Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] is the survival game du jour, and apparently not without cause. While others have tried to create worlds that combine dinosaurs with the crafting, progression, and violent encounters with other players typical of the genre, ARK’s early access release seems to come the closest to pulling it off. To explore it a little more, we asked Andro Dars to make a video playthrough to show what works and what doesn’t. Part one is below.>
When we sent Brendan into the dinosaur-infested open-world survival game Ark: Survival Evolved [official site], I imagined that he would get super-killed a dozen times over by players riding 12-metre murderlizards. Instead, he luckily found people helping each other, a whole server of good samaritans (riding 12-metre murderlizards). Well, it’s not all like that.
A new Hunger Games>-style (or Battle Royale>, if you prefer) mode is coming soon, with last-man-standing permadeath arena action and limited supplies. Developers Studio Wildcard say it’s “specifically balanced for tournament competition”, and plan to debut it through a livestreamed tournament with a $20,000 grand prize.
Going by the title alone, there's no mistaking that survival of one sort or another is a central part of the Ark: Survival Evolved experience. But sometimes, it's not enough to just survive. Sometimes, "survival" means killing a whole lot of other people.
Ark's new Survival of the Fittest mode is a to-the-death tournament in which combatants enter the field in a circular formation surrounding a cache of valuable items. It's a very Hunger Games-style setup, in which players can make a dash for the loot—making themselves targets in the process—or run into the forest and hide, leaving the others to battle for the gear.
After that, it's a perma-death fight to the finish. And to ensure that there is fighting, rather than a whole bunch of cowardly huddling in dark corners, the field will slowly contract within a "Ring of Death" that will force competitors together.
Survival of the Fittest will debut in a livestreamed tournament beginning at 12 pm PT on August 1, with 35 teams slugging it out for a $20,000 grand prize, plus various bits of kit from Logitech and Gunnar Optiks. During the tournament, which is scheduled to run for five hours, the audience can vote on Evolution Events, described as "powerful world-altering sequences that will occur every 30 minutes" like freak weather, a dinosaur attack, or a supply drop, that will mix things up even further.
We're currently trying to come up with a way to convince Chris to take part in the tournament, without actually telling him that it's a tournament—or team-based—because we think surprise online suffering (his, in particular) is funny. After all, look what happened to him the last time. (Or the time before that.)
A tree fell in the distance, lumberjack style, and I knew I would have to investigate. A second tree fell as I approached, then a third. By the time the man in red armour turned and saw me, I had already resolved to die in whatever mundane or horrible fashion he deemed appropriate. Hours of DayZ and Rust had instilled in me an understanding of survival gaming s harsh realities. Yet, for some reason, all that time spent respawning had never eroded my essential curiousity for the human beings who inhabit these deadly environments. I said hello to the man in red. He held his axe aloft for a moment and stood eerily still. Hello, he said. Then he did something entirely unexpected. He took me into his home.
Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] has been straddling the Steam bestsellers list for months since its release. Like the many survival games before it, the dinosaur infested island of Ark has been attracting PC gamers non-stop, as if they really were arriving to its pristine beaches by the boatload. And yet the response of the games media, outside of the YouTube dimension, has been kind of muted. You can understand why. It is another survival game.