KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
Honestly, it's because it's based around the assumption that not everyone has a single base and has to do everything, but rather that you'll have a group of 10-16+ people average with at least 4-8 people on at any one time, commonly harvesting, taming in shifts, and generally working in close proximity to each other. That's why things are balanced against single player-type play, and why you get more XP the more people are doing things around you.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Honestly, it's because it's based around the assumption that not everyone has a single base and has to do everything, but rather that you'll have a group of 10-16+ people average with at least 4-8 people on at any one time, commonly harvesting, taming in shifts, and generally working in close proximity to each other. That's why things are balanced against single player-type play, and why you get more XP the more people are doing things around you.
Yeah, but if babysitting my tame is boring, how exciting is babysitting someone elses? It's just not a fun game mechanic. There's no challenge to it. It's purely a waste of time.
Taming is especially bullshit with weird stuff like Troodons. On 1x I eventually shot the Equus I was trying to tame in the back of the head just to end the bullshit, because seriously that was taking forever and that horse was going home with me together or in pieces.
The one tame that makes sense to take a while is Titanosaur, and mainly just on pvp servers because it's a bunker buster and other tribes may object to you taking one... But that one you just beat up until you can put a saddle on it and that's that.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
Honestly, it's because it's based around the assumption that not everyone has a single base and has to do everything, but rather that you'll have a group of 10-16+ people average with at least 4-8 people on at any one time, commonly harvesting, taming in shifts, and generally working in close proximity to each other. That's why things are balanced against single player-type play, and why you get more XP the more people are doing things around you.
Yeah, but if babysitting my tame is boring, how exciting is babysitting someone elses? It's just not a fun game mechanic. There's no challenge to it. It's purely a waste of time.
You're assuming it's "someone else's" tame, when it would be the entire tribe's tame. The seems to be that, default Tribe options set as they are, dinos that a tribe tames are the tribe's dinos, not a personal dino. Like, Tom, Bill, and Bob tame a rex for their tribe, trading places and keeping watch over it, and in the end, it's anyone's tame to ride, because the tribe itself needs a rex, not because Tom's personal base needs a rex.
I've found things to do while babysitting a knocked out tame before, more than one thing to do, really. Harvest stone I need for building at home, grab berries while I'm out, whatever. But yes, it can be boring. My point is that it's less boring when multiple people can switch off on the puppy guarding duty.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
I mean, sure. Even when I was playing on XBox with a small clan of about 6 of us, we would help each other with tames. So yes, that happens. It's not an unreasonable thing.
But it also totally sucks for the solo player. And even with multiple people manning shifts on a tame, its still boring as fuck.
Some of that can be mitigated by good planning, preparation, and experience. Like... we had a taming pen inside our base. For small stuff, we would fly it in with a ptera and drop it into the pen and tame it in the complete safety of our base. For bigger stuff that couldn't be flown, we would build a temporary taming area out in the field with wooden spikes and things. But even with good methodology and best-practices, it's still super lame to sit there and watch a dino's torpor levels and food levels.
Which brings me back to my original point that I'm playing this to have fun and taming dinos is the least fun part of ARK (to me). Owning dinos, riding dinos, and all that is great. But taming wild ones within their horrible game systems is the worst.
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
But taming wild ones within their horrible game systems is the worst.
I dunno, from what I know of breeding it's a regular shitshow as well.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
edited September 2017
I'm not saying their original systems are good, I'm saying they're balanced for a higher number of people than solo play and for PvP. I don't think their PvE setting is nearly good enough by itself, for example.
Kalnaur on
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
But taming wild ones within their horrible game systems is the worst.
I dunno, from what I know of breeding it's a regular shitshow as well.
Breeding in ARK feels like it was designed by someone who saw a egg/chick incubator at a museum once as a kid, and extrapolated from a vague memory of how reproduction works in birds.
Yeah, even if you're a small tribe, a reasonably-leveled, say, Therizino, could take upwards of eight hours on 1x where it needs constant attention. For a tribe of five people that's an incredible pain in the ass. You have to cordinate the play schedules of all five, and make sure you can take turns uninterrupted for the next eight hours.
And, if in a PVP server, which seems to be the default assumption, hope against hope that an asshole on a rex doesn't come by and kill your unconscious tame for lulz while there is only one dude and his mount guarding it, seven hours into the tame.
