Ark is a bad game. Ask anyone who plays it and they'll tell you the same thing: the game is a buggy mess, the developers are evil, and no one should ever play it. Yet, somehow, we've all sunk hundreds, if not thousands of hours into this "bad" game. The reason is simple, Ark: Survival Evolved is terrible at being a video game, but when it comes to being a life simulator, it's incredible. I've had the highest highs and the lowest lows I've ever had playing Ark. I've experienced the purest forms of joy, terror, pride, and loss while playing this stupid dinosaur game. ArkSurvival Evolved traumatized me in ways I'll likely never recover from, but I wouldn't trade the time I spent with it for anything in the world.

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A Hook For Broken People

If you aren't already familiar, Ark: Survival Evolved is a survival-crafting game that came out during the seemingly never-ending wave of early access survival-crafting games in the mid-2010s. It's one of the only ones besides Rust and The Forest to ever make it out of early access. Though, whether it really made it out of EA or not is up for debate.

Ark is a primitive world inhabited by semi-scientifically accurate dinosaurs that can be tamed, trained, and used to further any number of personal goals. Long before you tame your first Pteranodon though, you begin as a Beach Bob: naked, defenseless, and practically doomed.

The first several hours (or more realistically, several days) of Ark is all about establishing basic needs. Punch a tree, gather some wood, make a spear. Pull up some grass, make a shirt, protect yourself. See a velociraptor, get eaten, start all over. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. The "new player experience" in Ark would run-off any rational person with even an ounce of self-respect. It's brutal, unforgiving, infinitely frustrating, and a massive waste of time. A new player will die and restart dozens if not hundreds of times before they finally learn enough to make some clothes, craft some weapons, gather resources, and build their first house with a bed so that when they die they'll have a familiar place to respawn and start over. That milestone is nothing short of euphoric. It's beating Dark Souls times 1000. It's hitting Grandmaster in Overwatch on a 50 game win streak. It's 100%ing Through The Fire And The Flames on expert with your eyes closed. Nothing compares, and if you make it to this point, congratulations: you're hooked. It's going to be a wild ride. See you in 500 hours.

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Forging Your Own Path Forward

There's a story I like to tell that I think does a pretty good job of demonstrating what playing Ark is like. The next significant milestone after establishing your basic needs is to find a steady supply of metal. There are hundreds of crafting materials to farm in Ark, but a metal supply is what takes your tribe out of the primitive era and allows you to start manufacturing guns, machines, defensible bases, saddles, and essentially everything you need to meaningfully progress in Ark. Metal ingots are a standard for trading with other players as well. Simply put, having a metal supply is the difference between surviving and thriving.

My tribe's modest bungalow was built on the beach beneath a 200ft cliff on a tiny island the locals affectionately called The Millenium Falcon due to its Falcon-esque shape. Using a primitive spyglass made of Phiomia hide (a prehistoric pig we would hunt in the early days for food) and crystal found at the base of the cliff, we discovered a rich supply of metal ore waiting to be claimed at the top of the cliff. On the opposite side of the island, a path through the jungle led to the top, but it was a long and dangerous journey and metal is very heavy.

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We prepared for the journey for several days. We hunted insects at the edge of the jungle to make chitin armor, crafted waterskins to stay hydrated while we hiked, and learned how to defend ourselves with bows and arrows. Finally, the day came when we were fully prepared, so we set out at dawn with all of our supplies in order to get the most sunlight possible for the trip. There were some close calls along the way, and more than a few predators in the jungle we had to avoid on our way up. Eventually, we made it to the top of the cliff and collected as much metal as we could carry. The sun was setting, we were out of water, and we could barely move due to all the extra weight. With one last look back we crossed our hearts and jumped off the cliff, pulled the chords on our makeshift parachutes, and gently glided all the way home. Everything went according to plan.

