Wounding my quarry with an arrow and watching my raptor chase it down and kill it came with a joyous sense of friendship and power.Īt higher levels, though, taming animals becomes a joke. I tamed my first raptor, named him after my dog (naturally), and then the raptor and I went hunting. Having a pet is really awesome in Ark, and it's amazing how quickly I bonded with my dino-pals. Though it's a little boring to stand around and watch a sleeping dinosaur wake up, it only takes a few minutes. To tame a dinosaur, you knock it unconscious and give it food to nurse it back to health-I guess dinosaurs have a short memory. Taming your first pet is a really cool experience. Taming dinosaurs, one of the game’s most enjoyable activities, is perhaps the most offensive time sink. It was a bitter moment, and I'm not sure I can recommend it.īetween the grind and the death penalties, Ark just doesn’t respect a player's time. I walked out of my wooden house, tore a branch off a tree, tied it to a rock, and made myself a new stone axe. But when so much of Ark is grinding drudgery, the consequences of its unforgiving style are hard to enjoy. Escaping that fear can be dramatic, and the tragedy of almost getting away can be unforgettable.

My pet raptor was dead and I was without so much as a sharpened stick to my name.įeeling real fear in a game-fear of failure, fear of loss-can be really fun. Finally I saw my first corpse fade away and I died again, respawning naked at my base. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get past that raptor. I spawned at my home nearby, with no weapons or tools and only a few minutes before my body disappeared and all of my best gear was gone forever. Once, I was out hunting with a tamed raptor when a wild, high-level carnivore killed us both, then camped out, chewing on our corpses. In those first 30 hours, there were a few times where I lost absolutely everything. It took me a long time, maybe around 30 hours, before I had enough resources to make backups of my most essential items. More than upgrading tech and building homes and riding dinosaurs, this is the angry core of Ark: everything takes resources gathering resources takes time at any moment, death will destroy everything. It is incredibly stingy with resources, and it takes a lot of time out in the open, where death lurks around every corner, to farm up enough material to do anything. But the ugly side of this freedom is Ark's environment itself.

Ark survival evolved