There's a reason why in single player my taming method is catch dino, hit tab, type dotame. And the mod with the potion that drops a dinos hunger to 0 is the best.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
They seem to have been trying on some level to change up the taming model with later tames, but ultimately they end up being as tedious/dangerous or moreso than the standard method. Feeding tamed gigas to troodons? Killing and using physics carry on fish and chasing down a duck? Guess I'll never tame those.
Also, the countdown page has eyes moving around now.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
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firewaterwordSatchitanandaPais Vasco to San FranciscoRegistered Userregular
I don't really see the appeal of single player on this one but I've also never tried it so who knows.
Can't really replicate my favorite ark memory in single player: a bunch of half naked dudes huddled together in a tiny metal hut half way up a mountain trying not to freeze to death.
Similarly, my favorite ark memory is going on a taming safari with my brothers with a herd of trikes and a paracer and taming our first major tame, a big spino with beautiful coloration on its spine. We were way undergeared and almost died a lot because Ark happens but we managed to tame it, and bring Spino Bifida back to defend our cliffside manor.
My favorite Ark memory is the phrase "Quick, take off all your clothes and lead it away with a string of your own corpses!"
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
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firewaterwordSatchitanandaPais Vasco to San FranciscoRegistered Userregular
2nd favorite memory was randomly stumbling across the t-rex I had lost a week or two prior in the middle of nowhere. I was so happy to have my poor lost Cheesefries back!
Only really played singleplayer, and it is fun, up until you start trying to move past early firearms and metal armor.
Gathering materials for, well, everything, becomes a real slog.
I ended up in a loop of taming a pack of raptors and other dinosaurs, use them to take down something bigger, loose most of the dinos, tame new dinos, take down single bigger dino, tame new dinos...
Server settings would probably help, make gathering easier and enemies weaker, but it really is not designed for single player.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
My favorite Ark memory is the phrase "Quick, take off all your clothes and lead it away with a string of your own corpses!"
I remember when Sallah did that. She still has my eternal gratitude.
We murdered it with 3 large meat-eaters a short while later.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
I use Single player at this point to cheat in massive amounts of building supplies and make epic huge shit that would bog down even the beefiest servers. Past that, I'm not super sure that SP is really all that useful for actual play.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Single Player does have some advantages. For one, it has a pause button. And for another, you can't come a week later and discover that all your dinos are dead because a Spino happpened to acquire an interest on your area.
In general it's a lot less pressure. Like, back in the server, I honestly at points felt pressured to play. Gotta come in every few days, go off to hunt and grab berries to refill the food troughs, spend an hour and a half going to the north for oil and refining it to refill the electricity which my ability to keep stuff depends on, blah blah blah. I honestly started to grow annoyed at it, because I wanted to play other stuff but I had invested too many hours into these things to just let them die, because the sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a thing. By comparison, I played a chunk of singleplayer this summer, now I haven't played in about three weeks because I'm playing other stuff and I know that when I feel like continuing I can just retake it whenever I want. There's a freedom in that that genuinely makes me uncertain if I want to play in a server again, much as I had fun with you guys.
Single Player does have some advantages. For one, it has a pause button. And for another, you can't come a week later and discover that all your dinos are dead because a Spino happpened to acquire an interest on your area.
In general it's a lot less pressure. Like, back in the server, I honestly at points felt pressured to play. Gotta come in every few days, go off to hunt and grab berries to refill the food troughs, spend an hour and a half going to the north for oil and refining it to refill the electricity which my ability to keep stuff depends on, blah blah blah. I honestly started to grow annoyed at it, because I wanted to play other stuff but I had invested too many hours into these things to just let them die, because the sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a thing. By comparison, I played a chunk of singleplayer this summer, now I haven't played in about three weeks because I'm playing other stuff and I know that when I feel like continuing I can just retake it whenever I want. There's a freedom in that that genuinely makes me uncertain if I want to play in a server again, much as I had fun with you guys.
That's all true. Totally true. It's basically the problem with a single player base in multiplayer on this game; it's just not intended or expected, because the upkeep is a lot of work.
I feel like the best base experiences I've had thus far are when Budd and I either shared a base on The Center, or had two rather close compounds on SE. If he needed me to check something, I could, and if I need him to, he could, with no problems. If I couldn't make it for, like, a week? He could make sure there was a minimal amount of food in the trough and the energy was still running (though the modded solar panels generally saw to that anyways, once we switched over to them).
