Sep 19, 2017

Games like Hellblade are eroding the border between indie and triple-A

Firewatch

Staring into the eyes of Senua, the heroine of Ninja Theory's latest game Hellblade, hurts like staring into the sun. Vibrant turquoise, her eyes cut as deeply as any of the viking weapons brandished against her and convey loss, anger, sorrow, confusion and courage in the space of a single heartbeat. They're easily among gaming's finest contemporary achievements, those eyes, and they're so real as to make the similar expressive work in The Witcher 3 look like sketchwork by comparison.

They're more than merely pretty: they mark a shift in the gaming industry as we've known it for much of the last decades. Senua’s eyes allow a glimpse of a gaming landscape where the lines between indie and so-called "triple-A" games are blurred. We're now finding better artistry in smaller projects. We're finding former mods like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds outselling the works of major publishers. And based on recent chats I had with Ninja Theory and Firewatch's Campo Santo, it all springs from a perfect storm of increasingly standardized technology, overlapping talent, and comparatively freeform distribution models. It may be precisely what gaming needs in order to evolve.

Why would anyone want to play as a regular person instead of a space marine?

It's fitting that Hellblade's story and its development both have roots in defiance. Ninja Theory achieved critical and commercial acclaim with 2007's Heavenly Sword and 2013's DmC, but it sought greater artistic achievements than "triple-A" development normally allows. Dominic Matthews, Ninja Theory's commercial director, tells me of a meeting a few years back when the studio was trying to pitch an open-world sci-fi game called Razer. They found themselves pressured to fill too many checkboxes for trendy features like multiplayer modes and mobile compatibility. And finally a publisher scoffed at their idea for a more human story than big-budget gaming normally gets with this response: "Why would anyone want to play as a regular person instead of a space marine?"

The moment was an awakening. "We looked at indie games with some envy," Matthews says, while waxing poetic about games like The Stanley Parable and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, both remarkable games that took risks larger publishers wouldn't. Elsewhere games like Goat Simulator were proving you no longer needed big budgets (or even production quality) to reach comparable sales.

With Hellblade, Ninja Theory saw a chance for studios to reboot the concept of "double-A" games in the vein of 2000’s Jet Set Radio. Games, in other words, with more ambition than a Limbo or Super Meat Boy, but less than a Destiny 2. Games that could play the wide-release art house flick to the super blockbuster, sort of like The King’s Speech appearing in the same theater as Dunkirk.

Under the hood

Matthews is quick to point out that Ninja Theory would had struggled to find this confidence just a few years ago when many high-profile games ran on custom engines. Nowadays though, widely used and relatively approachable standardized engines like Unreal 4 allow small teams to craft graphics that were once out of reach. He admires what other studios have achieved with landscapes and "walking simulators" in this regard, but the studio believed it wouldn't earn the "indie triple-A" feel it sought unless it could extend that quality to Hellblade’s characters as well.

There was, of course, more at stake besides hoping someone might cheer its "jaw-dropping graphics" in a Twitch stream or Steam review. Hellblade attempts to take a serious look at psychosis, and few of its goals were as important as getting players to understand what was going on beyond those soul-ripping eyes.

"Our belief is that if you can relate to the character and believe in her, then you can engage on a far deeper emotional level," Matthews says. "Other games might not place too much attention on facial animations, but our story is a very personal journey. I think it's critical that you believe in Senua to go along on that ride with her."Fortunately, today's widespread standardization also allows for easy collaboration. Filling in the blanks of a studio's skillset used to be a time-consuming and costly endeavor, but it's relatively painless now that contractors usually don't have to learn the intricacies of custom engines."We found that people want to find ways to work with independent developers," Matthews says. "If you want to use performance capture, license music, or use or you technology that you may be way outside of your price range, your best bet is to just have conversations with people."

So rather than tackling this effort themselves, Ninja Theory brought in contractors 3Lateral to create Senua's head and Cubic Motion to handle the animations. Working on a tight budget, Ninja Theory met them halfway. Rather than fly out to Los Angeles or New Zealand for motion capture as in previous projects, they built a DIY motion capture studio inside their Cambridge boardroom using parts from IKEA and Amazon.

Senua herself was modeled by Melina Juergens, Ninja Theory's own video editor rather than a professional actor. When they wanted similar detail for the ghostly Celtic monk Druth without spending the same kind of cash, they carefully incorporated live-action capture. The approach allowed them to play off their strengths and outsource only when they absolutely needed outside help to create that "triple-A" vibe.

"We always had the approach that we will make the game that we re going to make and we will price it appropriately."
Dominic Matthews

I hear similar praise for the standardization of 3D graphical technology from Campo Santo's Sean Vanaman. It proved a blessing when working on Firewatch, as contractors could ditch the arcane initiation rites formerly required when joining a project midway through development. One globetrotting contractor, he tells me, initially didn't even have to download the core game files since she had ready access to Maya scripting tools. They merely needed to import her work upon completion.

"Basically, if you know how to use the Unreal or Unity engines, then you already know a ton about making games," Vanaman says. "So I feel like the flattening of standardized platforms allows people to compete across the board."

Vanaman points out that the fruits of this standardization extend far beyond games, to the point that indie game studios like Campo Santo can now draw from the same talent pools responsible for some of the highest-grossing films of all time.

