Ark: Survival Evolved - Fuck Aberration!

 

Back when Claire and I first started playing Ark, all the way back on Nintendo Switch, we played for an entire year, hundreds and hundreds of hours, having absolutely no clue about the story, progression or how to actually 'finish' THEISLAND via boss summons, ascension and the like. It didn't matter, because we made our own adventures every day. Each time we logged on, we'd decide on an objective and then spend the following hours doing whatever we could in order to achieve it.

It never had to be overly complicated or elaborate, either. "I need more shotgun ammo." "We want warm clothes, so we can explore the frozen biome." "Let's get jumped by a thylacoleo in the redwood, so we can tame it and explore caves with it." Due to the chaotic and unpredictable nature of Ark, it never took more than such a simple goal in order to get massive adventures taking several hours to complete. Sometimes a pet dino would get lost on the journey and we'd have to start a rescue mission. One of us might die and end up having to retrieve lost gear. We'd trip upon creatures we didn't know existed at the time and decide to tame them, then desperately try to bring them home in one piece. I still vividly remember building a massive cage on top of a flying dino, then catapulting a bear off a cliff and down into the cage in order to transport it home, safely.

And then there's Tits-out-Thursday. You'd hate to miss it!

Things changed a bit, when we ended up transferring from Switch to PC. Suddenly, we had access to tons upon tons of additional content, expansions and DLC. Progression. So we quickly completed THEISLAND, then moved on to Scorched Earth, which we completed over the course of only two or three days. I didn't like it a lot, because where THEISLAND had lush, green fields, forests, jungles, snowy tundra and swamps, Scorched Earth has nothing but sand as far as the eye can see. There were some exciting new creatures here and there, but there was really just one boss battle and in the end we breezed through the whole thing fairly quickly. And then came Aberration.

Look. I understand that, first and foremost, Ark is a survival game. Throwing nasty shit at you and having you struggle to cope is the entire point of this game, even though Claire and I really just play it like a virtual dino petting zoo. But Aberration is too much. 95 percent of your play time is spent in claustrophobic, depressing caves, which never let you see the light of day. You can try to climb up to the surface, but it's literally on fire during the day, then kills you with radiation at night. The surface is also crawling with monsters, which will literally rape and kill you, then their offspring bursts out of your guts to kill you all over again, because everyone loves xenomorphs, I guess.

I'm raising him as my own, because abortion requires death by radiation.

Don't get me wrong. Aberration is pretty. It has much higher-quality assets than THEISLAND, the varied landscapes and creatures are absolutely stunning, but the whole thing simply isn't very fun to play. Earthquakes, skyscraper-sized, face-eating crabs, packs of mutated cave wolves, which inflict bleed procs. Bulding a camp gives you a choice between death by dehydration and death by spino, depending on whether or not you try to settle near the water. Also, every critter spawns in its 'aberrant' (read: glass cannon) variety, meaning they'll one-shot you even harder than regular dinos.

In the end, it was enough to make me stop playing. On the one hand, I didn't want to go back to THEISLAND, because I knew there were plenty more interesting creatures, ascension rewards, boss battles and other cool shit waiting in the DLC areas. On the other, I was getting sick of constantly starting over with no gear, no base, no resources and no dinos in increasingly deadly locations. I had my fill, and so I quit. Until VR.

Feral stegosaurus and its baby. I like mods.

Originally, Ark was intended to have native VR support. This, however, turned out to be so broken, glitchy and unplayable, that it was quickly dropped. Fortunately, there is now software such as VorpX, which allows me to play most games, including Ark, in VR and stereoscopic 3D regardless, so I did exactly that. Ark lets you do everything in first person, and since it was originally meant to support VR anyway, it has a decent 1st person body simulation. Imagine riding a cave bear or a velociraptor in VR, where you can see every single hair, every scale, right in front of you in completely insane detail. I'm not kidding - if you install the whole game with all the goodies and DLC, it'll easily take up some 300gb of SSD space. That's in a game, which is almost entirely devoid of voiceovers and speech, has no music apart from the title and combat tunes for each expansion and some minor jingles (level-ups and the like) and comes with zero rendered cutscenes and videos. It's the textures. Ark uses incredibly detailed, high resolution textures for every creature, every piece of clothing, everything from your dinos to your gear to random mushrooms. 

