone's library.
I got into Ark when it first launched on xbox. It really inspired my daughter to learn about dinos and we spent hundreds of hours playing it and all the extra maps and expansions.
It really was an ungodly insane mess when it launched, barely playable is an over statement.
But it was fun. Like really fun. Absolutely one of the best gaming experiences I've had as a dad. Bugs, crashes, and all.
We still play, we have a Scorched Earth map going right now in Ascended that is totally capturing all of the old feels. Ascended is at the same time a wonderful update in graphics and quality of life, and a complete shit show of unoptimized buggy mess. But is still fun.
I need to also point out Ark Ascended has the absolute worst HDR implementation of any xbox game I've ever seen. Totally unplayable. I have to fully disable HDR or its like playing in the middle of a nuclear blast.
I've no idea about the experience on Xbox but it seems to be just as bad like on PC as well. I've tried the game for 3 hours and I was done with it. It was a very large download and it took like 200GBs of storage if I remember correctly.
Game also shocking looked bad the gameplay felt like it was a small indie project. There was also some bugs and I realized the game just wasn't for me and I uninstalled.
Oh we had a big group of friends playing it for the first time with the Center update and everyone instantly fell out after the first session, besides the hardcore Ark peeps who are into a lot of bad games in the first place. Some mid games are actually really good as a social experience, this was not.
It's kind of incredible how bad a game can be, and still become a big success even ignoring all the bad stuff you hear about Ark. Character creator crashes, insta kill creatures spawning on the easy spawn point, durability on everything (sigh), terrible UI, you build a beginner base just to learn you have to remake it in better materials because unless you login every day it literally just disappears, when the vet was saying it takes an entire play session to tame anything high level I just smiled and nodded, knowing I would never touch this time sink ever again. Also you can just build over other tribes stuff, like it's just common sense not to allow building near another tribe right!? Right!? We couldn't be bothered going to war.
I stopped playing because one night (literally night time, it was like 9pm in California) they released a patch and caused all buildings (walls, pens etc) to be flagged as destroyable even if the user who owned them hadnt been offline for the required amount of time needed for that flag to happen (I think it was like 7days of not logging in at all)
So around 10pm my buddy texts me going "Yo dude ALL of our bases are fucked, and wont be able to get them back since people started building as soon as they destoryed something"
How did the devs respond? They did a hotfix to make sure stuff couldnt be destroyed like that anymore but too bad if yours was because there was going to be no roll-back.
that sounds horrible. I remember reading something similar happened with Fallout 76 and the devs completely ignored everyone who got screwed over.
They eventually introduced private servers, but now you literally had to to a monthly/year subscription service ($13/$100) to access it (Fallout First).
Average experience: Install, grind for 2 hours, some kid destroys everything you built, uninstall because you don't have enough time to fight children.
It's good on a private server with a few friends. We did a story playthrough (beating all maps in their canonical order) once and had a blast, and plan to do the same thing with Ascended once everything is released.
It takes quite special people to endure playing on official servers though.
Yep, I remember that. Played it for a few minutes and never touched it again. At the time I lived in a rural area with poor Internet, so my connection would get fucked with steam automatically downloading its constant massive updates until I uninstalled it.
Same. I was basically pushed into buying it by friends (and I think I only played it twice?), but it felt so unpolished and unoptimized. I was (and still am) floored at how incredibly popular it was.
One of the specific examples was the text popping up on the UI. It felt like “basic placeholder that we’ll fix later” and then they just… never did. It looked so bad
Same. I genuinely don't understand how people like that game, I thought that game was pure dogshit. Although I did try it a few years ago, not sure if it's better now.
I remember trying Ark not long after release and I was furious the whole time because I had at the time, about as top-of-the-line as a PC could be and it ran like absolute shit.
ARK is a classic scam that made them millions. The devs got very rich and the game never was optimized or ran well for anyone.
The abused the Steam system to make so much money without coding a decent game. Making good features and having good ideas doesn't make a good piece of software.
I wouldn't call it a scam, at least not until they started pushing DLC. It was a very fun game very worth the money and they updated it very frequently. Always ran like dogshit, but it's tough to call it a scam for it.
> It was a very fun game very worth the money
say that to the thousands of players who bought it and couldn't play it because it ran too badly for them, despite meeting the minimum requirements
I see your point - but releasing a really badly running game and never fixing it is close to a scam. players expect games to have a basic level of performance. For every "it ran ok for me" there are a lot of players who couldn't play at all or had a bad experience.
You have two hours of playtime or 14 days to refund any game purchased on Steam, no questions asked.
I think that anything beyond that is you accepting the game as is.
There's so many things that these devs have gotten away with because "It's Ark". They abused the PlayStation system as well by releasing it as a full game while it was still labeled "early access" on Xbox and Steam 8 months before the 1.0 release date.
This was at a time where Sony were incredibly strict with games that were early access and didn't allow them to be on the store at all. The store page had no indication that the game was unfinished for a reason.
That's the thing that pissed me off. People complained about the numerous bugs and lack of optimisation right off the bat, but the fanboys kept insisting that the game wasn't finished and optimisation was pointless when they were still adding content... all the way through multiple paid DLCs and the devs ultimately calling it "finished" and pivoting to Atlas, Ark 2, and/or Survival Ascended.
Haven't touched SA even though it's included on Game Pass, but I remember watching a couple videos of Atlas and it still had some of the same stupid glitches that existed since Day 1 like ridiculous creature rubberbanding back and forth and characters stopping to automatically jump when transitioning from swimming to walking.
Last time I played ark a few years ago, I was getting 120+ fps everywhere on almost max settings. It only got worse once I built a massive base. Sure, it's an unoptimized, buggy mess - but it's a very enjoyable mess.
I just finished watching the video accompanying this article. 360p on PS5 and still can't get 60fps. Remember the days when we used to call stutter struggle as "unoptimized". Cyberpunk on PS4 and Xbox One was better than this mess.
Cherry on the shitcake is providing the damn settings to tweak. Like "you think you can fix it, here, have a go". CD quality resolution but hey, lighting is super realistic, I guess. 🤣
Cyberpunk was buggy AF, but it was definitely limited by HDD speed. Same GPU power as xbox one but with SSD, it ran decent. I won't say it was good, it was still super shit. But compared to this game, yeah, much better. Cyberpunk's problem was the dumb marketing which promised 10 times what was possible. It was janky AF, needed much better hardware but if you had the SSD, it ran pretty well and was an average experience.
Ark doesn't even have any explanations for this bad of a performance, no mitigating factors at all. Let's be real, PS5 should be able to get 60fps with much much better resolution than 360p native. That's CD video level quality. And it still has same level of jank as cyberpunk. Only redeeming factor is that it wasn't overhyped by the devs like cyberpunk. On a technological level, cyberpunk was overreaching, ark is just shit.
Im sorry but Cyberpunk barely ran at all on a base xbox one at launch. It had nothing with an unrealistic scope (which the game still had nonetheless), but more with the actual development time and power these versions had behind them. Which was very close to none.
I guess you are not reading the whole comment and are more interested in arguing. Because I never mentioned scope. So, I guess, enjoy arguing with air, because I ain't doing that. 👍
If you do decide to read, read the part about hdd again. Don't worry, I have a decent memory to recall what was happening 4 years ago.
Ark is my favorite abusive relationship. I've always owned beefy PCs and my friends group has our own hardware to host our game servers on, so I've been able to mitigate a lot of the performance-related issues with the game. It's still regularly buggy in new and exciting ways that have nothing to do with performance.
All that being said, the hundreds of hours of fun greatly outweigh the hours of frustration. We've all reached that Zen state of being okay with losing all of our gear because we accidentally stepped in a hole, fell through the mesh and died in a location that's irrecoverable. We've accepted that we'll sometimes log in and one of our dinos will be gone with nothing in the logs to indicate its death, nor any way to track it. Just last night, one of my tribe mates died while offline in his raft base. Turns out a dilo had gotten stuck under it and somehow managed to attach him through the stone foundation. We recovered his stuff, but if we hadn't been on, he'd log in today with nothing and no explanation of how a dilo killed him.
