Video Gamers Podcast - Ark: Survival Evolved Deep Dive - Video Games Podcast

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Video games hosts Ryan, Paul and Josh are taking on Ark: Survival Evolved in this week's legendary Deep Dive. Ark: Survival evolved may be a bit older but this is one video game episode you can’t afford to miss. We’ve share our thoughts on Ark: Survival Evolved, break down what works (and what doesn’t), share how we single handedly spread Swamp Fever to most of a server and other hilarious moments in this legendary episode.  Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Skippy, Kiitaclyzm, Gideon Is Lit, Toro, Scrump, Gaius, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q  Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Video games covered this week:  Ark: Survival Evolved Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. Hello, gamers of the world, and welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are three dads who are lifelong gamers, and today we will be deep diving the largest game that I've ever had on my hard drive, Ark Survival Evolved. Guys, this one can get up to 400 gigabytes with all the expansion packs and maps. Goodness gracious. I am your host, Paul, and joining me are my two fellow dinosaur hunters. First up, you can find him suffering from heat stroke at no fault of his own. He just has some inconsiderate base buddies. It's Josh.

It's you, Paul. You gave me heat stroke. That was the weirdest login I have ever had in a game, by the way. Josh, I only had six fires going on in our base. I did not know it would give us heat stroke. No, it gave me heat stroke. It didn't give you heat stroke. Everybody knows Paul's a crafter, okay?

Yeah. Yes. I didn't know his crafting could hurt me, though. I had all my fires going, cooking all these meats, turning it all into jerky, and gave Josh heat stroke. The best part is you logged on, and you you're like what the heck did you do to me i just started stabbing you right away because i didn't even know i was just like my very initial reaction was just vengeance yeah and then you sent screenshots of what it looked like for you

having heatstroke oh man oh it's great all right and then next up after Josh, he's got a swamp fever. And the only prescription, apparently, according to him, is to give it to the rest of us. It's Ryan. Oh, goodness. Good old swamp fever. That was horrible. And we'll get into that story coming up. That we will.

All right, so Ark, why are we covering this game today, you might ask? Ryan, tell the people. Well, we had the beautiful privilege to cover this game because Gideon is lit. It was a legendary pick. With legendary picks, you get to pick a game for us. So Gideon decided to pick this one for us to painstakingly play for hours and hours and hours. But he said at the time it was a perfect game for him. It's one of his favorites. He absolutely loved it.

So he went with Ark. Survival evolved. And we put a lot of time into it. But thank you so much. And we had a lot of time into it but thank you so much um and we had a lot of fun i i do have to ask you guys real quick because this is always fun when gideon is lit said i want you guys to play arc what was your very initial reaction why would i play rust light is is what I initially thought. Okay. Ryan? Am I Noah? What game is this? Mine was, I was actually happy

because Ark is famously one of my oldest daughter's favorite games. She has played Ark a ton. She's asked me to play with her in the past and I just go, I don't really have, I'd rather play Rust. And I've offered. I'm like, hey, let's play Rust together.

And she's like, no, I don't want to play Rust. So oddly enough, I actually had a little bit of elation because it's like well now i have to play it so let me see if this game is as good as my daughter makes it out to be my impression was always well like you said paul rust is going to be better so why would i play arc if i have rust that i can play um so I'm just curious what initial thoughts are with that. Yeah, well, thank you to her because she was our survival guide. It's very true. You'd hear Josh in the background,

hey, what do we do with this? How do we do this? Oh boy. Yeah, and it should also be said that GideonIsL lit chose this as his legendary game on march 27th so thank you for your extreme patience gideon this one took a long time to get out there just so happened to be this big run of legendary supporters in one month and then a whole bunch of triple a releases we had to cover like z Zelda, Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4. So this one's

been a very long time coming. So Gideon, we hope you enjoy the show. We very much appreciate the support. If anyone else wants to be a legendary supporter like Gideon, you can go to MultiplayerSquad.com. It forwards to our Patreon page. You can support starting as low as five bucks a month, but there are also higher tiers that have different perks, legendary of which you get to pick a game. So that's why we're getting into arc here today. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk about some of the mechanics of the game.

We'll talk about what the experience was like for us. Then at the end of the show, we'll do all of our regular segments like hot takes community reviews and where we will place it on our overall leaderboard. Okay, I think it's time, guys. Let's fill up our pockets with some prime meat jerky. Make sure your canteen is filled with water before saddling up on your favorite T-Rex. It's time to head out and deep dive Ark Survival Evolved. Okay, here's a description of the game on steam stranded on the shores of a mysterious island

you must learn to survive use your cunning to kill or tame the primeval creatures roaming the land and encounter other players to survive dominate and escape all right So my favorite thing to do when talking about a game like this is just to start at the beginning. All right. So the very first time we decided to load up Ark, Josh was working that day. Ryan and I happened to have a free afternoon. He and I hopped on. We were talking about what kind of server do we want to join? You can do PVP. You can do PVE. Since Josh and i have all this experience in rust we were immediately thinking you got to go pvp that's where all the fun is going to be rust has very little pve content and what it has is actually quite bad and so we were

thinking we got to pvp this all the way so ryan and i hop online i've got arc in epic game store he's got it in Steam. We can't see the same servers. It takes us like 30 minutes to sort of figure all this stuff out. We finally get into the game. We pick our server. We hop in. We spawn at the same location.

And Ryan, you and I played for maybe like 90 minutes. And we did not know a thing. We did not look up any information online. We did not ask Google any questions. We just started running around the world trying to figure out the game. And I think it might've been the most frustrating experience I've ever had in the opening stage of a game

because you and I could not figure out how to do anything. I even started recording our audio. I'm like, I gotta record this because this is so frustrating and ridiculous. All we did was get attacked by everything. Yes. And I never played Rust like you guys. So the whole kind of premise was new to me.

And I spawn almost butt naked and I'm just wearing like a loincloth. And I'm like, what the heck is going on here? And that was right away that stupid bird kept attacking us. Yes, the birds. Yeah, the birds, right? We're not kept attacking us yeah we're just like what's yeah the birds right we're like in a cave we're not in a cave but it was like a little you know covered area with rock by the beach and and and then we went from there but oh man that was that felt like five hours i was gonna say listening to you two i was at work and i was jealous at the fact that you two got to jump in right away. And I was like, well, I want to play guys. Listening to the two of you whine and moan and complain about how

terrible it was to try to get started in this game was glorious to me. Until then I hopped in later on. I was like, wait a minute. This, this is terrible. Like, we keep dying over and over. So here's the thing. It's not just the dying. It's that this game has no tutorial. There are no quests. There are almost no tips. Like, if you get dehydrated, the game says you're dehydrated.