This is a pretty big deal, considering how the vast majority of VR games are smaller indie-titles made by very small teams or even single devs, usually offering some 2-3 hours of play time. With the exception of something like Half-Life: Alyx or Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, most VR titles offer relatively basic visuals. Don't get me wrong. Warhammer 40k: Battle Sisters is one of my favourite VR games out there, it's stupidly fun to play, whilst being far more affordable than its AAA brethren. But that doesn't change the fact that it looks a lot like a PS2 game. It's fun, but it'll never be as immersive in VR as a game with realistic graphics and high resolution textures.

Without exaggeration, Ark feels like a different game in VR. The way you have to tilt your head all the way back to look at something like an Allosaurus, that feeling of vertigo when you sit on top of a mighty T-Rex or soar across the skies on a gryphon. Once I got the stereoscopic 3D to work properly (VorpX is rather fiddly), the ride on a flying dino went straight to my stomach - especially with somebody else in the pilot seat, so you can't anticipate which way you're going to fly next. It can be a lot more intense than those virtual rollercoaster rides they used to show off the original Oculus Rift to people. 

Since you can't see a keyboard in VR, I also added voice commands using a program called Voice Attack. First you record some phrases via Windows speech recognition, so Windows will learn to recognize and understand you, then you fire up Voice Attack to attach specific button presses and actions to each phrase. So now I just have to say 'shotgun', 'water' or 'inventory' to access the corresponding items or menus. I can look at a dinosaur and tell it to attack, come or stay put. Yes, it feels weird to sit around with a giant lump of plastic mounted to your head whilst talking to imaginary dinosaurs, so it isn't for everyone, but once you get used to it, it can be a LOT more immersive than simply playing on a flat screen with a mouse and keyboard.

So now I was back on Aberration, watching my dinos through a headset and chatting with them through the built-in microphone. Fun stuff! It made the whole experience a lot less miserable, though Aberration was still frustrating as a whole. Admittedly, the setting is pretty interesting - the entire ark (read: game world) is malfunctioning, some nasty, alien liquid is leaking all over the place and mutating shit everywhere, then there's the whole radiation and burning surface thing I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, not only does that make the whole thing a massive pain in the ass to play, but it also leads to reduced creature variety. More than anything, you'll encounter a small selection of dinosaurs from previous content, but in their 'aberrant' version, which really just means they've got slightly tweaked stats, some glow in the dark skin patterns and some resistance to radiation. Some being a very important key word here, but I'll get back to that.

So in the less dangerous, but by no means safe part of this ark, you're getting mauled by bears, raptors and ravagers when you stay away from the water or you'll be ripped to shreds by spinos, comically oversized crabs and piranhas if you like it wet. Ravagers are new to this expansion, their name leaving little to the imagination when it comes to how dangerous they are. Visually, they're basically an old man's scrotum, which somebody attempted to vaguely shape into the form of a dog. The game files refer to them as 'cave wolves', but ... yeah, well.

Cave wolves, apparently.

Claire had already completed Aberration during my year-long absence from the game. Simply wanting to finish this expansion as quickly as possible myself, I let her plan out our journey. And according to her, we absolutely needed ravagers in order to complete this expansion, so we went and tranquilized a bunch of them, then force-fed them barbecued meat while they tried to eat our faces, because this is how you earn the love of an animal or something. We bagged an entire pack of them early on and, having no love or respect for the disgusting fuckers, I didn't put any effort into naming the two of them, which ended up in my care. One of them had sickly-yellow skin and very little else, so I named it cheese. The other one was a mix of disgusting grey and brown, I called her 'Nice Rack', because my mind was somewhere else, then moved on with my life. Rack quickly turned out to be the weirdo of the pack. She'd eat each and every corpse we left behind on the way back to our camp. None of the other ravagers acted up, everything was set to neutral, so they'd only defend themselves in case of emergency and just follow us otherwise. Rack just kept eating everything that died on the way for some reason.

