Scorched Earth Done - Some Closing Thoughts

The boss is dead. Time to move on.

After spending hundreds of hours on THEISLAND, we just finished Scorched Earth over the course of a week. Only three artifact caves, one boss battle, very little variety in the landscape - it's downright tiny compared to the base game. Seeing as this was paid DLC, released while Ark was still in Early Access, I can see how it rubbed the fan-base the wrong way.

There are glitches. I watched some of the Neebs Gaming videos from 2017, where tames get stuck inside random wildlife, characters get stuck and hover in the middle of nowhere - we're getting all of that in 2020. Some days that sort of thing wouldn't happen at all, only for one of us to get stuck every other minute or so, making for an incredibly frustrating experience.

The vast majority of explorer notes are hidden in these dunes. Everything about Scorched Earth feels a bit rushed and lazy.

Difficulty is all over the place. On the one hand, resources like silica pearls just appear out in the open, no longer forcing you to dive into shark-infested waters or venture into a dangerous snow biome like the base game does. Oil can just be pumped out of the grounds at plenty of nodes.Early encounters are tougher. Dilophosaurs and dodos are now raptors and terrorbirds. The toughest areas are guarded by rock golems, which are borderline invincible.

So far, so Ark. But then there are the artifact caves. One of them is a complete joke, containing only a handful of relatively weak critters. The one small platforming section will leave you injured if you fail one of the two jumps, but not enough to kill you.
Then there's a cave, which is full of golems, insane amounts of random trash, then throws a platforming section with bottomless instakill-pits at you for good measure. We've lost more time, nerves, brain cells, items and tames to that shit, none of the caves on THEISLAND came even close. It's a bit of a Goldielocks situation, as the third cave is just right, offers just the right amount of enemies and platforming without being impossibly difficult or an absolute cakewalk.

Our wyverns, Ember and Venom, redeemed themselves in the end.

Once we had all three artifacts, it was time to move all our toughest dinos from THEISLAND to Scorched Earth. This is when I came really close to uninstalling this mess of a game and moving on with my life. In theory, all you do is move a dino to an obelisk (or transmitter), hit the upload button, your dino will disappear from the ark and rest inside the obelisk in digital form. In practice, more often than not, my uploaded dino didn't despawn despite being uploaded, meaning I had essentially cloned them. So now I've got a whole bunch of cloned T-Rexes, allosaurs, carnos and I hate it, because it's cheap, it's kinda (accidental) cheating and it's a hassle to organize.

I mean, our long-term plan is to finish all the content, then retire on Ragnarok, bringing all our trophies, artifacts and dinos. Now I've got duplicates of lots of them, spread across two arks. It's a known glitch, which has been reported for as long as the upload feature existed and it still isn't fixed. But they keep arting out new paid content. Great.
What's worse, when I uploaded all of Claire's powerful tek gear, then took it back out on Scorched Earth, the game immediately crashed after transferring her last item. And thanks to the game's stupid save system, it had immediately saved the now empty item storage of our obelisks, yet it had not saved my character's inventory as I crashed, effectively deleting Claire's full set of customized and dyed Tek armor, her tek weapons, as well as a bunch of upgraded tools, tonics, all the good shit you want to take with you on a difficult adventure.

Her cool Iron Man armor? Yeah, that shit is gone.

The duplicate dinos ... fine, whatever. Once we decide on a final ark and camp as our retirement location, I can take just one version of each retired dino. Or take their clones behind the barn to Old Yeller them. But that lost gear wasn't just some basic hide armor you can just make up again from scratch. Unlocking full tek required us to defeat all three original bosses on their highest possible difficulty. Hundreds of hours preparation, artifact-hunting, boss battles, not to mention endless resource grind just to craft that shit. What really pisses me off is how this has been happening since 2017 across all platforms.

The one redeeming factor about this whole mess is that I'm now aware of these problems, meaning I can create emergency backups before messing with any more item or dino transfers in the future. This won't help prevent unwanted clones, but I'll be able to to restore lost items, at least. Right after I said we'd stop the save scumming. Though I feel it's fair game when it is done in order to circumvent glitches.

My raptor is a wizard!

One reason we're still moving on to Aberration this weekend, rather than playing something a little less frustrating and broken, is the incredible, too awesome for words, you kinda had to be there alpha chimera boss battle. Holy shit!

