Top 3 reasons to avoid buying ARK: Survival Evolved early access.
Top 3 reasons to avoid buying ARK: Survival Evolved early access.
After about three hours of playing, I began questioning whether I should have purchased it. Here’s the breakdown! (All performance was measured with today’s hardware: CPU – Intel Core i5 4460, GPU – EVGA GeForce 970, RAM – 8GB DDR3 1600MHz, Storage – 1TB Seagate HDD 7200rpm, 60fps.)
1. Gameplay challenges: The optimization was poor. Even though the early access is known to have issues, I had to play with low settings (medium/high) to maintain around 30 frames per second. Stuttering, objects appearing unexpectedly, audio quality problems, and inconsistent frame rates were all major hurdles.
2. Material gathering: Progress was slow. You’d need to jump 30cm in the air, drink water every five minutes, eat regularly, and deal with extreme temperature fluctuations. At level 5, encountering large dinosaurs at every step made survival difficult.
3. Online experience: High ping was a big problem. Few servers were available, and most were already full. Getting into a match was rare, which made online play frustrating. The lack of sufficient servers really hurt the experience.
Am I permitted to express myself? It doesn't matter. No problem, Sherlock.
It was obvious from the start, I was anticipating that. This post is just to warn those considering it.
Thanks for the update, the game seemed really promising. I’ll keep an eye on it and hope for improvements, similar to what happened with Rust. I was also excited about that title beforehand.
It's understandable—common sense. Your comment about avoiding early access games due to instability makes sense. We appreciate your perspective.
Did you mean to mention optimization in your message? No. Just keep it straight—this isn’t the full experience. You’re getting a partial version, which is typical for early access. It’s running in alpha or beta mode, and that’s why it behaves differently than a finished product. Don’t get surprised by unexpected changes.
They focused on improvements in different areas, though not just optimization. Still, it was centered around making things better.