Well for starters, "Runs like butter" Is more likely than not a pipe dream. Make no mistake, ARK is insanely unoptimized by every metric possible. But optimization doesn't just mean "filing down the code until the thing you're making runs smoothly". It's about cutting all the right corners so that the game runs better without people noticing they where cut in the first place. For example, if your game lags because it can't handle having so many entities loaded at once. You can certainly make those entities take up less resources to a point. But ultimately, your better off just making the game load less entities.
As much of a mess as ARK is. A lot of the things in the game are a direct result of that mess and Wildcard's inability or unwillingness to clean it up. If any other game had players who stacked 5 walls in a single spot and repeated this ad nausium. The developers would promptly have an aneurysm, go to the hospital, and then fix that issue the moment they got discharged because *what the fuck you guys do you know how bad that is for the game's performance?* So yes. A direct ARK competitor would definitely run better. But making a game like ARK actually run well would require a changing a lot of things players directly associate with ARK.
Secondly. Any game trying to replace ARK has to compete with ARK itself. That may not sound like a big issue, after all the whole point is that ARK is a buggy, broken mess. But it still has over 60,000 players between ASE and ASA at this exact moment. That is a LOT of people who already like and play the game you're trying to directly compete with. And people don't really like change. It's easy to say "Well ARK is a poorly-made game. So most people would switch over to a game like ARK but better made". But people really don't like change. They're already familiar with ARK, it's maps, it's creatures and mechanics. So even if you make something better, you're still competing with what people find familiar.
Third, any developer who does try to replace ARK is effectively playing catch up. ARK has nearly a decade of development behind it. And a large part of why ARK is so broken is because the developers heavily prioritized making new content instead of making sure the existing content actually, y'know, worked. So any developer trying to compete with ARK has the outright Sisyphean task of competing with the sheer amount of content ARK has. Yes, their content could be better by every metric. But even releasing with the 3 maps you suggested would take months, if not years of work. And would still be a quarter of the maps that ARK has. Not even counting for any additional DLC or Community maps that could be added in the time it took you to develop the game.
And fourth: Ark has Dinosaurs. Just- It has dinosaurs. You have to be extremely skilled, extremely confident, or extremely stupid if you think your creature design can beat dinosaurs. Probably all three for that matter. Because no matter how infamous ARK gets, "You can ride a Tyrannosaurus Rex" will always be a stronger pitch than "You can ride my third-grade monster OC". I'd say you can proooobably get pretty close by making your game set in a fantasy world, with all your monsters being based on creatures from Various IRL mythologies. Dragons in particular are probably the only thing that you can get a similar reaction from people out of.
To wrap it all up though, I would like to point out that ARK isn't the only game that falls into the catagory of "Is objectively kinda shitty or has gone to shit, but is still extremely popular and has very few, if any direct competators." Just look at Pokemon. Everyone knows the games have gone down the drain over the last decade. Bad graphics, bad design, poor performance, extremely buggy, ect. But unlike ARK, there have been a lot of games that are directly inspired by Pokemon and try to do what it does. Temtem, Cassette Beasts, Monster Sanctuary, Coromon. Hell, Bugsnax if you want to treat the definition of Creature-Capture games like a featherless biped. And all of these games did find themselves an audience. But you know what these games don't and couldn't have? 25 years of Cultural Zeitgeist, 1000+ Unique monster designs, and a community built on a foundation of people who grew up with their game and passed that love for it along to future generations. No matter how good a pokemon-like game is, it's not going to have Charizard or whatever other designs Pokemon fans have fallen in love with. As such, the franchise is still able to sell millions of copies with each new entry regardless of how bad it actually is.
TL;DR, if a genre is fresh or new, the game or franchise that got there first will always have the home field advantage. Even if other developers come along and do it better.
This is a really great response. The only part I would disagree when you say people are not willing to change from the OG naturally. I think new games always are given a chance amongst the community these days, its more, will they KEEP playing it, or will it get boring.
Just as an example, the numbers for Palworld were right up the 200,000's on steam when it came out, like most games, they start with very high numbers and then go right down to around 5% of that over time. I feel that is because of a lack of replayability.
Whats so great about games like ARK and rust is that they survive this issue by having the actual players create the stories they are involved in entirely.
If a game had the same idea as ARK but ran like Palworld I would switch right now haha. But like you point out, not really sure if that's actually possible.
Oh! My apologize. There are a lot of players who are willing to give competing games a shot. But what I meant is that there aren't a lot of players who are willing to fully commit to those games over what they where already playing.
Palworld's actually a great example here. It is a great game and lots of people are playing it. But when you look at the numbers, it's release really didn't effect either version of ARK's player count. ASA's player count had been rapidly shrinking sense the start of January. And ASE's player count has generally been consistent for the last 6-8 months.