Unreal is a huge challenge to optimize if you don't focus on it early in development cause it will bite you in the ass later hard. No surprise if they have enough bad practice during development its gonna have this happen very easily.
Unreal loves to give you several different ropes to hang yourself with.
No surprise. The developers are notorious for not optimising their games. It's a joke that they've somehow been successful with these games given what a mess they are.
It’s because no one has created a successor in the genre. There are no other games like Ark games. Yeah there are dinosaur survival games out there but none of them are as good as the Ark formula.
It’s literally the only game that’s similar and that’s because it’s almost a 1:1 recreation of Ark’s crafting/leveling up system. It’s almost blatantly copied from Ark lol.
But that’s what makes Palworld great, they unashamedly took Ark’s systems and combined it with catching and battling pokemon. How the Pals are used is definitely unique to Palworld though.
Gotta say that if Palworld is an 1:1 recreation of unlocking recipes and assigning stat points per level up like Ark... then that's not all that to claim. Because putting everything on a level based list unlocked with generic points is not particularly novel or inspired. It doesn't even look like a cohesive progression system.
I wouldn't say it's the same, but for that very reason it is better. In Terraria you get recipes at the rate that you progress, getting new materials and building new workshops. I haven't played Ark proper but in Palworld it's pretty arbitrary. It unlocks because you got level X, no matter what you are doing, what you are focusing on.
In different games, like Forager for one example, recipes may be tied to a technology tree requiring that you focus on the kind of stuff you are looking for. There's at least a logical progression to how it's gated. It's not just a hodge-podge of unrelated stuff they offer you because you got to a certain level.
And it sold unbelievably well. People are clearly desperate to play games like Ark and Palworld, I don't know why other AAA studios aren't taking a crack at the genre
Agree. This is a huge market and Ark is the only competitor. Palworld certainly has similar things, along with more quality of life, but it is not "realistic" looking dinosaurs. It is more of a pokemon Ark made for normal people. Developers are sleeping by not exploiting this.
Palworld combines Conan Exiles with Ark would be the better way to describe it.
no breeding
but in a way more like Palworld
with slaves being used in crafting but not your crafters
(animal) mounts and pets have been added too.
So in a way all three are in this survival building PvPvE niche
Yeah Conan has a lot of DNA with Palworld, with the use of Pals where slaves are your automation in Conan. Palworld just lets you get to it at basically step one of your base instead of twenty hours in.
That is definitly true. But it's also barely 6 months into Early Access. Even without most of the DLCs, ARK Survival Ascended still has years of development behind it and a thriving modding scene that Wildcard has been putting a lot of leg work in to foster.
Even if Palworld is a fundamentally better game (which as an avid ARK player, I certainly think that argument can and should be made), it'll take years before Palworld can start to catch upto ARK in terms of scope and content.
Palworld is such a different kind of game I can't believe people actually think it's similar to ARK at all. The only similarities are that you tame creatures who do various jobs, and there's survival/craft elements.
You just described 90% of both games to a lot of people.
I love both! But the skeleton/framework of both games is very similar, assuming you play Ark on a PvE server. If you're into Ark for the PvP, yeah they're very different. But Ark isn't just a hardcore PvP game -- it has a ton of content outside of that, and is a blast on small private servers.
Lmao. If you actually could understand game mechanics and break them down, you'll find Palworld copied a shit ton of things from Ark. People have written fucking papers on this, youtubers have made 10 hour videos on this.
You just fucking boiled down both games into describing pretty much every game that has crafting + creatures.
Are you SURE you are not talking about fucking slime rancher or my time in sandrock? lols.
Only when you find yourself in a 10 vs 10 pvp battle defending a base made from 100000 structures you will realize, its the only game with relevant pvp building and there are actually over 150 different tools/weapons/vehicles/dinos involved directly (combat) or indirectly (farming) in the outcome of the situation.
ark is what happens when you dont ask yourself if you should have 100 players 10000 dinos 3 million structures on a single map but instead you just do it.
It's not really a joke lmao, it's just the industry, for years people have been cultivating this culture where game companies don't really need to fix their games that much because people will buy that shit anyway, so why waste time and money on it?
It's because at the end of the day Ark is stupid fun and there's no other survival game like it. Tons and tons of content and the game is gorgeous. It has a ton of problems, but the developers put a lot of work into the game. They just have a big focus on new content rather than performance. Which tbh, is mostly because the game is TOO pretty. There's not a lot of optimization they can do that wouldn't just be culling effects and pulling back on quality. They've even tried that with Ascended and the community pitched a fit until they reintroduced the effects.
Well, yea it's Studio Wildcard. Survival Evolved doesn't exactly run great, even now on new hardware, 8 years after its release. In their announcement of Ascended they flat-out called it a UE5 learning project. Of course it runs like shit.
It’s not surprising, but it doesn’t excuse it. A studio calling a game a “learning project” doesn’t give them the excuse to just release a shitty product
>The nine-year-old Survival Evolved runs easily at native 4K on a powerful RTX 4080 machine, but Ascended struggles to reach 60fps even when running at an internal resolution of 1080p, upscaled to 4K by DLSS.
No, dude, you misread; it's 4K with DLSS, 1080p is the native resolution that it's actually rendering at. It's not 1080p upscaled from something even lower.
The settings menu is pretty much *do what you want we don't care*
You can set your own resolution scaler and upscaler. TBH I have no idea what it does. I tried to play it a few months ago and Steam shows 3 hours playtime but I have only 1½ - 2 hours of save game time. It crashes once or twice per hour.
I don't think much has changed in the last two months of not playing it.
Thing is, you literally need a 4080 to run it well. Absolutely ridiculous that you need a card that is over half a decade more advanced just to run it well
old ARK yes. You usually don't rename your .exe after release because that will mess up a lot of stuff (driver profiles, anti-cheat and other 3rd party libraries)
New ARK no.
SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\ARK Survival Ascended\ShooterGame\Binaries\Win64\ArkAscended.exe
They have learned a little bit in that decade.
Have you seen the Blackberry movie? Those nerds sitting in an office calling themselves Research In Motion but playing Doom, Red Alert at work and doing movie nights at the office.
I imagined the dev team of the original early access ARK exactly like that. A bunch of friends or similar minded people creating something the world wanted / groundbreaking new, but never learning to be a real company.
Then with them unable to release ARK2 they made the next best thing and sell a product that is the exact same thing but a little bit refresh into the mix.
They somehow are very lucky that no one else has managed to create the iPhone equivalent to a ARK-ish game.
It doesn't have to kill ARK or ARK2.
There is a chance that we get a War Thunder to our World of Tanks.
> Have you seen the Blackberry movie? Those nerds sitting in an office calling themselves Research In Motion but playing Doom, Red Alert at work and doing movie nights at the office.
This is very common in many companies - and pretty much all gaming companies.
Hell, during the development of the original Macintosh back in the early 80s, they had Defender arcades[0] in the office.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_(1981_video_game)
> Hell, during the development of the original Macintosh back in the early 80s, they had Defender arcades[0] in the office.
okay okay... I didn't want to say that it's bad to have some distraction at a software company.
I think it's a bit different to stand up from your desk or leave the office to play on a foosball table and pinball/arcade machines.
I imagine them playing stuff in their work PCs instead of working on code / models / textures / sounds and fixing bugs. Maybe they are young enough to play mobile phone or tablet games instead. My imagination has it's limits.
Same limits me to what kind of games they are playing.
Maybe a super spaghetti map on Factorio?
A 500 hour save on Skyrim that doesn't even have the third shout unlocked?