That's why I say that at heart, the game is multiplayer based. I love being able to pause the game, and to essentially play whenever you want, and single player hands me both those things. But if we have a larger single base instead of a bunch of largeish scattered tribe bases, it's just going to be easier, if my experience is any indication at all.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
For single player I set structure damage slider to zero and disable decay entirely, so there's no upkeep. Your base is 5% crafting stations, 10% storage, and 750% parking lot. The downside is that old abandoned bases start to clutter up if you don't circle back and demolish them.
I'm on a phone right now, but fast take, hell yeah we're playing that when it launches.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
edited September 2017
Good damn that looks fantastic.
There's not a hope in hell that I'll be able to get it when it comes out, as we're going to have to be moving within the next two months, but whenever I can, I'll just pick up their Season Pass, since it gives a 33% discount for having SE.
Also, we're getting closer and closer to having the possibility of Open World Turok-alike, so that's cool . . .
Kalnaur on
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Given the explanation for the Ark thing, I kind of wish at some point they would do an expansion that focuses on the pliestocene to current day animals, or just add some current day animals in. I know there's already mammoths and dire creatures, but I wouldn't mind just a regular elephant, lion or rhino popping up at some point.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Single Player does have some advantages. For one, it has a pause button. And for another, you can't come a week later and discover that all your dinos are dead because a Spino happpened to acquire an interest on your area.
In general it's a lot less pressure. Like, back in the server, I honestly at points felt pressured to play. Gotta come in every few days, go off to hunt and grab berries to refill the food troughs, spend an hour and a half going to the north for oil and refining it to refill the electricity which my ability to keep stuff depends on, blah blah blah. I honestly started to grow annoyed at it, because I wanted to play other stuff but I had invested too many hours into these things to just let them die, because the sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a thing. By comparison, I played a chunk of singleplayer this summer, now I haven't played in about three weeks because I'm playing other stuff and I know that when I feel like continuing I can just retake it whenever I want. There's a freedom in that that genuinely makes me uncertain if I want to play in a server again, much as I had fun with you guys.
That's all true. Totally true. It's basically the problem with a single player base in multiplayer on this game; it's just not intended or expected, because the upkeep is a lot of work.
I feel like the best base experiences I've had thus far are when Budd and I either shared a base on The Center, or had two rather close compounds on SE. If he needed me to check something, I could, and if I need him to, he could, with no problems. If I couldn't make it for, like, a week? He could make sure there was a minimal amount of food in the trough and the energy was still running (though the modded solar panels generally saw to that anyways, once we switched over to them).
That's why I say that at heart, the game is multiplayer based. I love being able to pause the game, and to essentially play whenever you want, and single player hands me both those things. But if we have a larger single base instead of a bunch of largeish scattered tribe bases, it's just going to be easier, if my experience is any indication at all.
The main reason I play single player is I just can't play a game for longer than a couple of weeks. I get burnt out and bored, and I need to move on to something else. Then I feel bad for leaving a bunch of crap around that I keep saying to myself that I'll log on and do something about, but then I never do. Really, the best way for me to play these games online is to just help out someone else for a while until I get bored.
I really do like the ability to adjust sliders, though.
I'd never played Ragnarok before, so I loaded it up tonight to explore a bit and, goddamn somebody make the designers of this map responsible for every map in every game ever.
I haven't tried Scorched Earth, but compared to Center and especially the Island, this is definitely a map that was designed with the game's mechanics in mind. I mean, shit, just spawning at Viking Bay, I can visually see six good spots for a sizeable house (not counting the acres of nice flat beach) and several for just plain huge bases. And not the Island's typical "Wow this looks like it's just perfectly flat and it goes on forev- nevermind three foundations and that's it," but like, "I actually spawned a ton of foundations and laid out a16x16 beachfront house with a huge deck extending two foundations into the water and two 4x4 sheds." I mean, sure, for PVP almost none of them are defensible unless you encompass most of the bay, but for PVE there's just great building sites everywhere.
Not to mention just the theme and flavor, the kind of scenery that you see and you *know* what game it's from. I'm currently building a large house around the giant skull at the back-right of Viking Bay because... You know, giant fucking skull in my living room.
I could see myself never getting past this area, just cutting down the entire jungle to build my dream estate right here.
Alright, on a laptop and can see the trailer at higher res now.
Things I noticed.
