Ark: Survival Evolved's patch 254, originally scheduled to arrive today, has been delayed 10 days until January 30. The highly anticipated patch will include Tek Tier 1 content, which will add endgame technology like power armor, jetpacks, and dino-mounted laser cannons. The patch also promises to deliver a whole mess of new dinosaurs, craftable lances for dino-mouted jousting, and most importantly (to me, anyway), hairstyles and facial hair that grow in real time.

In a post on the Steam forums, Ark's 'Community Overlord' Jatheish Karunakaran posted the following:

"We're going to be delaying the release of Patch 254 until the 30th of January. I know a lot of you are excited and trust me, we are too. This patch is much larger than we first anticipated and we need more time to work on it in development, and through internal QA process prior public release. However soon you will get to enjoy a hell of lot of new content, and we're cooking up an extra-special surprise feature for the patch!" 

Meanwhile, Ark's free Primitive Plus DLC did receive an update today to v1.4, promising bug fixes, balancing, and new items such as a battering ram and recurve bow. It was, however, quickly rolled back fix the problems caused by the patch (there were bugs with the placement of brick walls, lumber glass walls had vanished, and birds were not dropping poultry and feathers when killed, only normal meat and hide). Hopefully that will be sorted out soon.

First Pokémon, now Monster Hunter. Modders continue their noble work to combine every game with every other game, as showcased by the efforts of garuga123, whose Monster Ark: Hunting Evolved allows you to play Ark alongside some of Monster Hunter's most iconic beasts including the Rathalos, Deviljho, Barioth, and more.

It's surprisingly fleshed out. Originally I figured garuga123 had simply reskinned some of Ark's dinos to look like dragons, but they've actually imported the animations as well. Any Monster Hunter fan will tell you that these creatures' personalities are defined more by how they move than how they look, so being able to run around with a Rathalos and have it act like it does in a proper Monster Hunter game is fantastic. An interesting twist is that you can't actually ride any of these creatures but control them directly. The original intent of the mod was to roleplay as them—which I never realized was a thing that people wanted to do.

Along with the animations, each monster also has access to a few of their signature abilities. As a Rathalos, you can shoot fireballs from the sky. Uragaans can form up into a ball and roll around the island, and the Lagiacrus can charge up a blast of lightning and devastate anything nearby. If you bump into a wild Qurupeco, it'll even mimic the call of other animals so that they come to its aid—just like the bastard does in Monster Hunter. 

Aside from some problems with clipping into the environment the only drawback is that the mod will take some effort to get working fully. Right now the only way to encounter these beasts is to spawn them in using the console commands listed in the Steam Workshop description. That's a bit disappointing if your goal is to, well, hunt for one in the wild. Fortunately, players have conjured up some code you can easily paste into a game file which should cause the creatures to begin spawning naturally in any of Ark's maps. Instructions on how to do that can be found here.

If you want to play multiplayer but don't have the patience to set up a server, this one uses it. There's even more listed in the discussion forums if that one doesn't work. Consider joining the Discord chat server so that you can give any feedback or find others to roleplay that love story between a lonely Rathalos and Rathian you've had in your head for so long. 

When you tame a creature in Ark: Survival Evolved, your work isn't done. You need to keep your pets fed, though that's usually not a problem. Most carnivores are happy with red meat or fish, and herbivores are typically content with a selection of berries. Fill a trough, park the animal nearby, and it'll eat when it gets hungry. 

A few animals are more selective, like the dung beetle, which only eats poop. The beetle won't eat out of a trough like other animals, either: you have to stick the poop right in its inventory, but poop isn't exactly hard to come by since dinos and players are constantly taking dumps all over the place. There's even a key you can press to make yourself or your dinos poop on command. Dinner time!

There's another creature that only eats one kind of food, and that's the Achatina, a land mollusk that I will just call 'snail' to keep it simple. The snail, too, needs to be fed manually, but it has a more refined palate than the dung beetle. The snail only eats cake. And isn't that the perfect life? Only eating cake?

As you might imagine, cake doesn't just fall fully formed out of dinosaur butts, and it can't just be roasted in a campfire like a slab of meat. It takes a tiny bit of work, by which I mean you might wind spend hours gathering and mining and crafting and building several entirely new structures. All to feed a single snail.

I'll just briefly explain how to bake a cake. In a cooking pot, you'll place your ingredients: fiber—no biggie, you can grab that from bushes. Water—collected in a skin or a jar, no problem there. Stimulant—okay, you'll need to collect stimberries from bushes, and mix them with sparkpowder, which itself requires grinding flint and stone together at a mortar and pestle. A little work to do there, but still pretty easy.

