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We have been waiting with a keen eye for ARK: Survival Evolved to arrive on Linux. It’s a very popular survival game with dinosaurs that is constantly in the top-10 on Steam, so how is it?

About the game (Official)
As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements. Use your cunning and resources to kill or tame the leviathan dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roaming the land, and team up with or prey on hundreds of other players to survive, dominate... and escape!

Warning: This game is Early Access, and the Linux version has only just arrived.

My initial thoughts
Performance
Be aware that I am testing this on an Nvidia 970 and a decent Intel i5 4670K, so your mileage will vary.

It’s...pretty terrible. On High settings it dips below 10FPS at times, and looking around the world is mainly around 20-25FPS, but it will hit ~55FPS when looking at the coastline.

I’ve had to turn the settings to Medium to get even a remotely playable framerate, and it doesn’t look very pleasing on the eyes.

Graphics
They are good when you turn the settings up for sure, but that's only playable for super insane machines right now, so I took a look at Medium to make it somewhat playable.

Medium settings aren't too terrible, but it is ruined by the constant graphics glitching, and general sluggish performance. Medium settings are still better than most indie games around, so I'm not too bothered by how it looks, it just badly needs the glitches sorted.

Gameplay
I’ve never been a massive fan of many survival games, as most are ugly, or boring as hell. It’s also pretty hard to judge the game when it’s in such a state as this, but I tried it as much as I could to report back.

I have to say, I might actually enjoy this one more than other survival games like it. It already gave me a fright (and death) when trying to get some wood. I was minding my own business, casually pooping and gathering wood, and I peered around a tree to see some sort of raptor making a line for me, and death quickly came after I saw it.

Your character randomly poops (really, fart noise and all), and you can pick it up to use it later. That’s highly amusing, and totally gross, but realistic at least.

Later on I sat around my newly crafted campfire to cook up some meat, I was in a nice little rocky cove for safety, but as I looked above I saw a massive tail swinging around... think I might stay here for a while.

Bugs
Character creation is impossible, since the character generated is invisible, you can only see your character when in-game:
image

You also fall through the world, a lot, I keep spawning with the legs in the ground too, although in this case my foot seems to be beside my hip:
image

I sent it onto the developers, and they tweeted back that it’s being looked into, so maybe a quick patch could solve those issues.

I later found more issues, like seeing through a hill:
image

These rocks seem to have never heard of gravity either:
image

I kept seeing shadows in mid-air too, so shadows are a little off as well.

And quite a few more, looks like it will take a few patches to get a playable game for Linux gamers.

Final thoughts: You might want to wait quite a while, seriously. I was going to do a livestream of it tonight, but it’s too buggy, too sluggish and just not good right now, but I’m sure it will get quickly patched up.

Check out ARK: Survival Evolved on Steam now if you dare. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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39 comments
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Liam Dawe Jul 2, 2015
Quoting: ProfessorKaos64Appreciate the test results Liam. I enjoy Jurassic Park-like games, so I will keep my eye on this one.

You're welcome.

It seems to work a bit better after the updates last night, and my character isn't invisible on the creator, or in the Inventory panel. Loving the quick work by the developers to polish it up for us.
bubexel Jul 2, 2015
Ye! btw i find out that motion blur reduce 10 - 20 fps on my gtx970! i removed it, and now im playing with 35 - 60 fps :D the change was big removing the motion blur :D
BabaoWhisky Jul 3, 2015
Do you know which version of OpenGL the game use on Linux ?

Because UE4 can use OpenGL 3.3 and above and in-game it looks like OpenGL3.x which is used ...
Guest Jul 3, 2015
sorry if I missed something, I wasn’t going to install this for ages so I got a better experience out of the box ( only bought it because it was sub $20 and after my less than good planet explorers experience I wouldn’t normally go Early access :S: )

but I just installed it and it isn’t running, do i have to enter a code to run in Beta ? or sign upto something.

thanks
musojon74 Jul 3, 2015
Should just run from your steam list. Mine did. :-(
Noven Jul 3, 2015
Its a really neat game. Running it on medium has it running smooth but it looks like crap. I do say though that it gives me a chuckle whenever I poop. I guess my inner 5 year old will never go away. Multiplayer is a challenge. Lots of room for iwprozement.
musojon74 Jul 4, 2015
Running better after patch for me.
Aryvandaar Jul 5, 2015
Things are working great for me now. No textures missing, but I do get some FPS drops, but that's okay for now (it's not so bad).

It could possible be my CPU getting a bit old though.


Last edited by Aryvandaar on 5 July 2015 at 11:08 am UTC
evergreen Jul 6, 2015
Sometimes I have glitches and 26-50 fps on high details and all effects off. But it's very playable.

Ubuntu 14.04
Nvidia drivers 352.xx
Intel i5 4970k
Nvidia gtx 780
16gb Ram
SSD 256 Samsung pro
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