"You end up with people who have been doing triple-A work who can just walk onto an indie team and already understand huge pieces of your pipeline,” Vanaman says. "On our new game, we brought on someone who'd worked at WETA Workshop. She was all like, 'I did all these things for The Hobbit,' and we were like, 'Yeah, um, you're good.'"

Digital: A Love Story

But nothing made Hellblade possible quite like the prevalence of digital distribution. Hellblade was entirely Ninja Theory's project, free from crowdfunding obligations, fluff like multiplayer modes, and trend-minded publishing execs who want every hero to be a space marine. Digital distribution allowed the blockbuster developer to become the publisher, to escape the tyranny of the $60 pricing model and all its implied requirements. Unfettered from the need to stretch Hellblade to 12 to 15 hours to justify that cost, Ninja Theory was able to make it as long as it needed for the maximum punch: a swift jab in the gut rather than a taxing triathlon.

"That was a really beautiful thing about Hellblade," he says. "We always had the approach that we will make the game that we’re going to make and we will price it appropriately."

And Matthews knows other studios are watching. They've told him. Hellblade's success could prove that studios with a big budget pedigree could go back to making the games they're passionate about making, while at the same time proving that smaller studios need not shy from projects demanding higher production values.

"There isn't a ceiling any more," Matthews says. "There isn't a level of quality of that can only be achieved by the big triple-A studios and games."

Campo Santo's Jake Rodkin believes that these developments have advanced far enough that the indie scene isn't shoved off to the side like it used to be. It stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the former giants.

"One thing that struck me about PAX West this year was the smooth scale range of games on the floor from small 'bedroom indies' all the way to the hugest triple-A releases," Rodkin says. "Seeing this range of games all coexisting in the same space made me hope that we’re about to see a wider range of games on as wide a range of possible."

All of which brings us back to Senua’s wonderfully sculpted eyes. They’re terrible to meet head on, but there are better things lurking in there besides fear and uncertainty. There's also hope. There's determination. Stare at them long enough, and they look a little like the future.

Sep 19, 2017

5 things you want from the future of GTA Online

Grand Theft Auto V Legacy

Last week, I set up a short survey on what players want from the future of GTA Online. I did this to try and get a snapshot of where this sprawling game is now, and where you think it should go next—just to start a broader conversation about the game, really, but also to learn more about what areas of the GTA players value the most, and which they feel could improve.

GTA Online keeps racking up expansions and remains enormously popular on Steam, after all, and while I have my own thoughts on what I'd like from the future of GTA, I thought this would be an interesting experiment following our readers' version of the PC Gamer Top 100. The response was pretty great: there were 7,963 completed entries to the survey in eight days. It was possible to leave more than one response, but assuming only a few people would bother doing that, it's not a bad cross-section of the audience (GTA's daily average during the last month is just over 54,000 on Steam alone, according to Steam Charts).

Each question required people to provide an answer, and they could select up to three for the two multiple choice questions (about what you'd like to see the game do next and technical improvements). When you see the percentages for those answers, then, they won't add up to 100—that's the percentage of people who chose that answer, but they also had the option of selecting up to two others.

For the question about Shark Cards and money, I only allowed one answer, so the percentage represents the amount of answers to the survey. I've left the survey open so you can see the questions in full while digesting these results. Along the way, I'll provide some commentary on what these answers might tell us.

60% want new playing spaces

This was the most popular answer to any of the questions posed, which I kind of expected: people want new places to explore in GTA Online (I gave Liberty City as an example in the question). I love Los Santos and consider it the best open world ever created, but I do feel like I've seen every beach, highway and building a thousand times, which is inevitable. Clearly a lot of people feel the same way.

So what's the answer? I like the idea of a new playing space in GTA, and rumours about new areas (that haven't come to anything) have done the rounds for a while, now. But it's also hard to see Rockstar making an entirely new city just for the purposes of a multiplayer expansion. Would they have to create new radio stations for it? New NPCs? How would they charge for it? Would there be no option to explore it in singleplayer? I like the idea of the singleplayer's existing North Yankton map being used as an arena for multiplayer modes like Motor Wars, or maybe a co-op mission—that'd be a neat bit of variety in the short term.

If Rockstar ever remasters GTA IV in the fashion of GTA V, that's where I'd speculate that Online could expand, by adding a refreshed version of the gorgeous Liberty City landmass. Maybe you could import your character between games. Or, they could just wait until GTA VI, but that's likely many years away.

2017 is set to be GTA Online's record year in terms of moneymaking, though, and the game isn't going anywhere. Nothing's more likely to extend its life further than a whole extra playground to mess around in.

56.5% want new heists

GTA Online's heists feel like the strongest connection between the game's online and offline in terms of design. They're strings of narrative-driven missions where each player is given a different task to do, culminating in a huge, set piece-y mission where everyone gets rewarded with a nice pile of cash. Sadly, there haven't been any new ones since March 2015, and speaking to IGN in September of that year, it didn't sound like more were in Rockstar's future. "They were a tremendous undertaking and for now we have other ideas for GTA Online that we’re working to deliver," said Rockstar North's Director of Design, Imran Sarwar.

Nonetheless, 56.5% of you want more heists, according to our survey. Indeed, I suspect heists are the only way I'll get all the PC Gamer guys to put more hours into GTA Online again. What I love about them is that while money is the end goal, the design of the missions and the surprising ways these cinematic set pieces unravel felt like their main purpose.

