In the wake of its latest Aberration expansion, Ark: Survival Evolved has now launched on the Windows 10 Store as an Xbox Play Anywhere game.
Much like other games that have walked similar paths—like, say, Fallout Shelter and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard—this means PC players who access Ark via the Windows 10 Store can now join their Xbox counterparts on the same servers as friends or as foes.
"Tied to the players’ Microsoft account, Ark survivors can now pick up their adventure where they left off," explains a statement, "switching between their Xbox One and PC while taking their saved progress, Gamerscore, DLC, and achievements with them."
In his review earlier this year, Ian Birnbaum described Ark's post-Early Access release as "a bloated, grindy mess, but [is] so packed with options that a better game is hidden inside it."
Check out Ian's thoughts in full in this direction, and watch moving pictures of Ark's new Aberration expansion below:
As previously reported, you can also get Layers of Fear and its soundtrack for free. However, while it is included in the indie mega week sale, it's only free through 10 am Pacific tomorrow, Wednesday, December 20.
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Originally due in October, Ark's Aberration expansion lands today—bringing with it an new underground biome, dozens of alien-like dinos and over 50 new craftable items.
Despite not being much of a cave guy, Chris appeared to enjoy his hands-on time with Aberration last month, as he traversed its inhabitable and hazardous underground world where sunlight is apparently deadly. In turn, you should expect earthquakes, environmental pitfalls, ziplines, wingsuits, climbing gear, and, obviously, a cast of fantastically terrifying creatures.
Here's a look at some of that in video form:
And if that wasn't enough to contend with, developer Studio Wildcard warns we should "Beware the ‘Nameless’: unrelenting, Element-infused humanoids, which have evolved into vicious light-hating creatures, and the Reapers, massive alien monstrosities which can impregnate foes to spawn their offspring." Chris bills the latter process as a "rather messy chest-birth to a squirming worm grub" that's equally gross and fun. I'll take his word for it.
With new challenges and over 50 new craftable items to tinker with, Aberration provides plenty to get on with. Speaking to the new creatures, Studio Wildcard adds:
The intense radiation of Aberration has led to incredible genetic mutations, resulting in dozens of new creatures with amazing abilities! Clamber up walls and glide through the air on the back of a camouflaging chameleon-like ‘Rock Drake’, keep the dark at bay with one of four friendly ‘Lantern Pets’, or grab and toss multiple creatures simultaneously with a massive ‘Cave Crustacean’, or—if you are brave enough—allow the horrific Reaper Queen to impregnate you, and spawn a vicious male Reaper alien lifeform you can tame and control.
The Aberration expansion costs $20 standalone, and can also be purchased as part of the Ark season pass which includes Scorched Earth and an as-yet unspecified third expansion. We've been informed Aberration will go live at 6pm GMT/10am PT.
I recently got a chance to play around in an early build of Ark's second expansion, Aberration, which takes place in a series of underground biomes and introduces new movement systems like wingsuit gliding, rock-climbing, and ziplines. Originally planned for an October release, Studio Wildcard has announced that Aberration will now arrive on December 12.
Along with the new environments, and the new tools to get around in them, Aberration will of course arrive with new dinosaurs (or are they aliens?) such as the Rock Drake, which can glide, stick to walls, and become nearly invisible. There's also a hideous queen monster that can lay eggs inside you, causing you to give a rather messy chest-birth to a squirming worm grub. Gross! But fun.
Yesterday I had the chance to speak with Doug Kennedy, CEO of Studio Wildcard, the company responsible for Ark: Survival Evolved. Needless to say, that game’s heady brew of dinosaur riding and tree punching has been a remarkable success–and ranks among the few survival games to leave its stint in Early Access.
But it hasn’t been without controversy. The release of Scorched Earth, Ark’s first major expansion before the game had launched proper, was a sticking point among its playerbase, as were other factors such as the game’s price increase when it finally hit 1.0. But generally speaking the game is being played and enjoyed–it’s sold a whopping 11 million units across all platforms, which can hardly be attributed to player ambivalence.