-Adorable fish-dog
-Fireflies
-Chemical lights
-Giant mushrooms and crystals
-Some sort of... devices, looks like a pump... for some kind of purple ooze
-Character holding some sort of seed or... grenade?
-Ziplines!
-Village, specifically built into a cliff face YESSSSSSSSSS
-Mole creature in the village
-Stealthing bird-lizard that glides and can climb rocks
-Climbing/hanging from ceiling vines
-Bug/crab thing
-Wingsuits!
-Burrowing rat creatures
-Lightning gun
-Rat creatures mutate
-Bigger burrowing thing, looks kinda like a wyvern
-Climbing picks again
I think we can assume the terrain in the version is going to be very vertical.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I lost the link (or did I find it here?) but from.what I read it's all underground, so all the mobility tools are to deal with the terrain. The broken ark's surface is a barren, radioactive vacuum, but its underground is full of crazy mutants.
There's supposed to be some kind of hazard system for vacuum and radiation added, with new protective gear.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
Yeah, a read through of the current Steam page pretty much provides you with all you want to know, including that the names of the creatures are:
Rock Drake: Gliding cloaking critter
Lantern Pug: Take a guess
Cave Crustacean: The bigass crab
Nameless Queen: Bigass ratlike bitch that surfaced with the others, apparently can "impregnate your foes with a horrifying reproductive chest-burster!"
Items include glowsticks, climbing picks, wingsuits, ziplines, hazmat outfits, "charge" lanterns, batteries, explosive rounds, railguns, etc. New gathering items like fishing baskets and gas collectors, and of course the seen cliffside structures.
Earthquakes, radiation, gas leaks, and "element" chambers are the listed hazards, and the basic layout seems to be super irradiated ARK with no atmosphere up top, and therefore a lot of radiation leaking in and fucking shit up like the maintenance systems on the station.
The last tidbits are that the rat-things themselves are the ‘Nameless’, and according to the page, they are "unrelenting, Element-infused humanoids which have evolved into vicious light-hating monstrosities". Apparently there is a new "charge" energy of some kind that keeps waves of these creatures at bay. Also, that "in the deepest depths of Aberration, their terrifying -- yet somehow familiar -- master awaits… will YOU be among the survivors powerful enough to face him?"
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Yeah, a read through of the current Steam page pretty much provides you with all you want to know, including that the names of the creatures are:
Rock Drake: Gliding cloaking critter
Lantern Pug: Take a guess
Cave Crustacean: The bigass crab
Nameless Queen: Bigass ratlike bitch that surfaced with the others, apparently can "impregnate your foes with a horrifying reproductive chest-burster!"
Items include glowsticks, climbing picks, wingsuits, ziplines, hazmat outfits, "charge" lanterns, batteries, explosive rounds, railguns, etc. New gathering items like fishing baskets and gas collectors, and of course the seen cliffside structures.
Earthquakes, radiation, gas leaks, and "element" chambers are the listed hazards, and the basic layout seems to be super irradiated ARK with no atmosphere up top, and therefore a lot of radiation leaking in and fucking shit up like the maintenance systems on the station.
The last tidbits are that the rat-things themselves are the ‘Nameless’, and according to the page, they are "unrelenting, Element-infused humanoids which have evolved into vicious light-hating monstrosities". Apparently there is a new "charge" energy of some kind that keeps waves of these creatures at bay. Also, that "in the deepest depths of Aberration, their terrifying -- yet somehow familiar -- master awaits… will YOU be among the survivors powerful enough to face him?"
The real master was the friends we made along the way!
Question- I just built a new computer, and now I have a fast but small M.2 Solid State Drive, and an old regular HDD. Does Ark pull from the harddrive enough to be worth putting on the M.2? I'm just worried because I know Ark has been bloated in the past in terms of size and updates, and I don't want to overload the 250 GB drive (that has the OS and another game already on it).
Question- I just built a new computer, and now I have a fast but small M.2 Solid State Drive, and an old regular HDD. Does Ark pull from the harddrive enough to be worth putting on the M.2? I'm just worried because I know Ark has been bloated in the past in terms of size and updates, and I don't want to overload the 250 GB drive (that has the OS and another game already on it).
Your setup is basically what I have, it sounds like. I recently transferred my Ark files to my 250gb m.2 from my old spinny and it's almost completely stopped my god drops. Worth it for me so far. Gonna be pissed when it inevitably bloats.