We entered the boss arena with our rexes, allos and yuties, a healing pig, mostly the same team composition as with previous boss fights, plus some extras. But I'll get to those. The boss fight started with us standing around like idiots while the chimera just flew all over the place. I'm still new to ark on PC and I haven't memorized all of the hotkeys, so I had no idea how to get all of our dinos to follow me and/or go after the boss. I asked Claire to tell me the hotkey or get them to attack our dinos and she ... honestly, I have no idea what she was doing, so we just bitched at each other for a while. As you do.

Someone had to pick up the slack.

While we were just sitting there being useless, our wyverns started chasing after the chimera and battled it up in the air. It was easily one of the coolest things I've ever witnessed in this game. They didn't last long - the chimera poisoned them with its stinger and knocked them out fairly quickly, but it was enough to piss it off and get it to attack the rest of our dinos. Meanwhile, Claire and I each brought a mantis.

These guys are fucking awesome boss battle tames. I alternated between attacking the boss with my mantis' dual swords and blasting the crap out of it with my shotgun. Where previous boss battles were mostly just a rex rush with the occasional handful of trash that just died in the mayhem, the wyvern fight constantly alternated between close and long-range combat, the "trash" was comprised of deathworms and rock golems, and the boss arena allowed flying tames for the first time. I'm not sure it's as exciting to watch as it was to play, but there it is:

I've got video footage from our first logon to Sorched Earth to base building, to every artifact run all the way to the final boss. I'll throw it all together into one short and sweet video over the weekend. I doubt anyone is going to care, but it'll give us something nice to look back at.

Ark: Scorched Earth - New Beginnings

We've finally done it. It's weird, really.
Change is important, right? Progress. Evolution. Ark itself embraces that, has evolution right in its title. So how come most of us, as a species, dislike and straight-up fight change? Clinging on to the status quo, reminiscing about the good old days and shit. Anyhow, we've left THEISLAND for the next part of Ark's story: Scorched Earth.

There are a few things about Scorched Earth, which immediately put me off. First of all, it's set entirely in the desert. You get some mountains and canyons and dried-up river beds, but there's simply no way around the fact it's all a bit samey and gets old a lot faster than the varied landscapes and biomes of THEISLAND. Another problem is that moving to a new ark always means you're going back to the stone age.

Downgrading from tek gear to whatever this is.

The good thing about expecting the absolute worst is how it means you're already somewhat prepared. So we chose the east midlands as our starting point, as we live in the east midlands of the UK. Once more into the fray. Spawning completely naked. No guns, no kickass lightsabers, no jetpack. Punching trees, breaking off rocks, making basic caveman tools. At least this time we had an idea what we were doing, which made a big difference. It also helped that our characters already had a hundred levels under their belts, because Scorched Earth doesn't pull any punches.

Where Ark's first map gently pushes your survival instincts in the starting areas by throwing the odd dilophosaur at you, this time around we were immediately attacked by a raptor. Claire knocked it out with her bare hands. Maximum difficulty, no cheats. Apparently, a level 100 survivor is strong enough to take out a level 8 raptor using no gear whatsoever. Interesting. While Claire was taming her raptor, I took out a bunch of giant prehistoric boars using only a spear. Again, interesting. I remember dying countless deaths to raptors and pigs back on THEISLAND, even when we had actual weapons and armor. I didn't expect our levels to make that much of a difference.

We built a base in no time at all.

We followed the old river bed until we managed to find some water. That's where we decided to set up our base. I built a giant wall to section off the dried-up part of the river, then used the water and the surrounding cliffs to ward off the rest of our camp against potential intruders. I built a nice little stone house. Claire built a wooden house, which resembles a penis. The tip of her cockhouse has a little window in it. She can leave her dick house through the tip-window. She says she did none of this on purpose. Maybe it's all in her subconscious.

Definitely not a penis: Claire's house.

Scorched Earth has a handful of new creatures we haven't encountered before. One of them is a stomach-turningly cute mammal called the jerboa. It's basically a small kangaroo with the head of a fennec fox. You tame one and put it on your shoulder and it'll warn you about each of this ark's impending stupid weather conditions like blinding sandstorms and tech-disabling electrical storms and other such crap. I tamed two of the little shits, as the first one immediately disappeared into the foundation of our base camp, becoming one with our home for all eternity. Great.