Find some water immediately. But the game never even teaches you how to drink water. So when you first bring up this game i'm so used to rust that like i run up and i start punching trees or like trying to punch stone but then i'm like i finally figure out how to craft stuff and it's like okay well i need thatch well i don't even know how to get thatch and i don't know that you can just run up to any random bush and push the e button and i start grabbing all these berries and fiber and like the game just doesn't teach you how to play the game. 90 full minutes. And at the end of that

session, all we had was a two by two thatch base and Josh posting me typing, I ate my own poop and posting it to our discord with no context, not explaining that this was my character in Ark eating its own poop. And this is literally all we accomplished in 90 minutes is that I ate my poop and we had a two by two thatch base. Oh, just blindly posting that screenshot to our Discord server. I was laughing so hard to myself, Paul. And then I was like, I know that I know Paul's not going to get offended, but it was just hilarious that it was like, I can do this to my friend with zero context anywhere.

Oh my goodness. It's so crazy. Now, if anyone out there has played Ark, which is probably a lot of our listeners, like, you know how quickly you can build these bases. I mean, you only need what, maybe five minutes and you can get up a thatch base. Once you know how the game functions, it works okay. I do have some beef about how certain mechanics work. We'll get to it down the road. But I would compare this an awful lot to Terraria, where the game is incredibly deep and it has a lot to do,

but it is impossible to figure out unless you're watching youtube videos or have a one-on-one mentor uh you guys have already poked fun at it i was going to do exactly the same thing shouting out for crin every 14 minutes you know man you know crin what do we do to stop our meat from spoiling crin where can i can I farm chitin? You know, just any time we had a question, Kryn was our one-on-one mentor, which was incredibly helpful. I highly recommend if you pick up Ark,

play with someone who knows what they're doing, because I think you're going to enjoy those early hours a lot more. I will say this, too. I know we're a bunch of old men, but this game, to somebody that has played it, and now that we've played it, it seems so simple. It's like, oh, you just press E if you want played it. And now that we've played it, it seems so simple.

It's like, oh, you just press E if you want to drink. You just look at the go back to when you first played arc or a similar game that has zero tool tips, zero tutorial, zero nothing. This isn't when you're thirsty and you're near water, like a thing pops up and says, press E to drink water. No, like there is nothing, dude, like nothing that holds your hand in this game. So, you know, we were very frustrated in the beginning and we're lifelong gamers, man. I don't need, I don't need a two hour tutorial,

but at least just tell me what button to push to drink water or something like that. Like none of this was really intuitive and I get it in hindsight, you're going to go, you guys are a bunch of idiots, but we're not. It's just, there's nothing in the game that teaches you how to do any of this stuff, man.

Like look at rust. There is no complex quest system, but at least they tell you, okay, you open up your crafting by pressing this button and anything you can craft is just on one screen there's no multiple screens and they just tell you go craft a machete and i can see machete i can see the ingredients i know what to do and they at least give you a little bit of spoon feeding to teach you arc just yanks that out

entirely so it took us the first hour and a half then we kind of finally hit our stride we upgraded our base we've got this stone base going we do not yet know how to tame dinosaurs we're all complaining about inventory weight because we don't know you're supposed to load up all of your stone on you know like a parasaur or something but i will say that we were finally having fun like we hit our stride we understood these mechanics but then we ended up having a couple of problems on our first server uh probably most notably the fact that ryan decided to go walking around dead corpses with green hazes and decided hey let me go check this out and ended up contracting we didn't know what it was called at

the time but swamp fever and then proceeded to give it to me and j up contracting we didn't know what it was called at the time but swamp fever and then proceeded to give it to me and josh while we were sleeping and we did not know how to cure it and we were not yet ready or prepared to go make the antidote and this kind of put a little bit of a damper on our on our ability to play yeah explain yourself ryan yeah yeah yeah okay excuse me you want to see a dead body i want to see a dead body yeah uh i was just wandering the beach side as most you know people do and i saw a dead body i didn't realize the green haze was what at the time we called it arcades so that's what we refer to it as from there on out but i thought okay well we don't have anything let me go see if there's anything on this body i can loot

and then i start to walk away and my guy starts coughing i'm like why is there skull and bones on my screen i'm like oh no i google it i, you know, arc skull and bones, and it tells me. And then I'm like, uh-oh. And I didn't do this, honestly, until afterwards. I went around, explored more, did whatever. And I figured it was just some little thing that was temporary. Went back to our little mini base we had set up. Gave it to Paul and myself.

And then went back in there with them and logged off. And then, lo and behold, the the next day we all had it so i am a uh super spreader i'm a mass spreader i'm anthony fauci's worst nightmare i'm sorry everybody see josh i might have given you heat stroke but at least that was easy to fix ryan gave us swamp fever which was not easy not only did r give us swamp fever, but we had no idea how to cure this, number one. But then we discovered that it's very, very easy to give it to other people. Yes. And so we tried to cure ourselves.

At one point, I was like, Paul, just kill me. I don't want this swamp fever anymore. You killed me. I woke up. I still had swamp fever. I think it was Ryan was like, I'm just gonna start a new character so completely resets his character winds up logging back in gets too close to me new character gets swamp fever again right away i'm up this is where it gets funny though because i'm up mining some some ore some metal and some guy that i didn't see we're on a pvp server lands next to

me with some mega dragon bird thing and i'm like oh my goodness this guy's gonna kill me i look over and i see the green haze on him i think he was gonna gank me but then i gave him swamp fever so then he was like i'm out paul paul is wandering around looking for something. And all of a sudden, the server chat is just some dude cussing Paul out. Going like, I won't even say the words that he said to Paul. But he's basically, yeah, like, F you, Paul. And then I'm like, Paul, what did you do?

And he's like, Paul's cackling over there. He's like, I gave that guy swamp fever. And then we lost it, man. Oh, man. Yeah, this was kind of when we were definitely having fun, not necessarily in the way you were supposed to have fun in Ark, but we were finding fun in the mechanics. But then our base just kept getting raided, which, of course, happens on a PvP server. Like, you know, we're not idiots but we kind of realized okay we keep starting new characters to avoid swamp fever and we're getting rated we're never gonna figure out how to play this game so we decided to stop playing on a pvp server we hopped on over to

pve we played on the ragnarok map because gideon said that was his favorite map and i think this is maybe now a good time to maybe like circle back a little bit and talk about character creation. So since we were starting on a new server, I didn't even look at character creation. I just chose the default character. But now that we were restarting, I actually took some time. And this game's got, I don't know, maybe like 20 sliders. And it's on things like arm length, your head width, the length of your feet, the size of your calves, things of that nature. And they can go to some pretty far extremes. How would you guys describe the character that I ended up creating?

