ARK

[Lazybones]

FYI Ark has a lot of wild life variety.

http://ark.gamepedia.com/Creatures

The oceans are terrifying and you can craft underwater gear as well as tame water dinosaurs at the higher levels.

There are also several boss type challenge objectives.

[Lazybones]

Well with three of us playing on our own server now the game is still looking strong. Some things I have noticed.

- Built in voice chat works well. It is clear and easy to use. ( I have enabled global chat, not just proximity)
- Tribe members that area near each other when earning XP share XP even for crafting.
- once you have a slightly more difficult to capture dino you start to get huge resources... IE I tamed a Trik last night, now when stomping through the forest it can harvest mad amounts of berries.
- The variety of dinos spawning in an area changes / cycles, they arn't fixed spaws within the biom.. We have seen a number of small and large as well as deadly dinos spawn NEAR our settlement.
- Still fun to play solo, semi social (trading), or together (building, collecting for a common goal)

Haven't run into the new disease mechanic yet, hoping it isn't too brutal.

[Melbosa]

So we've been playing a bit now and I'd thought I would give my impressions of the game so far.

First off, at the very simplistic level, when looking at this game, and my first impression that holds somewhat true right now, is that is it Minecraft meets Pokemon.  There are elements of both in this game that really show up, and I find myself thinking that most of this game is building up your skills/crafting/infrastructure to get better dinos.  The game is very pretty to look at, the graphics are some of the best in the survival/crafting games out there.  There is a real impact when you first run up against a very large dino, you are very humbled on just how large they seem to be.

What I am struggling with is how brutal this game can be in terms of survivability and your dino's life expectancy.  I find every time I try to explore with what I think is a fairly capable group of Dinos at my back I seem to end up loosing my dinos and sometimes my own life just only a few 100 yards from our settlement.  I know Lazy and Mags are better at it than me and are higher levels than I but I find that most of my time in game has been upgrading and robusting our settlement for fear of loosing more dinos or my hard found stuff trying to explore.

In contrast to my first time with Minecraft my progress in this game feels slow and a bit frustrating, but you also get a sense of how vulnerable you would really be in a survival game.  I'm still having fun but I might also try Mr. A's Rust server to compare.

[Mr. Analog]

RUST moves a little faster I think, there's less to worry about without PVP though (other than PVE, which is just as deadly as ARK)

I'll get it up and running again after I finish installing my SSD

I want to start ARK as well I just need to find a good day where I can sit down and get familiar with it

[Melbosa]

Well good news, our ARK server is only PVE.

[Lazybones]

Initially I found ARK super brutal and unfair when alone and without gear. Death without bed spawn points really sucked.

Other than a few time sinks that I have been reducing via server settings (no building decay!, shorter night and faster taming) I think it is brutal but fair.

If your Dino is a herbivore nearly any medium carnivore will take it out with ease. Like wise raptors do decent damage but are not tough, it makes them easy to tame but not able to stand up to big Dino's.

Avoiding some threats requires observation and some knowledge of how dangerous things are. There is a spyglass you can craft around level 20 that lets you ID a Dino from a distance.

Still finding the game a challenge but at the same time feel like it lets me still progress.

Your pet stats matter, after taming some Dino's will have really low health or small hunger bars. This might be why we ended up with some paper raptors.

I have published the server settings as they change, if anyone wants changes let me know. Somethings are double edged however. If I reduce Dino hunger we need to feed carnivores less but taming will slow down as well.

[Lazybones]

It took a few arrows but with some team work we got this one to sleep

[Mr. Analog]

Wow! 

[Lazybones]

I was going to try and get a pic with Mags in it for scale but fog rolled in and I needed to go to bed.

I am assuming the tame was complete as it was 3/4 do when I logged off and Mags was still working on it.

[Mags]

Left you something in your smithy Lazy

[Melbosa]

Somebuddy crash landed!

[Lazybones]

Map changes coming soon
http://steamcommunity.com/games/346110/announcements/detail/820030895000377977


Dossier: Purlovia
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682223754
Not sure how I feel about these things launching out of the ground and attacking me.. Probably not too bad if on a mount.

[Melbosa]

Other than the Dino, nothing really affecting our current location.

[Lazybones]

Other than the Dino, nothing really affecting our current location.

Correct, but as we get into flying mounts most of the island will become accessible.

[Melbosa]

I'm just glad that I can be more productive now that I have some actual direction.  Not going after dangerous mounts like you guys yet, but at least I can do some stuff!