Next, we tamed a thorned dragon, because they look like a cross between a lizard and a pinecone, they're really good at harvesting stuff and they can put things to sleep with a ranged attack. In other words, they instantly make other popular workhorse-dinos like the triceratops obsolete. Which is fine, seeing as trikes don't seem to spawn here, anyway.

I miss our old friends!

Speaking of stuff that doesn't exist on this ark - we went and transferred some stuff over from THEISLAND. Obelisks and tek transmitters allow you to move gear and dinos between worlds, making things a little easier. We brought some of our worker dinos for resources, as well as our otters. They are incredibly helpful when dealing with extreme temperatures. For the time being, we left our tek gear where it was. For as fun as it is being borderline immortal, having the ability to fly without the help of dinos and shooting every possible threat with a plasma rifle, we didn't want to just completely stomp the place and eradicate all challenge from the very beginning. In that same spirit, we didn't bring our giga, a T-Rex or any other super powerful dinos for now.

Pinecone reminds me of some of our RL pets. I like him.

We also brought our flying dinos upon realizing that the giant moths in Scorched Earth are as adorable as they're useless. They're agile and all, but their stats are fairly unimpressive and they don't fight, because they're moths. So we went and grabbed our argies, then flew all over the place to get a better idea about our surroundings.

We're bringing freedom and democracy to Scorched Earth.

As we went and explored the desert from above, I spotted one of the coolest creatures in the entire game: a mantis. You know, big, green, googly eyes, deadly sickles for arms and apparently they like a little head during sex? I wouldn't want one for a pet in real life, as they're a bit on the fragile side and I doubt they're the bonding type. But in Ark? A specimen big enough for me to ride into battle? Fuck yeah!

I'm not massively keen on insects, but these guys are awesome.

So apparently, in oder to tame one of these bad boys you need bits of a creature called a deathworm. Well, that sounds easy enough, right? Let's go find and kill some of these deathworms and tame us a mantis!
Now, before you give me shit about underestimating something named deathworm, let's have a quick look at Ark's nomenclature, shall we? Because everything is already named giga, mega or titansomething. It means nothing. A titanoboa is largely harmless once you've gained a few levels and you've geared up a little. A megaloceros is something you punch in the butt and then laugh at as it panicks and runs away. So I'm not gonna be intimidated by some worm, no matter his forename. Well, about that.

We flew around the desert for hours. Actual, literal, real earth hours. Then we finally found some weird dust clouds in the sand. We flew a little closer and there was a rumble. A split second later, an alpha deathworm appeared, broke all of my gear and killed me in one hit. Just like that. I didn't know they were the size of a skyscraper or that there was an alpha variety. All I saw was this:

Except, from the inside.

Having sunk several hundred hours into Ark, my attitude towards items in this game has changed a lot. You see, in most games I play, items are everything. Picture any max level character in World of Warcraft. Put him side by side with another max level character of the same class, remove all their items and they become identical. Exact same stats, same skills, save for a handful of very minor, meaningless, non-permanent choices in their talent trees. Now clad one of them in green quest trash and the other guy in raid gear and suddenly there's a world of difference between these two characters. Same thing applies to most (*coughs* actual) RPGs to varying degrees. You get your skills and your attributes, but a huge part of your power, if not the biggest, always comes from items.

Ark, at least from a PvE point of view, doesn't give a shit about your gear. If anything, you'll wear it for utility. Stuff that protects you against hot or cold environments. Scuba gear for deep sea adventures. Camouflaged armor to sneak past predators. When that worm chewed through my riot gear? Fuck it. If you're lucky, heavy armor will protect you during one or two hairy encounters that might not kill you outright. After that, all of your stuff will be broken and require so much in resources to repair, it's basically not worth the effort unless you're part of some huge tribe, who mass-produces items on an industrial level. But I lost something else. Something I wasn't prepared to go without.

You'll be missed, little buddy.

Fishface was my otter. He was one of the first creatures I tamed all by myself, all the way back on Switch. I never went anywhere without him. He saved us when Claire and I lost our mount on THEISLAND and got surrounded by raptors and boas. I'm not even exaggerating. That damn otter fought long enough for me to wake up after getting knocked down, bought me enough time to grab my shotgun and helped me fight off that pack of raptors before they ate us.