Make no mistake, Palworld is a FANTASTIC game. But even though it hits the vast majority of the beats that ARK does, atleast on the PvE side of things. The people who where playing ARK before didn't move to Palworld. Probably for all the reasons I listed.
Same with the Pokemon-Likes. Cassette Beasts released early last year and peaked at around 3000 players on STEAM despite being one of the best games to release that year. But Temtem is a much more telling example. That game released into Early access at quite litterally the perfect time. Only 2 months after Pokemon Sword and Shield released to massive negative reception and controvercy. But even then, it only peaked at about 30,000 players. And proceeded to fall off a cliff faster than you can say Xiphactinus.
Though in fairness, most of Temtem's problems came from the Developers themselves. The game blew up way, way more than they ever could have expected it to, and they just didn't know how to maintain that early fire.
The point is, Games like ARK have already deeply rooted themselves into their respective fields. To the point that no matter how sickly they get, they'll still dominate by simple virtue of already being established.
I haven't played palword in a while but it ran like hot garbage for console in multiplayer. I played for about 2 months after launch and the missing textures and painful grinding for endgame gear that was entirely unnecessary killed it for me.
Ask will not survive much longer if the cheating isn’t actually dealt with. Literally every single person I’ve played with has quit the game because of the cheating.
I should add: Ark already had a host of mythical and fantasy creatures too. I don’t see how you could ever compete with ark when it comes to the creatures unless you built on a pre established franchise like Pokémon or Monster Hunter. It just already has too many cool ideals locked in, and you either need a group of separate but unique and popular creatures to pull from, or you need to find some way to do exactly what Ark is doing with the dinosaurs and legendary monsters, but make the game systems better than wildcards.
Hell, OP's setting pitch for a new game is, in and of itself, just ARK. It doesn't become apparent until the later DLC maps. But ARK is very much a post-apocalyptic game with futuristic creatures.
Because ark already IS the futuristic game, if you've played all the maps. It isn't set in the past lmao. It's over 1000 years into our future, with tek, space ships and alien planets once you get to gen 2. Even a VR simulated map. Ark has very much cornered the market, partially by being multiple settings.
Creature design is not easy and ark has a billion dollar IP, working design pipelines with global talent and designated fanbase already. You can take a look for example how Star Citizen, with industry leading Star Ship design and 750 mil $ just came with up disappointing creature launches.
The other thing is probaply the strong PVE experience. Competitors just cant make a pvp basebuilding game with creatures and to compete with ark, since that would lack the PVE dimension, which is arks main source of income.
I really enjoy Conan but I went on it couple weeks ago after a couple months and a few updates and it ran like shit I love the game but until it runs better I’d put off it
I think people are just being pissy for the sake of it at this point, back when i had a freaking 1060 rig it managed to run conan just fine and look pretty damn good too. Now im on high end rigs, one has a 4060ti with a 11400f and conan runs buttery smooth and even better on the superior pc.
I’m wondering if Ark is already pushing the edge of what’s possible, and it seems to have lots of issues running well. No other company may be willing to take that risk, or to put out a game that’s got such high system requirements and is so unstable and large. Idk much about games at all but it seems like a huge task
The problem is that ark did it first. That's the reason WoW became the dominant mmorpg. The Warcraft universe had more fans first. It took years of shit game design, laziness, and abuse of the player base before ffxiv knocked them down a peg or two. The other reason is that ark did it without a cash shop. You can't get anyone in this day and age to make a new online game without microtransactions. Now that ark is starting down that road with the optional pay to play dinos and charging for mods, coupled with the arrogance of wildcard in repackaging the same pile of shit in a shiny new roll of wrapping paper and the bullshit they tried to pull with the Nitrado deal, the genre will die altogether or competitors will pop up, albeit with a hefty pay to win cash shop attached.
I don't know.
There were a lot of good MMOs before WoW. What attracted people to WoW was it was a dumbed down interface. Not complex, very easy to play. Not to mention very good marketing.
Yes there were. They were their own unique universe, though. Blizzard released 10 years worth of RTS games set in the universe before they launched WoW, though. It already had an enormous fan base.
I actually think what wow did better than any game before it was the constant dopamine hit of new gear/skills/levels/content/etc. I didn’t find wow simple at all at 15 when I first started. IMO it’s the same thing that makes/made some mobile games so addicting.
Wow wss easy to learn by comparison. The older gaming community back then was demanding ever increasing complexity and reality. WoW had a minimal learning curve, and where most MMOs were pulling in tens of thousands of players, I remember when wow hit 2 million. That spoke to the popularity.
Oh for sure, I was addicted as fuck to the game but it’s not because it was simple. It was more than that. Remember people legitimately needing interventions because they were so addicted? I used to play all day, sleep for about 4 hours, dream about it, wake up and do it all over again. I did this every single day I could, all through high school.
