The biggest hit on Steam in the last couple of months, ARK: Survival Evolved, is having a free weekend if you wanted to discover what a sandbox survival game with dinosaurs is like. You’ll also be able to play the Hunger Games/Battle Royale from H1Z1-style total conversion, if you’re into that.
As an added note, the developers have announced that a patch adding DirectX 12 support for Windows 10 users is on the way, which should make for some interesting benchmarking considering how few games support DX12 at this stage.
There’s also a new Unnatural Selection mode pitting hundreds of players against each other in four-person teams “for a chance to ride the Dragon”. It’s a big dragon, too.
“This limited time ARK: Survival of the Fittest “Unnatural Selection” event will run from 6AM EST, Saturday August 29th through til 11pm EST, Monday August 31st with 24/7 open-preliminary matches on three 100-player Official Servers,” the developers wrote.
Oh, and did I mention: there’s tens of thousands of dollars on the line for this little tournament.
“The battle will last for 2.5 hours each and the winning tribes will advance to a Pre-Championship Tournament set to take place on September 1st at 10AM where contestants will again duke it out until we are down to the final 36 Tribes who will get placed into an epic 144-player Championship Match set to take place at 2:30PM EST and will be streamed on our SurvivetheARK Twitch Channel.”
The winning Championship tribe gets $US20,000; $US10,000 goes to the runner up while all players who make it into the Championship match get a $US100 gift card on Steam.
If that wasn’t enough, special meteor extinction servers will be running over the course of the free weekend until Tuesday morning. “he event will end with a gigantic meteor that comes crashing into the ARK on these servers specifically, destroying them at the end of Monday.”
“We will be uploading and posting the save data from these servers later, for anyone to download who wishes to continue playing their character in singleplayer or re-hosting their data on their own Unofficial Server.”
Pretty good way to do a free weekend on Steam. Read more here if you’re interested.
Comments
6 responses to “ARK Survival Evolved Has Free Steam Weekend And Almost $US50,000 In Prizes To Win”
If I started downloading it now… it might be done by Tuesday. 🙁
Terrible optimized game, will wait until devs finish content updates and finally decide to optimize.
Except that on the smaller maps with less moving parts the game is floorless. It is just that the normal map has over 40k dinos at any one time, even when most are in stasis there is a lot to compute. Probably need to upgrade from the i5 toaster man.
How do you navigate a floorless game? Do you have jetpack or something?
Correcting some one who was auto corrected by his mobile months before is cool.
Was only poking fun 🙂