Ark: Survival Evolved Review (Scout_Serra)
Im giving a negative review after having 15k hours put into the game for the same reason everyone else is, they are trying to force existing players to pre-purchase Ark2 by ending Ark1's official servers.
In Jan they announced a migration to UE5, and said it would be a FREE upgrade, and that we wouldn't lose our content. Now they realized Ark2's gameplay style is not a style many of the current players would be interested in, so they have bundled the remastered version of Ark1 with the pre-order of Ark2 to force current players to buy Ark2 when they probably would not have. This is an extremely shady money grab tactic they are implementing because they didn't listen to what their player base actually wanted.
Below is the tweet where they said data would carry over, despite the announcement TODAY saying that it will NOT carryover.
https://twitter.com/jeremystieglitz/status/1617537126069047300
IF YOU ARE READING THESE REVIEWS TO DECIDE TO PURCHASE THE GAME OR NOT, BE AWARE THAT OFFICIAL ONLINE SERVERS WILL END IN 4 MONTHS, so if you are interested in official online play, DO NOT SPEND YOUR MONEY AS ALL SUPPORT FOR THIS IS ENDING SOON.
The game itself is a great concept, but was extremely buggy. They could never fix one thing without breaking something else dramatically, constantly effecting gameplay. Managing the bugs became much like learning boss mechanics, you had to figure out how to avoid them and implement those tactics just to do basic game functions like transfer servers without losing things, or avoid dying and losing everything to a glitch when playing the game as intended. Instead of proper fixes, it was a constant cycle of spaghetti code hot fix errors that kept you constantly learning new work arounds just to get certain things to function as they should. And when you did lose characters or dinos, the support was almost non existent and they would just sort of shrug and tell you it happens and they have no way to help replace them as they were.
What made the game so enjoyable was the community it brought together and the friends people made along the way. The game had players from every part of the world and made it a really interesting place to interact and learn new cultures through some of them, and the underground trading circuit that developed because of it was amazing all on its own. Seeing that many people develop a basic universal economic trading structure in a game that did not have a currency just by having people agree and work together on a system is amazing.
Wildcard wouldn't have kept nearly as many players as long as they did if the players didn't come together to make the bugs and other issues tolerable. They worked together and taught each other how to do everything. Without the online play, alot of the charm of the game is gone.