Ark: Boss Battle Time

After nearly a whole year, or, more precisely, several hundred hours playing Ark: Survival Evolved on Switch, we had reached a point where we have crafted, tamed and obtained just about everything you can get - and then some.

After it was confirmed in a recent interview, that the Switch version is to receive all missing updates and DLC, I was interested to see whether the Switch already had any content, which went beyond the things you can see and tame in the basic version of the game. And what do you know - we've got bionic dinos in all the flavours, as well as griffins. Interesting!

May as well have one, now that I know they're here.

Having explored many of the caves on THEISLAND, we had acquired a nice collection of boss relics. We never really intended to fight these bosses, seeing as we're only two players. Besides, there's nowhere else to go after completing the one and only area in this game. But since that's about to change in the not so distant future and we're dangerously out of stuff to do, we figured we may as well give it a shot.

My otter and I were as ready as one could get.

With the Switch version being as quirky as it is, some of our strongest dinos had somehow managed to get melee damage bonuses of several thousand per cent, despite the fact we never touched the affinity settings for damage in any way. The only thing we did tweak in our favour were the sliders for dino health and stamina, since breeding dozens upon dozens of dinos for ideal mutations simply isn't massively enjoyable with only two players and only 24 hours in a day. So we had a few strong dinos with the recommended ~30k health for the boss fight, some of which were capable of hitting quite a bit harder than they should. Especially with all the pack buffs and roars and what have you. 

Claire was ready, too. I think. Bit hard to tell with the low-resolution Switch visuals. But she looks ready.

It's a bit annoying how our rexes hit for 1-2k, which can go all the way up to 6k with buffs, because it trivializes boss battles a little bit. Especially when you only fight their gamma versions - but it was our first attempt at this, so we had no idea what to expect or how it would go. We're gonna tackle the alpha versions of all three bosses in the coming days, but you have to start somewhere.

The biggest problem was moving our 20 strongest dinos to the obelisk where the boss is summoned. Moving the giga and the rexes was simple enough, since there isn't a tree in the world that could stop them. 

Basically, if Darth Vader was a dinosaur.

The official wiki recommends 19 rexes and a uterus to buff them. We don't have these numbers, so we had to make substitutions. One of them happened to be a sarco, which turned out to be a terrible idea. Basically, they're terribly slow on land, forcing the entire group to wait for them all the time. At the same time, however, they're faster than light when traveling through water, meaning it was now waiting for the entire group to catch up. We also threw in a high level scorpion for good measure, because it's the best we had. You know, everything but the kitchen sink or however the saying goes.

Some dinos handled the terrain better than others.

When we had finally moved everyone to the boss battle area, the whole thing only lasted for about a minute. We just stomped the boss into the ground. Some of our dinos got injured pretty badly, but there were no casualties. If I could go back (and we will, soon!), I'd crank that fight up to maximum difficulty. But again, we had to start somewhere to see how it all goes.

The trophy was too big to fit inside my house.

The journey to the obelisk and back, as well as the boss fight against the brood mother, was actually quite spectacular. Look at the video and tell me how this is supposed to be the worst game on Switch:

As an added bonus, I recorded a little bit of footage whilst riding shotgun on the back of Claire's griffin. We made an interesting new friend while we were up there. I don't care what everyone else says, I really love this game.