ARK: Survival Evolved has a major update with a needed UI refresh

People often say this game is badly optimised, I disagree with them, I say it hasn't been optimised whatsoever, the developers (not sure they deserve the title) just spend their days adding fluff & fiddling with hit points. If I hadn't been given the game I certainly wouldn't buy it as it stands right now.

I play on linux and stream it to twitch and yes whilst I agree with the cave glitches, I have never experienced a glitch with the red woods and the rain glitches is minimal.

Yes the game on linux is buggy, but its still a great game the UI has made things easier to get around. As well as a new way of taming the Equus.

ARK is the kind of game where losing visibility for even a few seconds could mean death. When an issue, however rare, has such terrible impact on gameplay I consider it to be game breaking. I love ARK but as a Linux user will not be playing it until the Vulkan fix is rolled out.

The new UI is functionally nice, but I think the old colour scheme was better suited for ark. I don't think the sci-fi theme fits ark at all. While TEK-tier is sci-fi themed, you won't get there right away, you will, however, get the UI.

The new UI is functionally nice, but I think the old colour scheme was better suited for ark. I don't think the sci-fi theme fits ark at all. While TEK-tier is sci-fi themed, you won't get there right away, you will, however, get the UI.

The idea of a UI that evolves with your tech level would be nice.

Them adding Vulkan support would essentially fix the graphical glitches... would be nice :)

The horse wrangling reminds me of the wrangling in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, complete with hearts when you pet it.

Ark will always hold a special place in my heart as my first Steam refund. I simply couldn't manage to get through the first thirty seconds or so with a frame rate crawling slower than a paraplegic iguana walking off one too many xanex.

And whilst the zoological gallimaufry expanded with each new update, problems, bugs, and glitches were only ever being halfheartedly patched or completely ignored. Nevertheless I continued to follow the game, thinking someday it would get better.

Most of the games I play are little more than atrocity simulators, where success is measured in the number of one's (sometimes socially sanctioned) murder victims. Yet, as much fun as I have in a typical shooter turning my enemies/victims into exploding meat fireworks, I remain unaffected by the virtual carnage I wreak. After all, it's only pretend ... just an adult version of playing "army men" or cowboys and politically-incorrect Indians with my boyhood pals.

Over time, as I followed ARK's progress, it dawned on me that the central conceit of the game, taming and domesticating dinosaurs (et hoc genus omne) involved nothing other than engaging in the systematic and prolonged torture of innocent animals.

No matter how gigantic, ferocious, and pretend they may be, the thought of beating an animal into unconsciousness and starving and drugging them to "tame" them simply repulses me. I'm not going to argue the ethical nuances that go into my feeling hunky-dory mowing down literally hundreds of cops in Payday 2, or driving gleefully through crowds of pedestrians in a Saint's Row game, but make me feel queasy and sad at the thought of torturing a T Rex. I'm just going to say that I stopped following ARK because of this torture feature.

Damn, this got dark. I was originally just going to make some point about how the devs idea of improving ARK is to add more creatures. I suppose I see that abundance of creatures as an abundance of victims so seamlessly that I couldn't talk about one without talking about the other.

I'm gonna go cheer myself up with some Payday 2.


Last edited by Nanobang on 1 Apr 2017 at 4:33 pm UTC

Them adding Vulkan support would essentially fix the graphical glitches... would be nice :)

It's desperately needed for all UE4 games, in my opinion (but then again, I have old hardware)

I don't know if I'm reading this right, but it does look like "Linux: Vulkan support" was set to be worked on this month in the UE4 roadmap
https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap
I'm hopeful it won't take them that long too considering that DX12 support is already in (and some developer said that DX12 and Vulkan are so similar it should be easy to port between them), and also considering that UE4 already has Vulkan support for mobile devices. All that's left to do is get it working on the desktop and up to par with DX12.

UE4 and ARK arent related really. They already said they wont upgrade their engine to newer version. its still on 4.5. SO they either have to backport the vulkan from the newer version to their old super modified version or write it from the scratch.... Wouldnt hold my breath on it though. They have said things before also, which were never fixed.

UE4 and ARK arent related really. They already said they wont upgrade their engine to newer version. its still on 4.5. SO they either have to backport the vulkan from the newer version to their old super modified version or write it from the scratch.... Wouldnt hold my breath on it though. They have said things before also, which were never fixed.

I think I had read the same somewhere, which is why ARK sits on my steam library no longer being played. After all those graphical glitches and the fact the game bores me.. I just couldn't do it anymore. Yet for some reason I can't resist buying a Conan game... So I bought Conan Exiles, which is almost the exact same play style as ARK, and doesn't even run on Linux... I feel ashamed! Damn you Conan!

the overall layout of the UI seems a bit better but the design is meh... I haven't had to much of the graphical glitches anymore. the textures and lighting seems to be much closer to the windows version from my more recent test plays.
btw, there's beta options now in the game properties. there is a newrenderer option which i've been using, which gives me a bit of a fps boost. nothing huge, mainly a more stable 60+ fps, but it does seem to have a bit better lighting and texture quality than the "stable" version of the game. also it still uses the older UI which is nice as well.