On Early Access
With all that in mind, would Studio Wildcard use Early Access again? With the notable exception of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Early Access projects have struggled to meet the profile and success of titles like Ark–as well as others such as DayZ and Rust, which remain unfinished. The initiative has an undeniable stigma in 2017, and yet Kennedy’s answer to whether the studio would take that route again is a resounding yes.
“We will absolutely 100% use Early Access for our next project,” Kennedy said. “I enjoy it because it allows us to onboard our hardest of hardcore fans and stay in tune with them, and to give them a voice inside a game that’s being developed.
Aberration, the second Ark expansion, releases next month.
“I’ve seen a lot of games go into Early Access and fail miserably, for a variety of reasons,” Kennedy continued. “We came up with an exceptional concept, we developed a great game. We listened to our fans: there isn’t anyone in the industry better than Jesse Rapczak and Jeremy Stieglitz in terms of staying in front of the fans, talking to them, developer diaries, developer logs, listening. We also manage it from a standpoint of: we have numerous community managers, and we listen to everything. There isn’t a single thread that we aren’t paying attention to. It doesn’t mean we respond to everyone, but we listen to them all, and when we roll out a new expansion pack or update or anything that’s a major change in the game, our community guys are tireless, they stay up days in a row: is there a bug? Is there an issue? What needs to be fixed?”
Kennedy says studios hoping to simply make a buck off an unfinished game shouldn’t go near Early Access. “It’s like having the world as a testing facility, but the problem is–and this is just my personal take–that a lot of people look at it as a means to get money early, and sell a game while they continue to develop. If you’re not listening to the community, if you’re not updating them with what’s going on and what the vision is, where you’re taking it, whatever the vision is, if you’re not doing that there’s no purpose for going into Early Access. Developers really should think long and hard about whether that’s the right place for their game to be. If they’re only going there to raise money early in development, it’s the wrong reason to be there.”
On reviews
I mentioned to Kennedy that Ark currently boasts a “mixed” status on Steam, both for most recent and older reviews. That’s not a particularly good look to newcomers of the game, though it’s a much better look than DayZ or The Forest in terms of games with very vocal playerbases. Do players of Early Access games feel more ownership of a title, and are thus more likely to be critical?
“They do feel more ownership,” Kennedy said. “It’s a balancing act. If you’re new to Early Access and you come on to play a game, and you’ve paid $29 for a title, and you’re expecting a polished game, you’re not going to give it a great review.
“I’d love to see a line in the sand drawn: I’d love for it to be: here are all the Early Access reviews and here are all the post-launch reviews. I’d like to see some kind of equation that says, alright, now come review our game. We’re going to let you review it twice: once before it ships and once as the finished product. Because really, I’ll use a car example. Come and review our car. People love the body style but they get in and there’s no engine. So how do you want to rate the car? That’s kind of an extreme but that’s the mentality of it. No one knew how big the car was going to be when we were building the game.
“But it’s the first game I’ve ever worked on that I haven’t worried too much about metacritic and scoring,” he continued. “Because I knew that we were catching some flack about things like bugs – but we didn’t put it through playtesting, we put it out there and then we fixed things. That’s what Early Access is.”
On Survival of the Fittest
Given the overwhelming success of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds–also an Early Access game–I asked Kennedy whether the studio had any further plans for the Ark equivalent, Survival of the Fittest. The short answer? It’s a “strong possibility”.
“Survival of the Fittest was a great idea, and I can tell you that we will continue to do something with it,” Kennedy said. “I look at it in this manner: it is not a trivial job to just dive in and say ‘hey we’re going to do a competitive battle mode’. We built it, we put it in the marketplace, and I keep talking about consumer quality and making sure you’re following through. It’s great to play it, but if we’re going to run tournaments, with competitive modes and cash prizes etc, we have got to be fully buttoned up.
“We had to make a decision when we put that out there: do we continue to try to run the tournaments and dedicate a ton of development resource to support this or do we develop the [main] game, release an expansion and ship a complete product? When we put SotF back into the marketplace, whenever we do that we should put it in the marketplace so that it’s spectacular and it attracts users and we have a development team to support it. We’ll need a marketing campaign, a tournament team, and everything else necessary for it to be a Triple A battle mode game. We learned a lot by putting it out the way we did. Mainly what we learned was that we have to do it with 100% commitment and do it right.”
