f13.net

http://store.steampowered.com/app/346110

i want this

Needs Dr. Ian Malcom.

Animal taming?  Dinosaurs?

I'm there.

There's a bunch of these kinds of games coming through Greenlight trying to pick up the ball Stomping Lands choked on. 
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=252900000
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=447132882

I dunno, it doesn't look BAD, I'm just not able to get super worked up about another early access game with survival elements and crafting and bleeeeargh.  At least there's no zombies in this one I guess.  Wake me if it ever gets a full release.

Rust with dinosaurs?

Anyway, consider me interested, although the problem with ALL these games is simply how deep in Early Access they are, or the opposite: how close to be a real game they actually are. That makes it or break it more than anything else to me at this point.


EDIT: This one seems interesting too. And so far has very good feedback. Savage Lands: http://store.steampowered.com/app/307880/

Can I fling dinosaur eggs from catapults?

What about dinosaur egg yolks?

I was watching Planet of the Apes last night (the bad one with Mark Wahlberg) and I was thinking to myself - why doesn't a game like this exist? (stranded on a mysterious island survival game). It's uncanny how often that happens to me. Carry on..

I thought this looked really cool until it turned into shooting shotguns at dinosaurs. If it was just arrows / spears and such I'd be a lot more interested. I don't really need another game where you run backwards filling things with lead, even if those things are dinosaurs.

That's cool, the guns are in there so you wouldn't play.

I don't think you can use Dirty Harry as your avatar anymore after that post.

My problem is that in games where you strafe backwards and shoot what you are shooting at rarely matters, especially if it's a melee enemy. It kind of defeats the purpose of them being dinosaurs.

If you just have a spear you have to get up close and jab at them then the fact that they have tails and claws and such really matters. If you just backpedal and shoot they might as well be dogs or robots or Nazis or anything else.

I'm not against guns. They just seem weird for this game. It doesn't really strike me as survival gameplay unless the bullets are very limited.

Guns could still work if you were actually hunting them.  Like, you had to track them and listen for calls and set bait and know their behavior and so on, that could be kind of fun.  Instead of just randomly spawning bullet sinks for players to stumble across, which is what generally happens in these games.

or i can just build a house and fend off dinosaurs instead of creepers like god intended

If this is how the game actually is, I'll buy it.

Starlord, man.

Who?

That's Shirley Bob's porn name.

What about this? Just released, and it's not Early Access (unbelievable!).

http://store.steampowered.com/app/293520/

A lot of these humans vs dinos games (and there are a lot) look like someone just threw some assets in UE4 and called it a day. At least ARK looks like a lot more effort went into it.

True story.

So some alpha / beta / EA / whatever version is coming out tomorrow and some people are streaming it tonight.

It's basically H1Z1 with dinosaurs. You run around and collect berries, explore, and strafe around punching other people. Everything I said about that game seems true here - the actual threat is just other humans being dicks to you, after 5 minutes the survival aspect doesn't seem relevant. H1Z1 is basically a PvP game with zombie trappings, and this is the same with dino trapping from what I can tell.

I guess if you liked that you'll like this? But if you didn't I can't see anyone liking this either unless they really love dinosaurs.

You can shoot a dinosaur in the head with a catapult, and then when it's lying on the floor feeling sorry for itself you can feed it berries and it becomes your friend. Then you can put a saddle on it and ride it around (according to the streams at least). That looks like it might be fun for a bit.

That's how I got my cat.

hmmmm watching this on twitch right now

I bought it.  It's...rough around the edges.  Probably the biggest thing is the optimization.  It takes quite a while to load up and execute.  The combat is herky jerky and the dinos warp around (so do their corpses).  The servers are full more often than not, or they just...aren't there.  Which makes it difficult to re-play guys you may have levelled up.  I have a level 9 guy with a house built and all sorts of resources and I can't seem to find the server anymore.  It's really buggy and rough but - it is pretty fun when you can get on and get going.
       

I'm enjoying this a lot.

Supposedly the dinosaurs being a bit warpy/laggy is making them easier to kill (or strictly speaking making them less capable of killing you) which I am glad about because I am bad at games.

Here's some tips:

Don't build a thatch hut as anyone can break into it. Go for wood buildings as soon as you can. People can still break into them, but it's harder.

Don't build right by the ocean or river shore, as that's where everyone hangs out and walks around. Build in a remote place where people passing by won't see it (sounds obvious but I've stolen lots of stuff from people who don't do this mwaahahah)

Dinosaurs have levels and they matter a lot. If you can kill a level 1 dinosaur then it's still possible a level 20 dino of the same species will wreck you. What's cool is the higher level ones actually look different.

