ARK: Survival Evolved is the new Crysis

Hello Guys!

I've had the excellent opportunity to play this game this past weekend and well, talk about a game clearly made for future hardware... :( It brings my Titan X to it's knees quite often. And the server lag still needs a boost, but what I've seen is going to be the hallmark of open world games. Didn't know that UE4 had such excellent tech in it so far. There is literally every bullet point of next-gen technology in this game starting with the hardest to do right:

* Dynamic Global Illumination (this is done RIGHT) -- this GI is everywhere. Going into the forest makes it even more prevelant. But what is so so cool is watching out the bounced light changes colors based on an other light source hitting it. If you create structures around trees, the light will take a different direction casting shadows in it's place. It's simply an amazing accomplishment in gaming.

* POM -- hardly used in most games, this is a welcome return. Seeing textures that have baked in occlusion according to light source makes the textures look rich and inviting.

* Displacement Mapping -- pretty good use of it.

* SSS -- awesome shader on the skin modes for all the fleshy creatures.

* Dynamic weather and sky -- the lighting is completely dynamic showing off some really nice bounce affects as the GI and shadows get calculated in real time.

* Ambient Occclusion Everywhere -- yes, we finally get occlusion even when you are in shadow. Everything is occluded.

* PBR shaders -- even the foliage has specular highlights depending on the sun's direction.

* SSR -- water is done really well here and reflective wet surfaces also are done dynamically.

Having said all that -- there are 2 things that really bother me:

* Animation -- this needs a lot of work. Not just in the character movements, but also in the dynos. I feel they don't have much weight to them. They need to mimic the procedural animations of the zombies in Dying Light., animation recoils from taking damage from the monsters would be a welcome

* FX -- could use some more love. Fire looks cool, but the sparks don't. Missing sparks for picking rocks, rounder blood for hit, perhaps some decapitation or dismemberment would be awesome, arrows need to stick in the creature, etc.. Rain textures are missing. We want Batman AK type rain animated textures on the ground, rocks, etc..

Lastly, I hate the trees, rocks, foilage, in the way they fall. They die out way too fast. They need to stay around a little longer to maintain realism.

Otherwise, this isn't a game I'm seeing getting surpassed in the coming years as far as "feature" equipped goes. It'll be interesting how much they remove for the consoles.
 
Can I play it in single-player or co-oped against an AI?
 
Well, if this video by JackFrags is anything to go by, the graphics are not very good IMHO. No character shadows and check out the object pop-in at 3:30 - 3:36.


ARK can have so many graphic feature bullet points as it wishes but without high quality assets, it won't be the new Crysis by a long shot.
 
If there are no super-tesselated concrete slabs, then it's definitely not the new Crysis.

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The game is still way early in alpha so it's likely not well optimized. Give it some time and I bet it will start to run way better.
 
Agreed.

Crysis didn't really have good assets either. Way overrated on that front. It took years before they made mods to make it look better.

Also I'm talking about TECH -- not quality of assets. That's like saying The Order is the new Crysis because the assets look so good..
 
Crysis had fantastic assets IMO. The foliage is still some of the best ever.
 
I've seen it, a friend bought it. They're talking up VR support which is nice. I was going to buy it during the steam sale as I have a DK2 but heard the performance is so bad it's not playable.
 
I've seen it, a friend bought it. They're talking up VR support which is nice. I was going to buy it during the steam sale as I have a DK2 but heard the performance is so bad it's not playable.

It is bad.. but that's because it's doing a lot. Clearly a DX12 game. I'm awaiting for the DX12 drivers from Nvidia that supposedly will increase rendering speeds by up to 40%. I'm thinking it's the new Tile Rendering of DX12. We'll see.
 
Ah yes, they state explicitly that the game will support DX12 which is great. My point was that if a game is coded only in DX11, it will only be DX11 no matter what system you run it on. It can't take advantage of DX12 if it isn't coded in DX12.
 
Ah yes, they state explicitly that the game will support DX12 which is great. My point was that if a game is coded only in DX11, it will only be DX11 no matter what system you run it on. It can't take advantage of DX12 if it isn't coded in DX12.

I would think a graphics engine has many subsystems. If a lighting engine, for example, used DX11 libraries for creating shadow maps, why couldn't they still use those and make the renderer run DX12 code to actually render the image in tiles? In that regard, the tech for the shadow mapping is probably custom anyway and just uses some basic DX11 helper functions. But the rendering engine could absolutely use a tile structure if the DX12 bits return true. That would give you the claimed performance boost but all the internal code could still use DX11 helpers without the entire engine using ALL DX12 code (which, let's face it, most of the codebase in DX12 is probably still using DX11).
 
No doubt, only point I was making is that they would have to modify the code to gain benefits from DX12. Which apparently they will be doing, do all is well :). I will check this game out once it's had a bit more time in the oven. My rule with Early Access games is that I will only buy them if I think the game is worth the money in the state it's in when I buy it. Since promises of future greatness rarely materialize.
 
I've seen it, a friend bought it. They're talking up VR support which is nice. I was going to buy it during the steam sale as I have a DK2 but heard the performance is so bad it's not playable.
The performance has already been noticeably optimised since the Summer Sale (if I can notice it, then it's definitely noticeable!).

Sadly the game itself hasn't been improved - they seem more set on adding new creatures than improving the pacing, the fucking awful XP system, the fucking awful taming system, or the fucking awful corpse retrieval. It's already in a playable state, and if you play solo you can triple the taming speed and the XP speed to lower those annoyances, but you won't be able to implement these same system controls in multiplayer (and you'll get murdered in your sleep and have all your erections destroyed by ARKholes anyway).

What strikes me most compared to other early access survival games is that they're really going for a bombastic, LOOK AT US LOOK AT US WE'RE AWESOME feel, and it kinda works! From the second the title music kicks in, it wants you to know you're playing something AMAZING.

It's not amazing yet, however. Plenty of wonderful effects may be in play, but the game doesn't seem to be going for either realism or... errr... unrealism? Like VFX_Veteran says, the animation on anything alive is shocking. But hey, it's a work-in-progress. Just a bit less Jurassic Park and a bit more Terra Nova (the TV show, not the Looking Glass game) so far.

I've been much more impressed by another early access survival game, The Forest. They haven't just thrown in a bunch of top-tier graphical effects and hoped for the best - they're clearly working towards realism, which is reflected in both the graphics and the UI. And the pacing is far better - my first three hours with The Forest had so much tension, so many memorable moments, and so many surprises. I could focus on enjoying the game. In ARK I'll be getting stuff together for an hour, and start to have fun... oh, two minutes later I'm dead. Another hour lost to corpse retrieval or starting over.... I'm dead. Tamed a bunch of dinosaurs... oh, a random aggro and they're dead. Can't build anything locked behind the arbitrary XP system, can't find corpses half the time... it's too much hard work and not enough play, and it really does need 12-15 hours of tedious play before it gets going. I can't see ARK coming out before Q416 at the earliest in its current state of gameplay. But it's still quite promising. And you can poop (although The Forest has "you cannot carry any more legs", so they're about even there IMO).

At a sale price of $10 for The Forest (or Sale-$10 for 7 Days to Die, if you prefer a bit of Minecraft in your survival and don't mind graphics that look like an easy port to 360), Sale-$25 is just too high a price for ARK at the moment.
 
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