On the future
As for the future of Ark, the studio’s goal was to release three major expansions for the main game (the second, Aberration, releases next month), but more may follow depending on player engagement and demand. In addition to Ark Park and Pix Ark, the studio has other plans too: unannounced plans. “We’re very concerned about quality, experience, and making sure we’re not just tossing stuff out there.”
On punching trees
Finally, I asked Kennedy the question I have always wanted to ask a spokesperson for Studio Wildcard (or indeed, any other survival game): have you punched a tree before? Alarmingly, the answer was “yes”.
“In real life? Actually I have,” Kennedy said. “It’s not one of my prouder moments, but as anyone who reads this interview will now know, I have actually punched a tree before. It’s a long story. I’m not taking any credit for the tree punching in the game, but it did hit close to home when I first did it in the game. [laughs]”
The dinosaur-riding survival game Ark: Survival Evolved is chugging along nicely, with about 40,000 people playing it at this moment (a daily peak of 56,000, according to Steam Charts) and a big new expansion called Aberration set to come out later this month. But nothing is forever, and creative director Jesse Rapczak told DualShockers recently that in the relatively near future, Studio Wildcard is going to start looking ahead to a sequel.
The developers aren't actually working on a followup yet, to be clear: Rapczak said Studio Wildcard has "a bunch of great ideas" for Ark, and it's currently in pre-production on a new expansion that's expect to be out sometime in 2018. But beyond that, it's harder to say.
"I think, you know, as we get down the line, over the next year or two, Ark needs to have a sequel at some point," Rapczak said. "It’s definitely gonna be on our minds about when it’s the right time to something like that."
It will be interesting to see how that prediction holds up. The game industry is heavily dependent on sequels, there's no doubt, but the real question is whether Ark is more akin to Call of Duty and Battlefield, which come and go with near-clockwork regularity, or Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends, games that are starting to look as though they'll outlast the mountains.
Either way, before all of that comes Aberration, with a new movement system featuring ziplines, wingsuits, and climbing picks, and a whole new underground world. It's a big change, but it looks very promising.
I've been a bit skeptical about stepping into the world of Aberration—the next expansion for dino-survival game Ark: Survival Evolved, due out this month. Aberration takes place in a different world, one where the only inhabitable spaces are underground due to the extremely hazardous conditions on the surface, where there's no atmosphere and even sunlight itself is deadly.
As a sci-fi concept it sounds cool, but the thing is: I'm just not much of a cave guy. I think caves in games can be nice places to visit, but the thought of spending all my time underground in a game isn't really appealing to me. It's not a claustrophobia thing, I just like being outside (virtually, I mean—in real life, not that much). One of the joys of Ark is soaring above mountains and forests on a winged dino, enjoying the blue skies and shimmering sunlight off the water. The base game has several of its own caves and caverns, and they're cool to visit from time to time. But the idea of playing Ark underground around the clock felt like it could be a bit stifling.
I got a chance to try a build of Aberration last week, and I'm definitely feeling much more optimistic about the expansion.
Aberration isn't just Ark crammed into a cave. It is a bit dark down there, obviously, but some caverns are so massive it essentially feels like standing outside under the night sky. I feel like learning the underground map will be trickier—on The Island map, landmarks like the volcano are helpful when orienting yourself—but during my time in Aberration I didn't really feel like I was underground except in a few areas. There's plenty of room down there.
More importantly, there are new movement systems in Aberration, and even just ninety minutes of fumbling around with them has me kind of excited. It's still Ark, but it already feels very different.
With new movement items like ziplines and winged glider suits, you'd think climbing picks wouldn't be the star attraction. I mean, they're just hooks. But the picks are easily my favorite addition to Ark's tools. With a pair of craftable climbing picks in your hands, the world, even contained underground, feels open. It's freeing to be able to scale rock surfaces and fort walls and giant tree limbs and pretty much anything you want to climb over, around, along, or on top of.