This was a purely emergent experience. We chose where to build our house, we chose the metal we wanted to farm, and we made the plan to do it. There were any number of ways we could have approached the task, but this is what we did, and that was our story. Ark is an open world in a way no other game can be. As our operation grew we eventually built an outpost on top of the cliff where we could store our collected metal and refine it into ingots to save time and space. Eventually, we made contact with a breeder on a nearby island who offered to trade us 2 giant eagles called Argentavis for a few hundred metal ingots. We used those birds to quickly fly up to the cliff and ferry our metal back home. No one else who has ever played Ark has done things the way we did. The way we played the game told our story.

Let's Talk Taming

Playing Ark is a lot like being in an abusive relationship. When things are good, they're better than you could have ever imagined. When things are bad, it's easy to make excuses and minimalize or justify the things that hurt. The game is an expert at conditioning its victims to accept abuse over time, using manipulating tactics to train them to accept being disrespected and set back, sometimes even to devastating degrees.

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One of the first ways Ark starts conditioning players to be victimized is through the taming process. Here's how it works: First, a dino needs to be incapacitated. There are a few ways to do this, but by far the most efficient is to shoot them with arrows or bullets infused with narcotics. There are 6 different crafting materials and 2 crafting stations required to make a single tranquilizer dart, not including the gun, meaning that just building up a supply of tranqs is expensive and time-consuming. What's more, the animal will quite often run away or kill you in the process of incapacitating it.

Once you manage you knock them out, you now need to feed them a steady supply of narcotics to keep them sedated as well as food to tame them. You can feed them raw meat or berries to tame them, but feeding them their favorite type of kibble will reduce the time it takes significantly. Kibble is a type of "dino chow" made out of dinosaur eggs and vegetables, meaning to make kibble you need a cooking pot, a farm, and 1 tamed dino at the very least. Every dinosaur has their favorite type of kibble and you'll need to feed them the correct one to tame them effectively. The most efficient way to tame is to follow a Kibble tree, taming each dino in order until you can make the kibble for the dino you really want. For example, if you want tame the quick flyer called the Tapejara, you need to start at the beginning of the chain with Lystrosaurus eggs, which are used to tame Diplododcus, which are used to tame Allosaurus, which you can finally use to tame a Tapejara. Taming 1 Tapejara will potentially take days or even weeks.

OK, so you've tranquilized a dino and it's time to tame. Let's say you're taming a Pteranodon, everyone's first flying dinosaur, and one of the easiest to tame. You're going to need to manually feed it 102 raw meat and 304 narcotics over the next 4 hours and 15 minutes. You came prepared with the correct kibble though, so instead, this tame will only take 55 minutes. You'll need to feed it 13 kibble and 43 narcotics during that time, and you'll need to watch it carefully and defend it from predators while it's unconscious. If a T-Rex comes by with 1 minute left, too bad. You'll need to find another Pteranodon, refill your supply, and start completely over.

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That's one of the fastest tames. A Quetzal, which is a giant flying dinosaur that you can build structures on and use as a flying base, takes 14 hours and 42 minutes of constant supervision to tame using cooked meat, or just under 3 hours if you can manage to build up a supply of T-Rex kibble. I haven't even mentioned what it takes to craft a saddle for your newly tamed dino, which is an entirely separate and equally complicated process.

This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Ark disrespecting the player's time. It would take an entirely separate article to explain the process of breeding, but believe me when I tell you I know many players that tame dinosaur in Ark as their full-time job. Ark is extraordinarily adept at sucking up all of your time. And for a certain type of player, it can be extremely dangerous. Hold onto your butts, here comes the really heart-breaking stuff.

This Game Is Completely Busted

Loss is part of life in Ark, but it hurts so much more because of how much time and work goes into your accomplishments. Losing your pet Pterandon to a hungry Raptor is devastating because you spent multiple nights working through all the steps to find and tame one and, within seconds, all of that work is gone. Life isn't easy in Ark, and you always have to be on your guard. The game teaches you respect for the wild, the value of hard work, and the pain of loss, and I think there's something valuable to that. Unfortunately (very, VERY, unfortunately), losing your hard work often has nothing to do with taking risks, playing poorly, or even simple bad luck. Losing your hard work is most often the result of Ark being a buggy, broken, piece of shit game that will never be fixed.