In Smuggler's Run and Gunrunning, you inevitably spend more time thinking about money and making money, because deliveries are what you're building towards. Many of the mission types in both expansions are fantastic fun, but overall they're about growing piles of cash. More heists would be a nice departure from that. Completing a heist with a team of friends is just magic, and the vehicles Rockstar has added since offer a lot of potential for new, chaotic set pieces.

Meanwhile, 30.3% like the idea of more temporary events and changes to the map or world state, like when the city is snowy at Christmas. 38.4% like the idea of more story-led mission arcs, like those in the main game, and 17% want more properties to buy. 19.7% want more business options, like those in Gunrunning and Smuggler's Run. The least popular option was more adversary modes, which had just 3% of the votes, and just above that was more of a focus on racing, which attracted 6.8%.

Shark Cards and grinding: 34.5% of players don't like GTA's payment model, 27% don't care either way and 9.7% of players like it

Shark Cards are a divisive matter in GTA. They're a way to speed up the process of accumulating cars, planes and helicopters from the in-game stores by spending real money. I've seen them mentioned in the comments of pretty much everything I've written about GTA on PCG. You don't need Shark Cards to enjoy GTA Online, and the game offers weekly ways to get double experience and money, but how they shape the game is clearly an issue for a bunch of people. 34.5% of people chose the 'I don't like them' option in the survey when asked about Shark Cards and/or grinding.

Elsewhere, 27% chose 'I have no strong feelings one way or another', while 9.7% of people like the game's payment model. Personally, I do like the idea of GTA Online growing as paying customers support the continued life of the game for a free audience, but variants on 'less grinding' and 'cheaper prices' came up a few times in the optional 'Other' box for this question (less than 3% of answers).

In the spirit of disclosure, I've so far spent £11.99 of my own money on one Shark Card to help buy a helicopter I wanted. Personally, I felt I could justify that after playing the game for longer than anything else in my Steam library. That doesn't mean I love the system or agree with the pricing of everything, or even how players are rewarded for their time, but loot crates have become a reality of modern multiplayer games and I can't see how this is terribly different. Again, I don't like loot crates either, but at least here you always know what you're paying for.

I also added a hypothetical option of GTA having paid expansions, rather than microtransactions, and this got an okay response—15.9% like the idea of that. My thinking there was more in line with the GTA IV and Red Dead expansions, where new modes, maps and so on were sold as part of a larger paid package. I wouldn't mind paying a standard £7-£15 price for the latest expansions if I could get a few guaranteed nice cars and aircraft out of it. Only 3.5% like the idea of GTA Online being a paid subscription fee MMO, which isn't enormously surprising.

Slightly more people either don't mind or like Shark Cards than dislike them, then: 37.5 to 34.7. Money is bound to remain a divisive issue for as long as GTA Online exists.

51.7% think loading times is the technical issue that most needs to change or improve, followed closely by cheat detection

This was a close-run multiple choice question: when I asked what should change or improve on the technical side of GTA, 51.7% chose 'how long it takes to find a session when you boot the game'. 49.2% chose cheat detection. Griefing from other players got 41.1%, and matchmaking speed was clicked by 33% of people who filled out the survey. How the game runs while you're playing online got 23.9%.

Booting up GTA Online can feel like the opposite of finding a quick match in Rocket League—waiting for my character to wake up in their biker bar, apartment or hangar always feels like it takes longer than I'm used to from playing modern online games, and clearly a lot of people agree. That said, I imagine this is something Rockstar would have already solved if it was easy to do, and there's a hell of a lot going on in any given GTA Online server.

A quick note: after just under 4000 responses, I added an extra option called 'Nothing needs improving' to this question, in case the weighting of it seemed a bit too negative (people could also leave the 'other' option blank, if they wanted to—a sizeable 10% of responses did). From the remaining 4000-or-so surveys, 185 people decided nothing needed improving.

Casino DLC, better character customisation and other specific things players want

I left the option for players to add one thing they'd change about the design of GTA Online, as well as blank options in the other questions that people could fill in themselves. Almost 90% of people left the last question blank, and a lot of answers varied on 'nothing', and a fair few that did answer complained about money again.

Elsewhere, though, there were some interesting suggestions, so I wanted to highlight a few. 100 people mentioned the idea of GTA Online getting a casino, or some kind of casino-themed expansion. GTA V's had Vinewood Casino with an 'opening soon' sign since launch, so this idea's been floating around for a while. A few people mentioned greater character customisation options, like hair types/detail, build, height and fashion, particularly for female characters (over 20 people specifically mentioned this one). There were a fair few calls for more water-related stuff to do: 12 people specifically mentioned submarines in their answers, and one guy wanted an underwater city to explore (!).

And of course, zombies: this came up 50 times. 301 people mentioned 'singleplayer', usually asking for either GTA Online content/vehicles to work in GTA V, or for the elusive singleplayer DLC that Rockstar once said was coming in 2014. I certainly sympathise with the latter, being a huge fan of the Episodes From Liberty City pack released after GTA IV, although I can't see it happening based on this IGN interview from 2015. I really enjoy GTA Online and like seeing it grow, but it'd be nice to have both, eh?

What next?

GTA Online is fascinating to me: with no mandatory paid expansions and no public roadmap for the game, its long term future is a total mystery. What Gunrunning and Smuggler's Run tell us, though, is that Rockstar is trying to expand the game beyond the bounds of GTA singleplayer and into less explored areas of the series.

