Unlike other games, you can’t really pet stuff in ARK: Survival Evolved. You can, however, make a lot of awkward eye contact.
I started playing ARK on PC this weekend, and I noticed that prehistoric beasties just kept walking up and looking at me. Were they trying to remember if we’d met at that party last weekend? I decided to find out what they wanted.
Tree
What It Wants: These things are everywhere. I think they just want to be left in peace to commune with the earth, you know?
What I Did: Not that. I punched the hell out of this tree.
What Happened: It gave me a bunch of wood and thatch and then disintegrated. Like The Giving Tree meets Rocky meets Ghost.
Fern
What It Wants: Since it was standing near a tree buddy, I figured it wanted to give me stuff too.
What I Did: You can’t punch ’em (a first for ARK!). I ended up sort of awkwardly groping it instead.
What Happened: I got some fibre that I used to make a pair of Stone Age JNCOs and a bunch of berries that gave me the scoots.
Compy
What It Wants: Things got a little weird with these fellas. This one skidded up to my feet and gazed at me like a kid at his first rock concert. He didn’t want an autograph, nor did he want to eat my toes.
What I Did: I punched him until he fell unconscious and then gave him some of my scoots berries.
What Happened: He came back with a friend.
When I wasn’t feeling it, he came back with a different set of friends.
Me
What It Wants: After repeatedly turning down the compies’ advances to little effect, I finally speared one of them. They all swarmed me, and I stumbled into the water and got eaten by something. I respawned facing my own body. I think she wanted to admonish me for not being cooler about the compies.
What I Did: After I felt suitably chastised, I looted her.
What Happened: I got back my fibre and scoots berries. My ARK characters are known for their healthy bowels, but not their social skills.
Brontosaurus
What It Wants: Not much to do with me, to be honest. This one glared at me once and then I chased it in circles for like 10 minutes trying to get a good face pic.
What I Did: I was mad at it for throwing shade at me, so I punched it in the leg.
What Happened: See previous entry.
Spinosaurus
What It Wants: I thought this one was just frolicking in the water, which seemed like fun after my busy day of punching and dying. Turns out it was having a massive fight with some kind of dinosaur shark. I decided not to get involved.
What I Did: That’s a lie. I chucked a spear at it.
What Happened:
Parasaur
What It Wants: As night started to fall, the light got dramatic and a whole new breed of thing decided to get up in my face. This one emerged from the lens flare like King Mufasa from the clouds.
What I Did: Promised to remember who I was and took off. I suddenly felt real guilty about all that punching.
What Happened: It was probably reincarnated as Aslan on the battlefields of Narnia. Look at this thing. It’s got some inner wisdom to impart.
Eye of Sauron
What It Wants: The One Ring. Do you have to ask?
What I Did: I did not wear the ring.
What Happened: I eventually tried to get to one of these things. I did not get far.
The Void
What It Wants: To remind you that your life is ultimately a momentary blip in a cold, uncaring universe and that one day everything you love will disappear and be forgotten.
What I Did: Stopped playing ARK and called my mum.
What Happened: She was happy to hear from me.
Comments
One response to “Why Everything Keeps Staring At Me In ARK: Survival Evolved”
Oh yes, I remember that game. Think of one tribe of 15 assholes (me included) that got our beautiful bases raided while we were asleep. Our dinos killed, 300 collective hours burned to the ground in 7 hours. They didn’t steal all our loot. 2 of us logged on and held them off tile we all woke up and logged in. Then it was war. We all went at it for 12 hours that day, we had no dinosaurs while they retained most of theirs. We fought back, borrowed some dinos from other tribes and I tamed my old girl tic tacs(max level, Max taming efficiency Rex) and we counter attacked. That was a 12 hour counter raid which we won.
Over the next 2 months, 3 other tribes went to war with us and we beat them all. I got bored after that, the official server we now owned having nothing else to do except spending 300-400 more hours farming materials solo to build a new base.
I will play ARK again when they do a global server reset and people come back