HoC Plays Ark: Survival Envolved - Day 1

It is just as humorous as you would imagine

"you are a naked man of superhuman strength with little time to figure out why you're even alive before being killed by venomous dragonflies" - Coxxorz

My quick description to Coxxorz when he joined me online, "It's Spawn Die with dinosaurs."

In someways that is more accurate than you would like.

And, to over share, I was there when Coxxorz was killed by a bug and it was hilarious.

In my first few attempts I was killed by a giant shark, a fish, some tiny itty-bitty cute dinosaurs, (singly and multiple), hunger, drowning, glowing alpha raptor, and once, memorably, by a T-Rex.

It really is an open world survival game with survival being the key word. I figured out, eventually, that they expect you to play it multiplayer. With a tribe surrounding you.

And when Coxxorz joined me we became a tribe of two. You can share campfires and storage boxes as well as passing resources back and forth. Once you join an in-game tribe you also share experience. I can see how a larger tribe would level up significantly faster. We still died often (that bug was vicious and it was a flying bug) but backed each other up, shared resources and kept track of each others dead bodies.

When you die you drop a knapsack containing your inventory. While playing single player I managed to find my dropped inventory once. One time out of many. With Coxxorz and I together we managed a higher retrieval rate. Not much higher as the dinosaur that just killed you tended to hang out around your dead body.

Once we figured out how to skin dead things for meat, it got easier.

We headed inland, found another beach, found an island, swam out to the island and started our initial main base. Next we are working on a bigger encampment and training a dinosaur.

However, it is obviously a preview game.

• It suffered from pauses/freezes every couple of minutes. Single player and when hosting a game.
• Draw in for distant textures is broken
• The interface for inventory is clunky (to put it mildly).
• It is not friendly to new players
• My search for online games never finished so Coxxorz and I had to run our own game.

  We aren't quite ready to set up a persistent dedicated HoC server yet. Depends on how many clan members buy (and play) the game and if we are still playing it a week from now. And also if we ever figure out a good way to share expenses other than having Coxxorz pay for it all (like having Stormblade pay for it all, I am good with that).