Thank you to those who filled out the survey—GTA Online isn't going anywhere, and hopefully the game eventually explores the things you're craving in Rockstar's online open world.

Sep 19, 2017

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider review

PC Gamer

I'm in a bank vault, up to my waist in water. This is still, technically, a 'ghost' run. No alarms have been sounded. But the hole in the roof above suggests a different story—one of planning, mild carnage, and 'oh, what happens if I do this?' Death of the Outsider's third mission is a standout heist that shows Dishonored's semi-directed design at its best. It's not necessarily my favourite thing about this standalone expansion—we'll get to that—but the dense network of possibilities and routes is as good as anything found in Dishonored 2.

Breaking into Karnaca's most secure bank is just another step in protagonist Billie Lurk's plan to kill the Outsider. Lurk, having cast off her assumed identity as the captain of the Dreadful Wale, reunites with her former mentor and frenemy Daud. The aging assassin enlists Billie's help for one last job: bumping off the black-eyed emo god-being at the heart of the Void. As in Dishonored's DLCs, The Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches, Death of the Outsider isn't about Corvo or Emily, (at least beyond the fact that, to Daud's mind, they too were pawns in the Outsider's game). But it is important to the world at large. This is an epilogue.

The nature of Billie's task, and the nature of Billie herself, means that Death of the Outsider diverges from the standard template of a Dishonored campaign. To be clear, much here is familiar—it's an expansion after all. But Billie's road to the ultimate assassination doesn't involve a hit list of rich jerks. It can—you're free to kill pretty much everyone you meet, with no Chaos system to punish you for it. But for the most part, your targets are information and items.

Billie's powers are different, too, in that they aren't granted through one of the Outsider's offers. Rather, they're drawn directly from the Void. In practical terms, it means they recharge over time, with no need to scour for vials of magical blue juice. Your range of powers are more limited than in previous games, but interesting nonetheless. Displace is the Blink variant, with the notable difference that you can place a marker and then—as long as you have line of sight—choose when to teleport to it.

This has a number of uses, not least as an easy method of escape if a fight goes bad. For instance, it combos with Foresight, which lets Billie stop time and scan the nearby area. While looking around with Foresight, you can place a Displace marker, potentially letting you teleport through grates and fences. But these specific instances aside, Displace is most frequently used to move between high ledges and reach other hard to access areas. I'm actually a little underwhelmed by how it feels. It's a small thing, but the extra mouse click required to accurately warp to a place makes supernatural movement feel less snappy and satisfying.

Billie's best power is Semblance, which lets you steal the face of an unconscious NPC. It's useful because Billie is a wanted woman, and guards will attack on sight—even out on the street. Walking confidently through a courtyard full of guards is a different kind of empowerment to that offered by Dishonored's typically more direct and murderous abilities. Semblance enables some specific interactions, too, like an auction you can only participate in if you're wearing the face of a civilian. It's not perfect, however—there are so many characters that inevitably some permutations aren't accounted for. At one point, I used Semblance on a shop owner who had a captive locked up in her basement—just to see what would happen. Unfortunately, nothing. The captive reacted as if I was Billie.

Crucially, these powers aren't direct attacks (not unless you Displace into an enemy, leading to their gruesomely messy demise). Instead, Billie is more reliant on her tools—including the entertaining new hook mines, which can grab enemies and fling them into walls, floors or even other people. To balance this, there are no runes to collect. Your powers work just as well at the start of the game as at the end. Instead, your money is spent on new bone charms and gear upgrades, both of which enable some powerful playstyles. In a longer game, the reduced toolset might feel stale. But, across the ten hours Death of the Outsider took me to complete, I never felt short of options.

These new powers, tools and small tweaks sit well in environments that are more directly comparable to Dishonored 2. Once again, you'll be exploring densely packed areas, full of detail, side stories, and money to pilfer. New for Death of the Outsider is a contracts system, which lets you pick up optional objectives from the black market. Some will take you to areas off the critical path. Others will challenge you to play in a specific way—make it through an area without alerting a soul, or murder all but one specific person. It's a fun extra that makes the most of Arkane's level design.

Some will no doubt balk at how two of this expansion's five missions take place in the same district. Personally, though, I welcomed the opportunity to return to the scene of the crime. Upper Cyria, the area in question, feels large and full of things to do on your first visit. While my return was far shorter having learned the layout, it was gratifying to see, for instance, how the black market responded to my earlier break in. Also, the second visit ends in that bank heist, so it's hard to feel hard done by.

A theme running throughout Death of the Outsider is of return and reevaluation. My favourite thing wasn't a mission or an individual section but the chance to see the world react to the events of Dishonored 2, and from a new perspective. It frequently shines new light on characters from throughout the series. Billie, obviously, and the Outsider, of course. But also the groups that you, as various protagonists, have previously encountered. The first few missions offer hints that the witches—powerful, late game enemies in Dishonored 2—are now desperate and vulnerable, scrabbling to regain a scrap of the power they once held.

Later on, Billie visits the Royal Conservatory. Once a witch stronghold, it's now held by the Abbey of the Everyman. The Abbey has always been antagonistic to each Dishonored character's Outsider-blessed adventures, but here, in the basement where the remaining witches are held captive, their malice is brought into focus. The combination of their wanton cruelty, Billie's personal connection to the witches, and Death of the Outisder's relaxation of the Chaos system culminated in bloodshed, as I abandoned a non-lethal approach that had persisted over two games. It was a convergence of story and systems to create a meaningful and justifiable switch in the way I was playing.