I played Ark yesterday on my 5 years old budget Windows PC and it worked and looked better than on my Steam Machine with GeForce 970.

the overall layout of the UI seems a bit better but the design is meh... I haven't had to much of the graphical glitches anymore. the textures and lighting seems to be much closer to the windows version from my more recent test plays.
as well.

The design is half done and not consistent, the main menu, server browser and options screen are still in the old style. So it clearly is unfinished. Next to that, on the center, it rains with a clear sky, and thunder sounds without the lightning, so that is still broken too.

-edit-
Undocumented changes
Swim Speed per point in Oxygen reduced by 80%. This affects both dinos and survivors.

Well that does it, underwater play was already hard on Linux with the glitches, now it has been made impossible to survive.

-edit 2-
Stamina drop of the birds is nuts, they are useless now. Next to that, the flying sound of the Ptera sounds like shacking bags of water, AWFUL! Will never get used to that!


Last edited by CyberRat on 2 Apr 2017 at 9:13 am UTC

-Stereo is more broken than it was before, most of the new sounds only come up from the right only no matter the direction of your character
-Shift split doesnt work into other inventories, works only in your own
-Craft all option doesn't show how many you can craft in advance.
-Inventories that were like 3 slots before are now full slot amount but stuff can still go into 3 slots only, hard to spot which slots are active on said inventory
-Fps seems a bit lower with the new UI/update
-Dino names and other floating texts are way too sharp now, specially at night, makes them annoying imo
-Glitches are still same, nothing fixed (just you will see them less because you cant fly fast anymore due to nerf)
-Esc Menu seems really plain now, Tribe Manager was removed from it.
-Hotbar is way too big and takes too much screen space (UI scaling anyone?)
-Sound sliders still doesn't do anything, everything just changes master volume.

probably a lot more things which i forgot.

The design is half done and not consistent, the main menu, server browser and options screen are still in the old style. So it clearly is unfinished. Next to that, on the center, it rains with a clear sky, and thunder sounds without the lightning, so that is still broken too.

it was a couple of months ago, maybe December time frame that at least for me, the clouds (for the most part) are there in a more volumetric way but they don't have special effects.
the rain and high quality ground textures are now working, except I feel that there may be some special cloud effects missing, but it does have better shadows in the middle of the nighttime when it is supposed to get darker it actually does, at least in my experience with the game so far. I can even go in caves without the crazy water effect issues now, although it's bright as daylight, which it should be very dark.
The storms I've seen on the Scorched Earth map actually seemed to work, with lightning working. although the shaders are off a bit, it does get darker and has wind effects.
the downside right now is after about 2 to 4 hours of playtime I will end up getting the shader artifacts associated to the rain and water effects, it happens randomly, turning it into the odd black and multi-colored artifacts. there are still issues with waterfall effects, inside caves.

I'm not claiming this game to be perfect by any stretch, it still has a number of bugs across all platforms. but I have noticed that it has gotten better in past 3 to 4 months, for at least some of us, I highly doubt I'm the only one. it's obvious to me that Mac and Linux are not much of a priority, nor did I expect it to be. I just hope they keep fixing the Linux client to make it more playable. all we can do is keep reporting the bugs and hopefully they get fixed.

if not then chalk it up to a lesson learned.


Last edited by neowiz73 on 2 Apr 2017 at 1:16 pm UTC

Bought the game on sale and returned it. Ran better a year ago during a free weekend.

Valve needs to limit how long a game can be in early access.

Valve needs to limit how long a game can be in early access.

An interesting idea. Based on ARK, the early access model seems to be pretty much for the convenience not to continuously develop the linux and mac versions which they already have in the wild. Every time someone from Studio Wildcard actually responds to anything linux/mac related, is when they remind that the title is still in early access.
How long will it be in EA? Probably for a good 5 years more by the looks of how the things are going.

1 year limit on the EA program through Steam should be a pretty good motive to get things done.
On the other hand, it could push the developers to release a half-baked title with much of the content missing which could arrive at a later date via DLC - now that I don't like to see. But that's all pure speculation.

I think the more we request an ARk fix for linux maybe we will get one! Or am I just crazy hopeful because I love this game?!

Unfortunately, overly hopeful. I bought this game the day it was released for linux and sunk about 1000 hours into it. I ran my own server for about a year and a half. I've participated in every AMA on reddit since launch, I've emailed them, tweeted to them, posted on their forums, etc.

Since release, they have not released ONE SINGLE BUG FIX specific to linux users. Not even one- and that isn't an exaggeration.

Studio Wildcard does not give a fraction of a fuck about linux. Hate to break it to ya. All they care about is Windows and Xbox

Why should they at this stage? We have already paid and Wildcard probably doesn't target any more Linux customers. Ark surfed the early wave of Linux gaming, we were buying whatever was released.

That said, if you sunk 1000 hours into the game, it has to be better than good enough - even on Linux :)

The one & only time I actually got it to anywhere near playable I was killed instantly by a Raptor, then I respawned in the same spot & the evil little bugger was waiting for me & killed me again & again & again. Since then I haven't been able to play it for more than a few seconds at a time without the entire system grinding to a halt while it waits for Ark to finish loading or doing whatever the heck it does when it's just sitting there frozen.

Just lost my first raft to the Leedsichthys. I liked rafts for not having weight limitation so I could put as many things as I had storages for there, but with this new whale, I don't see myself doing it again.