In Ark: Survival Evolved, your character just kinda poops sometimes. It’s a little alarming at first, in the same way that I imagine pooping for the first time in real life is. The origin of that funny mechanic? Grimly serious.
Turns out, Studio Wildcard co-founder Susan Stieglitz came up with it in order to get around having to insert a suicide key. Reason being, players can get trapped (for instance, by other players), and when all else fails, you need some kind of out. After all, Ark: Stuck In A Dark Room Forever doesn’t have the same ring to it.
“If you’re trapped in a room,” she explained to me at GDC in San Francisco, “it’s the only conceivable biological function you could kill yourself with. Originally, we were debating putting in a suicide key to escape situations like that.”
“Pooping is obviously pretty funny, and it had some marketing value, but it actually emerged as a solution to the idea of a suicide hot key — of instant death that would just feel cheap.”
And hey, it’s like I rarely, perhaps never, say: if life gives you shit, make shit-ade:
“It can be used in our crafting and planting systems,” she continued. “It’s a resource!”
The Ark team took the whole pooping thing to its furthest logical conclusion. Dinosaurs and creatures poop too. Everything poops, and you can use all of that poop for a bunch of stuff.
So that’s why there’s so much poop in Ark: Survival Evolved. The more you know.
Comments
23 responses to “Ark: Survival Evolved Added Poop To Avoid Putting In A Suicide Key”
Well they coulda made it look like a log at least… can you imagine the gaping maws those characters are running around, being able to plot out bowling ball sized poops like that?
Caveman sphincters were obviously much more elastic than those of today.
Dinosaur diet mate.
I try not to imagine it lol
Kinda a shitty story…
Sorry, that joke stinks. I’m just talking out of my ass. This article is THE shit.
Poop
You really scraped the bottom with that lot.
These jokes need to be packed into a rocket and fired off somewhere far, far away…
… like Uranus.
*golfclap* Bravo!
Would that be fudge packing?
how do you kill yourself with poop in the game? do you eat it? or freeze it and drop it on your head?
Given the size of it in that picture, you probably die from the stress it would place on your body trying to squeeze it out.
lol you eat it yes, at one point a friend and me had about 5 humans locked in a dungeon, their only way out would be to eat their own poop. @highperformance
Funny story….i was playing ARK with a friend and i was starving to death and we couldn’t find food or berries anymore.
Giant dinosaur shit right next to me and me and my friend looked at eachother and i said “I’m going in” more or less.
I died from eating poop that day
Do the characters do a little squat animation, or can you just poop mid-conversation with someone?
mid convo and it comes with an audible “blerttt”
Almost sounds like something from South Park, but not from the mouth.
Yeah, its kind awkward. Just running around and one pops out and rolls away lol
So I’m stuck in place with no way out and all I have is my own shit. How does that help with suiciding out of there?
eat da poo poo
i got this
like icecream
I really dislike the word ‘poop’. It sounds baby-ish and juvenile but not in a fun way. It seems like one of those Americanisms to avoid toilet related talk by making it sound cutesy.
This is the end of my self-indulgent rant. Thank you all.
your username kinda looks like the word poop with a bum on the end. <3