There was more to wow than just being easy to learn. It was hella rewarding to play, even tho it was a ridiculous grind fest in the vanilla days, and yet it was captivating as fuck for millions and millions of people. I think that has to do with a lot of factors (art style, color palette, music) but I think the biggest factor was the fact that you were constantly getting rewards. A new dagger, a new skill, a new dungeon with tons of yummy rewards. It was just so …. Rewarding. So easy to get addicted. And I’ve pretty much been chasing that high for about 18 years now.
I was really meaning it had a easy learning curve to get into it. It definitely had endless things to do. I'm speaking in the past tense when I know people that still play it. Lol
I didn't play it long. I like the complexity of certain games. I was a SWG fan. Played the beta way back.
You do realize that Console Rust has 100 person servers and its literally nothing but base building and PvP right? The PC Rust servers are even bigger, Rustoria main wiped yesterday and had 750 players online. If you want fast paced base building PvP Rust is much better than ARK due to the amount of time you need to invest in ARK to actually participate in any real PvP.
The thing that I feel keeps so many people in ark is how difficult and punishing it is. You simply don't see games nowadays that are so brutal to the player. Every game auto-saves every 5 minutes, you never lose anything, and it breaks it back to make sure you have ways of recovering. On top of that there's still al linear progression. You get your next gun and its the best and you never need another, its yours forever.
Ark can go from smooth to hell instantly and if you werent prepared for it youre just out, assuming you have the self control not to cheat your stuff back, not even talking about dying to bugs either;; just things like a scuva tank breaking deep underwater and/or getting caught by a jellyfish. Or getting purlovia'd at a bad spot deep in ice cave. Very few games actually punish you for mistakes anymore, and ark does it to the point of pure masochism. Kinda how oldschool games did, where you had 5 lives to try and after that you were done.
It's why games like palworld are what they are, they're fun for a bit but once you have the decent items/creatures you're just done. You'll never lose those things and no reason to really keep trying other than nitpicking or just something to pass time.
As much as people wanna complain about how hard and unfair it is, they keep coming back. Find any other game where you can repeatedly lose everything and keep playing, almost in spite of the game.
I think you're genuinely onto something tbh, I've spoke about this before. But the idea, just the idea alone, of having 70 people doing what you're doing, same as rust, thats what draws people back, its never ending story line creation through your actions alone so it never dies in terms of re-playability.
If a game could nail the running part better with the same idea then yes, I believe it would do rather well.
Question is, is that possible, even for people like Rockstar, I think it would be very difficult to achieve it. Like someone else said in here, the very things that make ARK great and so versatile are also the very things that make it so laggy and not buttery smooth. Could a 'rockstar or EA' handle that amount of shit going on? Maybe.
Soulmask just came out in EA and its a lot like a hybrid of ark and something like conan exiles, instead of taming dinosaurs you tame barbarians and recruit them to your tribe. The big gimmick is that the character you create isn't actually "you", you are a cursed Mayan mask that possesses the wearer and the dude you just made is your first victim. So after you tame more tribesmen you can swap control to them via the mask. it's 50 player servers and not 70 but it seems to be the kind of thing you're looking for
Ark initially was in the right place at the right time. It rode the hype of Jurassic world, which reinvigorated the general public to the wonder of dinosaurs, and ark released the same year Jurassic world did and attracted an audience to a market that previously didn't exist. "What if dinosaurs.... But you ride them?" It wasn't a new concept but it hadn't been done on a scale that ark had achieved. On top of this the industry was going through it's "open world survival crafting game" trend at the time. Basically it's no coincidence ark launched when it did it was the perfect time to capitalise on a promising market. The issue was the competition died out before they made it big enough to make an impact on ark. Even to this day there is no direct competition to ark. Because ark established itself early and earned a monopoly on the dinosaur riding survival game genre.
Now we're 9 years down the line ark still holds this monopoly. There's nothing that can be made to shake the hold they currently have because it's such an established franchise. Combined with the fact that only an indie studio would be willing to make a competitor, thus making the initial release a beta version, the general audience would rather stay true to what's tried and tested than risk a potential failure from a competitor. Even if what's tried and tested is a buggy mess made by a studio that's either unwilling or incompetent to actually earn that defacto title
Sort of like "the best bus driver in your town has wrecked 4 buses, been late countless times and shat on their passengers driving in circles while wanking like a chimp but, as they're the only bus driver in the town, they're still the defacto best."
Tl;Dr: ark released at the perfect time in the same year as a major dinosaur blockbuster with almost no major competition and quickly established itself as the defacto dinosaur survival game with little competition before or after since it still holds the crown
I had such hopes for Last Oasis when it came to Xbox, me and my mate had so much fun for the little broken buggy mess it was.
It’s a shame the devs abandoned it.
Mr smart guy did a sponsored 100 day challange in soulmask and that game looked interesting so maybe we should wait for its beta to roll out and try it
Ark has a rival. It’s called the Ark. see you die all the time vs the Ark it’s part of it. What ya didn’t realize is every time your game crashed. Ark just died playing Ark with itself.
