Archief - [PC/PS4/XBOX/SWITCH] ARK: Survival Evolved

As a man or woman stranded, naked, freezing, and starving on the unforgiving shores of a mysterious island called ARK, use your skill and cunning to kill or tame and ride the plethora of leviathan dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roaming the land. Hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements and store valuables, all while teaming up with (or preying upon) hundreds of other players to survive, dominate... and escape!

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:unsure: zei:

perfecte timing met Jurassic world

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The PS4’s powerful hardware has allowed us to bring a scale and scope to the game that wasn’t previously possible in the console space. We’re shooting for the moon with this one, a fully persistent game world, tens of thousands of AI entities, totally destructible foliage and environment, and multiplayer on a huge scale.

And yeah, we’ve got dinosaurs. Dinosaurs that you can ride! At release, we’re shooting for about 60 distinct species, and we don’t plan to just have them just wandering around as cannon fodder.

All creatures in ARK have their own living ecosystems, predator hierarchies, and an autonomy that exists outside of the players’ influences. Their interactions with each other intertwine with the way that players might use them, because almost every one of our creatures will be able to be tamed and used for peace or for war. The PS4 has the horsepower to pull this off, so we’re really excited to be finally bringing these kinds of next-generation gameplay experiences to consoles.

We didn’t stop there, though, because what’s better than experiencing all of this as if you were really there? After working for almost three years pioneering and creating high-end experiences for HMDs, I can tell you with good confidence that not much compares to soaring over the jungles and mountains of ARK’s islands on the back of your very own pteranodon. The feeling of immersion the team has created in this beautiful world simply has to be experienced first-hand; it is profound and impactful, and even for me was a little bit surprising when I first tried ARK in VR.

When you design an experience like this, one of the most important things is to not fall into the trap of focusing on one platform and type of input while letting the chips fall where they may on the rest. Just like mouse versus gamepad, you have to design with VR in mind from the beginning. All of your testing, all of your gameplay elements, they need to tie into the experience of wearing a VR headset, the different FOV, the perception of motion and presence that exists between looking at a flat computer screen and virtually “being there”. In the end we don’t just “allow” for VR, we recommend it, and ARK is a richer game because of it.

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Jesse Rapczak, co-founder and co-creative director at Studio Wildcard — developers of the early access game Ark: Survival Evolved — dropped hints about mysteries yet to be discovered in the game world, and revealed some of the backstory behind the formation of his team.

Ark is an online survival game set in a prehistoric world with mysterious science fiction elements. Players wake up on a beach to find a strange metallic jewel embedded in their arm. The prehistoric world around them is filled with dinosaurs and other extinct creatures on land, in the air and below the sea. As they build up resources and craft tools, players can eventually tame and ride dinosaurs.

The game is being developed on the Unreal Engine 4 and currently has Oculus Rift support.

Rapczak is a veteran game developer, but most recently was part of the team at Microsoft making the Hololens augmented reality device. In November of last year he says he made the decision to return to game development full time. That's when work Ark began. His team, now 40 people strong, has made rapid progress in order to reach their planned June early access release.

Why June? The theatrical release of Jurassic World of course. With all the rising interest in dinosaurs on the way, it made sense to make that window their goal.

Released on June 2, the game is already ranked at number 11 on steamcharts.com. Rapczak said that right now there are over 3,000 player-run servers, in addition to dozens of official servers being run by the team at Wildcard.

One of the complaints from the game's growing community is how low the framerate is. During our time with the game we've rarely experienced more than 30 fps, with the average being closer to 10 or 15. That's with a GTX 970 card and a modern quad-core processor and 8 gigs of RAM — well within the min spec listed on Steam.

Rapczak said that these kinds of performance issues are not unexpected, but that his team had to make hard choices to make the game playable by June.

"We didn’t spend a lot of time optimizing for lower-end graphics cards," he said, "because that would have taken development time away from our team."

Much of the fascination with Ark has surrounded its innate mystery. The game world is filled with floating obelisks, and much of their function has yet to be discovered by the bulk of players. Rapczak did spoil one feature during the interview, saying that eventually players will be able to upload their characters at an obelisk and move them — and their accumulated in-game skillset — to a whole other server if they want to.

Secrecy is familiar to Rapczak, who worked for three years to make the Hololens a reality.

"My wife didn’t even know what I was working on the entire time I was at Microsoft until we announced it," Rapczak said.

The Ark game world is 48 square kilometers, but Rapczak said players have yet to explore the entire landmass. Additionally, he hinted at vast spaces below the oceans and inside cave systems that players have yet to even gain entrance to.

"Our development team just watches people play the game on Twitch sometimes," Rapczak said. "It’s like non-stop focus testing, where we learn about bugs and assumptions people make about our game. We watched the first T-Rex tamed just yesterday. Took them about five hours."

His technical team is focused on forward-thinking, structural improvements to the game, all in advance of an expected 2016 launch on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Additionally, Rapczak wants to see the game running on Micrsoft's upcoming DirectX 12 as soon as possible.

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Kiiilerke zei:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T5Fe9VWrn8

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Kiiilerke zei:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T5Fe9VWrn8

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Incredible-looking dinosaur survival game Ark: Survival Evolved is off to a hot start.

An unfinished version of the game was released last week on PC through Steam Early Access, and has now moved more than 400,000 copies. The game sells for $25, which means it's already brought in more than $10 million in pure revenue.

Developer Studio Wildcard cofounder and cocreative director Jesse Rapczak points out in an interview with GamesIndustry International that it's too early to say how profitable the game will be. But, this initial revenue has already covered the game's $1.5 million development costs over the past seven months.

Ark: Survival Evolved is scheduled to launch one year from now, in June 2016, across PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Though the game is still a long time out, Rapczak says its core components are set.

"80 percent of the main game is done, with hundreds of hours of gameplay there already," he explained. "It's just down to balancing and feedback from the players. If all goes well we may even add more content once the community gets their hands on the mod tools. More on that later."

Also in the interview, Rapczak said one reason why Ark: Survival Evolved is seeing such strong support out of the gate could be due to the fact that it enjoyed a week on Twitch's front page. "Watching people stream the game is better than the best focus group money could buy," he said.

Rapczak also said it didn't hurt that "dino fever" is sweeping through popular culture right now with Jurassic World set to hit theaters this weekend.

"We knew dino fever would be at an all-time high right now for us to take advantage of, and we wanted to be the first truly great dino survival game on the market," he said.

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