To tame a dinosaur, knock it out by using a slingshot on it (shooting rocks at it) or just punching it in the head if it's a weak one. Then you give it food, to make it like you, but this takes time. So you also give it narcoberries, to keep it unconscious while you feed it. You need to open up the dinosaur's inventory, place the berries there and "remote use" the berries to force-feed the dinosaur.

You don't log out when you log off - you're just unconscious. Animals can kill you, people can steal from you, they can drag your body into the ocean, they can drag you into a prison they have made and extract your blood and force feed you narcoberries. Log off in a secure house, or somewhere remote.

Those bright lights usually indicate the presence of supply packages which contain some useful items for the first person to get to them. But sometimes there is a level limit to open the package.

You can store your stuff in boxes but be aware that anyone can open your deposit box unless you set a PIN code on it, and even then they can still smash it open. So put these in a house etc... And don't forget to close the door of your house!

Soooooooo, it's a dino date-raping simulator?

By the way, the same trick works on humans (you can extract their blood while they are unconscious if you like)

Why do these kinds of lord-of-the-flies games get so much traction? Is humanity just that broken?

Have you seen the Internet?  :awesome_for_real:

Being able to drug people and extract their blood while they're unconscious seems like an oddly specific fetish for a game about dinosaurs.

Those pixels were asking for it.  :oh_i_see:

Dinosaur Date Rape Vampirism

I always wanted my own roofie-saur.

Well, I've been playing this pretty regularly for the past week or so.  In the past I haven't been able to get into games of this stripe (DayZ, Rust, 7 Days to Die) but for whatever reason(s) I've been having a lot of fun playing ARK.  The crafting, combined with the dino taming and relative difficulty of just...staying alive, is keeping me coming back for more.  

Before I start blathering about the game itself I'm hoping to connect with anyone F13 currently playing, or maybe entice a few people to play (with me!).  I'm currently on a strictly PvE server rocking the care bear stylez, but I'm contemplating starting over on some verison of a PvP server and company (strength in numbers) would be welcome!  

But.  Bugs, technical issues; they're all over in game.  If I'm going to sit here and try and convince some of you guys to play it'd be a dick move not to mention how bad the game runs.  Caveat this may be related to certain chipsets (my machine is AMD / ATI based), and I see people that run the game perfectly with the graphics at high settings - but for most people that doesn't seem to be the case.  The loading time is anywhere from 3-5 minutes per session.  Game play alternates between lag, rubberbanding, and straight up pauses of 10-15 seconds (rarely but it happens).  Plane clipping and assorted weird graphical glitches.  After killing a dinosaur thee's a pretty good chance the corpse is going to rubberband / warp to a significantly different spot then where you killed it - sometimes in an unreachable spot (like on top of a rock or up in the air).  There's still a spate of gameplay bugs going on related to crafting, the UI, and taming.  The chat functionality is rudimentary at best.  The servers are full almost constantly.

On the other hand:

- There are hotfixes daily.  Sometimes two a day.  The devs are certainly trying.

- Dinosaurs

- Megalodons

- Everyone poops.  Visible poop on the ground.  You, the dinos.  "You just defecated".  Dino poop can be picked up as a fertilizer reagent

- There's a lot to maintain to stay alive (food, water, temperature, not getting eaten by a dinosaur, night time is dark as shit) so there's definitely a sense of accomplishment when you build your first house, craft a bed (permanent spawn point), tame a dino and so forth.  Treadmill is in effect.

- Depending on the server ruleset the opportunity for fun PvP activities (*cough* griefing, ganking, property destruction, kidnapping and imprisonment).  My first night I was attacked in the absolute dead of night by a naked level 2 named "Smallpenis".  He only had a torch and his bare hands, I had a stone pick and was level 4.  Alas Smallpenis I barely knew ye.  When I logged in my second night I discovered I had been found (you don't actually "log out" you just go unconscious) laying next to my campfire zonked out, so I was dragged into a guys "dungeon" where he had been sedating me and harvesting my blood; it puts the lotion on its skin type thing.  I quit that character, permanently.  Another time a high level guy swooped out of the sky on his pterodactyl, shot me with a narco arrow to stun me, took all my shit, then just flew away.  Yes, I'm playing on a pure PvE server at the moment.

So, anyway.  It's fun.  If anyone else is interested or is already playing please post it up.  I'm currently on server 326.  


Edit: to clarify - I'm on a pure PvE server now.  The Smallpenis beach blanket ambush attempt, Buffalo Bill dungeon and the rest happened on a server with a PvP ruleset.  Note there's PvE, PvP, and PvPvE (???) which makes it kinda interesting choosing a server.

I enjoy exploring in this game and stumbling across some giant fortress a group has built in the middle of nowhere.