Thick. Her thighs. they're so powerful it was thick troll yeah yeah her thighs they're so powerful oh man yeah i i had actually seen this before because my daughter was making these crazy characters. But these sliders go from one extreme to the other, which I think is hilarious. Kudos to the devs for having a sense of humor on that. But I mean, Paul's character was tiny, skinny little head, massive chest, non-existent waist, massive booty, short little stubby legs after that. I had made a character that was super short, but really, really long arms and a giant head. It just gets crazy. And what the best part about

that is, it's really funny at first, but then when you start putting armor on later on, the armor fits the character model. So then that looks funny all over again. And I was just like, oh, this is crazy it's one of my favorite character creations even though it's incredibly simple i love when games just let you go beyond anything of what you would ever see in nature my thought when i was doing it was oh i'm gonna make like a real life barbie and just see what that looks like but then i couldn't help myself i blew out the thighs i had tree tr, like legit tree trunks for thighs in that game. And it was just, it cracked me up so hard.

All right, so basically we got restarted on this PVE server. And this is actually the first time we really got into the game. We started messing around with cooking, base building, dinosaur taming, exploration, farming, combat, kind of the whole shebang. Let's start out by talking about base building. All right. Now, I would say, in a way, it is very similar to Rust's building system, but it is not nearly as user-friendly. It is not, I'm not going to say it's terribly complicated, but I will say it's very time consuming to have to keep clicking and dragging these different walls and doorways onto your action bar.

Rust makes it so simple. You just have a blueprint and you can just right click, choose whatever kind of wall or ceiling, and it's just immediately built. This one, you've got to craft all of these doors and foundations and walls, and then those all get dragged individually onto your action bar, and then you can start to actually build your base. I found it to work, but I don't know why they made it the way that they did. I feel like it would have been so much easier to make a simpler system. The inventory system in this game is not great um it is one of those we're going to make comparisons to rust because it is you know a very similar game in a lot of ways that people have heard us talk about we have a ton of hours in i don't understand why arc does their inventory

system the way that they do number one there is a gajillion different things that you can craft especially as you unlock more technology and stuff like that. There's no good way to categorize these inventory systems. You can break it down into folders or just a list of icons of what it is, but you have to hover over everything to see. It's just very, very unintuitive. And then when you craft something, you craft it, but you have to be in the right crafting inventory. And so you have to, like, if you're in a workbench, you have to make sure you're in the workbench's inventory, not your inventory. And if you do craft something, you have to move it from your inventory into the workbench so that the workbench has the materials in it so that you

can then craft it. But then the crafted item goes into the workbench inventory. So then you have to pull it out, put it in your inventory. But if you want to use it, you then have to take it out of your inventory and put it in your hotbar. Yes. We need to talk about this for a minute because Rust does this so well. If you have a recipe that requires like a workbench two or whatever, all you do is stand next to the workbench to pull up your own inventory and craft whatever you want. The fact that if I wanted to repair my metal armor meant I had to go to our smithy, click and drag my armor into the smithy along with the mats. Now, maybe the mats are already in there and then I could repair it. then i have to put it back into my inventory and re-equip it it's just requiring like 20 clicks to do something that should just be two clicks i should just open in my inventory and just you know hover over my gear and press e

to repair that's all it should be i they made it such a complicated system but like we said once you learn it it it does make logical sense it's just not user friendly no all right so you you put up these foundations and walls and doors let's talk a little bit about the different stuff that gets attached to your base like what are some of the different types of buildings that increase the technology as you play more arc um you know aside from like the smithy you have uh you know fabricator you have dehydrators you have uh pots you have a campfire that you can cook stuff on the forges you know there's all kinds of things that we could use again like you guys said it was a pain to have to okay i gotta deposit wood into this one and and this into that one and put the

metal here and there and then you got to pull it out then you got to take it to the smith you got to take it to the fabricator that part was again annoying but um there was it was cool to have all those features inside our little base unfortunately when we had them all running at the same time josh would get a heat stroke yeah some of us are a little more adverse to the heat than others but uh yeah it was uh there's i mean aside from that too you also have uh spike walls you can put up to surround you know keeping in your your dinos if you've trained any um nice outdoor courtyard yeah our outdoor courtyard areas you know there's there's a lot that you can get into as you advance.

And to touch back onto that categorizing system, I would get so lost looking for what I was trying to figure out to make. Okay, is it at the smithy? Is it at the fabricator? Is it here? Is it there? Can I do it in my inventory? Then I'd have the folders. I was like, okay, which one is it in?

And there's just so much, which is a good option to have. But when there's that much that's so hard to get to, I just found myself lost sometimes. And I'd be like, hey, guys, where's this? Where do I make this? Where do I make that? You bring up a really good point. This is one of my complaints, again, about the inventory system. It's like arrows you can make in your personal inventory. But if you go into the Smithy, because the inventory system is so big, you actually have to type in a search to say arrows. So if I'm in the Smithy inventory and I type arrows, you don't make arrows in the Smithy. So nothing would show up. And then it's like, oh, where do I make arrows again? Oh, that's in your personal inventory. So if a Smithy is an

advanced thing of crafting, why can I not make arrows in it? And so that's, again, just another one of those things where the design of the inventory system is not great. I will say that in regards to the bases and the different things that you can use to upgrade your base and these add-ons, this is the survival game aspect of Ark. This is the meat and potatoes of it, just like any survival game right like where is your progression at okay it's like well your progression is you know starting with a tiny little thatch base and then upgrading it once you get a forge now you can smelt metal and once you get metal now you can make a smithy and once you get a smithy now you can make advanced weapons

and armor and once you do that you can make a fabricator and now you're making assault rifles polymers right exactly and so this is your natural trend in any survival crafting type game and this is where you find that in arc as well so you know i don't know that there's anything that really stood out to me it was there anything like super unique in that regard to you guys that we haven't seen before absolutely not other than being so incredibly confusing so like at one point so normally if i needed to heal my character i would eat food because when you eat food it fills your hunger meter and also it heals you but once your character is full food no longer heals you and so i had to take to google by the way when you play arc honestly I would say 15%

of the time I was on Google and not actually playing Ark because I had to look up how to do all this stuff. And I looked up, how can I heal in Ark? Lo and behold, you have to build a cooking station, fill it with the red berries. I forget what the red ones are called. And then you have to have a canteen filled with water to provide the steam put those into a cooking pot and then put in some fuel and turn it on but you also have to remove the charcoal and as long as you do that now it's gonna pump out a like a healing potion essentially but if you leave the charcoal in there it'll make red dye and but like the game never teaches you these things right like similarly

one thing that i think is actually really cool but they never explain is the fact that using different tools to gather mats will give you different materials so if i take a pickaxe to stone i'm mostly going to get flint and on our first server i kept thinking like dude we've got like 8 000 flint in our base like are we ever going to use this i just want stone well if you take a hatchet to stone then you get stone you know so it's like you know you use a pickaxe on a tree and instead of wood you get thatch i think that's actually kind of clever but they don't they don't tell you exactly i don't mind the idea behind it, but it's like, let me know as I'm starting the game off that it's like, hey, this is how you get thatched. This is...