You'll also need carrots, corn, and potatoes, because this is a vegetable cake. You won't find those lying around, either, you'll need to grow them from seeds (gathered from bushes) in three different planters (built from wood, thatch, fiber, and stone) and you'll want to keep them irrigated with a water source like a reservoir (which is built from stone and cementing paste—which itself can be made from stone and chitin (which can be harvested from creatures with exoskeletons) and then connected with a stone pipe and tap (made from more stone and wood).

Of course, growing your plants will also require fertilizer, which can be created in a compost bin (combine poop and thatch) or generated by feeding poop to that beetle I mentioned earlier. And, unless you want to spend ages waiting for your crops to grow, you might as well go all-in and construct a damn greenhouse using a whole bunch of metal ingots (made in a forge), crystal (mined from mountaintops and caves), and more cementing paste.

So, you've built your poop box and farming plots and irrigation systems and a damn greenhouse and you've grown and harvested your vegetables. Time to bake the cake? Ha ha, no, dummy! You're not done yet. The cake's final ingredient is sap, which you can harvest from giant redwood trees, once you craft an enormous metal tap (from 100 ingots—which take 200 metal—and still more cementing paste). 

Ready to stick your tap into a redwood? Nope, you're not. You need to place it well above ground level, so hey, why not just craft a bunch of wooden tree platforms and build an Ewok-style base way up in the trees so you can actually attach your tap and collect your sap and bake your cake (which will spoil in just over an hour, so you might want to build a fabricator so you can craft a gas powered generator and a fridge to preserve it, too).

In return, your snail will produce paste, which is ironically enough, one of the resources you just crafted or gathered loads of just to be able to feed the snail its special veggie cake. It also produces a natural polymer for crafting, which is very useful. It makes a cool wet slimy sound when it slithers around, which I enjoy, plus it's one of the only creatures in the game that will never attack you.

Yes, it is quite a lot of work to feed this one snail, this one delightfully picky creature that insists on only eating hand-fed cake produced by hours of construction and tons of materials.

But in that way, Ark's snail is like a real life pet, which is why I love it. If you have a dog or a cat or some other type of pet, you know the lengths you'll go to just to keep them happy. You'll pay massive vet bills, administer expensive medicines, buy crates full of toys, replace pieces of furniture, and redecorate your entire home just so the little animal in your life can experience some contentment. You don't just put your dog or cat near a bowl of food and call it a night: you tend to them, care for them, and spend hours of your life doing back-breaking labor so they have what they need. Ark's snail is no different. It's just a little slimier.

Update 2: The DMCA notice has apparently been lifted, and no longer appears on the mod's page in the Steam Workshop.

Update: We've spoken with the developer of the Pokémon Evolved mod who has confirmed that, as of right now, this DMCA notice appears to have been submitted by another modder (or a supporter of that modder) who is also developing a Pokémon mod for Ark. (Copyright infringement claims can be submitted by parties who are not copyright owners.) Drama! We'll let you know if we receive any further information.

Original story: A mod for Ark: Survival Evolved that replaces all of the survival game's dinosaurs with Pokémon has appeared in the Steam Workshop, though if you want to catch 'em all you might need to be quick about it. The Workshop page states that "A DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement has been filed on this item." As of Sunday, five days after the the mod appeared, it is still available to be downloaded, though that may change in the near future.

We're not sure yet who issued the DMCA notice—we've inquired and will let you know when we hear back (and we have: please see the updates)—but it could definitely spell trouble for the mod, especially since modder 'Mystic Academy' admits the models and animations used in the mod were imported directly from Pokémon X/Y rather than recreated from scratch. The modder only made changes to ensure the models worked in-game.

We'll keep you updated as to the status of the Pokémon Evolved mod, which, legality aside, looks pretty cool. There's no resource gathering—you just hunt, fight, and ride Pokémon. You can watch enthusiastic YouTuber Riot enjoying it here.

As I write this, almost 32,000 people are playing ARK: Survival Evolved. By current player count, it’s the sixth most popular game on Steam. I’ve always dismissed it, figuring that if DayZ was still unfinished, any newer Early Access multiplayer survival games would likely be even further from completion. That’s a dumb thing to think, and not at all how game development works. I’ve decided to give ARK a chance.

I start the game, and chose a server at random. It’s nighttime. I pick myself off the ground and find myself face to face with a dinosaur. Score! It’s a dilophosaurus, and it looks familiar. Wasn’t that the one that, in Jurassic Park, spat venomous goop into Dennis Nedry’s eyes before eating him? Yes! It was! My suspicions are confirmed when it spits venomous goop into my eyes. Then, as if any doubt remained, it eats me.