Today I came across a guy asleep in a small, partially wrecked house. I wondered why one of the walls was missing from his house but wandered in to rob him blind. As I was leaving, a brontosaurus stamped on my head and killed me (not in combat, they just tend to accidentally stomp on you if you hang around their feet).

I suspect the brontosaurus wrecked the house, because they do that if you build a house near where they live. The lesson is, don't be like that guy and build your house where the brontosauruses hang out.

 :awesome_for_real: Roofiesaurus Rex.

And yes, I am playing this. Mulling a radicalthon.

I'm up to my eyeballs in survival games at this point, what makes this one stand out? (is it just dinos?)

Pretty much.  It's fairly polished (for an early access game) and more feature complete than a lot of the other survival type games available.  But yeah, being able to tame and ride around on dinosaurs is its biggest selling point.

Well if anybody wants to join forces I'd be happy to join up. Just name a server and we can form prehistoric Bat Country.

I'd prefer a server with the standard ruleset (the ones just called Official Server xx) which means PvP, not because I actually want to take part in PvP but going for a PvE server just feels like cheating a bit.

I am a euro so you'll probably never actually see me, but you might log on and discover I've built a second storey to the house.

Ok clearly nobody wants to play video games with me - probably very wise - but this game is going strong with features being added on a regular basis, such as new dinosaurs and other animals, new items to make for your characters and new objects that can be added to houses.

They are also continually improving the graphics optimisation, so frame rates are up.

Here's some footage of me and some friends demolishing another tribe's bases. We ourselves got raided a few days later!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmWuMNG1E1I

I've looked at this, and I'm wondering how this is different say, than Dayz or H1Z1, only with dinosaurs.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I suspect that if I didn't like those games I won't like this either.

Hankering to get disappointed by another survival game.  Anyone know if they're planning wipes for release?

I'd be minded to wait out wipes unless it's likely to be a forever EA game which everyone will have moved on from by the the time it's really out.

Anyone tried the non pvp servers? Any fun without pvp? Looks like something that might be fun to play with my son but I know he wouldn't be down with other people breaking/stealing his shit.

I haven't actually tried the non PvP server but there's certainly plenty to do without PvP, such as building a base, fitting it out with machinery and collecting a menagerie of tamed dinosaurs.

To be honest, actual PvP is largely something you try to avoid in the game as you're almost certain to lose all your gear if you lose the fight. Some high-end gear like the rocket launcher is really hard to make.

On a non PvP server I guess you could concentrate on building your own massive castle.

Well looks like with a little work you can host your own servers on the computer you're playing on. Pulled the trigger on it since think the boy will love it.

All three of my kids (age range 12-23) have been playing this together on a private server as a co-op game for the past month. They seem to be having a lot of fun. We had been playing 7 Days to Die but they prefer the dinos to the constant threat of zombie death for some reason.

I haven't jumped on it yet myself but my son has. He loves it so far.

Kids love dinosaurs - who knew?

(Also kids have time to stand around forever taming a dino)

I got this and have played for a few hours in a solo environment, and it gets grindy right quick. I presume the idea is that you don't do all the work on your own, but collaborate with others to gather stuff to do things? Or is it one of those things that in theory is meant to be collaborative but in practice is a PVP grief fest like Arma/Dayz?

I'd definitely join a tribe so you can collaborate with others on building your base. We had a group of 4 and did fine.

I played on my own for a bit before that and made myself a nice wooden base. If you're going solo though, I would aim for a non PvP server. On a PvP server you want to aim for a metal building and that takes a lot of work.

Use Ark Server Manager and tweak your settings. I'm playing with just my son so sped up taming times and raised resource gathering etc.

Played this a bit on the weekend, single player to try to get the hang. Only eaten by Raptors about seven times.

I guess I was kind of expecting more of an explore and find the dinos game, as opposed to spawn in surrounded by thirty dinos of various size and temperament. And bugs, and sharks, and dodos, and piranhas.

I've read that its mostly about them congregating to water, which is where you spawn. But if you build too far from water, you'll end up dying of thirst, plus if you do die, you spawn back on the beach of doom and have to navigate your way back. Past the Raptors of Doom.

I like the idea, and the ding grats factor was pretty addictive,  but it screams of having no logic in it's design. One of the few times I've ever pined for a game having "more game designers"

You need to build a base, with a bed which becomes your respawn point. This base can be a tiny thatched cottage which is pretty easy to make. In fact, it doesnt even need walls or a ceiling. And while you do need to be near water, there are loads of rivers inland.

However, the very early stages if the game can be hard as you can keep dying before you build even the most basic base.

One thing those of you playing on your own servers (assuming it's only a couple of you on there) may not realise is that you are playing on hard mode. On the official servers with lots of players, server-side lag means the dinasours do far less damage to you and they are much easier to kill. If you play regulalry on an official server then you notice the difference in off-peak periods when the population is low and there is less lag.