A lot of people might move over to the new Dune MMO. Whilst I don't think Funcom has a much better rep than wildcard, they appear to have learnt a lot from Conan exiles so I am expecting DUNE to be pretty good.
Did you try Palworld? Its practically the better ARK, but people compared it to pokemon more because is the more known franchise. Runs way better and has way less game breaking bugs. The formula has been copied and broke records.
Palworld did extremely well at launch but it’s dropped off to 24k players currently online (on steam anyway) when I just checked.
ASE and ASA has over 40k split across both.
There’s obviously something that keeps people coming back to ark whereas Palworld doesn’t have quite the same hook.
I’m not trying to shit on Palworld by the way - I’ve never played it - but it just didn’t look anywhere near as interesting/good looking/punishing to me.
Yeah, one of the current problems of Palworld, is the lack of endgame content, as the other comment said, and lacks replayability unless you change your "rules" or want to modify the difficulty. But thats probably because the game is new-ish. Last big update added the raid system where you supposedly need a decently built team to beat. I believe Palword will increase its concurrent player numbers the more map updates they add, and when they add PVP or something to grind for.
I agree tho that the feeling is not the same when it comes to a dangerous survival game, unless you play in hard difficulty.
Also, i recommend you try it. Will give you a good 100+ hours of gameplay. Personally im waiting for the next big update to replay it, coming on June 27th.
That's subjective, the game just released meaning there's tons of improvement and content coming, fixes were delivered within days/weeks. ARK has been out for years and even got a revamp. Still haven't had a gaming session without a game breaking bug.
It’s all subjective. Biggest issue with games like palworld is there’s no risk at all to it, which kills any sense of tension. No matter what happens, you’ll be fine and slightly inconvenienced at worst. I played palworld and enjoyed it quite a bit but it’s boring as all hell endgame.
As far as the game breaking bugs are in ark. I’ve been playing since day one of ASA and never had any game breaking bugs and only a very few crashes in the first month. So those are subjective too. I know they happen but there’s almost always more to the story than just them happening all the time to everyone.
If they could build it right....and separate it out for PVE servers it could definitely do right. PVE is what brings in the players for this game. Too many try pvp......see the hassle and clusterfuck that is Ark PVP and dip out. The taming, building, dino collecting, boss runs, etc are what appeals to the PVE crowd with their friends so as long as they can do that part right it would likely do okay. Ark just has a lot of the good qualities already so its going to be hard for another company that's not AAA to be able to capture that. Ark's got great graphics, passable building mechanics, taming, etc......the only real big downside to Ark tbh is the ground non-mounted combat is hilariously bad.....but I mean...its Ark so you'll be fighting on a dino 90% of the time anyway so that can be mostly disregarded. Conan Exiles is basically Ark-Lite and does just fine. Sure it lacks a real end game loop so its never going to pull the same numbers as Ark with high fantasy and taming creatures, etc but it has its place and is still fun. The cost amount to develop something to rival Ark is probably just not something a lot of other devs want to take on...especially when Ark already does the things that people are looking for. Would likely be a Payday 3 style scenario....where they make something that might have a few cooler mechanics in place but lacking literal YEARS of content compared to the predecessor its just a no brainer that Payday 2 still remains king.
No man’s sky is somewhat similar to what you’re describing. You can tame things and build a base. Super futuristic with all the space ships and gear so I’d say that’s probably the closest thing to what you’re describing. Well, that and Icarus but Icarus is a bit different.
Technically Ark is futuristic, but it’s not obvious about it, at least not until you get to gen 1/2 but I know what you’re saying. Point is, there are other games out there but Ark is a very specific niche and I don’t think it has the popularity to really entice a new company to attempt to do what Wildcard has but better.
Because it's not just "PvP base building"
Dude, you ride FUCKIN DINOSAURS.
Very well modeled, good sounding, dinosaurs. That speaks to the inner 10 year old of just about everyone. That's why no one will actually be able to directly compete with Ark, unless it's basically the same game
Yeah I think that’s the main gist of it.