I rarely unequipped my climbing picks while running around in Aberration, and you can see why above: I missed a jump and still managed to hook myself on and claw my way to the top. Since the danger of falling to death is going to be such a big factor in these deep caves and chasms, you'll always want to have some extra picks in your inventory.
Ziplines, which you can fire across gaps with crossbows and then anchor with a second shot, provide another fun way of traversing the map. And you're not limited to just sliding down them. Craft a zipline motor and (provided it's got enough fuel) you can slide up ziplines as well as down.
There are no flying dinosaurs in Aberration, so you'll have to make do with gliding. Luckily, it's pretty satisfying. I'll definitely miss the convenience of hovering on a winged dino, but gliding adds a bit of immediacy and risk. You can get some lift while skimming through the air with your glider wings, but it's not at all like mounted flying and being able to carefully choose a spot to land. I got a bit better after some practice, but still had plenty of crash landings.
Combine these three new systems (after all the crafting you'll need to build these items) and you've got a fun way to get around the new underground biomes. If you're ziplining and you need to make a quick escape, you can drop off the line and glide away. Can't quite stick the landing? Get your climbing pick out and try to latch onto something while you plummet.
Naturally, climbing and gliding isn't restricted to just players. I got to ride a friendly Rock Drake during my time in Aberration, and I rode it straight up a sheer rock wall. The Drake can also perform a lengthy jump, great for transferring from the ground to walls, from walls to trees, from pretty much anything to pretty much anything else, provided you've got enough room. You can glide with the Drake, too, sailing through the air to wind up clinging to something else on the far side of the cavern. Just to sweeten the pot some more, the Drake is a chameleon, and can cloak itself (and passenger) in shimmery, semi-invisibility.
Most of my time in Ark has been spent on a quiet private server with friends, so I don't have any raiding experience, but it's easy to imagine a tribe silently slithering up fort walls, clinging invisibly to cavern cliffs, and gliding in on a fleet of Drakes to stomp another tribe.
While in Aberration, I also had the honor of having an alien burst out of my chest cavity. There's a giant queen creature in the game that can implant players with her brood—I got a quick glimpse of her during my tour, and she's pretty terrifying. The incubation period is sort of amusing: as the creature grows inside you and you get closer to giving 'birth', your torso actually begins bulging comically (or horribly, depending on how you look at it). I was going to post a gif of the creature exiting my body in a spray of blood and wriggling away, but I think I'll let you discover it for yourself when Aberration is released.
I'm still not entirely sure I'll enjoy being underground all the time in Aberration—I still feel like I'll miss the sunlight, snow-capped mountains, and sparkling seas of the island map. But rock-climbing, ziplining, and gliding sure are a lot of fun. Even if I don't love the caves, I love getting around in them.
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.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds may have popularised the genre inspired by the Japanese movie, but it’s not the only battle royale game pitting players against each other in desperate fights to the death. Below are 11 games, modes and mods that you should check out if you can’t get enough of hunting your fellow man.
GAMES
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
Let’s get the current top dog out of the way first, shall we? PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, is still in Early Access, but it’s already swallowed up the lives of millions of players. In each match, 100 survivors are air dropped into a bucolic Russian island, seemingly abandoned during or just after the Soviet era. It’s a huge place, but the play area is always shrinking, forcing players to race towards safety on foot or using cars, bikes and boats, all while trying to murder each other with a wide range of guns and melee weapons. It’s a game filled with long moments of quiet tension, punctuated by chaotic, nerve-racking battles.
H1Z1: King of the Kill
Another Early Access game, H1Z1: King of the Kill was spun out of Daybreak’s zombie survival game. The survival aspect became its own separate game, Just Survive, while the more competitive, PvP side of things became King of the Kill. Frenetic and fast-paced, it’s more of an arena shooter than a game like PUBG, so you won’t have to wait long to get into a gunfight. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene was also a consultant on H1Z1 before making Battlegrounds.
Ark: Survival of the Fittest
Like H1Z1, Ark: Survival of the Fittest is another arena-style battle royale game, and is similarly a spin-off. Its hook, not surprisingly given its progenitor, is that there are dinosaurs and monsters to watch out for, as well as 71 human adversaries potentially hunting you down. Other elements from Survival Evolved have made it in, too, including riding and taming creatures, tribes and traps. Unfortunately, it’s struggled to retain its playerbase in the face of PUBG.