Death of the Outsider's story works best when it's toying with the morality of its factions and characters, and offering a different context for their actions. That strikes at the heart of the central objective: killing the Outsider. Daud's obsession with his death comes from a place of righteousness—of railing against his acceptance of what he now views as a Faustian pact. But Death of the Outsider also challenges that assumption. There are no heroes here, and everyone's reasons—even if they're ostensibly selfless—are put under a spotlight. Even the rats are recontextualised. Once the source of Dishonored's plague, now they appear as a cryptic ally who Billie can consult for advice and, more frequently, musings about biting and chewing.

Nonetheless, there's a lot to pack in. By focusing on Daud and Billie's personal goals, the ultimate truth of the Eyeless—the cult that Billie goes up against in her search for the Outsider—feels rushed. The final revelations are crammed into the confines of the final mission. There's a lot to unpack here, and it results in a dense delivery of cryptic clues that feel better suited for multiple missions—especially when key lines of dialogue are in danger of being missed, or wiped out by an errant sticky grenade. While I'm griping, that final mission also introduces a new enemy type—an irritatingly tough new foe that doesn't follow the general rules of killing a Dishonored enemy, while also being more mobile and more numerous than the Clockwork Soldiers.

Such small grievances add up, and do take some of the shine off an otherwise accomplished slice of freeform stealth action. When Death of the Outsider is at its best, though, it's a worthy accompaniment to the series at large. It's full of enjoyable new encounters and scenarios, offers new perspectives on characters and events, and, through its audacious central goal, caps off the existing Dishonored storyline in style.

Disclaimer: One of the writers for Death of the Outsider, Hazel Monforton, is a contributor to PC Gamer.

Sep 19, 2017

Ark: Survival Evolved is the new Crysis of PC hardware

ARK: Survival Evolved

Ark represents some of the best and worst aspects of Early Access. After more than two years spent in Early Access, Ark has finally hit the retail milestone. Poor performance and glitches were somewhat excusable during the extended 'beta' period, since the game wasn't officially released—it was early and many assumed optimizations would be coming in future updates. But the retail launch has now come and gone, so there are no more excuses.

Let's just get this out of the way right here: Ark's system requirements are steep, and it's perhaps telling that there's no official word on the minimum and recommended system specs for the game. While the visuals can be impressive at times, animations could be better, and clipping is a major issue. I also encountered various graphical glitches, depending on settings and hardware. In short, Ark isn't running anywhere near as smoothly as the Destiny 2 beta. If you're using anything less than a high-end graphics card, be prepared to dial down the settings quite a bit. The epic preset is brutally punishing, taking down even the fastest current graphics cards.

Let's start with the features checklist:

Given its PC and EA roots, it's no surprise that Ark gets many things right. Resolution and aspect ratio support are present and accounted for, custom field of view is also available, the framerate can be unlocked without any anomalies, and there are plenty of options for tweaking graphics quality and performance. FOV is about the only potentially contentious issue, as this can be disabled on servers, but it works in single-player mode.

One of the key elements of Ark is its full support for modding, a major saving grace according to our review. The official Ark servers can be a mess, with technology levels ranging from the stone age to the futuristic and a brutal grindfest, but mods and custom servers can alter nearly all aspects of the game.

Ark comes with a slew of graphical settings as well—27 to be precise, not including a few additional options like resolution scaling. There are four presets that define most of the individual items (low, medium, high, and epic), but one thing to note is that the presets adjust the resolution scale by default—94 at epic, 82 at high, 73 at medium, and 55 at low. It's not clear precisely how the scaling affects performance, since the range is 0-100, but basically anything below 100 will render at a lower resolution. I've set the resolution scale to 100 for all the testing that follows. If you want to render at a lower resolution, of course that can improve performance quite a bit.

Unlike some other games, many of the individual settings have a pretty sizeable impact on performance. I cover these in detail below, but basically you can nearly triple performance by going from the epic preset to minimum quality—with an equally severe drop in image fidelity, naturally. Some of the biggest items you might want to turn down include post processing, all forms of shadows (including ambient occlusion), view distance, and high quality LODs. I would also disable motion blur purely out of principle—I don't like games adding extra blur.

As has been the case with many of our recent performance analysis articles, Nvidia hardware leads AMD across most of the product spectrum. The good news is that the lead isn't quite so pronounced as I've seen in other games, but the bad news is that anything short of the GTX 1080 Ti will fail to break 60 fps at 1080p epic—and even the 1080 Ti falls well below that mark at 1440p epic. Thankfully, with some judicious tweaks you can get decent performance on midrange and above GPUs without making the game look too ugly.

The hardware

MSI provided all of the hardware for this testing, mostly consisting of its Gaming/Gaming X graphics cards. These cards are designed to be fast but quiet, and the fans will shut off completely when the graphics card isn't being used. Our main test system is MSI's Aegis Ti3, a custom case and motherboard with an overclocked 4.8GHz i7-7700K, 64GB DDR4-2400 RAM, and a pair of 512GB Plextor M8Pe M.2 NVMe solid-state drives in RAID0. There's a 2TB hard drive for additional storage, custom lighting, and more.

