Ark - Industrial Age

So we went and explored some of the furthest corners of THEISLAND. Constantly hanging around the same old beaches and jungles is only entertaining for so long, so we figured we should have a look at what else the world has to offer. And, once you get over the fact that everything is rather blurry on here, there are some spots with are actually quite beautiful.

We also made a few new friends along the way. I tamed a gigantic spino, which made Claire's hipster bird Edward almost look puny by comparison. The amount of detail on that dino is incredible. Not only can you make out every single scale on its skin, but it also has those fun little ear holes on its head, which real life reptiles have. I love the attention to detail.

We had quite the petting zoo with us on our journey. Both of us had our airplanes for the sake of making exploration a little easier, Claire tamed yet another diloposaurus, because it was so nice and red. I tamed one just for the heck of it and named it Dingleberry. I brought a spare bird for air support. Then Claire befriended one of those punchy little armadillo style punchosaurus things. And aforementioned new spino. We got ambushed while we sat down to rest for a minute. It looked like this:

I'm genuinely amazed at how all of this chaos just runs on the Switch without anything exploding. My screen is filled by over a dozen gigantic prehistoric creatures tearing each other to ribbons and, while the whole thing doesn't exactly run at 60 frames per second, it's certainly playable and not acting up in any way.
I've mentioned in a previous entry how, while resolution and things like shadow and vegetation draw distance were very poor, the Switch version sports a rather beautiful lighting system with beautiful, volumetric sunrays and realtime shadows, which are projected on to characters and dinos. Presumably, resolution and draw distance could be increased if the lighting and particle quality (and most, if not all shadows) were deactivated, but seeing as they're an important gameplay element, I can see why they decided to 'optimize' the game in that way. It's actually quite neat to look at, even if everything around it is such a blurred mess.

There's more ice and snow up to the north, which is where we want to explore next. We also want to tame a pair of direwolves, because they make badass mounts. Problem is, staying in the cold for too long literally kills you in this game, so we need all the fur, hair and pelt we can get in order to craft warm armor. I started by cutting Claire's hair. You can give players haircuts not just to give them a fancy new hairstyle (and change facial hair, where present), but to 'harvest' the hair for crafting. Nothing goes to waste.

I've also upgraded my airplane. Don't get me wrong, Ptetra the pteranodon is a war hero, she went on countless adventures with us and always came back in once piece and saved our asses more than once. But there's flying around on a croaking, prehistoric chicken and then there's this:

Meanwhile, Claire put a saddle on her whacky little clubosaurus. You can't just ride that thing and hammer other dinos to pudding with its mace-like tail. It can also curl up into a ball and roll all over the place. I may have to tame one and name it Samus Aran.

And since we were already in the middle of upgrading all our shit, Claire declared the industrial age and started by creating a watering system for our plants. We now have a fun little water cistern, which collects rain water and pumps water out of the stream by our camp. It then goes through some pipes and rains down on our crops. The next step is to install a working, flushing toilet. Not only is that a real thing, but you can also use it to fertilize the crops with your craps. Like I said - nothing goes to waste. Not even the waste.

We need to tame dung beetles to help with the poop harvest for our crops. Yes, that is also a thing.

Claire cooked some gasoline to power up our little fabrication engine, which I used in order to craft an assault rifle. Yep. We went from spears and crowssbows to assault rifles. Well. Personally, I'm more of a shotgun kinda guy, so everyone has their own unique boomstick now. I also put a saddle on our bronto, which was ... ahem, scary.

I took her out for a spin, but there's so much dino on the camera, it's difficult to see where you're going. Apparently you can build a huge metal platform on top of a bronto and then build a house on there, turning your dino into a mobile base camp and landing platform for flying dinos.
Lacking said platform, I decided to have our bronto help with the wood harvest. Knocking down trees and collecting a bunch of crafting resources actually helps raise the dino's level, which is fun. Work, get better, work even harder.

And now that I have a handy little helper that lets me collect large amounts of wood and other materials in no time at all, I can finally build something that's a little more interesting than just these little box-shaped huts we had all the time. How about an actual house with furniture, windows and a fireplace? Behold!

The next step on our list of pending improvements is actual electricity. Claire already set up a generator, next she'll be setting up working street lights, then we'll start crafting some real high level gear. Wonder how much longer it'll take till we get to craft working dino armor and weapons. Because yeah, that is also a thing on here.

It's weird. I'm usually too lazy to craft stuff, play house in a game, let alone do this whole survival thing where you have to eat, drink, even take a crap and deal with things like weather, temperatures and all that annoying stuff nobody enjoys in real life. But there's a real sense of achievement here, when you slowly move up from shitty little straw huts with shitty wooden beds to actual houses, a working fireplace, then a generator, proper armor and guns and so forth. I can't believe I never even had this game on the radar until now. Until recently, I just knew it was yet another open world survival thing (as in, the kind of game everyone was releasing before battle royale became the hip new thing) and people were pissed at the developers, who kept releasing paid expansions instead of taking the whole thing out of paid early access. I might actually look into the PC version and play that on maxed-out settings and in bearable resolution once we've had our fill on the Switch and feel that we've really seen and done everything. In the meanwhile, though, I am quite happy to limit our adventures to Nintendo's humble little hybrid.