Seeing as the spinos were the biggest and strongest thing around, as well as far less complicated to tame than the weird crabs, we also tamed a couple of those, then proceeded to clear most of the content on said spinos, making our ravers totally obsolete. Yay. Spinos are great in VR. You ride this gigantic monstrosity, which is easily the size of a house. Gives you a proper sense of vertigo. VorpX lets you use head tracking, so when I turned my head to the side, I'd see Claire riding hers next to mine. It's another one of those 'I wish I could describe it adequately but can't' moments, which completely change the way you experience this kind of game. You physically turn your head, see your co-op partner riding a giant dinosaur right next to you, you're looking at each other, at the dinos, everything looks unbelievably real, has real depth to it, like you could just reach out and touch it. One day I'm gonna have to invest in a more expensive headset, to see if it'll help with Claire's motion sickness. Unlike the rest of the family, she hasn't found her VR legs, so I'm constantly sitting here like, "I wish you could see what I'm seeing right now! You've got to try this! You have no idea what you're missing!" And she puts up with it, because what are you gonna do.

Modded character models for reduced caveperson effect.

Once we had our spinos, we took them to the radioactive part of the map and stole some rock drake eggs. Rock drakes are even bigger than spinos, they're gliding, climbing, feathered lizards, which are original and conceptually cool and one of the reasons I don't like Aberration. I play Ark for the dinosaurs and prehistoric animals, not robots, dragons and other fantastic stuff from SciFi or high fantasy. Dinosaurs are dinosaurs and dragons are dragons. I don't like mixing them. Go to any toy shop and you'll always find the dragons with the dinos. It makes people dumb. Some folks genuinely believe there were fire-breathing dinosaurs, because of this shit. Dinosaurs actually existed and dragons are made up. Do these people actually know that? I'm really not sure. Aaanyway, we had these rock drakes now, which is important, because they climb up walls and ceilings and survive long falls by gliding, because Aberration doesn't allow flying critters and too much fun is bad for you.

Rock Drakes are stronger and deadlier than any T-Rex. They can tank a million hits and make it very difficult for baddies to dismount you. They also helped us roflstomp our way to and through the artifact caves, which you have to clear in order to fight the one and only boss on this ark. The problem is, not only are they roughly the size and shape of a feathered subway train. They're also about as agile as one. If someone attaches itself to your tail, all you can do is try and outrun it and get enough distance to turn around and fight back. Otherwise you'll just go in an endless circle, never able to catch whatever is nibbling on your drake's butt. And that turned into a huge problem with the boss fight later on.

Alpha Rockwell is a bit more challenging than other bosses.

Many boss battles in Ark are generally very simple, especially if you run a local, private session with singleplayer settings. Just sick the maximum number of allowed tames at them, watch them mutilate the bad guy for a few seconds and that's the end of that. Rockwell, Aberration's final boss, offers enough targets to completely derp out the up to 20 dinos you're allowed to bring, whilst using annoying mechanics such as health-gating, which is a thing videogames absolutely have to FUCKING STOP doing! Basically, it means you can only ever lower a boss' health to a specific threshold, then they become invulnerable and force you through their next phase, repeating several times, so damage output and gear become entirely meaningless, and the fight will always play out the same, with no means to speed it up or defeat any mechanics through massive damage. Ark, Warfame, Path of Exile - you can all get fucked for relying more and more on this bullshit!

Oh hey, remember how I mentioned that aberrant creatures have *some* resistance to radiation? I tamed this beautiful aberrant raptor, pitch-black with orange feathers. We took him to the deepest part of the ark, then had to cryo-freeze him, because the radiation was basically melting him. He never even saw the boss battle. We fought Rockwell while riding our rock drakes, which was a disaster. The guy farts out a bunch of giant, slow-moving orbs, which chase after you and explode on impact, which can straight-up kill you or, at the very least, disintegrate your armor. You can avoid that by shooting the orbs. This is difficult when they're coming from behind, you can't turn around far enough on top of your mount to target them, and your mount takes a full ten minutes to rotate, basically forcing you to try and outrun them for as long as you can, until they inevitably get you. Apparently, the 'optimal strategy' employed by average Joe is to just tank the orbs and bring enough healing potions and spare armor to survive through the whole fight, which is both frustrating and horribly inefficient.