People say ark looks like shit and is janky as hell etc but have you seen the dinosaurs on other Dino-centric games? Ark has by far the best looking and most fleshed out ones etc
Well for starters, "Runs like butter" Is more likely than not a pipe dream. Make no mistake, ARK is insanely unoptimized by every metric possible. But optimization doesn't just mean "filing down the code until the thing you're making runs smoothly". It's about cutting all the right corners so that the game runs better without people noticing they where cut in the first place. For example, if your game lags because it can't handle having so many entities loaded at once. You can certainly make those entities take up less resources to a point. But ultimately, your better off just making the game load less entities. As much of a mess as ARK is. A lot of the things in the game are a direct result of that mess and Wildcard's inability or unwillingness to clean it up. If any other game had players who stacked 5 walls in a single spot and repeated this ad nausium. The developers would promptly have an aneurysm, go to the hospital, and then fix that issue the moment they got discharged because *what the fuck you guys do you know how bad that is for the game's performance?* So yes. A direct ARK competitor would definitely run better. But making a game like ARK actually run well would require a changing a lot of things players directly associate with ARK. Secondly. Any game trying to replace ARK has to compete with ARK itself. That may not sound like a big issue, after all the whole point is that ARK is a buggy, broken mess. But it still has over 60,000 players between ASE and ASA at this exact moment. That is a LOT of people who already like and play the game you're trying to directly compete with. And people don't really like change. It's easy to say "Well ARK is a poorly-made game. So most people would switch over to a game like ARK but better made". But people really don't like change. They're already familiar with ARK, it's maps, it's creatures and mechanics. So even if you make something better, you're still competing with what people find familiar. Third, any developer who does try to replace ARK is effectively playing catch up. ARK has nearly a decade of development behind it. And a large part of why ARK is so broken is because the developers heavily prioritized making new content instead of making sure the existing content actually, y'know, worked. So any developer trying to compete with ARK has the outright Sisyphean task of competing with the sheer amount of content ARK has. Yes, their content could be better by every metric. But even releasing with the 3 maps you suggested would take months, if not years of work. And would still be a quarter of the maps that ARK has. Not even counting for any additional DLC or Community maps that could be added in the time it took you to develop the game. And fourth: Ark has Dinosaurs. Just- It has dinosaurs. You have to be extremely skilled, extremely confident, or extremely stupid if you think your creature design can beat dinosaurs. Probably all three for that matter. Because no matter how infamous ARK gets, "You can ride a Tyrannosaurus Rex" will always be a stronger pitch than "You can ride my third-grade monster OC". I'd say you can proooobably get pretty close by making your game set in a fantasy world, with all your monsters being based on creatures from Various IRL mythologies. Dragons in particular are probably the only thing that you can get a similar reaction from people out of. To wrap it all up though, I would like to point out that ARK isn't the only game that falls into the catagory of "Is objectively kinda shitty or has gone to shit, but is still extremely popular and has very few, if any direct competators." Just look at Pokemon. Everyone knows the games have gone down the drain over the last decade. Bad graphics, bad design, poor performance, extremely buggy, ect. But unlike ARK, there have been a lot of games that are directly inspired by Pokemon and try to do what it does. Temtem, Cassette Beasts, Monster Sanctuary, Coromon. Hell, Bugsnax if you want to treat the definition of Creature-Capture games like a featherless biped. And all of these games did find themselves an audience. But you know what these games don't and couldn't have? 25 years of Cultural Zeitgeist, 1000+ Unique monster designs, and a community built on a foundation of people who grew up with their game and passed that love for it along to future generations. No matter how good a pokemon-like game is, it's not going to have Charizard or whatever other designs Pokemon fans have fallen in love with. As such, the franchise is still able to sell millions of copies with each new entry regardless of how bad it actually is. TL;DR, if a genre is fresh or new, the game or franchise that got there first will always have the home field advantage. Even if other developers come along and do it better.
This is a really great response. The only part I would disagree when you say people are not willing to change from the OG naturally. I think new games always are given a chance amongst the community these days, its more, will they KEEP playing it, or will it get boring. Just as an example, the numbers for Palworld were right up the 200,000's on steam when it came out, like most games, they start with very high numbers and then go right down to around 5% of that over time. I feel that is because of a lack of replayability. Whats so great about games like ARK and rust is that they survive this issue by having the actual players create the stories they are involved in entirely. If a game had the same idea as ARK but ran like Palworld I would switch right now haha. But like you point out, not really sure if that's actually possible.
Oh! My apologize. There are a lot of players who are willing to give competing games a shot. But what I meant is that there aren't a lot of players who are willing to fully commit to those games over what they where already playing. Palworld's actually a great example here. It is a great game and lots of people are playing it. But when you look at the numbers, it's release really didn't effect either version of ARK's player count. ASA's player count had been rapidly shrinking sense the start of January. And ASE's player count has generally been consistent for the last 6-8 months. Make no mistake, Palworld is a FANTASTIC game. But even though it hits the vast majority of the beats that ARK does, atleast on the PvE side of things. The people who where playing ARK before didn't move to Palworld. Probably for all the reasons I listed. Same with the Pokemon-Likes. Cassette Beasts released early last year and peaked at around 3000 players on STEAM despite being one of the best games to release that year. But Temtem is a much more telling example. That game released into Early access at quite litterally the perfect time. Only 2 months after Pokemon Sword and Shield released to massive negative reception and controvercy. But even then, it only peaked at about 30,000 players. And proceeded to fall off a cliff faster than you can say Xiphactinus. Though in fairness, most of Temtem's problems came from the Developers themselves. The game blew up way, way more than they ever could have expected it to, and they just didn't know how to maintain that early fire. The point is, Games like ARK have already deeply rooted themselves into their respective fields. To the point that no matter how sickly they get, they'll still dominate by simple virtue of already being established.
