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.