Who thinks to use a hatchet on a rock? I know. You know what I mean? No one does. Nobody, man. And again, I know people are listening and they're like, you guys are dumb, but it's like, this doesn't make sense. Nobody thinks a rock with a hatchet. Tell us how to make gasoline,

Josh. How do you make gasoline? You put oil and was it animal hides? Oil and animal hides in a forge. In a forge. In a forge to make gasoline, but then the gasoline just sits in this forge, and at one point I literally said,

do you realize that we have gasoline sitting inside a fire right now and that's totally fine what do you i don't see a problem with it that makes so much sense absolutely oh it's so funny all right well we got to take our first break and we'll be right back all right getting back into arc one last thing I do need to mention is that the defecating in this game really shocked me. Okay, I'm not like a prude. I don't care that it's in the game. I just did not think that defecating would be such a prevalent part of this game where your character just runs around and every once in a while.

I'm sure I can find a sound effect. I'll go ahead and I'll put it in here. Just every couple minutes, you hear that sound and it says you defecated. Well, guess what? By the time you're playing with multiple people and you have a lot of dinosaurs, you are hearing this defecating effect every 30 seconds. It's constant. It's so great. There are the most compact, perfect circular feces that you can just run around and loot. And you might wonder, what good is this? Well, you can put it in a compost bin and turn it into

fertilizer. So it does serve a purpose with farming. But man, I did not see that coming in this game. And it did make me laugh a lot. You can even press the plus button to try to make yourself defecate. But sometimes the game will say you are not yet ready to defecate and it doesn't work. So there's some very goofy stuff that I love when games put things like that in there. I actually thought that was really funny in in arc even though the sound effects get a little bit old over time the best is like when a giant brontosaurus poops and the poop comes out and it's really really big and then you pick it up and it tells you the weight of the poop yeah and it's like a brontosaurus poop is four pounds whereas like a little gallimimius poop is like a half a pound and i'm'm like, this is great, man. They thought everything.

Oh, their label. Yeah. Medium feces, large feces. Yeah, they're actually titled. All right. So let's get into dino taming, because I think this is probably what most people would cite sets Ark apart from other survival games. I would say Rust leans much more into the PvP side. Here with Ark, it definitely leans into using dinosaurs so different dinosaurs serve different purposes let's talk about how you tame dinosaurs because i think the process is actually pretty interesting uh ryan do you want to talk about how that works joss's dino trap yeah that's one we got that we got that a little later. But basically, thanks to Corinne, we learned how to get the Trank darts. You got to take your regular dart or your arrows. You get the narcobaries and put them in another different thing that you have to go put some inventory in. You make your narcotics and then you can create the trank dart or trank arrows.

And you take a couple shots at certain dinosaurs that you want to get. And then once they fall asleep, you have to either put meat or prime meat or berries, specific berries to do the training process while they're asleep. So there's like a meter that runs down and as long as you have enough in there of the good stuff, then they'll wake up trained and you can name them and then build a saddle for them

so you can ride on them or fly them or whatever they are depending on the dinosaur. That's when the game really started to turn pretty cool for me. I had a lot of fun on that aspect of it. Once we started to wrangle up some dinos, that's when it was good.

I had my son watching. He's like, Dad, I want to ride a dinosaur. I want to ride a dinosaur. I'm like, I know, I know. Hold on. Because the last time on the other server, Josh and I got a couple

and then we got raided and they killed everything. I told my son, I was like, all right, you'll get to ride them tomorrow. And then I logged in in the morning and everything was gone and dead i was like okay buddy it may take us some time i don't know how long because we're still pretty new at this so but that that was uh that was the fun part is when we started transitioning to actual kind of hunting for dinos and high levels and what we were going to use them for. So that was a good part.

I was going to say, this is honestly where Ark took off for me, because I think we were playing it a little bit like Rust, right? Where it's like, let's get our base set up, let's get our feet under us, and then let's try to branch out. And I think that's not the right way. Because as soon as we started taming some of these dinosaurs it really accelerated the rest of the game for us like you know paul mentioned it we you know you tame a parasaur they can hold a thousand weight so now all of a sudden you're collecting massive amounts of metal and rock and wood and stuff like that you're not having to spend so much time going out and running it back and being encumbered and all that stuff um taming a flying a dinosaur

pteranodon, right? Like all of a sudden we're like, guys, we're going to get to fly. And then I don't think Paul was on that session, but Ryan and I got one and we're flying around. We're both like, this is cool, man. We're flying around now. And we're looking everywhere. Cruising into the sunset. It was beautiful.

Yeah. And so I think we ignored that part a little bit too long. But once we got there, that's where the DNA for Ark really started to stand out for me. And that's where I went, okay, I'm understanding now why people like this game. This is cool. Let's do more of it. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's very fun. The logic doesn't really hold. I'm not so sure how just shoving a bunch of raw meat into a dinosaur's mouth while it's unconscious makes it your friend. But I'm all about it.

I thought it was really fun. We would go hunt to find certain types of dinosaurs that we needed. And then sometimes we would tranq them. And you'd have to protect it in case some raptors would run through the area and try to attack. And if they're going to attack the asleep dinosaur, you're going to end up losing it. So I thought that that was really fun trying to find the certain types that we needed. Now we did get our very first Carnotaurus. So it was our first carnivore dinosaur that you can actually ride and run around and attack other dinosaurs.

Do you guys remember what happened to our very first one uh it died a very unlikely death oh i don't remember now we were fighting sea scorpions whatever those things are i was gonna say you drowned it right you sent it off the cliff or something remember oh man oh yeah because it was asleep and then we couldn't get it out of the water yeah those stupid sea shrimp thing man it started with an e whatever those are called they yeah they look like little sea shrimps or something like that i don't know something crayfish giant prehistoric crayfish we got to talk about the torbidity meter in this game so there are certain prehistoric creatures that poison you or if you like eat certain things and the game has a meter where if it maxes out your character will fall unconscious now our base was set up near a beach and we were constantly going out

into the ocean in the beginning to like farm crates and that kind of jump started getting metal crossbows and metal tools and things like that. But then, every once in a while, we would aggro these sea shrimps, but all they had to do is hit you once, and you would fall asleep. And if you were in the water, you would just drown to death, and you'd have to go recover all your gear. So here we took our Carnotaurus. We were aggroing the sea scorpions to pull them out. And they kept biting our Carnotaurus. And he fell asleep in the water and then drowned. And I felt really sad.

It was like our first killer pet. And it died. That was the thing, too. Number one, it was our first carnivore that we had tamed. Number two, we didn't know if it was going to drown. And so it chases this shrimp thing and then it's swimming in the water. We're like, whoa, it can swim. And then the shrimp thing wrecks it. It falls asleep. And then we're going like, what do we do? We're going to have to wait for this guy to wake up.