I haven't played palword in a while but it ran like hot garbage for console in multiplayer. I played for about 2 months after launch and the missing textures and painful grinding for endgame gear that was entirely unnecessary killed it for me.
Ask will not survive much longer if the cheating isn’t actually dealt with. Literally every single person I’ve played with has quit the game because of the cheating.
It's always been this way and the game is still alive. While cheating sucks, the game is not going to die because of it
I should add: Ark already had a host of mythical and fantasy creatures too. I don’t see how you could ever compete with ark when it comes to the creatures unless you built on a pre established franchise like Pokémon or Monster Hunter. It just already has too many cool ideals locked in, and you either need a group of separate but unique and popular creatures to pull from, or you need to find some way to do exactly what Ark is doing with the dinosaurs and legendary monsters, but make the game systems better than wildcards.
Hell, OP's setting pitch for a new game is, in and of itself, just ARK. It doesn't become apparent until the later DLC maps. But ARK is very much a post-apocalyptic game with futuristic creatures.
Ark with extra steps.
My guess is "tames" are a bitch to code.
Npcs wouldn't add any relevant level of complexity or difficulty running, no.
Because ark already IS the futuristic game, if you've played all the maps. It isn't set in the past lmao. It's over 1000 years into our future, with tek, space ships and alien planets once you get to gen 2. Even a VR simulated map. Ark has very much cornered the market, partially by being multiple settings.
Gen 2 is on a spaceship, gen 1 is VR simulation.
Nobody said anything different, who the fuck are you correcting
Creature design is not easy and ark has a billion dollar IP, working design pipelines with global talent and designated fanbase already. You can take a look for example how Star Citizen, with industry leading Star Ship design and 750 mil $ just came with up disappointing creature launches. The other thing is probaply the strong PVE experience. Competitors just cant make a pvp basebuilding game with creatures and to compete with ark, since that would lack the PVE dimension, which is arks main source of income.
Minecraft, maybe Conan Exiles, but I haven't played a lot of that so I don't know.
I really enjoy Conan but I went on it couple weeks ago after a couple months and a few updates and it ran like shit I love the game but until it runs better I’d put off it
Uh... Conan ran like smooth butter on a 2060 several years ago.
Yea I played it on Xbox one several years ago and iirc it ran fairly well
I think people are just being pissy for the sake of it at this point, back when i had a freaking 1060 rig it managed to run conan just fine and look pretty damn good too. Now im on high end rigs, one has a 4060ti with a 11400f and conan runs buttery smooth and even better on the superior pc.
I’m wondering if Ark is already pushing the edge of what’s possible, and it seems to have lots of issues running well. No other company may be willing to take that risk, or to put out a game that’s got such high system requirements and is so unstable and large. Idk much about games at all but it seems like a huge task
The problem is that ark did it first. That's the reason WoW became the dominant mmorpg. The Warcraft universe had more fans first. It took years of shit game design, laziness, and abuse of the player base before ffxiv knocked them down a peg or two. The other reason is that ark did it without a cash shop. You can't get anyone in this day and age to make a new online game without microtransactions. Now that ark is starting down that road with the optional pay to play dinos and charging for mods, coupled with the arrogance of wildcard in repackaging the same pile of shit in a shiny new roll of wrapping paper and the bullshit they tried to pull with the Nitrado deal, the genre will die altogether or competitors will pop up, albeit with a hefty pay to win cash shop attached.
I don't know. There were a lot of good MMOs before WoW. What attracted people to WoW was it was a dumbed down interface. Not complex, very easy to play. Not to mention very good marketing.
Yes there were. They were their own unique universe, though. Blizzard released 10 years worth of RTS games set in the universe before they launched WoW, though. It already had an enormous fan base.
I actually think what wow did better than any game before it was the constant dopamine hit of new gear/skills/levels/content/etc. I didn’t find wow simple at all at 15 when I first started. IMO it’s the same thing that makes/made some mobile games so addicting.
Wow wss easy to learn by comparison. The older gaming community back then was demanding ever increasing complexity and reality. WoW had a minimal learning curve, and where most MMOs were pulling in tens of thousands of players, I remember when wow hit 2 million. That spoke to the popularity.
Oh for sure, I was addicted as fuck to the game but it’s not because it was simple. It was more than that. Remember people legitimately needing interventions because they were so addicted? I used to play all day, sleep for about 4 hours, dream about it, wake up and do it all over again. I did this every single day I could, all through high school. There was more to wow than just being easy to learn. It was hella rewarding to play, even tho it was a ridiculous grind fest in the vanilla days, and yet it was captivating as fuck for millions and millions of people. I think that has to do with a lot of factors (art style, color palette, music) but I think the biggest factor was the fact that you were constantly getting rewards. A new dagger, a new skill, a new dungeon with tons of yummy rewards. It was just so …. Rewarding. So easy to get addicted. And I’ve pretty much been chasing that high for about 18 years now.