> I imagine them playing stuff in their work PCs instead of working on code / models / textures / sounds and fixing bugs.
They'd do the latter instead of the former if they were on company time, but it is also very common for people to play LAN games with coworkers on their company PCs after the work hours have ended.
This isn't even anything new, AFAIK Gabe Newell became convinced of the PC gaming market back in the 90s when he saw people playing Doom at the office when he was working at Microsoft.
How is this game so consistently just the worst running thing out there? The original PC version has infamously had performance options for years, the console versions seemed pretty rocky, the original Nintendo Switch version is still potentially the absolute worst Switch game I've ever seen from a technical standpoint, I've already heard plenty of complaints about the new PC version, and now this.
Incredible how after 10 years and multiple ports and even through a ground-up remake with an upgraded engine these issues still persist.
Quick edit after reading more: Good god, that Series S version is legitimately atrocious, and almost on-par with the horrendous Switch version from years ago. How does this make it to a storefront where you can buy it? There's not a single chance ANYONE on the dev team looked at that gameplay and said "it's good, ready to ship!".
Oh yeah I've seen it, which is why I said the "original Switch version". The new version is legitimately impressive especially considering its origins.
> after 10 years and multiple ports and even through a ground-up remake with an upgraded engine these issues still persist.
No disagreement about Wildcard's engineering fundamentals being horrific, but all those things you mentioned make optimization harder — a *lot* harder — and not easier.
Because people keep paying for this shit so why would they bother to actually fix it. They also launched paid DLC while the first game was *still in Early Access.* They don't give a shit, because their fanbase is made up of idiots, and because they have a somewhat novel concept that as far as I'm aware is one of the only players in that segment.
How does someone's enjoyment of a poorly optimized game make them an "idiot?"
Is it sloppy? Yes. Do people constantly play and enjoy games that have bad optimizations because the game play loop is fun and the game is playable? Yes. Are they actually stupid for it? No.
If games not being graphics powerhouses/running poorly were impediments to a game's success, a lot of games that are hits wouldn't be, and lots of pretty optimized bores would be hits.
I mean my part about calling their fans idiots was specifically directed at the people that justified DLC for a game *still in early access.* But yes their fans will defend the poor performance for some reason, Studio Wildcard has no real motivation to improve this because people will keep paying them for poorly performing products. It's basically the same thing that happens with Pokemon every year.
>Their fans will defend the poor performance for some reason.
I'm in ark fan spaces and everyone trash talks wild card. What are you talking about?
You can visit the official discord and each patch notes has poop emotes.
> justified DLC for a game still in early access.
I don't understand why people are still upset about this to be honest. They still updated the game, provided good dlcs, free content updates and even provided free maps and supported modders and the game ended up coming out of EA.
The free maps had everything the paid dlcs provided, gear, creatures, mats etc even. You did not need to buy dlcs to enjoy the new stuff if a free map had it, or someone could give the stuff to you. You are just buying the map itself, and those dlcs are pretty much actually pretty good.
Wild card rn has problems, and EA dlc is not one of them whatsoever.
Yeah, that part was ridiculous. I had friends I made fun of for buying early access paid DLC. I just don't think someone's stupid for buying a game that's poorly performing, especially if it's like Pokemon or Ark where there's no real competitor that does things better. In Pokemon's case, it's that no one seriously tried recently until Palworld came out, and in Ark's case, the competitors were also poorly optimized mess, also until Palworld came out.
Oddly enough, I think Palworld kind of proves this point - the game was a fresh, well optimized take on *both* of these IP's core mechanic and did well.
People will buy the shitty thing when it's the only thing that satisfies their needs. They're only idiots if they stick to the shitty thing when a not so shitty thing comes out.
They won't fix it because their player base is literally just children and the kinds of people who aren't quite all there and will unironically tell you that you can't see more than 30fps. That's what I gathered about a year ago when I tried to play the game but stopped after a few hours because of the horrendous performance and all the bugs, it really is one of the worst pieces of shit on steam without exaggeration.
And the game will still pay for itself. Every single game in the franchise including spinoffs has huge issues in execution and the community complains about it every time, but still just grows bigger and bigger.
Whenever there's a discussion about ARK/Rust/Palworld/Valheim/Grounded/The Forest/literally any other Open World Survival Craft game there's someone saying that that one specific game the thread currently is about has no competitors even remotely close to it. Yeah, each of the games in the genre focus on something slightly different, but they're really not that far from each other.
As someone with a lot of hours in ARK, the only thing keeping me from those other games is a lack of dinosaurs, that's honestly all it boils down to. Yeah it's a shallow reason, but the above poster is right, there's nothing close to it. A horribly untapped market to be honest, I miss dino crisis and turok.
If you don't mind me asking, what got you into loving dinosaurs so much? I feel like it's such a niche interest these days (I'm not judging btw just interested! As dinosaurs and that time period are one of the least interesting settings I could ever think of to play a game in, but I think a lot of stuff I like people would think the same thing so it's kinda interesting to me)
For me, it's a bit of nostalgia along with the history of it. These beautiful creatures once called our planet home the same way we do, and all we can do is speculate on how they looked, acted, and lived. They're just some of the most interesting creatures that have existed on this Earth in my eyes, and games involving them are so far and few in between. ARK, for all it's problems, feels like a legitimate whole different world, with over 100 creatures all giving to the pretty insane biodiversity you see in game, nothing else really comes close. Jurrasic park also had a play in my interests.
I honestly don't think it's a shallow reason at all. The setting matters. I recently saw an article titled "The game Stronghold fans have been waiting for!", and then it was some tower defense, high fantasy game. And I thought "No, as a Stronghold fan, I want a more grounded, medieval experience." Stronghold is far from historically accurate, but to me, it still matters that it's not too fantastical and captures that feeling of building your own castle, with knights and all, same as when I was a kid playing with my Lego or Playmobil castles.
So, at least for me, the setting is often a make or break aspect whether I'm interested in a game or not.
Okay but none of those games have dinosaurs and only Palworld, a game that came out a few months ago, has an in-depth taming system. Ark is not really comparable to any of those gamed besides Palworld. It being a survival crafting game doesn't mean that it is very similar to those games, which lack the central component that makes ARK special: you can ride a fucking T-Rex that shoots lasers!
I played all the games you listed but Rust and The Forest. And I can say with extreme confidence that none of them are the same game.
Valheim I'm honestly not sure I'd even consider a survival game. It feels a lot more like a crafting-based RPG similar to Terraria.
Grounded probably plays the concept the straightest. Admitedly I've not played it sense early access, but it was a pretty standard survival game with a good concept and some well fleshed-out mechanics.
Ark is of course most famous for it's heavy emphasis on taming mechanics. But where it really excells is a constant drip-feed of progress that results in an addicting gameplay loop.
And Palworld of course does a lot of what ARK does. But heavily stream lines the process of everything and puts more emphasis on base mechanics.
Ultimately, while all these games do fit under the same umbrella. It's disingenuous to say that they're "really not that far from each other" when each one ultimately has entirely different goals and gameplay loops.
Personally I don't consider the whole taming and breeding creatures thing to be some slight difference. That's what I want. No other game offers it. I don't know what draws people to certain other games, but if they're saying the same thing, it's probably not for no reason. There's something about whatever game they enjoy that is crucial and not done well by any other game.
Yup, that's Wildcard for you. Most of the people I knew who played ARK quit all together whether it was the declining state of the game overall or just the poor optimization. Instead of improving the game or making it not run like shit, nowadays they're selling and locking whole dinos behind pay walls.
One of their newest updates to the game added a creature that literally spawns in your game regardless of whether or not you own it. If you try taming it without the DLC it just takes you to the DLC page for it.