And I remember one of us going like, can he drown? And then 30 seconds later, it's like carnotaurus has drowned and we were like no no it's also neat that they build certain mechanics in so that if you're riding a dinosaur and you use that to eat an animal it'll also give you different yield of mats so for example like we were constantly trying to get chitin in the early stages of the game and we were farming it from those scorpions and it turned out that if you were riding a saber tooth because of how like saber tooths use their their jaw and their claws that would end up yielding far more chitin than if we killed it on foot and then hit

it with a pickaxe or a hatchet. So it's kind of neat how they have this very unique dinosaur system in the game where they can just haul goods, or you fly, or you fight, or you gather resources. And then, of course, there's even bigger and greater ones later in the game to where you're riding T-Rexes, you're flying on Wyverns. You know, there's a lot of stuff in this game as far as progression with dinosaurs that I think is really fun. Now, I think that's a good transition. Let's talk a little bit about when we would go out on expedition. We can talk about maybe our early sailing adventures, fighting through the castle. Once we got scuba diving gear, we were doing some scuba-ing.

What do you guys want to talk about what what first stands out the pain the pain stands out to me paul um what pain do you remember when you and i were trying to find crystal this is when we were playing on the pvp server still and we had to find some crystal to make a fabricator and i asked my daughter hey where do we find christmas oh you guys got to find a cave. So you and I go looking for a cave. We find a cave. We're like, ooh, cave. Outside the cave, giant owl thing, giant scorpion thing, giant centipede thing. We get obliterated within seconds. So then we go, okay.

And you're like, do you remember where that cave was? I do. I have a good sense of direction, Paul. Follow me. So what do we do? We run back to our bodies. What's happening in our bodies? They're being camped by giant owl thing, giant centipede thing, giant scorpion thing.

We died like 10 times in a row. We almost quit. I mean, legitimately, I remember Paul like super tilting. I was super tilting at this point, but a little bit less than Paul where Paul was like, dude, I don't, I'm not gonna play this game. Like this is, this is just the stupidest thing ever. We can't get our bodies back. Why do the monsters camp you? I remember asking my daughter, how the heck do we go? She's like, oh, you got to train them away. Like, why?

Shouldn't they wander around? Well, here's the thing. We had made our very first pistols. And I was thinking, oh, pistols are way better than bow and arrow. These are going to wreck those stupid little you know spiders and stuff like that and so we just like unleashed i don't know maybe like 14 bullets into the very first mob and it was a did not drop it oh yeah it was a bat it was a bat like we thought how many shots could this bat possibly take we unload all these clips and we still just

got wrecked and yeah i was like i i don't I don't know that I want to keep doing this because we were getting reset constantly. Yeah. Because we just made it an assumption that firearms would be so much more powerful. In reality, like the crossbows are pretty darn strong. You can rely on them a lot. But I mean, it is nice once you get AKs. It's very funny running around dinosaurs and shooting stuff with automatic rifles yeah uh i think it's very funny to me the thing i remember

the most is just like working our way through that castle where we just kept flying back and we would inevitably accidentally grab 14 bats that would start chasing us. And we would just start screaming, leave, go, abort, abort. Fly away, fly away. And then we would hear Ryan talking about how he can't get his pterodon off the ground. And then his pterodon dies. And then I have to try to recover the saddle. There were a lot of moments like that. But it was always fun to gear up, take a bunch of food, take a bunch of arrows or ammo, and then just set out on an expedition.

I always thought that was fun. Let's just go find what this game has to offer. And sometimes we would find very dark areas where we would have to go craft torches, and then I would hold out a torch, and you guys would have your weapons weapons and we're running through these castles or finding these underwater canals that are dark where you can't see unless you're wearing like a light up miner's hat or chucking glow sticks or something like that i i always thought it was a lot of fun to just go out and do that um the game does technically have an end game the whole idea is to extract yourself at the end through ascension. So there is like an area you can go to after you've killed the game's major bosses, and then you can ascend to basically beat PVE mode. There are several DLCs. We did not play any of them. This game is very large as it is. We only played the base vanilla game because that's

really all that we had time for uh before we kind of move into our final segments here i wanted to ask you guys when does arc play at its best when is it most fun uh for me it's when you just stumble upon 30 t-rexes and you claim them all as your own there might have been an old like decaying base and and we were able to steal a lot of t-rexes oh yes we were and that was unfortunately near the very end when we played but that's when i was like oh now we're talking now we're talking but but in reality i for me i i once we got the the dinos and we could train them and we could ride them that's when it really kind of turned because like you were saying earlier

I mean I would take them when you guys were getting all the chitin or whatever I was going I was collecting stone berries you know all of the extra stuff we needed for all the other stuff we were you know making and fabricating but with the dino it's so easy to just go out and I could bring back like 400 500 metal

and go back get a bunch of berries and a bunch of wood and fiber and whatever else we needed. Or we just all hopped on Pteranodons and we could go, let's go check out that over there. And you could just fly over. That's how we find those T-Rexes. So once you figure out the mechanics and the way to get these dinos, train them, get high-level ones that can actually do some damage if you need to defend yourself. That, for me, is when the game really kind of turned into a different game, and it really became fun. And especially playing with you two at the same time where we could all do it together, that's when it was really fun for me.

It's funny, and I mean, I guess this is a little bit my personality too, but the, the arc plays best when things are going wrong, in my opinion, like, you know, we did, we were trying to tame an Argentavis,

which is a giant flying bird that can hold a lot of weight. And it was like, you know, I built this thing. My daughter's like, Oh, you have to build a dinosaur trap. And it's like,

you get it stuck in there. And we're like, we're trying to lead it in and then it gets stuck, but then it manages to like squeak through a little gap and we're all freaking out and we're shootingannodons don't let him kill them you know and it's like we're all freaking out and running around and ryan's like i'm gonna run it away from the base guys and he runs up to it hits it and it turns around and just wrecks ryan in one shot ryan's like josh you're up and then it was just like to me that's when these games really shine right is it's just like poop is hitting the fan nothing is going right but you're far enough

along that that's okay at that point. In the beginning, I know we were all super frustrated because we kept dying over and over and over again. That's not the stuff I'm talking about. I'm talking about the misadventures that you have. Ryan's pterodon getting killed when we were trying to clear the castle. And he's like, I don't know how to fly up there now. And Paul getting knocked out in the water by the stupid crayfish thing and like yeah you know me trying to run over and save paul from drowning and like that

kind of stuff i fed him like 40 stim berries for a week you know that's that's where you know arc shines that's where any kind of game of this genre shines for me. Yeah, to me, when I liked this game the most was the very beginning of the middle stage of the game. So the very beginning, you're just kind of trying to get your feet set with a basic base. Once that is up, that is when I had the most fun, because the progression is constantly coming to you, where you unlock the Mortar and Pestle and you unlock the Smithy and you unlock the Fabricator. But then once you hit that and you're taming your first dinosaurs, to me, that was when I had an absolute blast. I looked forward to hopping on a couple of days. We played like, I don't know, six, seven hours.