Just looked at the install size... yeah, I'll just deal with a few hitches.
I've left it on my platter drive due to the size and haven't had any issues that I noticed. It looks quite quickly, all things considered (maybe 20 seconds).
Edit: I say that, and then after this latest update, it's been taking a lot longer to load. Also noticing textures loading slower in game. FPS is still decent, though.
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Yeah, but if babysitting my tame is boring, how exciting is babysitting someone elses? It's just not a fun game mechanic. There's no challenge to it. It's purely a waste of time.
The one tame that makes sense to take a while is Titanosaur, and mainly just on pvp servers because it's a bunker buster and other tribes may object to you taking one... But that one you just beat up until you can put a saddle on it and that's that.
You're assuming it's "someone else's" tame, when it would be the entire tribe's tame. The seems to be that, default Tribe options set as they are, dinos that a tribe tames are the tribe's dinos, not a personal dino. Like, Tom, Bill, and Bob tame a rex for their tribe, trading places and keeping watch over it, and in the end, it's anyone's tame to ride, because the tribe itself needs a rex, not because Tom's personal base needs a rex.
I've found things to do while babysitting a knocked out tame before, more than one thing to do, really. Harvest stone I need for building at home, grab berries while I'm out, whatever. But yes, it can be boring. My point is that it's less boring when multiple people can switch off on the puppy guarding duty.
But it also totally sucks for the solo player. And even with multiple people manning shifts on a tame, its still boring as fuck.
Some of that can be mitigated by good planning, preparation, and experience. Like... we had a taming pen inside our base. For small stuff, we would fly it in with a ptera and drop it into the pen and tame it in the complete safety of our base. For bigger stuff that couldn't be flown, we would build a temporary taming area out in the field with wooden spikes and things. But even with good methodology and best-practices, it's still super lame to sit there and watch a dino's torpor levels and food levels.
Which brings me back to my original point that I'm playing this to have fun and taming dinos is the least fun part of ARK (to me). Owning dinos, riding dinos, and all that is great. But taming wild ones within their horrible game systems is the worst.
I dunno, from what I know of breeding it's a regular shitshow as well.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Breeding in ARK feels like it was designed by someone who saw a egg/chick incubator at a museum once as a kid, and extrapolated from a vague memory of how reproduction works in birds.
In actual real time. :rotate:
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
And, if in a PVP server, which seems to be the default assumption, hope against hope that an asshole on a rex doesn't come by and kill your unconscious tame for lulz while there is only one dude and his mount guarding it, seven hours into the tame.
Also, the countdown page has eyes moving around now.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Can't really replicate my favorite ark memory in single player: a bunch of half naked dudes huddled together in a tiny metal hut half way up a mountain trying not to freeze to death.
Gathering materials for, well, everything, becomes a real slog.
I ended up in a loop of taming a pack of raptors and other dinosaurs, use them to take down something bigger, loose most of the dinos, tame new dinos, take down single bigger dino, tame new dinos...
Server settings would probably help, make gathering easier and enemies weaker, but it really is not designed for single player.
I remember when Sallah did that. She still has my eternal gratitude.
We murdered it with 3 large meat-eaters a short while later.
In general it's a lot less pressure. Like, back in the server, I honestly at points felt pressured to play. Gotta come in every few days, go off to hunt and grab berries to refill the food troughs, spend an hour and a half going to the north for oil and refining it to refill the electricity which my ability to keep stuff depends on, blah blah blah. I honestly started to grow annoyed at it, because I wanted to play other stuff but I had invested too many hours into these things to just let them die, because the sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a thing. By comparison, I played a chunk of singleplayer this summer, now I haven't played in about three weeks because I'm playing other stuff and I know that when I feel like continuing I can just retake it whenever I want. There's a freedom in that that genuinely makes me uncertain if I want to play in a server again, much as I had fun with you guys.
That's all true. Totally true. It's basically the problem with a single player base in multiplayer on this game; it's just not intended or expected, because the upkeep is a lot of work.
I feel like the best base experiences I've had thus far are when Budd and I either shared a base on The Center, or had two rather close compounds on SE. If he needed me to check something, I could, and if I need him to, he could, with no problems. If I couldn't make it for, like, a week? He could make sure there was a minimal amount of food in the trough and the energy was still running (though the modded solar panels generally saw to that anyways, once we switched over to them).