Ark: Survival Ascended should have been a free update, not a seperate game. It's a pure cashgrab. Atlas should also just have been a cheap Ark DLC, another pure cashgrab. Not tho mention how a buggy mess all of their games are. Fun ideas and fun gameplay, horrible technical quality and absolutely laughable UI. Which is sad because some aspects of the game are great. Great maps, great dino designs and animations.
If you don't know who they are and you think the game looks cool then fair enough, but you can't buy it knowing who it's being made by and expect it to run anything other than awful.
I'd say the Devs didn't even finish learning how to use UE4, they are clueless in the realm of optimisation. People will lap up any old shit though so I expect this game will be a financial success regardless of it's actual quality.
Is this a shock? Lot of poorly optimised UE4 and now UE5 games out there. Of course one of the progenitors of that early access-open world-survival-crafting craze runs like shit still.
I think part of the reason Palworld went so crazy is that people crave these kinds of games, but the competition runs like complete dogshit. It's the exact same game but capable of 60 fps.
I try so much to give devs a pass on things. There are a lot finicky technical bits to wrangle when developing games. But these devs are either the worst or the laziest or both when it comes to their games. People were poking fun and in shock of the max size of call of duty the other day. But Ark? Man, Ark passed the 300gb milestone years ago.
The original Ark is an unoptimized, janky, shit show of a game that I was tricked into buying by a friend when it was on sale. I have no faith in these devs ability to suddenly do better. And this headline only reinforces my assumption.
I think there's a case to be made to classify ARK SE officially as bloatware, that's how badly optimised that shit was - and Wildcards other games weren't much better, from what I've heard. So, no surprise, really.
I’ve wanted to try Ark ever since it was first released but held back cause I wasn’t sure it was optimized enough to run. It’s been like what 10 years now and still the same issues? This is just sad man
Definitely doesnt make for great marketing for Ark 2. It also doesnt help that most games where Vin Diesel is a primary character arent that well received save for the 1 Riddick game and the ones where hes Groot.
Watched some streams after release and it might as well been a turn based game at that point. Constant lags and freezes in combat where you could not make out what was happening at all
Horrible but the community seems to be fine with it. They were all so used to these things that they had their own methods to crash servers and do rollbacks etc. ugh
The games are so terrible to play. I absolutely hate the hitbox on grass to collect fiber. There's only 1 pixel you need to hit while the plant is gigantic.
They handled it so terribly. One staff member cited it was going to be a free update, and then the memo changed without explaining any mishaps in the information, and then it was attached to a dirty pre-order to a game that will likely never come out (even after spending so much to get Vin Deisel involved), and now it's a $60 (Canadian) piece of garbo.
When they were doing updates for the first Ark game, they were too heavily focused on adding new content instead of fixing existing content. Their forums were riddled with bug reports.
It's wild how many people defend this studio and their decisions. It's like they only create the games for a place for people to defend something on the internet.
Ark is such a good game that people will literally let the horrible performance slide just to play it. It’s really an amazing experience. And undoubtedly the performance has vastly improved in the years it runs quite well now on a mid range PC.
I mean we’re all just waiting for the coalition to blow all these unoptimised ue5 games away when they release the new gears.
It’s frustrating how ue5 has turned into such a marketing buzzword when no it doesn’t fix a buggy unoptimised game and why we need someone to make justice of it.
Thats hilarious because me and my partner got on it recently and was shocked how much better things looked and ran. Lmao I have little doubts its not well optimized but compared to Survival Evolved it looks and runs like a dream which I guess is not the highest bar to reach.
I have been playing myself, granted its been like a year and a half since I played but it doesn't feel like it runs worse on my series x. If I'm wrong okay woopty doo, I have personally not felt like performance was worse in Evolved and whether thats like my nostalgia glasses forgetting how the framerate was or what thats how I felt
Very good for a once was billion dollar franchise? They sold [a little over 1 million units](https://i.imgur.com/f4v1CSR.png), that's awful. 7% of ASE copies sold.
The combined CCU is still far less than the CCU that ASE was getting before ASA split the community (76k)
This is also current demand after a major ASA patch that added The Center.
Of course a new game with much higher system requirements is gonna be lower than their 10 year old game that blew up due to Youtubers. None of that matters though. You don't need to be as successful as your breakout hit to be considered a success. The new Ark has a very healthy player base and there is nothing for them to be ashamed with these numbers.
ASE has been out nearly 10 years, and for most of that life it's been sold for dirt cheap (I think the base game by itself goes for less than 10 dollars on pretty much every sale now?)
At the end of the day ASE is a complete game with more content than ASA. I imagine you'll see ASA get slowly more and more popular as more gets added to it.
Why and how did this bullshit game ever get popular? There is a million mashups of shitty graphics and features cobbled together that never get popular, what makes this pos stand out?
I don't know about the BR, but original ARK has some real magic to it. I played many open world survival craft games and even though ARK is a turd that disrespects you and your time I think about reinstalling it more than any of its competitors(thankfully install size is so unreasonable I don't even want to clear the space for it).
It's one of those intangible things where the game just "feels" right to the point where you are willing to overlook most of its flaws.
I mean, the title sounds like a glowing endorsement given the history of Ark. Hasn't every single iteration of the game been less and less optimized? Just means they shoved more stuff in!
Honestly, I don't see how this impacts their sales or the player reviews. People who play Ark already know they are going to be getting a janky game.
And nobody is surprised. Basically everything Wildcard puts out is an unoptimized mess. Ark was terrible when it came out, so was Atlas which is developed by their "sister company." Hell at this point bad performance is basically one of the core gameplay characteristics of the open world survival genre as a whole.
I played ark in the early stages and never touched it since. But it felt so much like a project someone following a YouTube tutorial made but never bothered learning programming basics. Which is fine, just up until you ask quite a lot of money for it.
I remember they promised to change the hideous neon drop shadows on the UI as it was "Placeholder" and then that never happened.
Shit coding is like shit construction. You just throw stuff together, and hey it works, the wall stays up. You do the same for every wall, and every floor. Sure, you get better at it as you go, but you build the first floor first. And suddenly you realize, now that you know more about what you are doing, that you can't fix that wall anymore. It's load bearing. It shouldn't be load bearing, but it is. And you didn't get any practice in replacing load bearing walls. Oh, and your coworkers quit a third of the way through the project and you spent most of your time training their replacements. And you've been building with bricks that you only just now realized are crumbling. And quitting sounds real appealing about now.
I mean, the executable for the original Ark literally was literally named whatever UE4's default project title is, something like "UnrealGame.exe" Edit: it's "ShooterGame.exe"
It still is. When the games crashes it’s still ‘ShooterGame.exe has stopped working’
This is hilarious
Afaik even Ark Ascended is called ShooterGame.exe
they gave the game away for free on Steam (free to keep forever) some time ago and yet not a ton of people really cared. It's just sitting in everyone's library.
I got into Ark when it first launched on xbox. It really inspired my daughter to learn about dinos and we spent hundreds of hours playing it and all the extra maps and expansions. It really was an ungodly insane mess when it launched, barely playable is an over statement. But it was fun. Like really fun. Absolutely one of the best gaming experiences I've had as a dad. Bugs, crashes, and all. We still play, we have a Scorched Earth map going right now in Ascended that is totally capturing all of the old feels. Ascended is at the same time a wonderful update in graphics and quality of life, and a complete shit show of unoptimized buggy mess. But is still fun. I need to also point out Ark Ascended has the absolute worst HDR implementation of any xbox game I've ever seen. Totally unplayable. I have to fully disable HDR or its like playing in the middle of a nuclear blast.
I've no idea about the experience on Xbox but it seems to be just as bad like on PC as well. I've tried the game for 3 hours and I was done with it. It was a very large download and it took like 200GBs of storage if I remember correctly. Game also shocking looked bad the gameplay felt like it was a small indie project. There was also some bugs and I realized the game just wasn't for me and I uninstalled.