Friends and family will confirm I look like this IRL.

So this is the bit where you'll have to picture a training montage, because it's just cooler and less boring that way. See, I cannot fucking stand rock drakes. I crave mobility. It's good to have a tough, strong mount, which still lets you whip out your own gun, but that becomes entirely useless when you can't turn around fast enough to face attackers from every direction. So I went and leveled the absolute shit out of Nice Rack. 'Your Nice Rack killed an aberrant raptor!' 'Your Nice Rack has gained a level'. You get the idea. I went and murdered entire spawns of dinos until she was somewhere around level 180. Got her as beefed-up as I realistically could. Powered up the whole pack for a while.

Sometimes you just follow the dog's bollocks. Which is even more unpleasant in VR.

Ravagers are not immune to radiation. The moment we defrosted them for the boss battle, we could hear them sizzle. We also brought the drakes, the spinos, a stegosaurus or two, just to have something to distract the trash and soak up the occasional orb here and there. And I rode in there on a scrotum-faced cave dog, which was incessantly melting and sizzling. It was glorious!

Ravagers are fast and agile. I could ride circles around the boss, easily outpacing the orbs, with Rack and her pack gobbling up random trash baddies along the way. Rockwell spawns a bunch of tentacles you have to nuke in order to make him vulnerable. 'Shotgun'. It's immensely satisfying to ready your weapon with a vocie command, then aim it with head tracking. I kept the dog running straight, turned to the side in a 90 degree angle on top of her and shotgunned tentacles driveby-style. Once you get used to it, head-tracking will drastically improve your aim over simply using a mouse or a controller. I'm not kidding - these past few days I've been hitting targets mid-flight over any distance straight off the back of our tapejara. I'm tranqulizing the absolute fuck out of snow owls before they even know I'm there. 

Head-tracking turns hand-eye-coordination into mostly eye coordination. I've tranqed these guys whilst chasing after them in the air with another flying mount.

It's difficult to describe how intense and how satisfying the whole encounter was, outside of the mechanical bullshittery. Ride like the wind, turn around to one side to nuke an orb, turn around to the other to shoot a trash baddie, don't forget to look straight ahead to avoid riding into walls or some puddle of radioactive goo. It really helps to have a swiveling arm chair! As our lines were thinning, it was cool being able to ride past our surviving dinos to ask them for help. 'Come!' - turning the follow command into something triggered via voice recognition is a fun way to organize and re-group stray dinos without the need for any key presses.

In the end, we probably lost three quarters of our dinos. One spino kicked the bucket, the other one only survived because he failed to get teleported to the boss arena. One stego and our trike went missing, we saw some of our ravagers die, others were nowhere to be found after Rockwell fell. Even Claire's bulb dog had been pulverized. The rock drakes survived, because rock drakes don't give a shit. Other than that, Nice Rack and I managed to get each other out there in (mostly) one piece each. She was in pretty bad shape, but unlike her pack, she lived through the whole thing. It's weird how the ugliest tame with the dumbest name ended up becoming my favourite pet. I ended up porting her over to Extinction. If she lives through that one, as well, I'm gonna let her retire on Valguero with all our favourite dinos. That's the ultimate goal. Finish all the content (except Genesis, because that can get fucked for now), then set up a badass camp on Valguero and transmit all our surviving favourite pets over there, so they can chill. And probably get eaten by a stray giga spawning out of nowhere or whatever.

We'll be fine. Compared to Aberration, this feels like a vacation.

I'm actually looking forward to being done with 'content' on here. I don't need boss fights and artifact caves and shit to have fun with Ark. As soon as my Valguero holiday resort is set up, we'll go back to simpler times and easier adventures. Today we're gonna tame X, we're gonna harvest Y and we're gonna explore Z. The rest will fall into place all by itself. Such is the nature of sandbox games.