We're using Ark Server Manager to play on our own server. We have a custom set up for the spawns that decreases predators and larger animals, increases prey animals and spawns herd animals in groups. I tried to make it as lifelike as possible while also doing zero research cuz I'm lazy. We also added increased harvesting, faster taming and a bunch of other tweaks. So while it is definitely easy to die, things are easy to replace and build and once you knock something out it doesn't take forever to tame. I think the only way I'd play on a vanilla server would be with a group of people. This fucker is a grind without tweaks.

Yea, I managed to build a small thatch house. Then I looked in to a bed. The most hides I'd gotten off a dino at that point was 2 and I think you needed 50 for a sleeping bag.

I can see the lag thing being big. Running locally, I got myself (and my house) destroyed by one of those smaller armor plated dinos. Even though he was stuck in the front half of my house, I couldn't get close enough to jab him with a spear without getting bit every time.

I may try again with some severely tweaked settings (didn't notice you could turn down predators) so that I actually get a chance to explore the island.

If anyone is interested I've got a semi dedicated server that I just run on my home PC. It's up whenever me or a couple other people are playing. If anyone else is interested I might see about leaving it up more often or just pop on in if it's up. Lots of custom rules to facilitate small group/solo stuff.

http://arkservers.net/1/search/?term=toadchewer (http://arkservers.net/1/search/?term=toadchewer)

You can join from the link, PM me for password.

This is currently on sale on Steam for 40% off ($18).

FYI, if anyone is playing this there's a chance development might stop and the game could be pulled from Steam because of a lawsuit revolving around poaching employees and proprietary technology from the makers of Dungeon Defenders.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/24/ark-survival-evolved-lawsuit/

Thanks for the heads up, Ginaz.  I've wanted this game (in the cheap, of course <10$) but I'll wait if things look as if stupid shit is going to happen.

The game is probably the best of the current round of survival games, but I still find myself just gravitating back to Minecraft most of the time.

A friend just mentioned this game and suggested we pick it up, but not if it's about to get sued into oblivion. Guess I'll keep an eye on it and see how the legal troubles shake out.

I thought maybe I would buy this when it went game on sale, and it is right now for $18 which still seems a bit high for me for early access.  THEN, I saw they released an expansion yesterday.  How does an early release game get an expansion?  Now I'm thinking I'll wait until Far Cry Primal gets really cheap.  What do you guys think?  I just want some dinosaurs!! 

I know people like it and all, but I can't say I agree with a game releasing paid DLC for something that is still listed as early access.  It's not like they haven't made boat loads of money already, so they're not hurting for cash to continue development.  Finish the game, "release" it THEN start with the DLC.

It's pity they've done something so obviously sleazy as Ark is a great game.

I'm not sure Far Cry Primal lets you tame a giant scorpion and make a house for your giant scorpion and build a saddle for your giant scorpion and go riding around looking for people to paralyse with your scorpion sting so you can drain their blood and drink it, so I'd probably go with Ark out of the two.

I wonder if settling their lawsuit for $40 million prompted this being released as DLC instead of as an update or patch?

http://www.inquisitr.com/2999282/ark-survival-evolved-lawsuit-settled-ugly-battle-ends-with-defense-countering-claims/

But I want all that! 

Play Ark then, it has all that:) It's pretty brutal when your house gets broken into and all your best stuff is stolen though.

Not real surprising considering Jeremy Stieglitz

On sale for $12 (base game) or with expansion for $22 until January 2.

Trying to decide between this and Stellaris. Help me?

I've been curious about ARK and, you know, riding dinosaurs!  This is a decent price for me and Stellaris is still a bit dear.  I'm also not very interested in Stellaris right now.  None of this helps you decide, I know, but hi anyway.   :grin: 

I read about the public servers and talked myself out of it. Picked up Astroneer instead (for 20 bucks). Very happy with it!

ARK is really dickpunchy if played solo; you can tweak some settings to make it less so, but that just felt like cheating to me. I didn't play it multiplayer at all, though, so I'm not sure how much better/worse it feels with other people.

Don't the ARK devs have a habit of promising free content and then releasing it as paid DLC, with the DLC also serving as for-pay patches to bugs in the base game?

I thought about this one until I saw they'd released a pay expansion despite the fact the game was still in Early Access. Fuck a bunch of that.

They also just tried to offer as-yet-unreleased content in exchange for Steam awards votes (https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/5kktle/ark_survival_evolved_devs_offer_content_in/). However good the game is, the devs are a bunch of slimy shitweasels.

Ok yeah fuck those guys.

I'm game for going back to Ark for a bit if anyone fancies it. I prefer the official servers though.