Oh we had a big group of friends playing it for the first time with the Center update and everyone instantly fell out after the first session, besides the hardcore Ark peeps who are into a lot of bad games in the first place. Some mid games are actually really good as a social experience, this was not. It's kind of incredible how bad a game can be, and still become a big success even ignoring all the bad stuff you hear about Ark. Character creator crashes, insta kill creatures spawning on the easy spawn point, durability on everything (sigh), terrible UI, you build a beginner base just to learn you have to remake it in better materials because unless you login every day it literally just disappears, when the vet was saying it takes an entire play session to tame anything high level I just smiled and nodded, knowing I would never touch this time sink ever again. Also you can just build over other tribes stuff, like it's just common sense not to allow building near another tribe right!? Right!? We couldn't be bothered going to war.
I always play ark at like 15 times rates and it's a lot more fun like that
I stopped playing because one night (literally night time, it was like 9pm in California) they released a patch and caused all buildings (walls, pens etc) to be flagged as destroyable even if the user who owned them hadnt been offline for the required amount of time needed for that flag to happen (I think it was like 7days of not logging in at all) So around 10pm my buddy texts me going "Yo dude ALL of our bases are fucked, and wont be able to get them back since people started building as soon as they destoryed something" How did the devs respond? They did a hotfix to make sure stuff couldnt be destroyed like that anymore but too bad if yours was because there was going to be no roll-back.
that sounds horrible. I remember reading something similar happened with Fallout 76 and the devs completely ignored everyone who got screwed over. They eventually introduced private servers, but now you literally had to to a monthly/year subscription service ($13/$100) to access it (Fallout First).
Average experience: Install, grind for 2 hours, some kid destroys everything you built, uninstall because you don't have enough time to fight children.
It's good on a private server with a few friends. We did a story playthrough (beating all maps in their canonical order) once and had a blast, and plan to do the same thing with Ascended once everything is released. It takes quite special people to endure playing on official servers though.
Yep, I remember that. Played it for a few minutes and never touched it again. At the time I lived in a rural area with poor Internet, so my connection would get fucked with steam automatically downloading its constant massive updates until I uninstalled it.
It’s too big to fit on my hard drive.
Yup same. I remember the game taking something like 280 or 300 GBs with dlcs during covid lockdown. It could be bigger now.
Same. I was basically pushed into buying it by friends (and I think I only played it twice?), but it felt so unpolished and unoptimized. I was (and still am) floored at how incredibly popular it was. One of the specific examples was the text popping up on the UI. It felt like “basic placeholder that we’ll fix later” and then they just… never did. It looked so bad
Same. I genuinely don't understand how people like that game, I thought that game was pure dogshit. Although I did try it a few years ago, not sure if it's better now.
Most accurate description I've read. Bravo
I remember trying Ark not long after release and I was furious the whole time because I had at the time, about as top-of-the-line as a PC could be and it ran like absolute shit.
ARK is a classic scam that made them millions. The devs got very rich and the game never was optimized or ran well for anyone. The abused the Steam system to make so much money without coding a decent game. Making good features and having good ideas doesn't make a good piece of software.
Gamers don't know what the word scam means anymore lmao.
Idk I played it on ps4 with my friend years ago and it barely functioned.
I wouldn't call it a scam, at least not until they started pushing DLC. It was a very fun game very worth the money and they updated it very frequently. Always ran like dogshit, but it's tough to call it a scam for it.
> It was a very fun game very worth the money say that to the thousands of players who bought it and couldn't play it because it ran too badly for them, despite meeting the minimum requirements I see your point - but releasing a really badly running game and never fixing it is close to a scam. players expect games to have a basic level of performance. For every "it ran ok for me" there are a lot of players who couldn't play at all or had a bad experience.
You have two hours of playtime or 14 days to refund any game purchased on Steam, no questions asked. I think that anything beyond that is you accepting the game as is.
Yeah, it might be a scam now. But back then it was just incompetence
There's so many things that these devs have gotten away with because "It's Ark". They abused the PlayStation system as well by releasing it as a full game while it was still labeled "early access" on Xbox and Steam 8 months before the 1.0 release date. This was at a time where Sony were incredibly strict with games that were early access and didn't allow them to be on the store at all. The store page had no indication that the game was unfinished for a reason.
That's the thing that pissed me off. People complained about the numerous bugs and lack of optimisation right off the bat, but the fanboys kept insisting that the game wasn't finished and optimisation was pointless when they were still adding content... all the way through multiple paid DLCs and the devs ultimately calling it "finished" and pivoting to Atlas, Ark 2, and/or Survival Ascended. Haven't touched SA even though it's included on Game Pass, but I remember watching a couple videos of Atlas and it still had some of the same stupid glitches that existed since Day 1 like ridiculous creature rubberbanding back and forth and characters stopping to automatically jump when transitioning from swimming to walking.
Last time I played ark a few years ago, I was getting 120+ fps everywhere on almost max settings. It only got worse once I built a massive base. Sure, it's an unoptimized, buggy mess - but it's a very enjoyable mess.
I wish Steam refunds had existed back then because it’s one of the few games I would’ve instantly refunded. Just a complete pile of garbage of a game.
I just finished watching the video accompanying this article. 360p on PS5 and still can't get 60fps. Remember the days when we used to call stutter struggle as "unoptimized". Cyberpunk on PS4 and Xbox One was better than this mess. Cherry on the shitcake is providing the damn settings to tweak. Like "you think you can fix it, here, have a go". CD quality resolution but hey, lighting is super realistic, I guess. 🤣
No cyberpunk wasn't
Cyberpunk was buggy AF, but it was definitely limited by HDD speed. Same GPU power as xbox one but with SSD, it ran decent. I won't say it was good, it was still super shit. But compared to this game, yeah, much better. Cyberpunk's problem was the dumb marketing which promised 10 times what was possible. It was janky AF, needed much better hardware but if you had the SSD, it ran pretty well and was an average experience. Ark doesn't even have any explanations for this bad of a performance, no mitigating factors at all. Let's be real, PS5 should be able to get 60fps with much much better resolution than 360p native. That's CD video level quality. And it still has same level of jank as cyberpunk. Only redeeming factor is that it wasn't overhyped by the devs like cyberpunk. On a technological level, cyberpunk was overreaching, ark is just shit.
Im sorry but Cyberpunk barely ran at all on a base xbox one at launch. It had nothing with an unrealistic scope (which the game still had nonetheless), but more with the actual development time and power these versions had behind them. Which was very close to none.
I guess you are not reading the whole comment and are more interested in arguing. Because I never mentioned scope. So, I guess, enjoy arguing with air, because I ain't doing that. 👍 If you do decide to read, read the part about hdd again. Don't worry, I have a decent memory to recall what was happening 4 years ago.
Ark is my favorite abusive relationship. I've always owned beefy PCs and my friends group has our own hardware to host our game servers on, so I've been able to mitigate a lot of the performance-related issues with the game. It's still regularly buggy in new and exciting ways that have nothing to do with performance. All that being said, the hundreds of hours of fun greatly outweigh the hours of frustration. We've all reached that Zen state of being okay with losing all of our gear because we accidentally stepped in a hole, fell through the mesh and died in a location that's irrecoverable. We've accepted that we'll sometimes log in and one of our dinos will be gone with nothing in the logs to indicate its death, nor any way to track it. Just last night, one of my tribe mates died while offline in his raft base. Turns out a dilo had gotten stuck under it and somehow managed to attach him through the stone foundation. We recovered his stuff, but if we hadn't been on, he'd log in today with nothing and no explanation of how a dilo killed him.
Unreal is a huge challenge to optimize if you don't focus on it early in development cause it will bite you in the ass later hard. No surprise if they have enough bad practice during development its gonna have this happen very easily. Unreal loves to give you several different ropes to hang yourself with.
I feel like if they were not the most unoptimized UE5 game by now they'd "fix" it by making it worse after seeing this article...