The Culling
If you prefer battle royales of the more intimate variety, there’s The Culling and its 8-player and 16-player blood-soaked arenas. Though it’s fast-paced, there’s still time to craft equipment and set traps. The central conceit is a big draw, too, set as the game is in a crazed game show for sadists. It’s been in Early Access since March 2016, and while it was popular initially, it looks like player numbers might be on the wane.
Last Man Standing
Budget PUBG is probably the clearest way to describe Last Man Standing. It’s set on an island with 100 players trying to kill each other, the play area is a big circle that shrinks over time, mods can be scavenged and attached to guns, it’s got loot crates—there’s a long list of similarities, but Last Man Standing is free. It’s not quite as polished as its premium counterpart, however.
GAME MODES
GTA Online, Motor Wars
GTA Online recently got a competitive mode called Motor Wars, which has some similarities to popular battle royale games: a shrinking kill box, arriving from the sky, then finding the best weapons possible on the ground. The key difference is that it's more focused around vehicle combat, and all the cars are marked on the map, as well as the players driving them. The shrinking kill space provides a similar amount of tension, though, and there's tons more potential in building on the idea, given the size of the map they've got to play with. Sam had fun with it, even though it has some flaws.
Fortnite
Epic has announced a new battle royale mode for their base-building romp, Fortnite. It’s due out this month and will see up to 100 players duking it out until there’s only one left. The mode was put together by Epic’s Unreal Tournament team, who were busy experimenting while Fortnite was in development. The scavenging and building from the game’s regular mode will also feature in this new one, so you’ll be able to create bases and fortifications to hole up in while you wait for everyone else to die. They’ll probably be doing the same, mind you.
Unturned
Unturned is a blocky, free-to-play zombie survival game, but it’s also got a battle royale arena mode. Players are spawned at random points on the map and must hunt each other down while a barrier closes in, damaging those outside it. It’s as straightforward as a battle royale can be, but there’s one odd wrinkle: you can’t damage people with your fists, so you’d better get a weapon as quickly as you can.
MODS
PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale in Arma 2, Arma 3
Before PUBG, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene created DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of the original DayZ mod for Arma 2, inspired by the Japanese film. When players started leaving DayZ for the standalone Early Access version, Greene switched to developing Battle Royale in Arma 3. Later, it was licensed to Daybreak for H1Z1 and became the foundation for King of the Kill. A lot of Battlegrounds’ features started in PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale, and Arma 3’s realistic aesthetic isn’t far of PUBG’s.
Rust: Battle Royale
Rust: Battle Royale is an unofficial mode for Facepunch Studio’s survival game, made by Intoxicated Gaming. Inspired by the Arma 3 Battle Royale mod, it combines the brutality of Rust—you even begin naked—with the race to be the final person left alive. All the survival and crafting elements have been torn out, with the focus being entirely on gearing up and murdering your fellow players in a map that becomes smaller and smaller as bombs start to fall.
Garry's Mod Battle Royale
Created last year, this Garry’s Mod game mode, like so many in this list, owes its creation to the Arma 3 mod, being a lightweight recreation of it designed by IC4RO so they could play it with their friends. Since then, however, it’s become popular, no doubt helped by the fact that Garry’s Mod is considerably cheaper than Arma 3 or Battlegrounds.
Waking up in Ark: Survival Evolved is a bit of a jolt. Lost and naked, new players open their eyes on the shore of an island teeming with dinosaurs and a wild, hostile ecosystem. Ark is an open world in the truest sense: there's nowhere I need to go, nowhere I'm supposed to be. But I can't just starve to death on that beach, so I set off.
More than two years after it emerged as (yet another) open-world survival hit, Ark has finally launched. We're still learning how customer-funded, Early Access development affects games, but for Ark the flush of money and attention seems to have led to an unbalanced game with too many extraneous features and unrefined, unfocused fundamentals.
