Surviving Early Access

 Ark: Survival Evolved is leaving early access transformed from a primitive survival sim to a 1980s power fantasy.

- James Davenport

Hop on the T-rex with the E button and then control will enable targeting mode.” I heard this in a dream once, but I’m definitely awake now. Studio Wildcard co-founders Jeremy Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak are walking me through how to use the plasma cannons mounted on my pet T-rex’s head in ARK: Survival Evolved, their dino-laden survival sandbox. Were it 1997, I would have passed out by now.

Dinosaurs equipped with laser mounted future armor aren’t all ARK has going for it. Rapczak and Stieglitz have a lot to say about simulating an ecosystem, and the inherent mystique of their massive environments and science fiction narrative. ARK is the most complex survival game there is, but not because it’s hard to understand. You’re still chopping down trees, managing hunger, and forming tenuous bonds with other players. But ARK’s success gave Wildcard the room to go, well, wild and layer on more creatures, crafting, and survival systems than any other survival game out there.

If you want to terrorize new players with an army of pterodactyls, you can. If you want to be a peaceful dinosaur breeder, you can. Hell, if you want to open up a psychedelic berry shop on the back of a roaming brontosaurus, you can. ARK is a systems heavy, tree-punching, fort-building prehistoric playpen, but because of its breadth, it’s also clumsy and buggy, bearing the rough finish of most do-everything Early Access survival games. It doesn’t run very well, even on powerful PCs, and because it’s pushing so many pixels and systems at once, corners are cut all over. Creatures have erratic path finding, getting stuck in walls all too often, and a significant portion of what are meant to be tense, immersive survival interactions are still handled through a crowded, confusing UI.