And it flew by. It was a complete blast but then i kind of hit a point where it was like okay now to take the next stage to where we're building like the chemistry bench and the cryo fridge it requires so many resources it felt like the progression was at such a high rate in the beginning, and then it kind of drops off a cliff. And to me, that's when I started losing interest. And I was like, okay, well, now we have some of our own carnivore dinosaurs that fight really well. We've built all this stuff. To take the next step is so much effort. That's when it kind of lost some of its shine for me personally. But for me, I felt like the middle of the game really really was interesting and a lot of fun uh i would say that's when it played its best what is one thing that you would

change about arc if you could the inventory system for me it was just really bad it was it was clunky it was annoying i think if they had fixed that part of it, it would have made the gameplay a lot more intuitive and just streamlined. So for me, inventory system is a huge fix. That would be awesome to have a good inventory and all those things. If you could get into the server,

you shouldn't have to go to a separate, complete website, click a link with Arc Open to be able to get into the server that just somehow decided to not show up that day or that minute you could be on it back out for something and then go to try to find it again poof it's gone a lot of issues with the server browser we we fought the server browser a lot um yeah that was that was definitely a pain point. Yeah. I would definitely do away with the engram system. So if you haven't played Ark, really, if you do anything in this game, you gain XP, which I think is great.

But then when you level, you can spend engram points to unlock these recipes. I would make it like Valheim, where if you pick up an item, now that just unlocks every single recipe that requires that item. And I think that that would really drive the exploration and the discovery a lot. So if I pick up like keratin or chitin for the first time, and it starts popping up, oh, you can make this, this, this, this, and this. I think that would be so much more exciting than let's just grind out 100 of this and 400 of this and then build a bench. And now there's just like a list of recipes as I level. I think something like that would have made it far more interesting. I'm with you on that. Yeah, that's just going to drive exploration.

You know, when you're trying to find new materials, new things, and then it's not as painstaking to figure out what you can make with those. Yeah, I totally agree. All right, well, we're going to take our last break, and we'll be right back to close out the show. Okay, I know we're kind of running late on time here, but I feel like we have to mention the fact that Ark is coming out with a sequel. Ark 2 is being developed in Unreal Engine 5. Vin it will be available on game pass day one do you guys think that you'll pick up and mess around with the sequel i thought i thought you're gonna say it was gonna have more family more coronas more family more cars i'll be honest man i'm a sucker for a survival game i i really love exploration, survival, progression, that kind of stuff. I told my daughter the other day, we're going to do our Ark episode. I'll give my points, maybe they make it a little bit more like rust. Maybe.

I mean, we're catching arc kind of near the end of its lifespan, too. Oh, yeah. The official servers are going dead later this year. Right. And so I think maybe we're just a little bit late to that game. Arc two is not something that's on my radar, but that doesn't mean that I refuse to let it be on my radar. If it comes out and people are like, dude, this is great. My daughter picks it up and she's having a blast with it.

And it fixes some of the pain points. Then I don't see why I wouldn't play it at that point. I'd be more likely to pay for game pass for a month. Cause I don't think I'd want to play arc beyond that. What about you Ryan? Yeah. Yeah. I'm the same.

Yeah. I just don't, I know we had a lot of fun and points of the game, but with all we have to play and everything else, I just don't i i know we had a lot of fun and points of the game but with all we have to play and everything else i just don't see myself getting this yeah all right well guys let's go into our next segment here let's bring up some hot takes yes all right who wants the honors of going first i'll go first oh were you gonna you going to? Oh, I was going to. My hot take is dinosaurs can absolutely make a video game

because if it wasn't for dinosaurs, Ark would just be some bland, every other survival exploration crafting game that I've ever seen in my life. You know, like I said, it's hard to not compare it to Rust because we have a ton of time on Rust and stuff like that. The PvP aspect of Rust, the exploration, the interaction part makes that game. The dinosaurs make Ark.

I don't know how much of a hot take that is, but it is... My enjoyment of this game took off immensely when we started actually focusing on the dinosaur aspect versus the survival crafting aspect so dinosaurs 100 can carry a video game without the dinosaurs this would be an incredibly bad game yeah i would say the dinosaurs make it yeah what's your hot take ryan um first i want to say sorry gideon you're great thank you so much for going legendary. But other than playing with you guys and playing together in a few moments, this game sucked. Not a fan. Not a fan.

I know it's beloved. I know a lot of people like it, but I just, I don't know what it's rated, but I don't know why it's that high. I can already say that. Yeah. I would say this is the most confusing game I have ever played in my life. There was a lot of fun. I enjoyed a lot of it. But just to learn the game. For example, there is no gamma setting in the in-game interface.

I kept telling Josh. I was like, Josh, how are you harvesting stuff? I literally cannot see a thing. My screen is almost pitch black. And Josh is like, yeah, that's weird. I mean, it's dark, but I can see. And I'm looking. I hit escape. I'm looking at settings.

There is no gamma setting. But if you hit tab, you can bring up the console and type Gamma 3 or Gamma 4. So it's like you have to become a part-time programmer to understand how to more confusing to learn than this game. This is one of those games that you have to spend an extraordinary amount of time researching just to play the base game, and it doesn't have to be that way. I'm hoping that that's something that they'll drastically improve in Arc 2, because I just don't understand it. All right, Josh, I know that those are some of our thoughts. Ryan's let the cat out of the bag.

He was pretty down on it. I think Josh and I were a little bit higher than Ryan, but bring us some of the community reviews. What have the people to say about Ark? Okay. We always get a mix of reviews, so people don't have to take our word for it. We go to Steam, and I always pull a couple of good ones and a couple of bad ones. This first one, this dude says this game is recommended. He has 6,000 hours on record. Oh my word. Um,

which, uh, he's never logged out since 2015. You can put that kind of time into arc, um, which I think a lot of people like, but the review says arc is a game I love to hate. I spent so many hours playing it.

And then sometimes I wish I'd never played it at all. If you have a lot of time on your hands, this is the game for you. I would suggest to play on unofficial servers with mods, but if you don't mind a challenge, then you can go on the official servers. Personally, I prefer PVE. I couldn't build tame stuff that log in to have it all destroyed. Be aware it will eat up hard drive space and the more maps you buy, the bigger it gets. My space right now is sitting at 550 gigabytes of space taken up by Ark. Plus, you have the option to play Omega Docs mod variants, too. There's plenty of mods to add for you to try out and have fun with, but like I say, it eats your time and space once you start.