The worm ate him. I wish we had dived in there to grab him. Got close enough to whistle at him to run away or to at least fight back. To do something. We couldn't save him. Everything, everyone dies in the end, one way or another. Didn't make it any less of a punch to the gut. Look at his stupid, happy little face. The worm doesn't care. It just wants to eat. Nature is fucked up, in real life and in videogames.

Not even penis house cheered me up that night.

Claire said I could always have one of her otters. Or just get a new one from THEISLAND. And that's true. But I don't want to replace Fishface. Guess I'll just be otterless for a while. Doesn't have to make sense to you. It makes enough sense to me.

On a less depressing note, we ultimately caught our mantis and these guys are incredible! Not only are they really great harvesters and fighters, but you can even equip them with tools and melee weapons, so now I'm riding on this giant black insect, which chops all the dinos to tiny bits with his swords. I named him Chakan.

A glitch is making it look like he's wielding swords and axes at the same time, because this is Ark.

Okay, children, time for a bit of videogame history. Chakan: The Forever Man was a game on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis and the Sega Game Gear based on a comic book character of the same name. The game isn't every good, it's brutally difficult, the music is some of the worst in any videogame ever. The reason why this game has stuck with me since the day it was announced is its unusually dark setting and character. Chakan was this incredible swordsman, who would beat anyone in a fight until he ran out of opponents and challeneged Death himself to a duel. Upon defeating the grim reaper, Chakan demanded his ultimate prize: eternal life.

And since you don't fuck with death, the arrogant fencer soon regretted his wish. He continued to age, undying, ceaselessly withering away. In the game you have to fight your way back into Death's realm to defeat him once more in order to find eternal peace at last. How fucking cool is that? In the 90s, a decade dominated by mascot platformers and cheesy, 'radical' coolness, there was this game where your ultimate goal was to die. And check out that character art:

The megadrive cover art was reason enough for us to buy the game back in the day:

There was a sequel planned in the early 2000s, but in the end it never happened. Rumor has it, that much of the artwork meant for the new Chakan went into Blood Omen 2, instead. And that concludes today's history lesson.
So, inspired by some scrotum-faced badass, who fucks shit up with two nasty swords, I'm now riding around on a giant mantis, which is doing pretty much the same thing.

 The hat is important.

Having watched what my new pet of choice can do, it only took Claire five minutes before she wanted her own mantis. Hers is bright orange and lunges at stuff with two giant lances.

Imagine that thing flying at you like this.

This beastie is bright orange and chops its enemies to bits with heavy medieval weaponry. Obviously, there can only be one correct name for such a creature and that's Choppy Orange. Claire, however, decided to name him Ziggy, which is ... also a name, I guess.

Poor you.

Next to moths, killer insects and pinecone lizards, there's one more thing you'll definitely want to tame when you come to this place: a wyvern. Suffice to say I couldn't wait to go out on an adventure, fly into one of their lava-filled nests and steal one of their eggs, which is the only way to obtain one of these suckers.
Except, Claire went and did all that during a 16-hour Ark session while I was working. I'm not kidding. Started the game one evening, stayed on there until midnight, talked about how we should probably stop soon, fought deathworms until 4 in the morning, tried our new mantis pets at 5, by 10am there was absolutely no point in going to sleep and by 1 in the afternoon I requested a break, because health experts suggest frequent pauses and I could really use a two hour nap after all that.

Having deprived me of one of the cooler things you can do on this ark, I was stuck raising one of the little fuckers from a tiny baby to something the length of a grown-ass bronto. And while I won't deny that wyverns look cool, they're probably the only thing I dislike more than all those bionic robo-dinos. First of all, from a conceptual point of view. I enjoy Ark, because most of the creatures in this game used to exist for real at some point. Not all in the same time period, not exactly the way they're depicted in the game, but it's fun to watch them and to imagine what the world may have been like back in their day. Robots and mythical creatures just don't fit into the picture for me.

I like dinos. And I like dragons. But I don't want them mixed together. I'm not putting bacon on top of my ice cream, either.

I also find them underwhelming from a gameplay perspective. Not only are they the size of a flying oil tanker, but they also handle like one. They have a turn radius of 'see ya in three weeks' and while it's nice of them to come with various flavours of elemental breath attacks, their damage really isn't anything special by the time you have a level 200something argentavis. It'll take your dragon an eternity and a half to catch up in terms of raw stats and then it'll still handle like ass. And, much like gigas, you can't take them into boss battles, so what is their point in pve?

Owning dragons for the sake of owning dragons.