MSI also provided three of its gaming notebooks for testing, the GS63VR with GTX 1060, GE63VR with GTX 1070, and GT73VR with GTX 1080. Note that the GE63VR has replaced the GT62VR as the 1070 offering, with a sleeker, nicer looking build and a few updated components. For CPU testing, MSI also provided several different motherboards. In addition to the Aegis Ti3, I have the X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC for Skylake-X testing, Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon for additional Core i3/i5/i7 Kaby Lake CPU testing, X370 Gaming Pro Carbon for high-end Ryzen 7 builds, and the B350 Tomahawk for budget-friendly Ryzen 3/5 builds.

Ark: Survival Evolved benchmarks

For the benchmark settings, I've used the medium and epic presets (with resolutions scaling set to 100), but because Epic is so demanding I've also included some minimum quality 4K testing for reference. While in theory it would be best to test Ark on public servers, in practice that introduces a ton of variables that are difficult to account for—server performance, number of players, time of day, and performance altering adjustments to the environment—not to mention the ever-present possibility of getting clobbered by other players.

To avoid these, I've elected to run in single-player mode, with a static time of day (6:59am). I cleared out a nice beachfront property, built a humble starting shack with a bed and a few chests, and then got busy testing. I did do a few spot checks of performance on public servers as well, and found that in general the single-player benchmarks match up to what you'll see in less populated areas. If you're part of a tribe with a huge base and lots of dinosaurs, performance can drop below what I show—or in some areas of the game, performance may be better. The important thing is that for the most part, things will scale equally across the various GPUs.

First up, we have the normally tame 1080p medium, which is usually where the budget cards shine. Here, however, the lower tier hardware already starts to struggle. The 1050 and 1050 Ti barely clear 30 fps, along with the previous generation R9 380, while the RX 560 comes up well short of that mark. Medium quality looks decent overall, and ARK is certainly playable at 30-40 fps, but if you're after smooth framerates at 1080p medium, you're going to need closer to a GTX 1060 to get there.

If you drop everything to minimum quality, you can improve performance by around 60-75 percent as well, which gets the RX 560 to playable levels. Some mods can further reduce image fidelity as well, but in general ARK proves to be too much for slower graphics cards.

Intel's HD Graphics 630 shows just how bad things can get, limping along at just 5 fps—not even remotely tolerable. I wanted to see if I could get the game to a playable level at all on Intel's IGP, and depending on your definition, I sort of got there at 1280x720 and minimum quality, where the HD 630 was able to muster about 18 frames per second. Older generation integrated graphics solutions will fare even worse, so basically you should plan on bringing a dedicated GPU to the Ark party.

Stepping up to 1080p epic, the graphics cards continue dropping like flies. The only GPU to manage more than 60 fps is the GTX 1080 Ti, a $700 graphics card that currently reigns as King of the Hill in the graphics card market (unless you count the even more expensive $1,200 Titan Xp, which is about five percent faster than a stock 1080 Ti).

At 1080p Epic, the graphics cards are dropping like flies.

Of the current generation graphics cards, only half a dozen manage to break 30 fps. Basically, you'll need an RX 580 or GTX 1060, and maybe turn down one or two settings to get reasonably smooth framerates. With a few adjustments, the RX Vega 56 and above can get to 60 fps and still look good, but very few gamers are going to be able to max out all of ARK's settings, particularly at higher resolutions.

Given what we've seen so far, 1440p epic shouldn't be much of a surprise. Now even a GTX 1080 Ti only gets 46 fps, and the Vega 64 and GTX 1080 only barely clear 30 fps. If you're running a 144Hz 1440p display, good luck on maxing out the refresh rate—even at minimum quality you're going to come up short.

The overall standings don't really change much from 1080p epic, the framerates just become lower. RX 580 does pull ahead of the GTX 1060 3GB now, but it's a pyrrhic victory considering both fall below 20 fps.

If you're hoping multi-GPU helps in the form of SLI or CrossFire, I did see a boost to framerates with GTX 1080 SLI (around 74 fps, which is better than 100 percent scaling), but unfortunately there were also rendering errors—flames in particular looked pretty bad, along with some shadow flickering. Given the increase in framerates, I suspect SLI isn't fully rendering everything. It can work in a pinch, but you're better off with a faster single GPU and lowering some settings.

And how about 4K epic quality, the holy grail of gaming? Performance is about half of what I measured at 1440p epic, which means even the $700 GTX 1080 Ti struggles at just 25 fps. SLI scaling is again very good, above 90 percent, but with the rendering issues I wouldn't call that a clear win.

I didn't bother testing most GPUs at 4K epic, for obvious reasons. Nothing short of 1080 Ti SLI can properly handle these settings, and there are better ways to improve performance. Instead of spending more time on settings that no one is likely to run, I decided to run some additional tests at 4K minimum quality to see if I could get playable framerates.

There we go, smooth sailing at 60+ fps and 4K! And if you have a 1080 Ti, you can even bump a few settings up a notch and still get smooth performance. But the only other card that can hit 60 fps at 4K minimum quality is the GTX 1080, and this is with a factory overclocked card. Ouch.

If your goal is 30 fps or more, you'll still need at least a GTX 1060 to get there—and for multiplayer, probably a GTX 1070 or Vega 56 is a better starting point for 4K.

What about CPU performance?