Sauropod goals
In the jungle, I tear a branch off a tree, tie it to a rock, and then I have a stone axe. Basic tools help me get more trees and rocks, bootstrapping my way up through the history of human-made technology. Unlike many other survival games, Ark's exploration of technology goes all the way: that stone axe eventually leads to rocket propelled grenades, industrial forges, and forcefields.
Whether I'm wearing a hat made out of grass or steel, my goals in Ark are essentially unlimited. Like many of the best PC games, Ark asks me to set goals for myself and be the author of my own stories. I can climb the biggest mountains, I can become a big game hunter, or I can tame my very own pterodactyl and take to the skies.
I decided I wanted a nice little house on a cliff overlooking a waterfall, so I set up camp, built storage containers, and started stripping the hills of wood and stone. I laid foundations and raised walls until, hours later, I stepped back and admired my little slice of the world. Feeling a sense of agency in the world sent me into Ark with the same obsessive abandon that drew me to games like Minecraft or The Long Dark.
But the ugly side of this freedom is Ark's environment itself. It is incredibly stingy with resources, and it takes a lot of time out in the open, where death lurks around every corner, to farm up enough material to do anything. More than upgrading tech and building homes and riding dinosaurs, this is the angry core of Ark: everything takes resources; gathering resources takes time; at any moment, death will destroy everything.
It took me a long time, maybe around 30 hours, before I had enough resources to make backups of my most essential items. In those first 30 hours, there were a few times where I lost absolutely everything. Once, I was out hunting with a tamed raptor when a wild, high-level carnivore killed us both, then camped out, chewing on our corpses. I spawned at my home nearby, with no weapons or tools and only a few minutes before my body disappeared and all of my best gear was gone forever. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get past that raptor. Finally I saw my first corpse fade away and I died again, respawning naked at my base. My pet raptor was dead and I was without so much as a sharpened stick to my name.
Feeling real fear in a game—fear of failure, fear of loss—can be really fun. Escaping that fear can be dramatic, and the tragedy of almost getting away can be unforgettable. But when so much of Ark is grinding drudgery, the consequences of its unforgiving style are hard to enjoy. I walked out of my wooden house, tore a branch off a tree, tied it to a rock, and made myself a new stone axe. It was a bitter moment, and I'm not sure I can recommend it.
Tyrannosaurus wrecks
Between the grind and the death penalties, Ark just doesn’t respect a player's time. Taming dinosaurs, one of the game’s most enjoyable activities, is perhaps the most offensive time sink.
To tame a dinosaur, you knock it unconscious and give it food to nurse it back to health—I guess dinosaurs have a short memory. Taming your first pet is a really cool experience. Though it's a little boring to stand around and watch a sleeping dinosaur wake up, it only takes a few minutes. Having a pet is really awesome in Ark, and it's amazing how quickly I bonded with my dino-pals. I tamed my first raptor, named him after my dog (naturally), and then the raptor and I went hunting. Wounding my quarry with an arrow and watching my raptor chase it down and kill it came with a joyous sense of friendship and power.
At higher levels, though, taming animals becomes a joke. Animals can take hours or even days—according to actual, real-world clocks—to tame. According to one online animal-taming calculator, some high-level animals could take you over a hundred real-life hours to tame: start taming that beast on a Tuesday, and it might be ready to ride into battle by the weekend.
At least in DayZ, both sides have invented gunpowder.
That kind of round-the-clock commitment is clearly impossible without help. I suspect Ark's worst grinding mechanics are designed to push players into playing in tribes online. Though abundant, these servers can be really hit or miss. On PvE servers, the biggest problem I had was that the spawn areas are really built out, full of fenced in compounds, stripped forests, and megastructures created by established tribes. It was pretty hard to find somewhere I could start punching rocks.
And on the PvP servers, the brutal grind and the fear of losing hundreds of hours of work brings out the worst in online behavior. Anyone who has ever played a survival game knows how frustrating it can be to get ganked by some higher level players. In DayZ, for example, it's really common for a pistol-wielding noob to die in battle against an established squad outfitted with rifles. While getting murdered by a high-level jerk sucks, that's what I would call 'normal' for these kinds of games. Surviving to become more powerful yourself is part of the fun, and the stories generated by these power disparities are partially what made the genre so interesting and popular. But at least in DayZ, both sides have invented gunpowder.
