ARK: Survival Ascended

Get rid of premium mods please. That system's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ garbage. I see a cool server with some cool mods? "Oh you better pay $15 to download two mods" WHY THE HELL IS THIS EVEN A THING?? ASE WAS TOTALLY FINE WITH STEAM WORKSHOP MODS BEING A THING, BUT NOOOOOO ♥♥♥♥ US I GUESS. I've already paid $40 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DOLLARS for this game back when it launched in hopes of supporting the devs for their future endeavors and what do we get? Every interesting piece of content locked behind a paywall because they can never get enough from us. Want to experience some of the new dinos? Buy Lost Colony or Bob's for over $60 total, BASICALLY A WHOLE AAA GAME ON TOP OF WHAT I'VE ALREADY SPENT. It's downright predatory. I was really looking forward to playing this again since it had some updates since it launched, but I cannot even experience most of the servers because of the amount of money I need to spend on TOP OF A GAME I'VE ALREADY PAID FOR. Hell no. The devs have no respect for us whatsoever : )

This game is like getting shot then dipping your wound in salt water, but ever since i lost my girlfriend I play it to feel something again.

Love the game, I have over 5k hours. That being said, it is disgusting how this game is being maintained. [list] [*]You will have to pay for every new release (they say it's free, but everytime they release new overpowered stuff, so you will have to pay if you want to keep up with everyone else) [*]Every release you have the same cycle: delay, release a completely broken update, make sure only 10% of the playerbase can actually connect to a server. [*]The broken updates they release are incredibly bad. You will crash all the time, the server will crash, you lose all your stuff and you can lose your character. There will be patches released very frequently, so everyday you'll be downloading and waiting, but these patches rarely ever fix anything, and even worse, they usually break other things that were not broken before. Several weeks or months later, the game is still in the same state, and people give up. New features don't work, nothing works as advertised, it's very frustrating. [*]The servers are a complete nightmare. As I said before, after a new release, only 10% of the playerbase will be able connect. That means, if you want to play, you have to spend 10 to 20minutes, everytime you want to connect to your server. And you just hope you get lucky and get in, and when you finally get in, you hope you don't disconnect or crash. During this time the network obviously can not handle this load, and the lag/rubberbanding/freezing is really bad. So when you can finally play the experience is not good at all. This happens every cycle, they just refuse to spend more resources. [/list] Long story short, the concept of this game is amazing. The people running the game on the other hand, they have no shame. It's absolutely mindblowing how they refuse to learn any lessons from previous releases and at the same time keep milking the players for more money.

I love hating this game. I thought I was done with this godforsaken game made by con artists. But then my wife's co-workers talked about playing and through tintoberry colored glasses we fooled ourselves into thinking that was a good idea. This game is worse than I remember and somehow runs worse. I have to boot up twice to get anything to run and I can feel myself age playing this game as it sucks me drier than a wyvern's milk gland. The beyond cool DLC tames (that should be FREE, considering the state of this game and all the dino ♥♥♥♥ they make you wade through) show how creative the team behind this game can be and I hope that one day they will make a game worth the money so more people can play, or just ya know release the sequel. Screw you Ark, I'll see you tomorrow you sunnofabitch.

I spawn in. I punch a tree. I got pegged by a raptor gang. 10/10 game

I love building bases, taming and fighting dinosaurs, and exploring. This game is wonderful for that. The advantages over Ark Survival Evolved that most leap out to me are as follows: -The creatures have slightly more behaviors than having herbivores simply wander aimlessly, or having carnivores be mindless murder machines with black holes for stomachs. -There are baby creatures wandering around you can tame easily, and even gain imprint bonuses on (if you can get them to safety) once their parents are no longer around. -There are more creatures. -The game has the potential to be prettier (though it's very demanding on system resources, and in today's economy, that can be a problem.) -You can easily pick up and move structures, rather than having to rebuild or demolish things for a refund if you misplace something, or want to change your base around later. -There's slightly more effort put into a story you can discover through exploration. However, it's important to note that most of these benefits are ones you can get from mods in ASE. This makes it a little more streamlined, however, and you don't need to mess around with mods, if that's a source of frustration to you. It's also important to note that the Devs are very unscrupulous. They put features from their DLCs into the game's menus, allowing you to see what's there and make it look like something available, but you can't use it until you buy the DLC. They also include creatures on the maps that can absolutely attack you, but you can't do much with them other than kill them unless you have their corresponding DLCs. You might not discover that, however, until you're trying to figure out how to tame one from running across it in the wilderness.