There are two more areas to look at with Ark. First is CPU requirements, which end up being mostly a non-event. ARK is super heavy on the GPU side of things, but not so much on your CPU.

Even a modest Core i3-7100 handles the game, though it might do worse in multiplayer, and I doubt anyone with a 1080 Ti is using less than a Core i5. Testing at higher resolutions and quality doesn't give the CPUs much a change to differentiate, but at 1080p medium there's a sizeable 50 percent difference between the Threadripper 1950X and the i7-7700K.

That's with all the CPUs using DDR4-3200 memory, incidentally, but while Intel holds a clear lead at 1080p medium, for most PCs you'll end up with a GPU bottleneck. At 1080p epic, there's only a 12 percent difference between the fastest and slowest CPU I tested, and at 1440p epic it's an eight percent difference.

Core i5 or Ryzen 5 and above should be more than sufficient for Ark.

I also ran some CPU tests with the RX Vega 64 as a second option, and unsurprisingly the gap between CPUs becomes much smaller. At 1080p medium, Threadripper 1950X is still the slowest CPU, at 77 fps, but even the overclocked i7-7700K only gets 84 fps—and the Ryzen 1800X also get 84 fps if you're wondering. 1080p epic, all the CPUs fall into the 43-46 fps range, and at 1440p epic it's 29-30 fps.

In general, Ark needs far more from the GPU than the CPU, and Core i5 or Ryzen 5 and above should be more than sufficient for most gamers, with Intel's chips still holding a small advantage depending on the resolution and settings.

Going mobile

Flipping over to gaming notebooks, there's not much to say. The GPUs all land right where you'd expect, with the desktop equivalents delivering better performance than the notebooks in all cases. The gap is smaller with larger notebooks that have better cooling, as the clockspeeds on the smaller notebooks tend to be a bit lower for both the GPUs and CPUs.

The GT73VR is a huge 17.3-inch desktop replacement with large cooling fans and heatsinks, and the desktop 1080 is only 5-15 percent faster at 1080p, depending on settings. Stepping down to the more compact GE63VR and its 15.6-inch chassis, the desktop card holds a 15-20 percent lead. Finally, the thin and light GS63VR has to cope with much more constrained cooling, giving a 20-35 percent lead for the desktop card.

Fine tuning performance

There are a lot of knobs and dials to fiddle with in Ark, and many of them can cause a pretty decent jump in performance. Here's the full rundown of the various settings, along with approximate performance differences. These tests are from a single GTX 1070 running at 1440p epic, comparing the minimum setting on each item to the maximum (epic default) setting using the average framerate.

Graphics Quality (Low/Medium/High/Epic): the global preset, with four settings. Going from epic (with 100 percent scaling) to high improves performance by around 40 percent, while going from epic to medium improves performance by about 80 percent. Finally, going from epic to the low preset yields a 125 percent increase in performance—and even low doesn't represent absolute minimum quality.

I've included some image quality comparisons in the following gallery to show how the various presets change the way the game looks. The first four 1440p images have resolution scaling set to 100 (the way I benchmarked), while the second set of four 1080p images use the true preset, with resolution scaling of anywhere from 55 (low) to 94 (epic).

Resolution Scale: This isn't really a setting I like to use, as it's just a different way of modifying the rendering resolution. You can go from a minimum of 0 to 100 percent, so there's no supersampling option—not like many GPUs could really handle that. It's also unclear what the settings actually correspond to, as lower values below 50 don't appear to cause much of a change.

World Tile Buffers (Low/Medium/High/Epic): Affects the loading and caching of large areas of the map into system memory. If you have a system that doesn't have much RAM, turning this down could help more, but on a 16GB system there was almost no change in performance between epic and low.

View Distance (Low/Medium/High/Epic): The range at while extra object rendering gets cut off. This has a significant impact on visuals, and turning it from epic to low results in about a 15 percent increase in performance.

Anti-Aliasing (Low/Medium/High/Epic): All of these are post-process anti-aliasing algorithms. I believe low uses FXAA (Fast Approximate AA), which has almost no impact on performance, while the other three settings use varying degrees of SMAA (Subpixel Morphological AA). Going from epic to low increases performance by around 4-5 percent.

General Shadows (Low/Medium/High/Epic): Determines the quality and amount of shadows cast by various objects—trees, rocks, creatures, buildings, etc. Dropping this to low disables all shadows from these entities, and increases performance by around 17 percent.

Terrain Shadows (Low/Medium/High/Epic): Like the above, only this is specifically for non-destructible options—the terrain. Dropping this to low disables all terrain shadows and increases performance by around 14 percent.

Textures (Low/Medium/High/Epic): Affects the quality for all of the textures, and can cause a significant performance hit on graphics cards with less than 4GB VRAM. Dropping from epic to low gives a 12 percent boost to performance, but the visual impact is significant. Most GPUs should be able to handle the medium or high setting without much difficulty, and these look much better than the low setting.

Sky Quality (Slider): This only changes the quality of the sky, so if you don't care about seeing clouds and other effects you can turn this down. Dropping to minimum results in about 6 percent better framerates.

Ground Clutter Density (Slider): Effects the amount of extra clutter—grass, rocks, and other non-interactive objects. While there's a large visual tradeoff by setting this to minimum, it can make the game easier to play, as you are able to see stones and other objects you can pick up more easily. At minimum, performance improves by around 17 percent.

