Ark: Operation Goodbye THEISLAND

Hey, 'member how we did this shit on Switch?

It's funny how you never see cool moments like these when random YouTubers blab about how Ark is 'the worst game on Switch' after a whopping three minutes of play time. A cynic might say they never really tried to actually play the damn thing and just jumped aboard the hate train for some easy clicks. But of course there are no cynics here in this blog.

Anyway. We've re-created our most awesome Switch adventure in the PC version, this time fighting the alpha version of the spider, making the fight last juuust a little bit longer:

Good times. We squished one of the three main bosses on the hardest difficulty setting. This led to what we thought was the logical assumption we could tackle all the remaining content on Ark's first "level", THEISLAND. Thing is, Ark doesn't understand difficulty.
There's no curve here. You start facing a wall. You die repeatedly, while the game tells you absolutely nothing about WTF you're supposed to do. Till you either give up and leave like the vast majority of people who ever try this game. Or until you smash head-first through the wall, tame the absolute shit out of all the dinos and rapidly get to that point in the game where difficulty just drops and flatlines at the very bottom.

Once you've got your own pack of raptors, then grab a T-Rex or two, start breeding your own, you basically own THEISLAND. Yes, there are some challenging bits left, such as taming a Giga or trying to survive in extremely hot or cold zones without proper gear or a pet otter (they help regulate your body temperature for some reason). But there aren't many challenges which can't be overcome by simply throwing enough dinos at them. Or using tools such as bear traps, bolas and improvised cages for the more dramatic taming attempts. It's all about the dinos and the tools. Weapons and armor ... yeah well. Try shooting that T-Rex with your pistol and see what happens. Or have half a dozen hungry raptors chomp on your riot gear and see how long you'll survive.

Even some of the most advanced gear simply breaks after an encounter or two.

We had reached a point where upon level-ups I'd start raising random dump-attributes on our dinos, because I felt guilty about the amounts of health, stamina and damage they had. It seemed the game was becoming just a little too easy.
Broodmother Lysrix, the spider boss we just whacked in its difficult alpha form, is the second out of three boss encounters on THEISLAND. So we figured we may as well go and challenge the first boss, some angry cyber ape, who is supposed to be quite a bit easier to fight than Lysrix.

In order to get to that first boss, however, we had to retrieve a bunch of artifacts from caves scattered around THEISLAND. These caves function a bit like dungeons in an RPG. They're full of traps, monsters, treasure, that sort of thing. Pretty easy stuff, as far as we knew, because we had absolutely no trouble obtaining all the artifacts for Lysrix. So how hard could it be to finish three more caves for some boss you're supposed to tackle first? Yeah well. I did say Ark doesn't understand the difficulty curve.

Our dinos are so powerful, there is nothing left that would threaten them.

The first of the three caves used three annoying methods to absolutely fuck with us. First of all, it simply didn't allow any dinos inside, so we spent the next hour or so shotgunning the crap out of dozens and dozens of bats and spiders. They infect you with MEGARABIES, because everything in this game is giga, mega or titano and in ALL CAPS for emphasis. Bring a bunch of antidote or die in seconds, basically.
Then there are the countless bottomless pits. Fail at platforming and die. We crafted a bunch of grappling hooks and ninja'd all over the place, but the level designers were kind enough to place a shitload of enemies all around the bottomless pits, who'd repeatedly knock us over the edge, anyway.

Once we finally managed to navigate around the entire cave and kill every last enemy in sight, there was no artifact. Turns out it simply doesn't spawn half of the time. In the game's defense, this problem has only been there and was repeatedly reported since 2017, so it's not like the developers had a lot of time to become aware of it and fix this issue. In the end, we had to spawn in the artifact manually through a console command, which is the least satisfying way to do this, but if the game refuses to spawn the item, it leaves us little choice in the matter. On a mildly related note, it turned out we didn't even need this particular artifact for the ape boss, but heyho.

Ark is a pretty big game with a pretty small dev team. The game has its problems.

Well, at least things could only get better from there. Except, it got so much worse. The next cave on our list didn't allow anything inside that was any bigger than your average player character. So we put a cage on our quetzal's platform saddle and stuffed it to the brim with dilophosaurs, then had a bunch of dimorphodons come along for air support as we made our way to the Snow Cave. That's what the game calls it. Just the Snow Cave. Doesn't sound very dangerous or impressive, does it?