i really like the game since you can ride,tame,kill.fight and even more like the originall ark survival evolved,but please,before you buy the game,wait a bit for the price to go down because paying 60 dollars for a game that lag and crash pretty much is not worth it

I want to preface this by saying that I don't play PvP and have no intention to, so this review comes entirely from a singleplayer and PvE standpoint. ARK is genuinely a once in a generation game. I would go so far as to say that it's the best survival game ever made. This game is a remaster of ARK: Survival Evolved and it is exactly what a remaster should be. The game is stunningly beautiful thanks to the engine upgrade, there is built-in cross-platform mod support, most of the game-breaking bugs from the original game are fixed, and countless quality of life features have been implemented to improve the core gameplay. The game is also incredibly replayable since its a sandbox, but even if you only play each map through once you can easily get four or five hundred hours from it. The game is very close to perfect, but there are some major issues: - At times the game seems to be trying to push you to buy the DLCs. There are a few paid DLC creatures that can spawn on the standard maps - even if you don't own the DLC - but they can't be interacted with, instead prompting you to purchase the DLC. There is also a tab in the inventory menu for a DLC exclusive feature, and this tab can be seen but not interacted with if you don't own the DLC. - Singleplayer thankfully works great, but the game is almost unplayable with the built-in multiplayer. As far as I know steam invites are not supported, and there are many game-breaking bugs that only occur on these non-dedicated sessions. Playing through a map with someone, we constantly ran into certain items not spawning, the tether distance aggressively pulling him back if he is too far away from me, supply crates being unopenable unless I am near them, and player corpses clipping through the ground after death. It feels like the built-in multiplayer has been neglected to encourage people to buy a server from the publisher's server partner. - The game is still runs quite poorly, but it has been optimised significantly from launch. There have been multiple huge opimisation updates but it's still incredibly demanding and basically requires you to use upscaling and frame generation to play above medium settings unless you have an ultra-high-end PC. Ascended is an objectively better game than Evolved, but the issues I highlighted might but people off it. If that person is you, I would suggest buying ARK: Survival Evolved instead and using mods to make the experience better. I'm torn. If you can tune out the issues I mentioned the game is a 9 or a 10, but if you care about them then you might rate it a lot lower. That being said, there is nothing like ARK and I would absolutely recommend the game to anyone looking for a difficult survival-sandbox.

It's actually impressive they managed to make a game buggier and more poorly optimised than Ark: Survival Evolved

Writing this after the genesis release I can confidently say this is the worst state the game has ever been in. I was hopeful for ascended and would have no issue with paying for a remaster if they actually improved the game in a significant way. I don’t think the developers even know who the game is made for since 1% of the player base for this game has a strong enough pc to run this game on high settings and get above 60 fps without using ai frame gen or upscaling. On a game who’s 10+ year old successor struggled to run on most pcs, you would think fixing the bugs or creating a smoother gameplay experience would be a priority over slapping a ridiculous amount of graphical overlays to make the game impossible to play for most people. Most PvP players are going to run an ini, but why should even casual players have to disable fog and clouds just for the game to run? My biggest complaint as of writing this is the genesis release, which was probably their last chance at redeeming this game. Up until this point the the reworked maps released have been improvements in my opinion that are better looking and more interesting to play, but after playing genesis I genuinely cannot tell the difference between Ark evolved vs ascended. All biomes aside from the ocean biome look like they were ported directed from evolved without change and the ocean biome looks extremely unfinished with untextured nothingness in between the islands. The ocean biome, which in my opinion, was just created to sell their new dlc. Don’t even get me started on the unnecessary, overpriced, p2w dlcs that they push out without even testing their actual content. They could’ve created seamless transitions between the biomes but instead slapped a sea of thieves ripoff on top of the old genesis map and called it a day. Also, none of the devs test anything, whether it’s wildcard or snail games I don’t care, your game should not have game breaking bugs and exploits day one which result in a large amount of official players losing their characters they spent hours on grinding ascensions, which they will probably not get back. I’ve lost all excitement for this map and hope anyone reading this will save their time and money and not touch this game with a 20 foot pole.