Ark Corruption Evolved

 Sometime it be your own developers.

I have some history with the dinosaur survival crafting game ARK. Not a lot, but just enough to colour my perception in a manner that I've come to learn is extremely indicative of the core experience shared by most players. That is to say, I downloaded the game on Xbox 360 (Or One, I can't remember which) back when it launched and spent the entire one hour demo time trying to log into a world. Then I uninstalled and never picked it up again. As it turns out, ARK in renowned for instability in just about every aspect. Following along closely, it feels like ARK is a very rough starter game that was treated to inordinate success thanks to an explosion of Youtuber content which led to the game building more and more upon it's mouldy and unimpressive foundations in a manner that now makes the early game utterly impenetrable with the late game being where all the actual content is at.

Essentially, it's a game that was slapped together like a Jenga tower by a team so green and out-of-their-depth that they have always been just too scared to go back and clean up the player experience for new comers. In fact, they became so scared that after a while they just gave up on updating the main ARK game and announced a replacement sequel so that they could start again from scratch and maybe work on all that crap they missed out on thanks to the messy original framework. Like maybe a non-placeholder character creation system, wouldn't that be nice? (Still waiting to hear more about that Sequel, by-the-by. It really has been a while since it last breathed air.) But that doesn't mean the team can just brush aside the many controversies they racked up on the original game during their highly criticised and customer-aggressive support of the original- which managed to turn their game and community to something of 'black sheep' among the 'made famous by Youtube' crop of video games. 

But we're not here to talk about the past and it's transgressions, but the present and rather fresh transgressions, because even in the lead up to a new dawn of the ARK 'franchise' we've got ourselves a brand new example of exactly why it is that this development team are a childish crop of confused slugger likely unhealthy to the ecosystem they've set out to build. As the story goes, it was the ARK development team who somehow managed to turn themselves into corrupted lords of their own realms when it came to the management of ingame clans and their interactions with one another. Specifics are disputed, but from what I'm told this all started with the existence of a clan who's members were close with active developers on the game. These members were not actual developers themselves, I think, just friends and maybe family.

And what do you think happens when you, as an unaffiliated and normal player, engages in the many systems that the game is built to facilitate in order to raid a clan close to the world's gods in a game that is known to be guided by corrupt hands? (The answer won't shock you one bit!) Indeed, as the situation goes it appears that another clan raided the developer's favourite clan and that led to retaliatory bans being dished out for the crime of making other players mald about losing. That is some embarrassing levels of in-game corruption- not least of all because the story has travelled so far as to reach those not within the insular ARK community and has further coloured the perception of this game as still a 'members only club', even when the team are angling for a 'fresh start'.

The 'problem' here should be pretty much self explanatory: developers shouldn't be invested in certain individual players in a competitive multiplayer lobby, banning powers shouldn't be abused willy nilly and... actually that's pretty much it. The two big points. But they are rather important points, are they not? Who wants to dedicate hours of their game playing time into a game that is subject to the hormonal whims of bratty developers living it up like godlike tyrants in a digital world of their own creation. It's like the ultimately pathetic seizing of control for those that were victimised and bullied in the playground. The pitiful product of trauma unresolved left to fester within a studio that seems to hardly be run at all for how absent the game's direction has been during it's entire lifespan.

All of these bubbling and ceaseless controversies build upon the general sense of dislike shared between the creator's and players of the game. A division nurtured over years of well know reported feedback being ignored and endless lukewarm expansions stuck atop the messy package that was already there, sizing up to the newest version of ARK which is being developed to totally replace the legacy version's servers and requires a full priced repurchase... right before the supposed release of this mystical sequel they've been babbling on about for the past few years. It's fairly clear to everyone exactly where the studio's priorities lie, but that doesn't make it anymore loathsome to confront in the flesh. But even then there's a muted begrudging capitalistic acceptance towards that sort of conduct. This is just... childish.

I've never had the chance to get into ARK and as I've learned more about it firmly sat on the the outside of the community, this game has steadily built itself up more and more as the exact opposite of what the industry needs in this current age. Or more to the point, as the exact opposite of what this genre needs. The community based light-weight social genre of online game that thrives on the strength of it's own autonomy and freedom. Games like this should be self sustaining and putty in the hands of the audience, but instead what we have is a strangely archaic mess run by people with a god complex and, I'll be honest: a pretty meh creative vision which fails to excite the modern world of game enjoyers to the point they would really need to rock ARK back to the place it needs to be for ARK 2 to land with a splash.

Honestly, with the reputation they've built and the 'expertise' they've demonstrated, I expect ARK 2 to land with an extremely forgettable thud. I don't think it'll be a complete failure, mind you; the survival genre has a strangely loyal base of fans that have clung onto the static genre as though trying to will life into it's corpse. ARK's player numbers are really healthy and I suspect that ARK 2 will inherit that, but it won't enter the pop culture again like the first game did with it's launch, survival games have just slipped into the same sort of niche that MMO's inhabit. All the more reason why this sort of conduct shouldn't be tolerated if the community that persists doesn't want to whittle itself down in the knowledge that it won't be getting any new blood anytime soon.