We've also encountered our first cave, which, compared to the caves on THEISLAND, was a bit of a letdown. There were about five enemies and a small platforming section in there, which wasn't much to stop us from obtaining our first artifacts. Two more to go, then it'll be time to fight the one and only boss on this particular ark. And that's okay. The desert is nice and all, but I wouldn't mind a change of scenery. We've got what we came here for and I'm sure that some of our new friends will move to a new ark with us once we're ready to relocate. Next one on the list is Aberration, I think. But we still have a manticore to fight before we worry about that.

I've recorded several days worth of video footage showing pretty much all of these events as they happened. I might convert them into another supercut when I find the time. Not that it really matters, it's not like anyone really watches these. It's still fun putting them together, if only to have a reminder of all the crazy shit we get up to in this game. Right now, the plan is to complete all story content present in each of the official arks, then build a retirement base on Ragnarok and settle there with all our surviving favourite dinos from all the arks we've explored. There's still so much to do!

Ark - Our Big, Fat Alpha Ascension

So, 'member how I said we were preparing to fight the dragon 'n shit? Here's how that went down:

We packed all of our strongest dinos and a spino (they're horseshit) into pokéballs and battled the last of the three titans on THEISLAND. Basically, all we had to do was to cram the fucker right in the middle of our 20 tames, beat the crap out of him and stuff a pig with all the food in the world in order to out-heal some of the dragon's nasty DoT effects. My pants broke, because Ark is stupid and somehow all bosses and dinosaurs in general always go for the ass. They're always my first piece of equipment to break. I've never finished a single goddamn boss battle with my pants on.

Beating the dragon was a pretty big deal for us, because it meant we could finally craft a full set of tek gear. And it's pretty insane.
Partial tek was pretty impressive already. We had tek helmets after the spider boss battle, which allowed us to breathe underwater. We had boots, which absorbed fall damage. Gloves with a pointless super punch, because why punch shit when you have a shotgun? Now we have full tek armor and we're basically Iron Man. Iron Men? People? We're Iron People.

We're also pretty damn sexy now.

We can fly without argies or pteranodons now, sprint so fast we can literally walk on water, fall from just about any height without taking damage and hang around under the sea with zero risk of drowning. The tek helmets even clear up all water distortion and sight limitations. Beating the dragon also unlocked tek sharks, so now our fishy friends can look awesome while they sit around and rot, never to be used again.

That's really my one small complaint with this whole thing. Yes, Tek is amazing, game-changing, a massive reward when you actually beat the game instead of just spawning it all in via console commands. It also means you're so stupidly fast, agile and basically unstoppable, it makes using most dinos pointless. Basically the thing that ruined Saints Row IV - that game made you a superhero with godlike abilities from the very beginning, meaning you never had to steal a vehicle or use any of the countless guns, because what's the point when you can fucking fly, run faster than light and destroy everything with one punch?

Saits Row The Third was basically GTA with more wrestling moves and a giant dildo.

In Ark's defense, you're pretty much at the end of the game by the time you unlock it, if you do it the legit way. Continue to the next ark (read: map, level) and you'll be back to sticks and stones until you find the resources required to get all of your tek back. So I suppose it can be forgiven that players get to be completely overpowered as they tie up some final loose ends, hunt down their last few explorer notes and prepare for ascension. That's the thing where you face the ark's overseer and learn a little more about what these arks actually are. We've ascended and there's a little video, but mind the thpoilerth that lurk within:

Next stop: Scorched Earth. Not sure how to feel about that. Leave Camp Nova behind, get used to a whole new place, build up another base, decide which dinos we want to take on our next journey. THEISLAND is a shithole, but it's pretty and it's been our virtual home since late 2018. There's also the fact that Ark has suddenly weirdly exploded on Steam, so we're now supposed to play and review Genesis. Not entirely sure how to squeeze that in. Maybe move from THEISLAND straight to Genesis, finish that first for our review, then play the rest of the DLC in its intended order. Or create alts for Genesis and cheat them up to endgame level. We'll see. I guess Ark's gonna be my job a little while longer. Life could be worse, I guess.

Ark Quickie

Look, we've done a thing under water:

Also, we're now making the bebbies:

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.

Ark - Operation F**k 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 full to the brim 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 game attached to it.

You can't go wrong with an allosaurus.

Once our badass dinos were finally asleep, 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.