The huge tech disparity makes the PvP environment in Ark so much worse. Imagine this: you and your friends build a stone-age village with thatch huts and campfires. One night, you all get murdered and your village destroyed by a team of commandos wearing night-vision goggles and wielding assault rifles equipped with silencers and laser sights. That's not a way that I'm interested in spending hundreds of hours of my life.
Jurassic pork
The really frustrating thing about this state of affairs is that Ark began with a pretty simple pitch: it's an open-world survival game, but you're stuck in Jurassic Park. After more than two years of development with a hungry player-base, that straightforward idea became bloated and top-heavy with weird, irrelevant features at the expense of sorting out the basic mechanics.
Here’s my favorite example of feature-bloat in Ark: a camera. I can decorate my home with painted canvases, but after I craft a camera I can snap pictures, print them, and hang the canvas on my wall to showcase a nice sunset vista. That's a cool idea, but it’s far, far away from the essence of what makes a survival game fun. Survival games are about perseverance in the face of scarcity, but in Ark it takes more refined metals to make a camera than to invent the concept of firearms.
For a game spent more than two years in Early Access, it still has a lot of bugs and missing basic features. Pathfinding for dinosaurs, both wild and domesticated, is really poor. The easiest way to take down a dangerous predator, in fact, is to run through some trees and watch it get stuck.
Ark’s performance also suffers, though I don’t know if that’s due to feature bloat or just a lack of optimization. Running a singleplayer game locally, the only issue I’ve seen a lot of is textures that are slow to load and dinosaurs popping into existence right in front of me. Online performance varies wildly depending on the server, but even on servers with a good connection, I noticed long lag times between moving an item and seeing it change in my inventory and dinosaurs that take several seconds to notice that I’m attacking them. Mega-structures built by powerful tribes usually load one or two chunks of wall at a time, with textures showing up much later.
And in my homestead one morning, I discovered that all of my furniture was permanently glued to the floor. If I wanted to move my bed from one corner to another or add a crafting table to a corner, I’d have to destroy it, lose most of the resources I spent making it, and just make a new one. Certain that I was missing some simple solution, I went searching Ark’s community wikis—there’s no in-game tutorials, so all useful information is maintained by players—only to find that people have been begging for this feature since 2015.
Instead of implementing this essential feature that games in this genre figured out seven years ago, Ark is full of cameras, cake, and wardrums you can bang on like bongos by pressing the number keys on the keyboard. It's hard to excuse something with missing or broken basic mechanics just because it's stuffed full of so much other stuff that just doesn't matter.
Om-nom-nomivore
As a game, Ark is more frustrating than great. But as a platform, it s ambitious.
It’s easier for me to understand Ark less as a game than as a platform that hosts anything players can think of. As a game, Ark is more frustrating than great. But as a platform, it’s ambitious. Ark supports a huge community of modders who make it more focused and more refined.
Ark games also run on a deep menu of options. Most people won’t run their own servers, but if you do, you can change almost everything. Taming animals can be instant, resources can be plentiful, and all of the grind can be eliminated. You can even restrict certain technologies.
The ability to mod and customize everything, and the way that freedom has been embraced by the community, is Ark's biggest strength, and the primary reason I can recommend it. Right now, there are Ark servers are running Primitive Plus, an officially supported mod that keeps technology limited to the pre-metal age. Huge tribes ride high-level dinosaurs into battle with stone-tipped spears. Fighters dressed in leather and fur follow a charging triceratops as it charges through a wall, and a band of raptor-riding marauders raid deep into enemy territory.
Refined, large-scale prehistoric warfare is what I want from Ark, not the janky version full of bugs that includes tyrannosaurs with laser beams attached to their heads. But thanks to Ark’s community, I get to have both, and more. Primitive-tech-only servers, a PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds-style battle royale mode, and a boisterous role-playing community are just three examples of the way Ark’s players are using the game as a base for more interesting things. The long community-involved development cycle might have produced a bloated game full of mismatched features, but it has also built a population of players ready to take it upon themselves to make Ark into something better.