I respawn in a different location, and start exploring the beach. I learn that tapping E over bushes and rocks rewards me with stones, berries and fibres. I also find a tree and punch it. Wood is added to my inventory. This is for sure an Early Access survival game. Soon... hold on, what’s that sound? It’s a raptor. I know about them from Jurassic Park, too. I’m dead. Again.

I exit to the menu, figuring that a daytime server would at least enable me to see the creatures that are eating me. I spawn and, for a change, see gentle dinosaurs. I spend a moment admiring a brontosaurus up close, before a raptor runs up and eats me. I should try a different spawn point. I pick one to the west, and wake up on a tiny, floating patch of ice. I’m naked, and freezing to death. I jump into the water, planning to swim to the mainland. A megalodon is looking right at me. It does what I assume comes naturally to a massive prehistoric shark. 

I try spawning to the east, and wake in a tropical biome. I’m told it’s too hot. Before I can do anything about that, I run into a giant snake with a goddamn dinosaur face. Why is everything in the past so big? What is prehistory trying to overcompensate for? Instead of eating me, the titanoboa merely paralyses me. Then it eats me.

In a last-ditch attempt to make any progress, I go back to the eastern spawn point. I wake to a temperate beach, and, best of all, no dinosaurs. Instead, there are dodos. I punch one for a few seconds, and its meat is added to my inventory. After a little bit of scavenging, I start a fire and craft a weapon and pickaxe. Sure, I’m still 25 fibres away from owning my first pair of trousers, but it’s a start. 

I explore a bit more. Suddenly, my health starts to drain. I spin around, but see nothing. My health is still falling. I look down, and finally see the problem: a pack of compys—tiny carnivores that would be cute if they weren’t eating my bits. I run, but they keep up. I get out my hatchet, and start swinging wildly. I take one down, but it’s too late. I’m killed. I spawn in the south. It’s pitch black. It’s night. A titanoboa eats me.

The openness of PC gaming allows anyone to contribute, from modders, Twitch streamers, and two-man dev teams to the biggest game studios in the world. But with no real regulator at the helm to set and enforce standards, it also means that everyone has shared ownership of the platform, opening the door to abuse, troublemakers, and scandal.

Pour a glass of dramamine and revisit the finest flubs that graced PC gaming this year. From least-most controversial to most-most controversial, these are the stories that drew the greatest negative reaction from the PC gaming community in 2016.

ARK: Scorched Earth

The pressure on Steam's Early Access program has only increased since its introduction in March 2013. Although Early Access has yielded excellent games like Darkest Dungeon, Don't Starve, Offworld Trading Company, Subnautica, Divinity: Original Sin, Infinifactory, RimWorld, and Kerbal Space Program, some PC gamers remain reluctant to buy into unfinished games and the uncertainty that the Early Access label sometimes carries.

In September, Studio Wildcard dealt a blow to Early Access' reputation when it released Scorched Earth, the first paid expansion for Ark: Survival Evolved. At $20, it was two-thirds the cost of the base game. Many fans were unhappy to see a game that was by definition unfinished getting post-release content. On the third most-popular post on the Ark subreddit ever, one fan criticized: "We paid for the developers to finish Ark: Survival Evolved, instead they took our money and made another game with it." Studio Wildcard defended its decision saying that implementing an expansion early would make the technical process easier for future expansions.

More reading: Ark: Survival Evolved dev responds to paid expansion controversyValve must take greater ownership over Steam's Early Access program

Nostalrius

Vanilla WoW (that is, a pre-expansion version of World of Warcraft) has remained a popular way to play the most popular MMO of all time. As Angus wrote in April, "Nostalrius is a time capsule: a beautifully nostalgic record of what a living world used to look like. It's a museum piece created by passionate fans with no official alternative." 

But it's against WoW's terms of service to operate an independent game server, even if that server takes no money from its community. In April Blizzard issued a cease-and-desist against Nostalrius, WoW's biggest vanilla server, which boasted 150,000 active players. The forecast was grim: Blizzard had shut down other vanilla servers before, and it felt unlikely that the internet petition that sprung up in response was going to reverse the action against Nostalrius.

The server owners complied, shutting down Nostalrius in April, but the fight wasn't done. Shortly after, they managed a face-to-face meeting with Blizzard to press their case for the value of vanilla WoW. "After this meeting, we can affirm that these guys WANT to have legacy WoW servers, that is for sure," wrote a Nostalrius admin.

