PlayStation Plus offered Ark: Survival Evolved last spring, but I only got intrigued enough to give it a try when I saw a friend tweeting about. I just had to see what it was all about — Valheim, but with dinosaurs?
The PlayStation 5 version doesn’t seem to let you connect to hosted servers, like the ones G-Portal offers. That’s where we hosted Valheim and V Rising. So I opted to just start a single player world, just to see what sort of excitement Ark held for me.
I got dropped on a beach, where I was told to punch a tree. This caused a bird to fly at me and kill me. I respawned, and a cute dinosaur walked up and killed me. I respawned, and a small dinosaur spit poison at me and killed me. By this time it was getting pretty late, and it got really dark, and the cold killed me.
I took a screen shot (above).
There may be an intro or something that set up the situation, but I never saw one. Maybe it’s something I’m supposed to figure out on my own?
In Ark — as far as I can tell — you are a test subject tossed into a Jurassic Park-style with nothing, not even the clothes on your back. All you have is a weird device on the inside of your wrist and an initially blank map. Gaining experience doing anything — punching trees, punching rocks, punching dinosaurs, grabbing berries off bushes — gains you points to spend on stats and engram points that teach you how to craft items. Initially some basic weapons and tools, then clothes, thatch houses, wooden houses, and so on.
Various extinct animals wander around. Not all of them are dinosaurs. You can kill them for their bits or tame them, and tamed dinos will help you out and may even be ridden.
After making it through the first dark night (not totally dark; at some point a brilliant galaxy lights the sky, and there are strange sci fi towers all around that I haven’t yet explored), I spent the next day furiously building a thatch hut, and then cowering in there the second dark night, eating berries. Something thumped against the hut, but left.
Randomly respawning after my many deaths had eventually gotten me to a place where critters didn’t normally come. The third day was spent making clothes, a sleeping place, a thatch-burning light poles, so nights stopped being so cold and dark. With the weapons I was able to make, I could start going on the offense on the smaller dinos in the area. I had some sweet revenge. Got to 15 and could finally open the goody boxes that sometimes float down from the sky.
Right now, I am crouching in my hut, waiting for the day to come so I can go explore a little more, maybe try to grow a crop or tame something.
More later.