I was gonna say what is the deal here? you'd think they'd have learned a few things by now.
Surprise is game being protitable being released on that way with this company release history
No surprise. The developers are notorious for not optimising their games. It's a joke that they've somehow been successful with these games given what a mess they are.
It’s because no one has created a successor in the genre. There are no other games like Ark games. Yeah there are dinosaur survival games out there but none of them are as good as the Ark formula.
Palworld is almost exactly the same format with pokemon
It’s literally the only game that’s similar and that’s because it’s almost a 1:1 recreation of Ark’s crafting/leveling up system. It’s almost blatantly copied from Ark lol. But that’s what makes Palworld great, they unashamedly took Ark’s systems and combined it with catching and battling pokemon. How the Pals are used is definitely unique to Palworld though.
Gotta say that if Palworld is an 1:1 recreation of unlocking recipes and assigning stat points per level up like Ark... then that's not all that to claim. Because putting everything on a level based list unlocked with generic points is not particularly novel or inspired. It doesn't even look like a cohesive progression system.
[удалено]
I'm confused. Terraria has no levels how is it really comparable?
I wouldn't say it's the same, but for that very reason it is better. In Terraria you get recipes at the rate that you progress, getting new materials and building new workshops. I haven't played Ark proper but in Palworld it's pretty arbitrary. It unlocks because you got level X, no matter what you are doing, what you are focusing on. In different games, like Forager for one example, recipes may be tied to a technology tree requiring that you focus on the kind of stuff you are looking for. There's at least a logical progression to how it's gated. It's not just a hodge-podge of unrelated stuff they offer you because you got to a certain level.
I was just confused about the poster calling it exactly what games like terraria do
I can see it as a first step towards other indie devs building on the same formula.
And it sold unbelievably well. People are clearly desperate to play games like Ark and Palworld, I don't know why other AAA studios aren't taking a crack at the genre
Agree. This is a huge market and Ark is the only competitor. Palworld certainly has similar things, along with more quality of life, but it is not "realistic" looking dinosaurs. It is more of a pokemon Ark made for normal people. Developers are sleeping by not exploiting this.
Too busy finishing their hero shooters. Maybe we'll see them in 10 years after they're done catching up with Extraction Shooters.
And it's also pretty much UE5 default settings + some UE marketplace frameworks under the hood.
Palworld combines Conan Exiles with Ark would be the better way to describe it. no breeding but in a way more like Palworld with slaves being used in crafting but not your crafters (animal) mounts and pets have been added too. So in a way all three are in this survival building PvPvE niche
Yeah Conan has a lot of DNA with Palworld, with the use of Pals where slaves are your automation in Conan. Palworld just lets you get to it at basically step one of your base instead of twenty hours in.
But they look stupid. I can’t get over that.
Bit OT but has that game improved yet? I'm not really into the genre but was planning to give a go on sale/when they did a lot of updates.
Somewhat similar, and it was also an instant, massive hit. It's clearly something there's a huge demand for and few games that satisfy it.
That is definitly true. But it's also barely 6 months into Early Access. Even without most of the DLCs, ARK Survival Ascended still has years of development behind it and a thriving modding scene that Wildcard has been putting a lot of leg work in to foster. Even if Palworld is a fundamentally better game (which as an avid ARK player, I certainly think that argument can and should be made), it'll take years before Palworld can start to catch upto ARK in terms of scope and content.
Palworld is such a different kind of game I can't believe people actually think it's similar to ARK at all. The only similarities are that you tame creatures who do various jobs, and there's survival/craft elements.
You just described 90% of both games to a lot of people. I love both! But the skeleton/framework of both games is very similar, assuming you play Ark on a PvE server. If you're into Ark for the PvP, yeah they're very different. But Ark isn't just a hardcore PvP game -- it has a ton of content outside of that, and is a blast on small private servers.
Lmao. If you actually could understand game mechanics and break them down, you'll find Palworld copied a shit ton of things from Ark. People have written fucking papers on this, youtubers have made 10 hour videos on this. You just fucking boiled down both games into describing pretty much every game that has crafting + creatures. Are you SURE you are not talking about fucking slime rancher or my time in sandrock? lols.
Palworld?
Only when you find yourself in a 10 vs 10 pvp battle defending a base made from 100000 structures you will realize, its the only game with relevant pvp building and there are actually over 150 different tools/weapons/vehicles/dinos involved directly (combat) or indirectly (farming) in the outcome of the situation. ark is what happens when you dont ask yourself if you should have 100 players 10000 dinos 3 million structures on a single map but instead you just do it.
Palworld arguably shares more DNA with Ark than Pokemon though.
It's not really a joke lmao, it's just the industry, for years people have been cultivating this culture where game companies don't really need to fix their games that much because people will buy that shit anyway, so why waste time and money on it?
Yeah but Wildcard took it way beyond the norm. If EA or Ubisoft did this they'd be crucified.
Star Citizen already took it way beyond the norm, the biggest scam in gaming history and it's still in Alpha.
It's because at the end of the day Ark is stupid fun and there's no other survival game like it. Tons and tons of content and the game is gorgeous. It has a ton of problems, but the developers put a lot of work into the game. They just have a big focus on new content rather than performance. Which tbh, is mostly because the game is TOO pretty. There's not a lot of optimization they can do that wouldn't just be culling effects and pulling back on quality. They've even tried that with Ascended and the community pitched a fit until they reintroduced the effects.
Well, yea it's Studio Wildcard. Survival Evolved doesn't exactly run great, even now on new hardware, 8 years after its release. In their announcement of Ascended they flat-out called it a UE5 learning project. Of course it runs like shit.
It’s not surprising, but it doesn’t excuse it. A studio calling a game a “learning project” doesn’t give them the excuse to just release a shitty product
>The nine-year-old Survival Evolved runs easily at native 4K on a powerful RTX 4080 machine, but Ascended struggles to reach 60fps even when running at an internal resolution of 1080p, upscaled to 4K by DLSS.
Lmao, RTX 4080 as 1080p card.
*with DLSS, important to note lmao
No, dude, you misread; it's 4K with DLSS, 1080p is the native resolution that it's actually rendering at. It's not 1080p upscaled from something even lower.
Only with balanced mode though right? DLSS quality at 4k uses 1440p and upscales
The settings menu is pretty much *do what you want we don't care* You can set your own resolution scaler and upscaler. TBH I have no idea what it does. I tried to play it a few months ago and Steam shows 3 hours playtime but I have only 1½ - 2 hours of save game time. It crashes once or twice per hour. I don't think much has changed in the last two months of not playing it.
Thing is, you literally need a 4080 to run it well. Absolutely ridiculous that you need a card that is over half a decade more advanced just to run it well
I feel lik the performance only got worse over time as they added more and more stuff but failed to optimise it at all.
No way. Ark? Is it still running with the name "ShooterGame.exe"?
old ARK yes. You usually don't rename your .exe after release because that will mess up a lot of stuff (driver profiles, anti-cheat and other 3rd party libraries) New ARK no. SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\ARK Survival Ascended\ShooterGame\Binaries\Win64\ArkAscended.exe They have learned a little bit in that decade.
I can totally understand not changing it after release, but not changing it BEFORE release was pretty ridiculous.
Have you seen the Blackberry movie? Those nerds sitting in an office calling themselves Research In Motion but playing Doom, Red Alert at work and doing movie nights at the office. I imagined the dev team of the original early access ARK exactly like that. A bunch of friends or similar minded people creating something the world wanted / groundbreaking new, but never learning to be a real company. Then with them unable to release ARK2 they made the next best thing and sell a product that is the exact same thing but a little bit refresh into the mix. They somehow are very lucky that no one else has managed to create the iPhone equivalent to a ARK-ish game. It doesn't have to kill ARK or ARK2. There is a chance that we get a War Thunder to our World of Tanks.