The story continued to develop as members of the Nostalrius team, seemingly uncontent with Blizzard's lack of discussion about the issue at BlizzCon, announced their plans to bring back the server under a new banner, Elysium. Barring some change of heart by Blizzard, Elysium itself stands a decent chance of also getting shut down. But the resurrection of Nostalrius puts greater pressure on Blizzard to permit vanilla servers, lest it be embroiled in another battle with a big piece of the WoW community.

More reading: Inside the WoW server Blizzard wants to shut down

Blizzard's buttroversy

Debate about the portrayal of videogame butts came to a head in 2016 when, in a lengthy post on the Battle.net forums, player Fipps complained about a victory pose for Tracer, Overwatch's speedy and spunky attacker.

“I have a young daughter that everyday when I wake up wants to watch the Recall trailer again," Fipps wrote. "She knows who Tracer is, and as she grows up, she can grow up alongside these characters. What I'm asking is that as you continue to add to the Overwatch cast and investment elements, you double down on your commitment to create strong female characters. You've been doing a good job so far, but shipping with a tracer pose like this undermines so much of the good you've already done.”

Blizzard agreed, and promised to amend the pose. “We want *everyone* to feel strong and heroic in our community. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel uncomfortable, under-appreciated or misrepresented,” game director Jeff Kaplan wrote. 

Then came criticism that Kaplan was caving to criticism, or worse 'censoring' Overwatch in response to a complaint. "We understand that not everyone will agree with our decision, and that’s okay," he wrote in a second update. "That’s what these kinds of public tests are for. This wasn’t pandering or caving, though. This was the right call from our perspective, and we think the game will be just as fun the next time you play it."

Lost in the pile of this was how civil the original critique was. "My main complaint is that there is no facet of Tracer's silly/spunky/kind personality in the pose. It's just a generic butt shot. I don't see how that's positive for the game," wrote Fipps in the original post. I continue to agree that the pose wasn't Blizzard's best. Really, the reaction to the reaction was bigger, as it fed into a wider conversation around sexualized characters, feminism, inclusiveness, player criticism and other issues in games.

More reading: Overwatch victory pose cut after fan complains that it's over-sexualized

Microsoft's UWP

Microsoft's latest courtship of PC gaming continues to be a mixture of good and bad. We loved Forza Horizon 3, liked Gears 4, and found Halo 5: Forge to be surprisingly great. But on the operating system side, things weren't all blue skies and green fields for PC gamers in 2016. 

In March, Microsoft asserted its plan to bring its biggest games to Windows through its Universal Windows Platform, a set of standards and restrictions meant to, in Microsoft's eyes, make it easier to publish applications across multiple Windows devices, improve security, and help developers write code under a more unified platform. Those modest benefits are outweighed massively by the danger of Windows becoming more of a closed platform.

Among game companies, Epic Games CEO and co-founder Tim Sweeney was the most outspoken critic of UWP. In March, Sweeney labeled the initiative "a closed, Microsoft-controlled distribution and commerce monopoly," and called for others in the industry to oppose it. Sweeney didn't miss the opportunity to level more harsh words later in 2016. "Slowly, over the next five years, they will force-patch Windows 10 to make Steam progressively worse and more broken," he warned in July.

More reading:Epic CEO Tim Sweeney pummels Microsoft's UWP initiativePhil Spencer on Microsoft's PC plans: "I wouldn’t say our strategy is to unify"

CS:GO skin gambling

The stage for 2016's skin gambling debacle was set three years earlier, when Valve rolled out cosmetic microtransactions for CS:GO. These items could be traded, sold, and bought through Steam for as much as $400—the maximum listing price on the Steam Community Market. It didn't take long for questionable, unlicensed third-party websites to realize they could use Steam bot accounts to automate item winnings and losings, and it didn't take long for dozens of flavors of skin gambling to spring up as CS:GO peaked in popularity.

The lowest point so far in a story that continues to develop, though, was the revelation that two very popular YouTubers showed themselves winning thousands of dollars of items on a site called CSGO Lotto without mentioning or indicating in any way that they were the creators of CSGO Lotto. Oops. Exposed, TmarTn offered a pitiful apology, saying that his relationship with had been "been a matter of public record since the company was first organized in December of 2015," presumably meaning that a public record existed of his co-ownership of the shady gambling website for someone else to uncover.

There's no definitive verdict on the legality of in-game item gambling at this time, but you can expect the issue to continue to be explored in 2017.

More reading:YouTuber owner of CS:GO betting site offers worst apology ever CS:GO’s controversial skin gambling, explained

No Man's Sky

It was a perfect, ugly storm of some of the least-appealing trends in modern gaming: unchecked hype, unfinished games, last-minute review code, bland procedural generation, and misleading marketing.

