An Eye On Indie - “Ark: Survival Evolved” - Studio Wildcard
A New Breed of Open World Survival
Hunt, Tame, and Ride Dinosaurs in This Large-Scale, Multiplayer, First-Person Survival Game Coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Steam.
Independent developer Studio Wildcard, founded by former Microsoft technical art director Jesse Rapczak, unveiled its Jurassic creation with the announcement of “ARK: Survival Evolved”, an open-world dinosaur survival game where players fight for every breath amongst the most ferocious creatures to ever walk the earth.
Created in the Unreal Engine 4, ARK: Survival Evolved is a first person survival game with a focus on multiplayer cooperation and competition. Arriving unarmed and naked on an unnamed island with several giant pillars reaching into the sky, players will find themselves in the thick of an expansive wilderness surround by the giant beasts of the past and on occasion another survivor. Players must quickly learn to hunt, harvest, craft, and research new skills and technology in order to stay alive in this dangerous land. Building a shelter is only just one of your concerns. The land is truly expansive and on foot could easily take hours to cross, assuming you remain undetected by the hostile carnivores or perhaps even those hostile players who already call the island home. It’s not just the living creatures players must be aware of in "Ark," nature and the weather play an incredibly key point, the days can be scorching hot, the nights freezing cold and you need to manage your personal health on such occasions.
Stay in the burning sun to long and you’ll quickly dehydrate, become too cold or wet and you’ll slowly lose health and stamina as your body begins to give into the elements.
“ARK taps into the scale, size, and wildly unpredictable nature of the dinosaur eras like no other game before it, then pairs it with the wonders of exploration and technological discovery,” Jesse Rapczak, co-founder and co-creative director, Studio Wildcard
It will be important to build your character’s strengths and gain items, skills, and pet creatures as you continue to survive on the island, each new level bringing you boosted stats and new technology to create and dominate both the prehistoric creatures and any potential enemies. You’ll be able to create what the game calls tribes, a group you create alongside friends which allows you to share resources and homes. Anyone in the tribe can contribute to its growth and all will benefit from creating a working society. It’s this feature which creates the largest possibilities for “Ark: Survival Evolved” the world you live in has a degree of persistence, build a home and never return? That structure will stay there until its destroyed, cause a massive wave of deforestation in your quest for wooden buildings? The landscape will be more desolate for a time as nature slowly repairs and regrows the destruction you’ve brought. Remember though, nature is your friend, it offers shelter and protection from not just the dinosaurs
Other players are organizing rebel tribes to accumulate resources, experience, re-spawn points, and to construct sprawling villages and cities, with technology spanning the primitive stone-age to the modern electric-powered era and beyond. And they will fight to destroy anything they see as a threat.
You’ll have the ability to tame 60 amazing dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts, including gargantuan creatures on a massive scale. Fly a Pterodactyl, race on the back of Raptors, create a convoy of gigantic Brontosaurus or rampage through your enemies on the back of a T-Rex. Be warned though you still need to look after your creatures, you need to feed, water and care from them if you want to keep them on your side and alive.
“ARK: Survival Evolved” will launch in early 2016 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One via the ID@Xbox program and Steam, including Oculus Rift VR support. It will also have a thorough integration of Steam community features such as Steam Economy and Steam Workshop for custom maps and mods.
