It's on sale on steam and I'm tempted. But then I noticed it had a DLC and that it was still in early release. I mean.. Isn't that the definition of cheek? "Here, pay more money to continue testing our game for us!" Am I seeing this wrong or something?
That actually bugged me. As an early backer of ARK, I was frustrated that various bugs and performance issues persisted while the devs added extra content - ignoring base issues. However, when it was discovered that the devs were using backer / early-access money to develop a separate DLC I at first assumed myself, and other early-adopters would get it free, as a thankyou for our very early support for the game. Nope. So, major issues for a lot of people in the base game, money NOT used to fix these, but rather code paid-for DLC. Totally left a sour taste in my mouth, and I've not touched ARK since. Very poor show by the devs doing this. Fine if the base game was already out and they'd done extra work, but not when the base game is unfinished and has issues. Scoob.
Short answer is that the founders of Wildcard are very unscrupulous and have no business ethics or acumen.
You aren't alone. There are 4.7 million owners and about 50,000 players. You can't fool people, they know when they are being taken for a ride.
And with the nerf, i mean patch today it is blowing up again. Those guys really don't know what they are doing. You have thousands of people playing thousands of hours and pee down their necks? Not wise. I guess they just want to make sure No Man's Sky doesn't get all the bad press
It's a fun game, and excellent multi-player. Especially if you can get onto a private server that is locked down to just you and your friends, but I gave it a very bad review, due to them favouring making money over fixing issues. The bugs are very, very annoying. I've stopped playing now. Not due to in-game issues, but due to the fact that it quickly turns into a fracking job. A job where no time off or vacations are allowed, lol.
Well I avoided buying it. Mostly because it looked like it was more focused on multiplayer than on an SP game. I'm just to old and crotchedy to deal with mp. I play games to get away from people not to get all mired up with them more.
Yeah, I picked it up early. Then they started moving towards a focus on PvP instead of a focus on content and bug fixing. I got my money back fast. @medicineman, Yes, the focus is completely on MP. As near as I could tell, they don't care about SP play at all. SP gets really boring after about 3 hours of gameplay.
That is really what I'm afraid is going to happen to Empyrion too. Even though PVP doesn't seem like an emphasis right now most of this game's development has been hobbled by multiplayer requirements so it is only a matter of time until PVP becomes a focus. You can't have MP without PVP. And in the end why make up content when you can just provide yet another arena for people to fight each other in. The lowest common denominator.
Don't let these nay sayers fool you, ARK is the number one played Survival game on steam for a reason and has been in the top 5 played for weeks now. It is a great game and the devs have fixed many issues with it including many optimizations to the game itself, unlike other games that launched with more optimization and little to no content they did it the other way around and launched with lots of content and have optimized over time. They continue to optimize and yes add more content and the recent flyer patch is not the first time they nerfed dinos to balance them out but you don't hear anyone complaining about that anymore because it was a great thing in the end. They already made a 2nd pass on the fliers and they are much better now. The flyers really did need the nerf. WC does listen and one of their devs wrote a very well written and informative thread on what they are wanting to do with the flyers. I have been running an ARK server since the day it came out and yes there have been some frustrations with some patches but they have improved so much over the time since they have launched. The DLC is really not a big deal at all, people make a fuss over it because they can, you can hand someone a $100 and they would complain it wasn't more...
Lol that is the worst argument I've ever heard. Launching a DLC before you've even finished the game and are in early release is a cheap shot. Just a money grub. It's even worse than a zero day DLC with a big AAA launch because nobody paid upfront to get the AAA game developed via early release funding. Anyway ARK seems way to MP oriented anyway. Not my style.
I really hope that Empyrion balances on pve and mp. I dont play pvp as my name suggests why. I love Empyrion and am excited for 6.0. Empyrion is on the top of my favorite games and hope that the devs will keep the balance.
I agree. I got suckered in with the sale of ARK but being a solo or MP PVE player that game isn't for me. I hope Empyrion focuses on more MP PVE in the future. I am loving this game but setting up servers and hoping you find a good team to explore with seems difficult. Also would like to see more missions or POIs to attack and scale according to how many people in a party or something similar. In the meantime I got some POIs to attack.
Played Ark for awhile in single player mode and liked it but having seen what players are doing in multiplayer mode it's got ridiculous at what their able to build.
Ark PvP is a flaming pile of turd, its even worse than Empyrion is with all the experimental bugs and all. At least Empyrion has tons of potential with SV dogfights and lining up CVs for artillery volleys. All ark has pvp wise is... you drop turtles on the enemy's base in order to drain their turrets of ammo. And as odd as that sounds, it ends up heavily favoring the attackers since turtles are dirt cheap while turret ammo is expensive. What Ark is good at is its pve content on heavily modded unofficial servers. And awsome mods is hardly something the devs can claim credit for.
Not a big fan of PVP in any game more a PVE myself but there are lots of people that like that sort of play
I think they have a good idea and game but a few bits poorly implemented has cost them a fair bit, they seem to me like there not getting the sales they expect, maybe because it went so well on launch and that peak has died off or maybe its just not that good of a game long term, I cant testify to long term play of it, I have 2 accounts and between both of them just under 100 hours of play so not a huge amount of time in the game, it seems to me the devs maybe have there mark to high when it comes to cashflow. I dunno there dev set up, how many what there costs are, maybe they have over spent in setting up and are now being left short wages ? Who knows but I ALWAYS get realy really suss on developers that ask for DLC during basic development of a game. Usually a sign of poor choices earlier.
ARK is the number one most played survival game on Steam, 4,883,135 players. For awhile they were number 3 on most played games on steam overall, I am sure they are doing just fine.