Before that, though, heavy, sincere anticipation had formed around No Man's Sky. Here was a game from a small studio with an impossible promise: 18 quintillion planets, procedurally-generated wildlife, infinite exploration. In trailers, it looked like a massive step forward for the stagnating survival genre. To help Hello Games achieve these lofty designs, it had the backing of a major publisher in Sony. And No Man's Sky was delightfully mysterious, so much so that we were still answering fundamental questions about the game a month before launch, thanks to limited access to code. At a preview event, Chris was allowed to play for less than an hour. 

Concerning signs came in the days before release. A significant day-one patch was on the way to fix major exploits. The PC release date itself wasn't announced until very late. A player who acquired a leaked copy of the game was able to reach the center of this allegedly near-infinite galaxy very quickly. And in a strange move, Hello Games wrote a blog warning players about the game one day before its launch on PlayStation 4. "This maybe isn’t the game you *imagined* from those trailers," wrote Sean Murray in a blog post that outlined, from his perspective, what the space game was and was not. "I expect it to be super divisive."

It was more than that. But initially, No Man's Sky became the biggest launch on Steam of 2016, hitting 212,620 concurrent players on PC. That's more than double the all-time peak of 2015 phenomenon Rocket League. In short order, the mystery unraveled. Two players, livestreaming simultaneously on launch day, could not see one another despite reaching the same location. The limitations of the game's procedural generation were revealed, as players shared screens and video of samey-looking aliens. And the hope that somewhere, cool, custom snake monsters were prowling the universe, disappeared. Players urged other players to seek refunds, and No Man's Sky's concurrent players sunk. Hello Games went quiet.

Our reviewer, Chris Livingston, recaps the rest of the saga perfectly in our lows of the year:

And then there was the reaction to the reaction: Hello Games went utterly silent for a couple of months. While I understand the reasoning—when everything you've ever said is suddenly under intense scrutiny, it makes sense to be careful saying anything else—the impenetrable silence only made matters worse, as fans felt they had been completely abandoned and ignored. At least things have gotten better recently, with new features added in the Foundation update, and the promise of more changes to come in the future.

There are lessons to be learned on all sides. Devs: keep in mind that no one ever forgets what you say during development, and while it's fine to talk about the elements you hope to put in your game, you're going to hear about it if those things aren't actually there when you release it. Plus, completely shutting off all communication with the people who have bought your game is a terrible idea. As customers, we need to remain skeptical of early E3 trailers, bullshots, pre-launch hype, and be especially cautious about pre-ordering games. And, we need to be patient. Even if developers aren't talking, they're listening, and adding new features to a game takes time.

Ultimately, it was a pleasantly chill, but underwhelming neon planet generator that became the poster child of many of the things we dislike. The lingering thought is how differently things would've gone if No Man's Sky had released in Early Access as a $20 or $30 beta.

More reading: The anatomy of hypeFive reasons game marketing can be misleading

Ark: Survival Evolved developer Studio Wildcard has clarified that the Ovis Aries—better known to the world as "sheep"—will be coming to the game in its next major update, regardless of whether or not it takes the prize for "Best Use of a Farm Animal" in the ongoing Steam Awards. The announcement was made following a wave of criticism over the original Ovis Aries reveal, which implied that the wool-bearing beasts would be added to the game only if Ark wins the award. 

"We were encouraged by Valve to rally the Community to come together and vote in the upcoming Steam Awards. We thought what better way to do this than add a modern-day farmyard animal! In our excitement, Ovis Aries was designed as a celebration of the nomination," the studio said in the "re-announcement" of the sheep. "We want to make it clear that regardless of whether Ark wins a Steam Award or not, Ovis will be making its debut in the next major Ark version update!" 

The original announcement, which has since been deleted but can be seen through the Wayback Machine, is somewhat more open to interpretation. "Head over to http://store.steampowered.com/SteamAwards/ on Thursday the 29th of December, as you’ll have the opportunity to come show your support for Ark by voting for us!" it said. "If Ark wins the award, we will ensure that our fluffy friend quickly makes its debut on the Ark in the next major version update!" 

That could be taken to mean that winning the award would spur the studio to ensure that the sheep arrive with all possible quickness, but many players read it as an all-or-nothing proposition: No prize, no sheep. A flurry of negative feedback blew in, both on and off Steam, as gamers shared their outrage over the attempted "bribery," leading Wildcard to pull the initial announcement and issue the update.   

A date for the update hasn't been announced, but voting for the Steam Awards' "Best Use of a Farm Animal" will begin later today. Ark: Survival Evolved is up against some major rural competition: Goat Simulator, Stardew Valley, Blood and Bacon, and Farming Simulator 17.