6,000 hours in a video game. What more can you ask for, right? I mean, honestly, my daughter has not played 6,000 hours in a video game. What more can you ask for? Honestly, my daughter has not played 6,000 hours because I don't even know if she's that old. But this is a game you can just lose yourself in forever, honestly. It is that big. Oh, yeah. Now, I got Ark for free through Epic Game Store. How much did you guys pay for it on Steam? Do you remember? No, I got it free as well. Okay. Do you know what you paid for it? Oh what you paid oh no no no i got it super cheap my daughter bought it on my steam account but you can get it for like under ten dollars i think it was like 10 or 15 when i got it okay yeah i'm taking a look it's 20 bucks i will say this is some of the best bang for your buck yeah where

you can get a lot of hours out of this 20 game game, as long as it can run it, because it's not very well optimized and takes up a lot of hard drive room. Yeah. All right. This next one's not recommended a little bit longer, so I'll just chug through this one. But I think they make a few good points. So 144 hours on record. It's not a bad game. It's super engaging, and it's easy to log hundreds of hours playing and barely scratch the surface.

But in some ways, it is designed to make you regret having played it at all a dinosaur you spent dozens of hours leveling stun locked by a jellyfish and it's dead the shiny new assault rifle you sunk a bunch of time and materials into turns out it's basically useless against dinosaurs who knew p.s you just got knocked off a cliff and fell to your death and now you have no hope of recovering your gear. Look down. Now look back up at the base your base could look like until it gets completely wrecked by a wandering alpha T-Rex. Also, your flying mount just flew off into the sky and is now completely out of reach

because your key bindings mysteriously reset themselves. You're probably going to buy the game anyway because it's incredibly cool. Have you seen all the dinosaurs? OMG. And you're going to have fun. You're even going to enjoy your first 35 deaths because you're a noob. And it's hard to get mad when you're being carried off into a swamp by some kind of adorable crocodile monster. Then you'll get a little more capable and you'll start to accumulate nice things. But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, because that's how it's all designed to work.

And when it happens, you'll regret every hour you put into it. Pretend you're lactose intolerant and this game is five gallons of your favorite ice cream. You'll enjoy it for a little while, but that joy will be fleeting and you will suffer as I have suffered. As somebody who's lactose intolerant, I understand exactly what they said. Now, this is kind of the nature of these type of games. Paul and I have joked around that Rust is the best, most infuriating game ever. If you're playing on a PvP server, you expect that. I will say that our base got wrecked by an alpha carnosaurus, and that was just PvE. Sometimes you can't help what happens. But again,

I feel like this game shines when things aren't always going right. So I get the sentiment. But at the same time, I think it's those things that add to the game overall. Yeah, it's very much like Rust. You just have to adapt the kind of mentality, use it or lose it. Don't just... I remember at one point,yan was like well should we take the aks and i was like yes pick it up go take it with you because we don't know how long we're gonna play this game or how long until things get wrecked uh for some reason animals loved running by and destroying my compost bin like it was constantly getting destroyed uh that's just the nature of survival games you gotta restart every once in a while you're going to lose things and you got to rebuild it up you know it's just the nature of the game all right

so moving on this next one's recommended 437 hours on record i don't know if you guys are seeing a trend here but people play this game a lot um one of my favorite games of all time i have another few hundred hours in it elsewhere too it's not a perfect game by any means and the developers have certainly made some controversial decisions but i still come back to the game every few months and enjoy all my time spent in it it's not everyone's cup of tea but it's definitely mine all right seems to be the i mean honestly people that love this game they absolutely love it um and they play it a lot um this last one, short and sweet, not recommended. 3,344 hours on record. The game is about to die in four months to be sold again at full price under a different

title. Now, the reason I bring this up is because almost universally, the negative reviews on this game are simply talking about the developers of the game, the fact that Ark is going away, it's being replaced by Ark 2. We covered some of the controversy around that with them charging full price and then not giving you things and then giving you things and then they changed what you were going to get with the upgraded version, which is called Ark Survival Ascended. We won't get into that now, but there's a lot of people out there that are very upset over the fact that they are sunsetting Ark and turning it into Ark 2 and then charging you full price for that. Well, yeah, it's weird to pay for this

version of Ark. And if you play on the official servers, they are telling you, you now need to buy a full price remake to keep playing the same game you already bought. So you're essentially being double charged. I don't think anyone cares that Arc 2 is coming down the road, but the fact that they're going to charge you once again to play the exact same content. It's kind of like Overwatch 2, right? I mean, that's free to play.

Imagine if Overwatch 2 was a $20 game and they brought down Overwatch 1, but they were all the same maps and the same characters right we would say why i already paid full price why do i have to pay it again so i they deserve maybe normally i'm not for review bombing but i'm not saying to go do it but i understand why some people do yep all right so that's some of what the community thought this is where we try to guess the overall rating of the game using the steam scoring system of zero to 100 paul i think you won last time you're on a hot streak no i think it was ryan oh it was ryan last time ryan was not not ready to introduce the segment

well you get first crack at this ryan what do you think the overall Steam score for Ark is? Oh, man. Also, about 250,000 reviews. Ark's a very well-known popular game. Now, this is where I have to branch between my feeling of what it should be and what it actually is. I'm going to say let's do a nice even 85, 85 from Ryan. Paul, I think it's going to be higher. My initial thought was 91. I initially was like, I think it's right at like that 90 mark.

And then I kind of went, I don't know, maybe it's a little lower. So I just arbitrarily knocked off. If you, I guessed 87%. Okay. All right. Um, so we just arbitrarily knocked off a few. I guessed 87%. Okay. All right. So we're all pretty close to each other here. The actual is 83%, which means Ryan, back-to-back victories on this. Oh, yeah.

I hope you're ready, Ryan, because you get to introduce this next segment, buddy. Hit that music, Paul. Hey, baby. You ever heard of arcades you want to if you didn't if i won i was definitely using the arcades reference so oh boy all right tell the people what this segment is ryan oh well now we're going to go to make love, marry and murder. So we all pick one of the three and decide on how we rank this game based on those. So Paul,

you want to lead us off? Sure. I can lead, I can lead off here. So I think that for a lot of people, this game is marriage material. For me, I would say it was a lot of fun

i would not say it's a must play i think if you have a couple of buddies who are willing to hop in with you it's well worth the investment so it's almost weird i i would say engage if that was an option like you know this game would be a good fiance but uh maybe i'll say it's like a good first wife like you know it's not gonna last forever but hey for you know for a short while it's gonna be fun and maybe it won't be forever but if i had to choose between make love or marry i would say make love even though i think you can get a lot of time and hours out of it the only reason i'm not gonna say it's marriage material is because I don't think it falls into that must play category. Yeah. For me, this is a widow because the game is dying, I think in August. So honestly,