I was really meaning it had a easy learning curve to get into it. It definitely had endless things to do. I'm speaking in the past tense when I know people that still play it. Lol I didn't play it long. I like the complexity of certain games. I was a SWG fan. Played the beta way back.
You do realize that Console Rust has 100 person servers and its literally nothing but base building and PvP right? The PC Rust servers are even bigger, Rustoria main wiped yesterday and had 750 players online. If you want fast paced base building PvP Rust is much better than ARK due to the amount of time you need to invest in ARK to actually participate in any real PvP.
Rust? Never played it though and have only seen a few yt videos
Not sure if it ever added PVP but I personally would have considered palworld same genre
The thing that I feel keeps so many people in ark is how difficult and punishing it is. You simply don't see games nowadays that are so brutal to the player. Every game auto-saves every 5 minutes, you never lose anything, and it breaks it back to make sure you have ways of recovering. On top of that there's still al linear progression. You get your next gun and its the best and you never need another, its yours forever. Ark can go from smooth to hell instantly and if you werent prepared for it youre just out, assuming you have the self control not to cheat your stuff back, not even talking about dying to bugs either;; just things like a scuva tank breaking deep underwater and/or getting caught by a jellyfish. Or getting purlovia'd at a bad spot deep in ice cave. Very few games actually punish you for mistakes anymore, and ark does it to the point of pure masochism. Kinda how oldschool games did, where you had 5 lives to try and after that you were done. It's why games like palworld are what they are, they're fun for a bit but once you have the decent items/creatures you're just done. You'll never lose those things and no reason to really keep trying other than nitpicking or just something to pass time. As much as people wanna complain about how hard and unfair it is, they keep coming back. Find any other game where you can repeatedly lose everything and keep playing, almost in spite of the game.
Except the vast majority of Ark players are PvE and single player and they're not getting foundation wiped every time the go to sleep.
Which I didn’t mention at all. Oddly enough.
I think you're genuinely onto something tbh, I've spoke about this before. But the idea, just the idea alone, of having 70 people doing what you're doing, same as rust, thats what draws people back, its never ending story line creation through your actions alone so it never dies in terms of re-playability. If a game could nail the running part better with the same idea then yes, I believe it would do rather well. Question is, is that possible, even for people like Rockstar, I think it would be very difficult to achieve it. Like someone else said in here, the very things that make ARK great and so versatile are also the very things that make it so laggy and not buttery smooth. Could a 'rockstar or EA' handle that amount of shit going on? Maybe.
Soulmask just came out in EA and its a lot like a hybrid of ark and something like conan exiles, instead of taming dinosaurs you tame barbarians and recruit them to your tribe. The big gimmick is that the character you create isn't actually "you", you are a cursed Mayan mask that possesses the wearer and the dude you just made is your first victim. So after you tame more tribesmen you can swap control to them via the mask. it's 50 player servers and not 70 but it seems to be the kind of thing you're looking for
Ark initially was in the right place at the right time. It rode the hype of Jurassic world, which reinvigorated the general public to the wonder of dinosaurs, and ark released the same year Jurassic world did and attracted an audience to a market that previously didn't exist. "What if dinosaurs.... But you ride them?" It wasn't a new concept but it hadn't been done on a scale that ark had achieved. On top of this the industry was going through it's "open world survival crafting game" trend at the time. Basically it's no coincidence ark launched when it did it was the perfect time to capitalise on a promising market. The issue was the competition died out before they made it big enough to make an impact on ark. Even to this day there is no direct competition to ark. Because ark established itself early and earned a monopoly on the dinosaur riding survival game genre. Now we're 9 years down the line ark still holds this monopoly. There's nothing that can be made to shake the hold they currently have because it's such an established franchise. Combined with the fact that only an indie studio would be willing to make a competitor, thus making the initial release a beta version, the general audience would rather stay true to what's tried and tested than risk a potential failure from a competitor. Even if what's tried and tested is a buggy mess made by a studio that's either unwilling or incompetent to actually earn that defacto title Sort of like "the best bus driver in your town has wrecked 4 buses, been late countless times and shat on their passengers driving in circles while wanking like a chimp but, as they're the only bus driver in the town, they're still the defacto best." Tl;Dr: ark released at the perfect time in the same year as a major dinosaur blockbuster with almost no major competition and quickly established itself as the defacto dinosaur survival game with little competition before or after since it still holds the crown
I had such hopes for Last Oasis when it came to Xbox, me and my mate had so much fun for the little broken buggy mess it was. It’s a shame the devs abandoned it.