Ground Clutter Distance (Slider): This determines the range at which the extra 'clutter' is rendered. Again, there's a decent improvement of 14 percent that can be had by dropping this to minimum, though if you change the above to minimum as well that already accounts for most of this performance increase.

This is Ark at epic quality, crapping on your PC's hardware.

Mesh Level of Detail (Slider): Changes the amount of extra polygons used in rendering the environment, terrain, trees, and other objects. The visual impact isn't all that large when dropping from max to minimum, and you can gain about 10 percent higher performance, but you may want to keep this a bit higher for image quality.

High Quality Anisotropic Filtering (Off/On): This appears to toggle between 16xAF and trilinear filtering, with a five percent increase in performance by turning this off. Anisotropic filtering helps with keeping textures from appearing blurry even when viewed from oblique angles.

Motion Blur (Off/On): Causes blurring of frames based on speed of movement. I really don't care for this effect, and turning this off can improve performance by around five percent.

Film Grain (Off/On): A post-processing effect that adds a bit of graininess to the output, with a minor three percent impact on performance. This one can easily be turned off since it doesn't really add a lot to the overall image quality.

Distance Field Ambient Occlusion (Off/On): This is a higher quality form of ambient occlusion, and it comes with a warning that it can cause a 'significant' impact on performance. It's off by default, even on the epic preset, but turning it on only causes a four percent drop in performance. Still, on slower graphics cards there's no reason to enable this.

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (Off/On): Ambient occlusion affects the rendering of shadows caused by ambient lighting, with SSAO being a relatively fast approximation of full AO. Turning SSAO off improves framerates by 12 percent, though grass and many other objects look 'flat' without it. Note that post processing must be set to medium or above for this to actually do anything.

Dynamic Tessellation (Off/On): Currently, this setting doesn't actually do anything—you can't turn it on. It's supposedly going to be an option with DX12 and/or Vulkan, if that ever gets implemented.

Distance Field Shadowing (Off/On): Improves the quality of shadows on distant objects, from what I can tell. Turning this off gives a pretty massive 18 percent increase in performance, so this is one of the first settings I'd recommend changing if you're trying to increase performance.

High Quality Materials (Off/On): Improves the quality of materials effects, like bump mapping and specular highlights. Disabling gives a small four percent performance increase.

Sub Surface Scattering (Off/On): Improves how light interacts with materials, with a small four percent performance increase if disabled.

High Quality VFX (Off/On): This appears to change the quality and quantity of visual pyrotechnics, mostly if you're using weapons (or on fires). In testing, disabling this gave a three percent increase to performance, though the difference may be larger in firefights/raids.

Simple Distance Character Movement (Off/On): This causes no discernable effect on performance in testing, and it appears mostly to reduce the quality of animations on dinosaurs/characters who are far away.

High Quality LODs (Off/On): Increases the level of detail on objects and terrain. Turning this off gives a decent 11 percent increase in framerates.

Extra Level Streaming Distance (Off/On): Mostly affects systems with limited RAM, from what I can tell—it will cause the game to load (stream) in objects that are farther away. In testing, this only causes a small 1-2 percent performance change.

Color Grading (Off/On): A post processing filter that changes the way colors are displayed, mostly making things brighter and more vibrant when enabled. Disabling gives a small three percent increase in performance.

Light Bloom (Off/On): Light blooms are the 'overexposed' highlights caused by reflections from the sun and other bright light sources. Disabling this increases performance by around 3-4 percent.

Light Shafts (Off/On): Creates 'god rays' from light shining through tree limbs. It may have a larger impact in other areas, but I only saw a 3-4 percent change in performance at the test location.

Low Quality Level Streaming (Off/On): Reduces the number of objects loaded into memory, and may help systems that are RAM limited. Gives a 3-4 percent increase in performance.

It's interesting that Ark's developers at one point were talking about a DX12 patch to improve performance, but that was put on indefinite hold over two years ago. Later, the devs started talking about potentially supporting Vulkan instead, but that hasn't appeared either. Regardless, based on the way the game looks and how it currently runs, I'd say there are likely other optimization tasks Ark needs first, before anyone starts thinking about getting improvements via low-level APIs. Meanwhile, more expansion packs are already nearing completion.

Something else to point out is that Ark does use some Nvidia GameWorks libraries, though it appears to be limited to Ansel—the tech that allows you to take ultra-high-res screenshots. The Nvidia branding isn't displayed in-game, but you can see it on the Ark Park trailer. It's difficult to assess how much Nvidia-specific optimizations might be present, but there's reason for at least a bit of suspicion.

Thanks again to MSI for providing the graphics cards, desktop PC, and motherboards for testing. Additional CPU scaling testing was done with various MSI motherboards for sockets LGA2066, LGA1151, AM4, and TR4. All testing was done with the latest Nvidia and AMD drivers available at the time of testing, Nvidia 385.41 and AMD 17.9.1.

Ark is a game that can generate strong feelings from both its proponents and detractors. Some love the 'do anything you want' sandbox environment, others hate it, but the good news is there are servers—included custom dedicated servers run by individuals—for all types of players.

As for performance, Ark also joins the ranks of some of the most demanding PC games currently available. It's possible to run the game on more modest hardware, but at maximum quality, it can take down even the beefiest of rigs. It's also the poster child for the ups and downs of Early Access, and at least in this instance, Early Access didn't do any favors to the hardware requirements.