I think it's like two months from this recording where they're going to just turn everything off on it, except for your unofficial servers or private servers or whatever. I hated this game in the beginning. I think we all did, honestly. The first probably five hours of playing, I think every single one of us was like, Gideon, I can't believe you made us do this, man. What did we ever do to you? But then, like Paul said, we hit our stride,

and I am a sucker for this type of game, man. I started having so much fun. The chaos was great. The taming the dinos was great. The rampaging around with 14 T-Rexes at the end of the game was phenomenal. Really changed my opinion of it. This is an easy make love for me. I get why people love Ark. I see now why my daughter absolutely loves this game. You can play this game forever. There's that much content there. It's not in my nature to want to play it that much,

but I really did have a lot of fun. I love the fact that the three of us really got a lot of playtime together in it, which did help it. Solo, don't know that I'd feel the same way, to be honest with you. But for me, it is an easy make love. It's not a Mary for me because I think there's better options out there. I would put satisfactory and rust over this

easily. But I really did start to have a good time with it. So for me, it's a make love. All right. What about you, Ryan? We got two make loves and a... Well, to what Josh said about quitting it i remember us talking about i was like man after the last play session i was like i don't i don't know if paul's gonna keep playing he may just rage quit on us and not play this anymore because he was i played different times with each of you and paul was so frustrated and i hated it the most for sure paul was gonna i was like he's gonna rage quit i don't know what we're like, he's going to rage quit. I don't know what we're going to do. He's going to just rage quit and just say sorry. But with that being said, I really enjoyed the banter and us playing together.

Like you said, solo, I would have played 20 minutes. I just been like, there's no way I'm going to play this game. Once we got the dinos, once we started running around and doing other things, that was really cool and fun. But for me, I just can't get past the inventory, the issues logging into the server, servers disappearing, servers coming back, all the stuff that we had as far as lack of tutorial entering into the game. So I'm going to hack and slash and blow up and murder this game. It's a no for me, dog. I will say, there were pockets that you definitely enjoyed it. There were a few times that you would message me and Josh

and be like, guys, I can't wait to get back on Ark. But then it was almost like you would come off that high really quickly. Once you started playing the game again? No, it would come off when I'd be. Once you started playing the game again? Well, no, no, no. It would come off when I'd be like, I can't wait to get back on. And then I'd say, guys, my server's not showing up. I can't get on. Yeah.

Or I got killed by a dino and I've died seven times trying to get my stuff back. Or back when we were on the original server and I had three Sabretooth just circling our base. And I couldn't go literally anywhere just lead them away just lead them away i can't i can't take two steps out of the base before getting mauled oh and look there's another alpha t-rex oh and then there's a a thing of beavers that are going to kill us all oh yeah the beavers i forgot about the beavers man don't touch don't touch the the dams because the beavers will smoke you the wood belongs to the beavers leave it there all right well let's go into our last segment here let's go to our leaderboard and see where this game stacks up okay so anytime we do a deep dive we have an overall list at multiplayerpodcast.com.

And as a three-man consensus, we have to agree, where do we put this on our list? So our greatest games are at the top. We got stuff near the top like Disco Elysium, Cyberpunk 2077, God of War Ragnarok, even Rust. We have clocking in all the way high at number seven. And then all the way down at number seven and then all the way down at the bottom we've got some of the dregs we got some things like uh sea of thieves and the forest and forspoken escape from tarkov boy josh and i did not like tarkov no uh we were in the minority

there so believe it or not arc is game number 100 So, we now have 100 games on our leaderboard. Taking a look here, what are you guys thinking about placement? I feel weird about this one. You could tell me anywhere in the 40s, 50s, or 60s, and I feel like it would kind of make sense. It's funny you mentioned that. I'm in the early 40s, early to mid 40s is where I'm looking and I'm like, my comfort level is spot on for that. I initially thought 41 because I would put this above Pillars of Eternity 2. So I'm kind of with you in the early 40s. Yeah, I'm in the early 40s. I'll be honest, anywhere between like 41 and 46 or even seven.

I think I'm fine with, I'm not too, too picky on that, but I think that's a good spot. There is a lot of fun to be had. If you like arc and you have friends to play with and you're patient and all that stuff, this could be, I see why this game is like a top five game for a lot of people. To be honest, the content is there. Like you can lose yourself in this game. a lot of people, to be honest. The content is there. You can lose yourself in this game. Maybe it's not for us. I know we prefer Rust. And it's like, man, I'd rather just play Rust if I have the itch for this or Satisfactory because I have that itch. But

I get why people love it. But I think people are blinded a little bit to some of the issues. So for people new coming in like us, it's hard to look past some of those issues with the game. We're also catching it on the tail end of its life. So it's like, I don't, I'm not trying to be too harsh with it, but we have to judge the game for what it is and how we played it. And so for me,

I think there, I think anywhere in the forties is probably a sweet spot for me. Ryan, I'm guessing you're a little lower being the murder. Like where, where, where are you looking? I wish our list went to a thousand. That's what for me. Ryan, I'm guessing you're a little lower being the murder. Like, where are you looking? I wish our list went to 1,000. That's what I wish.

That bad? Because it would be that far up. No, I mean, for me, that's high. But looking at a lot of these other games, I mean, I don't know. When you guys were saying, you know, 50s, 60s, you know, I'd probably say 70s. But I understand. I know there's two of you and one of me so i i uh look at all those games in the 40s i can i can understand why you would put it because we did we did have fun we we enjoyed our time and at points and uh it is something if you if you

have 30 hours to learn this game and then play with your friends or play with them while you learn that third in that 30 hours then i guess you can have fun and you can put it up there so you know i get it i'm comfortable with where you guys want to put it in in the 40s well if we're thinking two people are in the 40s and one's in the 70s probably needs to be somewhere in the 50s yeah do we want to put jedi survivor above arc well ryan what's your you like jedi survivor way better right oh yeah i like 100 i get that um i would rather play arc over tribes of midgard i just don't like tribes of midgard yeah you've always been super low on that i love i have vermentide 2 i think is a ton of fun um so i would say 59 is probably a pretty good spot

to be honest that kind of splits ryan's thoughts i think it's still respectable um vermintide 2 is just a lot of fun with friends and short and quick i'd much rather play raft which is another survival crafting type game yeah so i yeah let's i vote 59 i'm good with that paul all right so we'll have it below jedi survivor tribes of midgard far cry 5 raft high on life killing floor 2 and vermin tied to but we will have it above shovel knight sorry ace of shame uh keep talking and nobody explodes operation tango a way out and borderlands 3 all right that's a good spot acceptable all right we'll lock in. Alright, well that wraps up this episode on Ark. We want to say thank you once again

to GideonIsLit for going legendary and picking this game. I was especially grateful because I already had Ark for free, so I did not have to drop any money on this one. I claimed it a few years ago, even though I never played it. So, for those who are interested to know, our next deep dive

will be two Mondays from now. It will be Final Fantasy 16. I can proudly say Ryan finished everything up. He has given the PS5 to Josh. So we are now fully engaged in that. And then as a reminder to our listeners, please check out our Patreon support options at MultiplayerSquad.com. You'll get your bonus episodes and everything ad free and a day early and please check out all of our episodes mondays thursdays and saturdays i hope everyone out there is having a fantastic summer and until next time happy gaming see you all right see everybody