Not enough survival of the fittest in ARK: Survival Evolved for you? Then let’s ramp it up a notch.
The age of open-world survival sandboxes is far from over, if the latest Steam stats are any indication. In the top 20 games being played on Steam right now, ARK: Survival Evolved sits at #4 with a peak of just over 68,000 players.
Rust and H1Z1 are in the top 20 as well, with peaks of just over 23,000 and 25,000 players today respectively, and Terraria is still sitting about Warframe, Clicker Heroes, Skyrim and Rocket League in the top 10.
So the news that the ARK developers are adding a Hunger Games-inspired game mode should be of some interest to quite a few people. It’s called Survival of the Fittest (SotF) and was built using the game’s total conversion functionality.
“Each SotF battle takes place on a modified version of the ARK Island, with the objective being to eliminate all other survivors before they can eliminate you,” the Steam announcement says. “The map is covered by a dome-shaped forcefield that shrinks as the match progresses and there have been many alterations made to the core-game which effect leveling, taming, gathering to ensure that players are able to reach the end game before the dome completely shrinks.”
“Survivors not only have to worry about each other and the elements, but also the mysterious ‘Evolution Events’ which take place every 30 minutes and can have a major impact on the game, such as drastic weather changes, or predators falling from the sky.”
It also seems like a smart business move, capitalising on the popularity in H1Z1 for its Battle Royale mode. It plays into the way people play these kinds of games anyway: they form alliances, pit enemies against each other, pit friends against each other.
There’s also one other change in the latest update, with the developers (of which there are four) pushing out a “streamlined version” of the Unreal Engine 4 editor “to simplify the creation and sharing process” for ARK mods.
“The updated tools will include everything in the game thus far, as well as provide the players with the own ability to make their own changes, introduce their own weapons, creatures and items into their own version of ARK!”
If you want to check out how the Survival of the Fittest mode was put together, you can do that too — since the full source code has been included with the latest patch.
ARK: Survival Evolved is available for US$24 until August 20 on Steam or for US$22.50 through Amazon.
It’s coming to the Xbox One Game Preview program as well early next year, with a full release on PC/Mac/Linux/PS4/XB1 scheduled for June 2016.
Comments
7 responses to “ARK Survival Evolved Gets A Hunger Games-Style Mode And A Streamlined Editor”
Friend wants to pick this up, I like the look too. But I can’t justify spending $25+ on a game for the three of us, when there’s only a couple hours content.
You will have barely scratched the surface of the game in a couple of hours, unless you play on an unofficial server with drastically increased rates.
Explain? That’s now what reviews said. They’re saying there’s zero content in the game, just some basic survival and breeding/training mounts. I mean you can spend countless hours training dino’s but that’s grinding and can be lost very easily (apparently).
As for actual content, it seems there isn’t much. After you make a base and have dinos, what do?
It’s a PvP survival game, what more content do you want?
Still does not give any explanation to @stickman.
In the end, it is just roaming around taming dinosaurs and building base. That is the only content in the game.
You have to level up before you can build stuff. In two hours at normal pace you’re probably not even building stone structures or metal tools yet, and most of the more interesting dinos saddles come later as well.
I am 200+ plus hours in and still haven’t tamed the higher end creatures. I started on PvE, and it was great fun, but when you hit max level and realise that’s it, well… Then you move to PvP, and that is off the charts.
Most survival games are brutal in PvP. Ark is very friendly, with hostile elements thrown in. Most Aussies in the game are fine, because you can communicate with them. Most people in this game are friendly to your face but WILL kill you if they could do it without repurcussion. In a survival game with dinosaurs, however, there are repurcussions.
It is brutal, silly and fun all in one. DayZ has more finesse, but Ark has more balls.
There’s a lot more than a couple of hours content in there. Been watching a hell of a lot of streams & series on twitch/youtube of it since it’s launch
I am just getting bored of the current content now, and thats 225hours in. A couple of hours playing and your still just trying to get something basic set up, especially if your playing with a friend and trying to meet up somewhere. If you start playing with friends make sure you all start alone from scratch. Just joining up with people skips your a big part of the game.