Ark: Operation Wolf

After two weeks of spending 8-12 hours on Ark pretty much every single day since its release on Switch, boredom finally started to kick in. At this point in the game, we just had it all. A T-Rex. A pair of raptors. A Dutch Oven. A watering system for our crops. Guns. Enough resources to gear up the entire Ark community on Switch - each of the five players! And, most importantly, a working shitter.

The thing about our toilet is that it's also a death trap, which gets one of us stuck more often than not. You get stuck inside the damn thing, with only your character's head sticking out. And if the other one notices it, well... yeah.

Claire watched a bunch of youtube videos and saw some people riding around on direwolves. So she wanted one. Unfortunately, direwolves hang out all the way north, where THEISLAND is covered in ice and snow. It only takes a few moments to freeze to death up there, unless you're clad in a fursuit and hug all the torches and campfires. The area up north also has some stunning blizzard weather effects. Snowflakes don't just float around, but you can see them stay on the ground and in the fur and scales of your dinos. It's one of those mind-boggling graphical features they kept in the Switch version, all while lowering the resolution scale and render distance to something just above zero.
As for the direwolves, I never really cared for them all that much, because they look like four-legged cavemen. That weird, ugly, dumbass face!

A wolf shouldn't look like this.

But heyho, the woman wants what she wants and we had nothing better to do, so we spent our virtual days growing out our hair, then cutting it, then turning it into armor. Not only that, but putting a tame otter on your character's body actually helps keep them warm. It's weird, but I like it. Rather than just making these shoulder pets decorative or have them help you in combat, they all come with their own unique little bonuses and effects. And then we went north, where everything is shit.

We live in the southern part of THEISLAND, which consists only of our little camp and about a trillion dodos. All the raptors died in freak accidents when we tried to tame them, all the boas died, because fuck those assholes, most of the triceratops and pteranodon population drowned due to surprise fatigue attacks happening too close to the water, which had absolutely nothing to do with our inability to humanely tranquilize stuff. Up north, however, is a fucking warzone. Titanosaurs, which make our bronto look like a shitty little toy, huge packs of hyenas, prehistoric boars and neanderthal wolves, hungry dinos and mammoths, all constantly fighting and murdering each other. How the whole place isn't completely deserted by now, save for a mountain of corpses, is entirely beyond me. There's so much killing going on everywhere, it's comical. Also, furry T-Rex.

Ugly in all the right ways. I may have to get one.

So we flew around on our birds and spotted this really angry pack of wolves, which murdered the absolute shit out of all the things. They ate a mammoth and immediately ran to murder a bunch of dinos, then murdered some boars. We chased after them, trying to pick one up with our birds. Flying mounts can grab stuff with their claws and... eh, lemme show you.

As it turns out, you can't pick up a wolf that is neither tamed nor tranquilized, so they pretty much just plucked us out of the sky, we had to fight them, the whole pack died and that was that.
So we spent the next 15 or so minutes searching for another pack, spotted it, tried to sneak up on them and shoot them from the top of some rocks, which they probably couldn't climb. Well. Turns out direwolves can climb. They can also jump. So we had to euthanize another pack in its own best interest. Maintain the balance of nature and all that. Also, they were gonna eat us, because we're shit at taming stuff.

We tried the kamikaze approach. Go get a pack of wolves while it's hunting dinos, because they'd be too distracted to come after us. Except we didn't even have the chance to land our birds this time, because the wolves were fighting a rex, the rex roared and spooked our birds, we lost all control over our flying mounts, which ultimately glitched and got stuck in mid-air. Claire jumped off her bird and died. I'm smart, so I relogged, got spawned on the ground and was immediately eaten by the rex and the wolves, who had suddenly formed some sort of alliance, which existed solely to end me.
500 dead wolves later, we had a genius idea - what if we actually hid in a spot the wolves couldn't get to before attempting to tranquilize them? So we pissed off another pack of them, five in total, as well as two carnotaurs, which are the ugliest dinos we've spotted thus far.

WTF is going on with these stumpy arms?

We parked our birds on top of a really tall cliff. The wolves and dinos went completely braindead and just kept on bumping into the rocks below, once again trying to kill us without actually fighting each other. And we had a hundred tranquilizer darts, so we did the only reasonable thing.
First, the carnos were way too large and always got in the line of fire, so we had to take those out first. We tranqed them, because hey, free dino, even if it's ugly. Besides, we didn't want them to change their minds and have them kill the wolves. Once they had gone to sleep, we both tried to knock out our favourite wolf. I spotted a nice husky-looking one with snow white and pitch black fur. Problem is, there were two extremely similar ones, so it was impossible to tell them all apart from the top of my cliff. I had to shoot all of them, just to be sure. Meanwhile, Claire had set her eyes on a brown one, who was always right in the middle of the pack, so she kept hitting all the wolves with her darts, except for the one she actually wanted. In the end, we had five sleeping wolves and two snoring carnos at the bottom of the cliff.

We went out to tame one or two wolfy mounts and came back with an entire hunting pack. And then it turned out that direwolves no longer look shit in Ark, because their models had been replaced by better-looking ones. It's nice when stuff actually goes according to plan for a change. Now to fix that fucking toilet!

The one on the right is deaf and has no clue what's going on.