Last month, the creators of Ark: Survival Evolved released Unreal Engine 4 mod support for the game. Now that people have had some time to practise there's going to be a competition to reward the best.
You can make a new map or a new functionality/game mode. Your mod will be judged on originality/creativity, how it looks and sounds, and its entertainment value. Round 1 is partly scored by public vote, so start canvassing now.
The grand prize is for $15,000 and an Alienware Area-51 with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 TI graphics card, second place gets $5,000, an Alienware X51, and a GTX 960, and third place gets $2,500 and the same card. Don't worry about the dollar signs; the competition is open to residents of the UK and some other European countries too.
This isn't the first time Ark has handed out money to its players. A few weeks ago it offered $100 to players who could spot exploits in the game.
If modding isn't your thing, the team also just released the Hunger Games-style Survival of the Fittest mode that we told you about last month. No cash prizes for that one, unfortunately.
Thanks, RPS.
The ARK: Survival Evolved [official site] folks have been busy. Today they’re launching their Survival of the Fittest Hunger-Royale-style mode onto the Steam workshop. Coming with it are free mod tools, accessed via the Epic Games Launcher, that are a “streamlined” version of the Unreal Engine 4 editor. These will be used in a just-announced modding competition in partnership with Alienware where anyone can submit maps or mods for a shot at three big prizes. Phew, that’s a lot of links. Read on for all the details.
Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] has found a huge audience as a long-term, surprisingly friendly crafting and survival game, but the approaching Survival Of The Fittest mode is aiming for something different. It drops a group of players into the world with few supplies and a re-balanced progression curve and challenges them to be the last person standing. In other words, it’s Battle Royale with dinosaurs.
We were invited to try the mode before release, and although server problems cut the experience short, there’s a video below of intrepid RPS freelancers Andro Dars and Steven Messner eating berries, collecting wood and dying heroically in the cold.
A gigantic vampire squid-like creature called Tusoteuthis vampyrus will be terrorising the seas of Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] soon. Well, soonish. A newly published Dino Dossier for the creature shows it wrestling with an unwilling ichthyosaurus and brandishing clawed tentacles.
Here’s what the developers have to say about Tusoteuthis vampyrus: