Its been a year (and 1 day!) since my original review, and having become my most played game on Steam I figured I should update this review.

So a year on, and ARK has gone from 100-something hrs played with great promise, to currently 1,300-something hrs played with still more promise.

The points from the original review still hold true. For better or worse! The community is still divided on various topics, with the odd new one thrown in - such as the price increase (it doubled when it hit launch). Which even tho 60 quid is a lot for a game (seriously tho, shop around!), it was clearly stated that the game would be going up once it hit launch. Its hard to take the anger with this seriously. And even with the low points (ARK is a rollercoaster!), I cant let some salt take from the fact that this game has given me a serious amount of entertainment and even if you pay full MSRP, you will likely get your value.

So to update on some of the points previously made (below).

Official still sucks for rates and other reasons, playing unofficial is best.

Performance is still not where it should be, but despite complaints that no optimization has happened, that is false. Other than the small tweaks from time to time, it received a sizeable increase about a month before launch which gave me 15%+ performance, and driver updates at launch gave another 5% or so. Also added better SLI profile, altho I dont like multi GPU setups, dont recommend them, and even with these improved drivers you still only see 50-60% scaling. But you will see people linking year old (outdated) YouTube benchmarks showing ♥♥♥♥ performance... With almost gleeful reaction, seems plenty enjoy raging on performance rather than tweak their settings! Dear "professional" benchmarkers, consider turning off motion blur for eg!

Currently I play at 4K Res (scaled down a little over 20%, giving me roughly 6.5M pixels - or above triple HD), every setting 'Epic', Sky maxed, Ground clutter at about 20%, distance 100%, a few extras on like light shafts, extra quality AF, near AO. And this gives me 45-58 (capped for GSync), using a 1080ti OC'd. The game still struggles around high pop areas, but with little in the way of restrictions, this is what you get! If you have hundreds of tames, a large base with thousands of assets, tribes mates running around, 100's of wild AI in the locale, expect your fps to hurt. It is what it is!

BUGS. Still there. Too many of them honestly. I have still somehow escaped some of the nasty ones which others encounter. Even with some optimism thrown in, I dont believe this game will ever get bug free, or even bug-free-adjacent. I cant really excuse it. But the fact the game still entertains, the good continues to outweigh the bad.

MODS. Game has a healthy mod base, with some seriously awesome stuff to improve and change things. Still enjoy trying new stuff.

And on a final note - Its sad to see some of the negative reviews which detail dislikes which can 100% be addressed with tweaking/modding. If you dont like Tek tier for example - REMOVE IT! Poof! It doesnt exist! An annoying dino? REMOVE IT! An OP Dino? TWEAK IT! Dont like the loot drops - CHANGE IT! Ark allows a huge range of tweaks and changes, if your main issues lie with something that a single line of text in an ini file could render totally moot, I cannot take you seriously. And honestly, if you get thousands of hours of entertainment out of something, *IMO* you kinda need the devs to come and murder one of your family (or someone you like) if your going to rate it down after something not going your way...

*(E: Micro edit! 1 other thing, *Dear DEVS* Do better at communicating, thank you!)

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ARK is one of those games that if you love it, you are in for a treat, as the size and commitment of the community means so many experiences and mods can lead to hundreds or even thousands of hours of play.

The game generates seriously polarised opinions. This is due to a variety of reasons. My take on them are as follows:

The first being, that on an official server, with default values, this game is a MASSIVE time sink. For anyone who works, I dont see how you could play it very well, as before long tasks and activities require sometimes insane amounts of time. Whether its gathering materials to build upper tier structures or devices, taming certain dinos, raising a dino, and so on. This doesnt have to be the case, as on unofficial servers, the game can be tweaked in a huge range of fields to make things a more tailored experience.

Its performance. It gets its share of bashing over it. I dont personally think its bad (altho it sure isnt great!), but appreciating how much is going on, often you are asking the game to keep track of a thousand stats, render a mile off, draw a hundred trees, a dozen dino's or 4, shadows... it adds up! You will want a decent rig playing this. There are a good amount of settings so people on the lower side (770/960 etc) can still play if you notch some things back a bit, it wont look great of course. Any lower, and while it may run, I wouldnt recommend it. (Im surprised the system req are so low)

Paid DLC during EA!? Yeah, that happened. The short answer is, people were extremely pissed and its easy to see why. I understand the reaction of most, the game is still in development, still missing features, and still has bugs, how the hell did they think it was going to go down that they were spending time on paid content!! And heres the thing, I bought it, I love it and Im giving them a pass. DONT SCREAM AT ME! The reason is, its not like 99% of other EA games out there, it has a huge amount of content and gets regular updates. Its just in a different league to the vast majority of EA titles (heck, that statement could nearly be said dropping the EA part out!). The price of admission is a steal for what you are getting, the cost of the DLC vs what you are getting not so much, but to support such an incredible game (and the fact I got the base game cheap via Humble Monthly), I bought it and I love it.

Bugs. They exist. You will find them. How much it bothers you, or hurts your experience will vary. Ive not had game breaking stuff happen to me much. On 2 occasions I got completely stuck and had to exit. Some rather annoying collision issues. For me, the good still outweighs the bad. BUT seriously, some of them do baffle me that they havent been fixed, for eg, some loot crate locations (which are static) result in the crate being lodged in the world and you cannot access them.

The controversial BattlEye anti-cheat system. Far too long to discuss here, look it up. In a word "invasive". This is only req for official severs tho - thankfully! (launch command "-nobattleye")

Ive put more time in to this game than I thought I would. Ive had many great moments, and there's still plenty of play left in it. I havent even touched some of the big mods, still have only played on the official base map (plus some on the official DLC map), the new upper tier items look insane (Ive only barely gotten into the current upper tier stuff - metal/glass/guns/electric etc), the mod community continue to amaze and Im sure will for years to come, procedurally generated maps.

Its an easy recommendation!