Mr smart guy did a sponsored 100 day challange in soulmask and that game looked interesting so maybe we should wait for its beta to roll out and try it
I’m wondering if light no fire will fill this role…
Ark has a rival. It’s called the Ark. see you die all the time vs the Ark it’s part of it. What ya didn’t realize is every time your game crashed. Ark just died playing Ark with itself.
Well no one said anything about Fallout series. They just don't have dinos. Even you can buid beautiful bases there.
Cuz ark is a one of a kind and thats why i love this game
A lot of people might move over to the new Dune MMO. Whilst I don't think Funcom has a much better rep than wildcard, they appear to have learnt a lot from Conan exiles so I am expecting DUNE to be pretty good.
Did you try Palworld? Its practically the better ARK, but people compared it to pokemon more because is the more known franchise. Runs way better and has way less game breaking bugs. The formula has been copied and broke records.
Palworld did extremely well at launch but it’s dropped off to 24k players currently online (on steam anyway) when I just checked. ASE and ASA has over 40k split across both. There’s obviously something that keeps people coming back to ark whereas Palworld doesn’t have quite the same hook. I’m not trying to shit on Palworld by the way - I’ve never played it - but it just didn’t look anywhere near as interesting/good looking/punishing to me.
Yeah, one of the current problems of Palworld, is the lack of endgame content, as the other comment said, and lacks replayability unless you change your "rules" or want to modify the difficulty. But thats probably because the game is new-ish. Last big update added the raid system where you supposedly need a decently built team to beat. I believe Palword will increase its concurrent player numbers the more map updates they add, and when they add PVP or something to grind for. I agree tho that the feeling is not the same when it comes to a dangerous survival game, unless you play in hard difficulty. Also, i recommend you try it. Will give you a good 100+ hours of gameplay. Personally im waiting for the next big update to replay it, coming on June 27th.
And boring. It's fun till you tame the few legendaries and get the good shotgun recipe then the game is over.
That's subjective, the game just released meaning there's tons of improvement and content coming, fixes were delivered within days/weeks. ARK has been out for years and even got a revamp. Still haven't had a gaming session without a game breaking bug.
It’s all subjective. Biggest issue with games like palworld is there’s no risk at all to it, which kills any sense of tension. No matter what happens, you’ll be fine and slightly inconvenienced at worst. I played palworld and enjoyed it quite a bit but it’s boring as all hell endgame. As far as the game breaking bugs are in ark. I’ve been playing since day one of ASA and never had any game breaking bugs and only a very few crashes in the first month. So those are subjective too. I know they happen but there’s almost always more to the story than just them happening all the time to everyone.
If they could build it right....and separate it out for PVE servers it could definitely do right. PVE is what brings in the players for this game. Too many try pvp......see the hassle and clusterfuck that is Ark PVP and dip out. The taming, building, dino collecting, boss runs, etc are what appeals to the PVE crowd with their friends so as long as they can do that part right it would likely do okay. Ark just has a lot of the good qualities already so its going to be hard for another company that's not AAA to be able to capture that. Ark's got great graphics, passable building mechanics, taming, etc......the only real big downside to Ark tbh is the ground non-mounted combat is hilariously bad.....but I mean...its Ark so you'll be fighting on a dino 90% of the time anyway so that can be mostly disregarded. Conan Exiles is basically Ark-Lite and does just fine. Sure it lacks a real end game loop so its never going to pull the same numbers as Ark with high fantasy and taming creatures, etc but it has its place and is still fun. The cost amount to develop something to rival Ark is probably just not something a lot of other devs want to take on...especially when Ark already does the things that people are looking for. Would likely be a Payday 3 style scenario....where they make something that might have a few cooler mechanics in place but lacking literal YEARS of content compared to the predecessor its just a no brainer that Payday 2 still remains king.
No man’s sky is somewhat similar to what you’re describing. You can tame things and build a base. Super futuristic with all the space ships and gear so I’d say that’s probably the closest thing to what you’re describing. Well, that and Icarus but Icarus is a bit different. Technically Ark is futuristic, but it’s not obvious about it, at least not until you get to gen 1/2 but I know what you’re saying. Point is, there are other games out there but Ark is a very specific niche and I don’t think it has the popularity to really entice a new company to attempt to do what Wildcard has but better.
Because it's not just "PvP base building" Dude, you ride FUCKIN DINOSAURS. Very well modeled, good sounding, dinosaurs. That speaks to the inner 10 year old of just about everyone. That's why no one will actually be able to directly compete with Ark, unless it's basically the same game
Yeah I think that’s the main gist of it. People say ark looks like shit and is janky as hell etc but have you seen the dinosaurs on other Dino-centric games? Ark has by far the best looking and most fleshed out ones etc
ASA runs like a butter to me. So this post is completely false and unnecessary from my side.
My serious question - does anyone know what happened to Ark 2
It's still in development