Early Access may be considered a hive of scum and villainy by PC gamers these days after a string of high-profile implosions, but the service has been the source of quite a few success stories, with ARK: Survival Evolved being the flavour of the last few months. Just how flavourful? Two million flavours.
I can’t really take the flavour stuff any further, but you get the idea. For an in-development indie game that’s only been available for less than six months, two million copies is a staggering number and goes to show that there’s still a strong desire for multiplayer survival games, despite the constant influx of such titles. The difference is developer Studio Wildcard seems to be keeping up with its players.
As a sort of celebration, Wildcard co-founder Jesse Rapczak cracked open a Reddit “IAMA” to field questions about the title, with his introduction including the sales to date.
There’s a bit of talk about DirectX 12 and potential performance gains, but from what I can gather, it isn’t ready for prime time yet (to the chagrin of a few eager fans). That said, “console optimisations” should bring speed benefits to the PC.
The game is slated for a June 2016 release, when it will have undoubtedly sold a lot more copies. Anyone care to guess the future tally?
IAmA Co-Founder for recently launched Early Access title ARK: Survival Evolved. AMA! [Reddit, via PC Gamer]
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11 responses to “Early Access Darling ARK: Survival Evolved Hits 2 Millions Copies”
Although there’s many, many bugs in ARK at the moment (of the non harvestable variety…), I’m enjoying the HELL out of it. I play this every day almost with friends. It’s a truly amazing game, but I really do hope they don’t water down what they’ve done on the pc to ensure it fits on consoles, the PC version with its superb modding community and their results and with its all over polish which even in Alpha, outdoes a lot of big budget, big name games, is where this games true lifespan will be, not on consoles where it will enjoy a somewhat limited run as mmo’s tend to do.
i havent played much of but the devs have followed in the footsteps of Bohemia Interactive with their execution of Early Access which is great to see
I played 390 hours in the first couple of months of this game. I can attest that it is incredibly fun and one of the most fun multiplayer experiences I’ve ever had. The only problem was the fact that everything in there is real time. It got to the point where I was staying up all night in fear of our place being raided etc.
On the first server we played on (myself and a few mates) we managed to get a nice metal box base going really early on and secure it. I broke into our neighbours place when I was showing a new mate the ropes and the neighbours happened to catch me so they then came back with a Bronte and started attacking our base. When they ran out of explosives and couldn’t get in we ended up allying with them and becoming one tribe. We became one of the strongest tribes on our island and a Japanese hack tribe joined our island and eventually wiped everyone off it starting with us.
We moved to a new server with about 60 people who all fled the Japanese invasion and became the strongest tribe on that server with bases everywhere (since everyone joined up but wanted to do their own thing). Having everyone in one tribe made defence alot easier. But it got to the point where we were unstoppable… Had bazillons of dinos and bases all over the map. After we did everything, it reached that point of stagnation where there was no point to raiding and attacking people other than to grief them (the cost of attacking a metal base usually out weighed the rewards).
But my gosh some of our earlier exploits were fun. Getting revenge on a tribe who killed one of our dinos or members, bringing down an entire huge rock tower (early on this was extremely exciting, not so much in recent patches). There was this one enemy tribes base who had built a stupidly huge base and we managed to break in, and found all their door codes written on a sign. I was in tears laughing as we opened up their barn and killed all their dinos. The next day they logged in to their entire base just fully open. Ahhh good times.
Come play on the DRust server under modified. We’ve managed to nail down a multiplier that lets you level fairly decently without spending stupid amounts of hours doing so, decent gather multipliers without being stupidly overdone and a 7x taming multiplier that means the longest any one tame will take is 1 hour 🙂
Deserving of its success imo, played over 100 hours in the first week of early access. Taking a break now but will go back in a few months to see all the stuff they’ve added. Well worth it, also pretty sure its on sale on Steam atm if anyone is interested.
Last two weeks alone saw the addition of:
The Dire Wolf (Great at harvesting chitin and combat, needs no saddle though which means it takes more damage in combat. Possibly because of the fact it attacks so strongly and harvests so well, it had to have a flaw.
The Beelzebufo (giant Frog) : Can knock out enemies easily, can also jump around 3 – 4 stories high. It’s quite frankly fantastic. Swims fast as *hell* as well. Great raiding animal.
The Quetzlcoatl: Giant, flying bird, Can pick up anything but the largest of animals. Also has a platform on its back to build mini-bases on.
Pachysomething or other: Small dino that can headbutt things and knock them out.
Para…para….Paracetamol? I call it the Cow-raffe. It’s like a Giraffe mixed with a cow. Can have a base-platform on its back too. Slightly bigger than a mammoth.
Tranquiliser rifle darts, the machined sniper rifle, fur gear… a whole abundance of stuff. This is early access done right.
And the Mesosaurus on the 14th here (13th in America)!
Seriously, like you said, well deserved of its success that’s for sure. I’m now over 680 or so hours… I may need help. lol
I feel like I need to go rename mine now 😛
Jesus Were smurf.. 680 hrs in Ark? oh well i cant say much as ill have that ore more after Fallout 4 launches next month… woot 1 month to go!
SILENCE.
I didn’t have much to do last Uni holidays with my kid away and too much spare time LOL
F^#kin’ well deserved! 😀
performance is pretty bad on my high-end pc, so I stopped playing it. (i7/390x)