I would absolutely love to recommend this game, however while the concept is amazing, the actual game is sloppily put together, poorly optimized, and rife with game breaking bugs. I did enjoy it for a time, however upon attempting to progress the story with the same character in single player, I found that after an entire hour of settling into the next map (scorched earth in this case) and logging back in, I was horrified to see the character creation screen. I found my characters offline body "logged out" where I left off the previous day. all my tames, all my hard work beating the island, gone.
I chalked it up to bad luck and started fresh, this time making sure to force save via console commands to ensure I wouldn't loose anything this time, since the whole thing with loosing everything was apparently due to the single player instance only saving every hour, which made little sense to me, but I had hope that I had at least found a solution. I hadn't. upon logging into the game yet again, I had once more lost everything. so I took off to find a game that actually worked, one which the developers actually tried to fix bugs that broke there game rather then having the players dance and jive around them in an attempt to make there game functional
years later, not wanting my £200 + on DLC content (aka, the rest of the story maps) to be wasted, I gave ark another shot.
sick and tired of starting from scratch, I used console commands to give me at least some of what I lost, though my max mutation theri army could not be replicated, so that 2 months of hard work would remain wasted. content with how things were going, I travelled to aberration to try and progress the story, thinking I had finally figured out a method of getting to keep my stuff,,,,, by staying in a new world for an entire real life day to make absolutely sure it had saved my existence this time
while this method appeared to have worked on scorched earth, for some reason aberration felt differently, and for one final time, I logged into my world to find, oh my!
I've lost everything.... again
how surprising
as said previously, I love the concept of the game. exploration, crafting, free base building, taming fascinating creatures, and one of the most well written story's I've ever had the pleasure of immersing my self in. a true shame the development team did not seem to share this view, as they never once attempted to optimise there game well nor fix the issues that made the game nigh unplayable.
to those who do still find joy playing this game, I truly hope you don't suffer the same as I did, because this game truly meant a great deal to me, and seeing how broken it was time and time again hurt quite badly