Snow Cave is chock-full with super high level polar bears, wolves and other nasty shit. I don't know what the fuck they were thinking when they made this. It looks like something I created as a teenager in Game Maker. Just cram as many enemies as you can inside a small space and watch the ensuing mayhem. The critters in there beat the absolute fuck out of our tiny dinos. And once they were out of small dinos to eat, they continued with us. Great. Massive amounts of fun! The regular overworld had become laughably easy, but this cave, something you're supposed to play in order to access the first, easiest boss in the game, just throws some of the toughest baddies at you and leaves you no space to bring anything major for you to defend yourself! Grrr!

Our allosaurus pack would have torn the absol... waiiiiitaminute!

The thing with Ark is that you can't play it like most videogames. It's a bit like Divinity: Original Sin (2) in that regard. You don't just accept the rules, play by them and expect to win. It's about creativity. Thinking outside the box. As it turns out, Ark has these little things called Cryopods, which are basically Pokéballs. Small, portable devices you point at any dino, which will then shrink down because SPACE MAGIC or some shit, and go to sleep inside the pod.

So we went home to Camp Nova, shrank down four extra beefy allosaurs, flew all the way back to Snow Cave, re-summoned our massively overpowered dinos inside the cave, then spent the next 20 or so minutes watching the fuckers sleep, because apparently there's a thing called cryo sickness and absolutely everything in Ark must have some sort of arbitrary grind or time gate attached to it.

You can't go wrong with an allosaurus.

Once our badass dinos were finally awake, we sat back, issued the 'go out for breakfast' command, then casually retrieved our artifact from a cave, which was now entirely devoid of life, save for four allosaurs, two humans and two otters.

The next two caves were an absolute cakewalk by comparison. The first one was basically just a gaping pit. The idea is that you slowly and carefully shimmy across some ledges that spiral around the pit and lead all the way down to where the artifact rests. There's a fair bit of platforming involved, which is interrupted by frequent monster attacks. Oooor you just hop on a thylacoleo, climb up and down the walls and ignore all the mechanics as you're in and out with the artifact in five minutes and move on to more interesting stuff.

Like watching sunsets.

The final cave started like any other cave, with narrow passageways and bats and centipedes. Only for the remaining 90 percent to be completely flooded. Claire brought a baryonix. These fellas are water-proof and make excellent swimmers. I brought a wolf. And wolves are ... well, they're wolves. So that wasn't great. But we got our artifact, at least.

Finally, we stuffed 20 of our finest dinosaurs (translation: three or so rexes, our four allosaurs plus random assorted crap to fill the gaps) into cryopods and ferried them all the way up to ... White Peak? I think it's really just called White Peak. God, the location names in this game are so fucking boring! Anyway, we dragged all our dinos up some mountain top in order to summon them for the boss fight. Apparently the boss arena has some bottomless pits, which are super effective against dinos and their less than stellar AI, so we just stayed at the entrance, Claire pulled the boss, our dinos ate him and that was that.

I'm riding a wolf while wielding a pump-action shotgun. Best game ever.

By the way - if you want to see what all of these adventures looked like, you can watch it right here:

By defeating two out of three bosses on the hardest setting we've unlocked a bunch of tek gear, which makes the game significantly easier. Shock-absorbing boots to mitigate fall damage, a helmet with built-in night vision, a life sensor to detect nearby creatures, as well as an infinite oxygen supply and clear vision when exploring under water - there are some incredibly fun gadgets, which make defeating these bosses feel that much more rewarding.

Interestingly enough, even with well over 150,000 players over the past weekend, only the tiniest amount of people have ever fought any of these endgame baddies:

Barely one in every ten players even makes it to this point.

After dozens upon dozens of hours, weeks and weeks of RL time spent on this game across two platforms, it feels strange to be so close to the end. Only three more caves and one boss left to go - we're about to face a real dragon in the next boss arena!

Of course there are even more maps to explore after THEISLAND, more parts of the story to uncover, more dinos to tame and more bosses to fight in other places. We can finally leave this first zone behind. Part of me really doesn't want to. Yes, THEISLAND can get fucked for all I care. But I like my little blue hut by the beach (I painted it myself!), sitting in the shade under a pair of palm trees, starting every session by waking up in there, looking out the window and watching the sun rise above the ocean. My little piece of paradise. I'm not ruling out that landscapes titled 'Aberration', 'Scorched Earth' and 'Extinction' can be nice, but judging by those names, I'm not overly hopeful. I reckon once it's all done, all the bosses are defeated and all maps are fully explored, I'm gonna retire on THEISLAND, sit in my little hut, surrounded by all my favourite dinos, which end up surviving this journey.