Sometimes flyers fly away for no reason. Sometimes dinos clip into solid objects and they can't come back out. Server lag can cause the game to freeze up suddenly and unexpectedly, leading to unnecessary dinosaur death. The developers use frequent server rollbacks to deal with cheaters, which means hours and hours of work can be completely undone. I can't possibly list all of the bugs and broken systems that have devastated my tribe with loss, but I can tell you confidently that there are major fundamental time-stealing issues in the game that have been there from the very beginning and will never be fixed. There's has been a constant flow of new maps, new dinosaurs, new DLC packs to buy, and even more on the way, but the game has never been polished in a way that shows a respect for players and their dedication to the game.

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Ark is all about making goals and long-term plans and creating processes for accomplishing those goals. Accomplishing those goals is an incredible feeling, but having those accomplishments torn away by a game that isn't playing by its own rules is indescribably demoralizing. Here's a quick example.

When our collection of dinosaurs and resources became significant enough to warrant advanced protection, we decided to build a large wall around our compound to keep out predators and prying eyes. Our plan was to build the entire fence out of Behemoth Stone Dinosaur Gateways so that we could enter the compound from any direction and even the largest dinos would fit through them. Each gateway costs 900 stone, 900 wood, and 900 thatch. We needed 85 gateways.

Our two-man tribe spent more than a week doing nothing but collecting resources and constructing our wall piece by piece. We tamed dinosaurs that were proficient in collecting each individual crafting material and partnered them with the largest pack animal and the strongest predators we had, forming a dino caravan as we worked away around our island deforesting and mining up every last stone for our wall. As our builder placed the final gateway, closing the gap and completing the wall, the entire thing vanished. Some kind of glitch occurred when the last gateway snapped into the space between the gates on either side and the entire wall instantly disappeared. There was no rollback, no refund of our resources. Just time lost and accomplishment ruined.

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That wasn't the first major incident, and it definitely wasn't the last, but I think what's so telling about Wall-aggedon was that we kept playing. After all, we survived getting eaten 100 times before our first thatch hut was built. We survived our first trip to the top of the cliff, surely we could survive this. Ark conditions you to take a beating, dust yourself off, and get back to work. It rewards perseverance and fortitude. So when the game starts absolutely fucking you, you've been trained to take it. We rebuilt that wall and learned to dodge the bug that destroyed it the first time. Every game-breaking bug that got in our way, we learned to work around. Getting shafted by glitches felt the same as getting shafted by the game properly. Whether it was a hungry predator, taking unnecessary risks, bad luck, or bugs, it was always on us to learn and overcome. We internalized the game's shortcomings and reasoned that it was up to us to push through and try harder.

The Agony And The Ecstasy

We eventually broke up with Ark. One of the final straws was a server lag that led to our Quetz flying too low momentarily which caused it to clip inside a Dire Bear. The quetz died and we lost a refrigerator filled with every single kibble we owned. It was a long time coming and there were plenty of big hit leading up to it, but that was pretty much the end.

And yet, we still speak so fondly of our time in Ark. Our server had an incredibly supportive community that I miss being a part of. As our resources amassed and we started expanding our reach across the world we met so many people on the different islands. The taught us techniques, traded with us, and sometimes even gave us gifts and dinosaurs to help us along. The world of Ark is endless and every day is a brand new adventure. My favorite times playing were days we set off on a specific mission and ended up getting pulled into a crazy adventure we never expected to go on. I have more stories about things that happened in Ark then I do about my own life. I don't think I can ever go back, and I know the pain it caused me was very real, but I still have a deep love for Ark and an appreciation for it. It's complicated, magical, painful, exciting, and terrifying. Ark is a beautiful nightmare I wouldn't encourage anyone to play, but I will never forget my time with it.

Thank you, Ark. I hate you.

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