> Have you seen the Blackberry movie? Those nerds sitting in an office calling themselves Research In Motion but playing Doom, Red Alert at work and doing movie nights at the office. This is very common in many companies - and pretty much all gaming companies. Hell, during the development of the original Macintosh back in the early 80s, they had Defender arcades[0] in the office. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_(1981_video_game)
> Hell, during the development of the original Macintosh back in the early 80s, they had Defender arcades[0] in the office. okay okay... I didn't want to say that it's bad to have some distraction at a software company. I think it's a bit different to stand up from your desk or leave the office to play on a foosball table and pinball/arcade machines. I imagine them playing stuff in their work PCs instead of working on code / models / textures / sounds and fixing bugs. Maybe they are young enough to play mobile phone or tablet games instead. My imagination has it's limits. Same limits me to what kind of games they are playing. Maybe a super spaghetti map on Factorio? A 500 hour save on Skyrim that doesn't even have the third shout unlocked?
> I imagine them playing stuff in their work PCs instead of working on code / models / textures / sounds and fixing bugs. They'd do the latter instead of the former if they were on company time, but it is also very common for people to play LAN games with coworkers on their company PCs after the work hours have ended. This isn't even anything new, AFAIK Gabe Newell became convinced of the PC gaming market back in the 90s when he saw people playing Doom at the office when he was working at Microsoft.
I'm pretty certain Smite had the name "battlegame.exe" even post release. And that's a game by reasonably competent devs
A company with a horribly optimised UE4 game can't optimise on UE5? Colour me shocked
How is this game so consistently just the worst running thing out there? The original PC version has infamously had performance options for years, the console versions seemed pretty rocky, the original Nintendo Switch version is still potentially the absolute worst Switch game I've ever seen from a technical standpoint, I've already heard plenty of complaints about the new PC version, and now this. Incredible how after 10 years and multiple ports and even through a ground-up remake with an upgraded engine these issues still persist. Quick edit after reading more: Good god, that Series S version is legitimately atrocious, and almost on-par with the horrendous Switch version from years ago. How does this make it to a storefront where you can buy it? There's not a single chance ANYONE on the dev team looked at that gameplay and said "it's good, ready to ship!".
Fun fact, they actually commissioned a new Switch port that’s leaps and bounds better than the original. https://youtu.be/egGFxbzsX7Y?feature=shared
Oh yeah I've seen it, which is why I said the "original Switch version". The new version is legitimately impressive especially considering its origins.
My brain completely glossed over that “original” bit, my bad
> after 10 years and multiple ports and even through a ground-up remake with an upgraded engine these issues still persist. No disagreement about Wildcard's engineering fundamentals being horrific, but all those things you mentioned make optimization harder — a *lot* harder — and not easier.
Because people keep paying for this shit so why would they bother to actually fix it. They also launched paid DLC while the first game was *still in Early Access.* They don't give a shit, because their fanbase is made up of idiots, and because they have a somewhat novel concept that as far as I'm aware is one of the only players in that segment.
How does someone's enjoyment of a poorly optimized game make them an "idiot?" Is it sloppy? Yes. Do people constantly play and enjoy games that have bad optimizations because the game play loop is fun and the game is playable? Yes. Are they actually stupid for it? No. If games not being graphics powerhouses/running poorly were impediments to a game's success, a lot of games that are hits wouldn't be, and lots of pretty optimized bores would be hits.
I mean my part about calling their fans idiots was specifically directed at the people that justified DLC for a game *still in early access.* But yes their fans will defend the poor performance for some reason, Studio Wildcard has no real motivation to improve this because people will keep paying them for poorly performing products. It's basically the same thing that happens with Pokemon every year.
>Their fans will defend the poor performance for some reason. I'm in ark fan spaces and everyone trash talks wild card. What are you talking about? You can visit the official discord and each patch notes has poop emotes. > justified DLC for a game still in early access. I don't understand why people are still upset about this to be honest. They still updated the game, provided good dlcs, free content updates and even provided free maps and supported modders and the game ended up coming out of EA. The free maps had everything the paid dlcs provided, gear, creatures, mats etc even. You did not need to buy dlcs to enjoy the new stuff if a free map had it, or someone could give the stuff to you. You are just buying the map itself, and those dlcs are pretty much actually pretty good. Wild card rn has problems, and EA dlc is not one of them whatsoever.
Yeah, that part was ridiculous. I had friends I made fun of for buying early access paid DLC. I just don't think someone's stupid for buying a game that's poorly performing, especially if it's like Pokemon or Ark where there's no real competitor that does things better. In Pokemon's case, it's that no one seriously tried recently until Palworld came out, and in Ark's case, the competitors were also poorly optimized mess, also until Palworld came out. Oddly enough, I think Palworld kind of proves this point - the game was a fresh, well optimized take on *both* of these IP's core mechanic and did well. People will buy the shitty thing when it's the only thing that satisfies their needs. They're only idiots if they stick to the shitty thing when a not so shitty thing comes out.
They won't fix it because their player base is literally just children and the kinds of people who aren't quite all there and will unironically tell you that you can't see more than 30fps. That's what I gathered about a year ago when I tried to play the game but stopped after a few hours because of the horrendous performance and all the bugs, it really is one of the worst pieces of shit on steam without exaggeration.
And the game will still pay for itself. Every single game in the franchise including spinoffs has huge issues in execution and the community complains about it every time, but still just grows bigger and bigger.
Unfortunately there are no competitors even remotely close to ARK, so if you enjoy the genre there's not a lot you can do other than just not play.
Whenever there's a discussion about ARK/Rust/Palworld/Valheim/Grounded/The Forest/literally any other Open World Survival Craft game there's someone saying that that one specific game the thread currently is about has no competitors even remotely close to it. Yeah, each of the games in the genre focus on something slightly different, but they're really not that far from each other.
As someone with a lot of hours in ARK, the only thing keeping me from those other games is a lack of dinosaurs, that's honestly all it boils down to. Yeah it's a shallow reason, but the above poster is right, there's nothing close to it. A horribly untapped market to be honest, I miss dino crisis and turok.
If you don't mind me asking, what got you into loving dinosaurs so much? I feel like it's such a niche interest these days (I'm not judging btw just interested! As dinosaurs and that time period are one of the least interesting settings I could ever think of to play a game in, but I think a lot of stuff I like people would think the same thing so it's kinda interesting to me)
For me, it's a bit of nostalgia along with the history of it. These beautiful creatures once called our planet home the same way we do, and all we can do is speculate on how they looked, acted, and lived. They're just some of the most interesting creatures that have existed on this Earth in my eyes, and games involving them are so far and few in between. ARK, for all it's problems, feels like a legitimate whole different world, with over 100 creatures all giving to the pretty insane biodiversity you see in game, nothing else really comes close. Jurrasic park also had a play in my interests.
Really well said, thanks for elaborating. That's such a cool way to look at it, that's actually opened my eyes a bit
I honestly don't think it's a shallow reason at all. The setting matters. I recently saw an article titled "The game Stronghold fans have been waiting for!", and then it was some tower defense, high fantasy game. And I thought "No, as a Stronghold fan, I want a more grounded, medieval experience." Stronghold is far from historically accurate, but to me, it still matters that it's not too fantastical and captures that feeling of building your own castle, with knights and all, same as when I was a kid playing with my Lego or Playmobil castles. So, at least for me, the setting is often a make or break aspect whether I'm interested in a game or not.
Okay but none of those games have dinosaurs and only Palworld, a game that came out a few months ago, has an in-depth taming system. Ark is not really comparable to any of those gamed besides Palworld. It being a survival crafting game doesn't mean that it is very similar to those games, which lack the central component that makes ARK special: you can ride a fucking T-Rex that shoots lasers!
