Ark: Survival Evolved on Switch Has Changed my Life

I've gone and done something fun in autumn 2018 - I decided to spend all of our remaining money for that month on the Switch version of Ark: Survival Evolved. Not only that, but I bought it twice, so Claire could play it with me. I just installed it on her console while she was at work, then surprised her with it when she came home. She couldn't have been more excited had I just microwaved her cat, instead. I'm still not entirely sure what she was so upset about, just because the game was ridiculously overpriced at nearly 60 quid a pop at the time, sold entirely on lies and rapidly became known as the worst game on the system. Not 'one of the worst' - the worst. No game worserer than Ark.

Advertisement screenshot on the Nintendo eShop.

Actual ingame screenshot. Almost perfectly identical.

But we fired it up and gave it a fair shake, anyway. The Switch was a different animal back then. In between Nintendo's admittedly amazing first-party releases, we got a whole lot of stupidly overpriced WiiU ports and a bunch of okay-ish indie games we enjoyed on Steam seven years ago at a fraction of the price Nintendo would charge on their hybrid platform. In 2019 I have neither the time, nor the money to play even half of the games I want to own, let alone finish on there. But I digest.

We hated it. We absolutely hated every single minute we had to spend on there. Our first steps into Ark were weird, confusing and straight-up bizarre. I blogged about it in all detail, so let's just go with an abridged version here - Claire died, she respawned, we chopped up her corpse, roasted it over an open fire, then ate it. This led to her character taking a massive shit, so we sat by the fire, next to her half-eaten corpse, and used the emote system to cheer at a massive pile of crap. Ark in a nutshell.

We'd encounter much, MUCH bigger shits later on.

It wasn't very fun, but we decided to at least try and get our money's worth until we developed what might just be some form of digital Stockholm syndrome. By the time we tamed our first ever dilophosaur, we started to care. In this virtual world where absolutely everything is out to kill you and make your short, wretched life absolutely miserable, we suddenly had a friend. We went out and started to hunt. We had a dino friend, who grew stronger and more experienced alongside us. We finally had a fighting chance. Well, we did until we took a walk up Raptor Hill towards Horror Beach, where we lost all our humble belongings and our first ever pet, but by then we were determined to carry on and get it all back.

I frequently blogged about all of the stupid crap we did on there until the good folks at GameStar magazine said they could imagine featuring a German version of my Ark diaries on their premium section. Just a one-off, a goofy little something to entertain people for Christmas.
Almost a year has passed since then, and writing goofy game diaries has more or less become my job. I'm covering all sorts of games these days, and, more often than not, am asked to play incredibly lousy games for the sake of making these articles more entertaining. Basically, I get to play terrible games nobody else wants to look at, I moan about how much I hate them, then I get paid. People ended up liking angry diary-style articles so much, I started writing most of my articles that way, including a recent review about the excellent Remnant: From the Ashes. It's pretty awesome, really - I mostly get to write whatever I want, for as long as it's in the same style I used when I first started writing about our experiencs on Ark.

It's muddy and blurry, but I find it quite beautiful in places.

Today I have nearly 100 games on my Switch. It has replaced my PC as my gaming platform of choice, and I spend several hours playing with it just about every single day. But the one game I have played the most, the one I've spent more hours with than I have with Smash, Mortal Kombat, Dark Souls or Zelda, is Ark: Survival Evolved.
And yes, I could just buy the Steam version of that game, play with much better visuals, enjoy all the expansions and DLC and have a much bigger community, which consists of more than just five or so semi-active servers like on Switch. But we've spent literally hundreds of hours taming our dinos, building our base camp and making the one and only selectable level on Switch our home.

It's weird. I'm a sucker for maxed-out eyecandy. I will crank all the visual settings in every PC game all the way to the max, I'll sacrifice smooth 60 FPS gameplay over a bit of extra detail any day. But when I play this fuzzy, blurry, stuttering portable version of Ark, I'm having too much fun to even think about all the detail I'm missing by not playing it on Steam. I have a massive camp with well over a hundred dinos, each of which we've tamed, named and leveled-up by hand. Every building, every feeding trough, every stupid potato growing in our crop plots - we've created all of it, ourselves. And it fits in my pocket. I can check on our pets, build, explore, lead a pack of raptors around the place anywhere I go. We've played Ark on family visits, in the pub and at the park. I couldn't be more amazed by how this is even possible on a portable device if I was born in the stone age and had never seen a videogame in my life.

We care about these derpy faces almost as much as we do about our real pets.

Despite its ugly visuals, I genuinely believe that the Switch port of Ark is a technical marvel. Every creature, every boss fight, each and every item, mechanic, costume - absolutely everything you can find in the PC and console versions of Ark, is also included in the Switch version, sans DLC. Our camp has over a hundred dinos, all of which have their own AI and behaviour settings, hunger levels, favourite food, mates, paths they like to explore and what have you. And that shit runs on a crappy little portable device. No, it doesn't run overly well, it doesn't look great, but it's certainly playable and, in case you've forgotten about the frequent crashes on the PC version, it's definitely not any more unstable than it is on the bigger, more powerful platforms.

If it sounds like I'm biased and willing to forgive Ark's shortcomings because I like the gameplay, it's because I am. Just like everybody else. Have you seen Doom 2016 or Wolfenstein on Switch? They look abysmal. They struggle to maintain 30 FPS. And everybody rightfully loves these ports, because they're stupidly fun to play. Even with massively downgraded visuals, these games are some of the greatest titles ever made. Everybody loves Doom on Switch, beause it's Doom. If an unpopular game looks and runs like ass, well ...

Doom gets away with these visuals, because it's Doom.

I'm not going to pretend that Ark is this hidden, underappreciated gem that everybody needs to give another chance, because of course not. I'm just saying the game is getting more flack than it deserves. I believe that people choose to criticize it more harshly than other games, which commit many of the same sins, yet receive praise for being excellent ports. Of course I'm flogging a horse, which has long decomposed. I'd love to see updates for Ark, now that developers have been given access to higher clock speeds. I'd genuinely pay to get some of the DLC they released for the Steam version. Fat chance for that now.

Sure, there are many other titles on Switch, which make me spend my time with Nintendo's hybrid than I do on my PC. If it hadn't been for Ark, chances are, some other game experience may have led to me paying most of my bills these days with 'funny' articles. So the headline for today's entry might be a bit hyperbolic, like everything on the internet. But I sincerely love the Switch version of Ark: Survival Evolved, no matter how much everyone else loves to hate it. There won't be any performance updates, they'll never fix the messy visuals and there most certainly isn't going to be any downloadable content. But I'll be taking care of my camp and my dinos long after they inevitably shut down the last official server.