That's why I say that at heart, the game is multiplayer based. I love being able to pause the game, and to essentially play whenever you want, and single player hands me both those things. But if we have a larger single base instead of a bunch of largeish scattered tribe bases, it's just going to be easier, if my experience is any indication at all.
This looks rad AF. Good call on that broken Ark being the next xpac, Mudd.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
There's not a hope in hell that I'll be able to get it when it comes out, as we're going to have to be moving within the next two months, but whenever I can, I'll just pick up their Season Pass, since it gives a 33% discount for having SE.
Also, we're getting closer and closer to having the possibility of Open World Turok-alike, so that's cool . . .
Given the explanation for the Ark thing, I kind of wish at some point they would do an expansion that focuses on the pliestocene to current day animals, or just add some current day animals in. I know there's already mammoths and dire creatures, but I wouldn't mind just a regular elephant, lion or rhino popping up at some point.
The main reason I play single player is I just can't play a game for longer than a couple of weeks. I get burnt out and bored, and I need to move on to something else. Then I feel bad for leaving a bunch of crap around that I keep saying to myself that I'll log on and do something about, but then I never do. Really, the best way for me to play these games online is to just help out someone else for a while until I get bored.
I really do like the ability to adjust sliders, though.
I haven't tried Scorched Earth, but compared to Center and especially the Island, this is definitely a map that was designed with the game's mechanics in mind. I mean, shit, just spawning at Viking Bay, I can visually see six good spots for a sizeable house (not counting the acres of nice flat beach) and several for just plain huge bases. And not the Island's typical "Wow this looks like it's just perfectly flat and it goes on forev- nevermind three foundations and that's it," but like, "I actually spawned a ton of foundations and laid out a16x16 beachfront house with a huge deck extending two foundations into the water and two 4x4 sheds." I mean, sure, for PVP almost none of them are defensible unless you encompass most of the bay, but for PVE there's just great building sites everywhere.
Not to mention just the theme and flavor, the kind of scenery that you see and you *know* what game it's from. I'm currently building a large house around the giant skull at the back-right of Viking Bay because... You know, giant fucking skull in my living room.
I could see myself never getting past this area, just cutting down the entire jungle to build my dream estate right here.
Things I noticed.
-Adorable fish-dog
-Fireflies
-Chemical lights
-Giant mushrooms and crystals
-Some sort of... devices, looks like a pump... for some kind of purple ooze
-Character holding some sort of seed or... grenade?
-Ziplines!
-Village, specifically built into a cliff face YESSSSSSSSSS
-Mole creature in the village
-Stealthing bird-lizard that glides and can climb rocks
-Climbing/hanging from ceiling vines
-Bug/crab thing
-Wingsuits!
-Burrowing rat creatures
-Lightning gun
-Rat creatures mutate
-Bigger burrowing thing, looks kinda like a wyvern
-Climbing picks again
I think we can assume the terrain in the version is going to be very vertical.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
There's supposed to be some kind of hazard system for vacuum and radiation added, with new protective gear.
Items include glowsticks, climbing picks, wingsuits, ziplines, hazmat outfits, "charge" lanterns, batteries, explosive rounds, railguns, etc. New gathering items like fishing baskets and gas collectors, and of course the seen cliffside structures.
Earthquakes, radiation, gas leaks, and "element" chambers are the listed hazards, and the basic layout seems to be super irradiated ARK with no atmosphere up top, and therefore a lot of radiation leaking in and fucking shit up like the maintenance systems on the station.
The last tidbits are that the rat-things themselves are the ‘Nameless’, and according to the page, they are "unrelenting, Element-infused humanoids which have evolved into vicious light-hating monstrosities". Apparently there is a new "charge" energy of some kind that keeps waves of these creatures at bay. Also, that "in the deepest depths of Aberration, their terrifying -- yet somehow familiar -- master awaits… will YOU be among the survivors powerful enough to face him?"
Your setup is basically what I have, it sounds like. I recently transferred my Ark files to my 250gb m.2 from my old spinny and it's almost completely stopped my god drops. Worth it for me so far. Gonna be pissed when it inevitably bloats.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I've left it on my platter drive due to the size and haven't had any issues that I noticed. It looks quite quickly, all things considered (maybe 20 seconds).
Edit: I say that, and then after this latest update, it's been taking a lot longer to load. Also noticing textures loading slower in game. FPS is still decent, though.