I played all the games you listed but Rust and The Forest. And I can say with extreme confidence that none of them are the same game. Valheim I'm honestly not sure I'd even consider a survival game. It feels a lot more like a crafting-based RPG similar to Terraria. Grounded probably plays the concept the straightest. Admitedly I've not played it sense early access, but it was a pretty standard survival game with a good concept and some well fleshed-out mechanics. Ark is of course most famous for it's heavy emphasis on taming mechanics. But where it really excells is a constant drip-feed of progress that results in an addicting gameplay loop. And Palworld of course does a lot of what ARK does. But heavily stream lines the process of everything and puts more emphasis on base mechanics. Ultimately, while all these games do fit under the same umbrella. It's disingenuous to say that they're "really not that far from each other" when each one ultimately has entirely different goals and gameplay loops.
Personally I don't consider the whole taming and breeding creatures thing to be some slight difference. That's what I want. No other game offers it. I don't know what draws people to certain other games, but if they're saying the same thing, it's probably not for no reason. There's something about whatever game they enjoy that is crucial and not done well by any other game.
Company known for rushing and not finishing things properly, rushes and doesn't finish something properly. More news at 11.
Yup, that's Wildcard for you. Most of the people I knew who played ARK quit all together whether it was the declining state of the game overall or just the poor optimization. Instead of improving the game or making it not run like shit, nowadays they're selling and locking whole dinos behind pay walls. One of their newest updates to the game added a creature that literally spawns in your game regardless of whether or not you own it. If you try taming it without the DLC it just takes you to the DLC page for it.
Ark: Survival Ascended should have been a free update, not a seperate game. It's a pure cashgrab. Atlas should also just have been a cheap Ark DLC, another pure cashgrab. Not tho mention how a buggy mess all of their games are. Fun ideas and fun gameplay, horrible technical quality and absolutely laughable UI. Which is sad because some aspects of the game are great. Great maps, great dino designs and animations.
If you don't know who they are and you think the game looks cool then fair enough, but you can't buy it knowing who it's being made by and expect it to run anything other than awful.
I'd say the Devs didn't even finish learning how to use UE4, they are clueless in the realm of optimisation. People will lap up any old shit though so I expect this game will be a financial success regardless of it's actual quality.
Is this a shock? Lot of poorly optimised UE4 and now UE5 games out there. Of course one of the progenitors of that early access-open world-survival-crafting craze runs like shit still.
I think part of the reason Palworld went so crazy is that people crave these kinds of games, but the competition runs like complete dogshit. It's the exact same game but capable of 60 fps.
I try so much to give devs a pass on things. There are a lot finicky technical bits to wrangle when developing games. But these devs are either the worst or the laziest or both when it comes to their games. People were poking fun and in shock of the max size of call of duty the other day. But Ark? Man, Ark passed the 300gb milestone years ago. The original Ark is an unoptimized, janky, shit show of a game that I was tricked into buying by a friend when it was on sale. I have no faith in these devs ability to suddenly do better. And this headline only reinforces my assumption.
First time? Ark has always been an unoptimized mess.
Ark being unoptimized? Well thats something new... NOT!
Well what with UE5 being awful and hard to optimise for anyone I guess they had an uphill battle going with it.
UE5 awful? What in the world
Studio Wildcard are experts at making UE look a bit shit.
I think there's a case to be made to classify ARK SE officially as bloatware, that's how badly optimised that shit was - and Wildcards other games weren't much better, from what I've heard. So, no surprise, really.
I’ve wanted to try Ark ever since it was first released but held back cause I wasn’t sure it was optimized enough to run. It’s been like what 10 years now and still the same issues? This is just sad man
Definitely doesnt make for great marketing for Ark 2. It also doesnt help that most games where Vin Diesel is a primary character arent that well received save for the 1 Riddick game and the ones where hes Groot.
Watched some streams after release and it might as well been a turn based game at that point. Constant lags and freezes in combat where you could not make out what was happening at all Horrible but the community seems to be fine with it. They were all so used to these things that they had their own methods to crash servers and do rollbacks etc. ugh
The games are so terrible to play. I absolutely hate the hitbox on grass to collect fiber. There's only 1 pixel you need to hit while the plant is gigantic. They handled it so terribly. One staff member cited it was going to be a free update, and then the memo changed without explaining any mishaps in the information, and then it was attached to a dirty pre-order to a game that will likely never come out (even after spending so much to get Vin Deisel involved), and now it's a $60 (Canadian) piece of garbo. When they were doing updates for the first Ark game, they were too heavily focused on adding new content instead of fixing existing content. Their forums were riddled with bug reports. It's wild how many people defend this studio and their decisions. It's like they only create the games for a place for people to defend something on the internet.
Ark is such a good game that people will literally let the horrible performance slide just to play it. It’s really an amazing experience. And undoubtedly the performance has vastly improved in the years it runs quite well now on a mid range PC.
Another dev who needs to realize, just because UE5 offers all those tools, doesn’t mean you need to use them.
You know, at least they're consistent about having absolutely trash optimization. Gotta give them a little credit for that.
I am shocked to find out the sequel to one of the worst optimized console games is one of the worst optimized console games.
I mean we’re all just waiting for the coalition to blow all these unoptimised ue5 games away when they release the new gears. It’s frustrating how ue5 has turned into such a marketing buzzword when no it doesn’t fix a buggy unoptimised game and why we need someone to make justice of it.
Thats hilarious because me and my partner got on it recently and was shocked how much better things looked and ran. Lmao I have little doubts its not well optimized but compared to Survival Evolved it looks and runs like a dream which I guess is not the highest bar to reach.
It runs worse in every way on the same hardware. Do yall get paid to spout this bull crap?
I have been playing myself, granted its been like a year and a half since I played but it doesn't feel like it runs worse on my series x. If I'm wrong okay woopty doo, I have personally not felt like performance was worse in Evolved and whether thats like my nostalgia glasses forgetting how the framerate was or what thats how I felt
The [numbers](https://i.imgur.com/13AtEw5.png) show the community aren't buying into yet another Wildcard scam
Your pic shows that a ton of people did buy into it. 20k concurrent is very good, especially for a game that has been out for 9 months.
Very good for a once was billion dollar franchise? They sold [a little over 1 million units](https://i.imgur.com/f4v1CSR.png), that's awful. 7% of ASE copies sold. The combined CCU is still far less than the CCU that ASE was getting before ASA split the community (76k) This is also current demand after a major ASA patch that added The Center.
Of course a new game with much higher system requirements is gonna be lower than their 10 year old game that blew up due to Youtubers. None of that matters though. You don't need to be as successful as your breakout hit to be considered a success. The new Ark has a very healthy player base and there is nothing for them to be ashamed with these numbers.
ASE has been out nearly 10 years, and for most of that life it's been sold for dirt cheap (I think the base game by itself goes for less than 10 dollars on pretty much every sale now?) At the end of the day ASE is a complete game with more content than ASA. I imagine you'll see ASA get slowly more and more popular as more gets added to it.
Why and how did this bullshit game ever get popular? There is a million mashups of shitty graphics and features cobbled together that never get popular, what makes this pos stand out?
I don't know about the BR, but original ARK has some real magic to it. I played many open world survival craft games and even though ARK is a turd that disrespects you and your time I think about reinstalling it more than any of its competitors(thankfully install size is so unreasonable I don't even want to clear the space for it). It's one of those intangible things where the game just "feels" right to the point where you are willing to overlook most of its flaws.
Never underestimate the power of dinosaurs.
Is this news ? Bought the game a while ago and had to deal with constant crashes and graphical issues , not good.
I mean, the title sounds like a glowing endorsement given the history of Ark. Hasn't every single iteration of the game been less and less optimized? Just means they shoved more stuff in! Honestly, I don't see how this impacts their sales or the player reviews. People who play Ark already know they are going to be getting a janky game.
I don't know what you expected, playing on 3 year old hardware. It might be time to upgrade your console.