I picked up ARK Survival Evolved because a few people have bugged me to get it, and also because it was on a small Steam sale. I’ve only spend a few hours with it, and currently all of my characters are bugged, stuck in some kind of permanent spectator mode where I can’t do anything, including dying or creating a new character. Have an email into support, hopefully will hear back ‘soon’.
Anyway, assuming that issue does get resolved, here are some quick thoughts on ARK. For starters, its a Unity engine game, and feels like it. While Unity has been used to make a million games, the style used in ARK is the same used in Rust and many other games, and while the theme and details of these games are all different, the just feel like the same game. If you told me ARK was a fan mod for Rust, I’d believe you.
That said, it would still be a pretty cool mod. Lets be honest, dinosaurs are cool, as is the idea of taming them and using them in combat, or fighting them when they attack you in the wild. Put that together with the usual ‘gather resources, build a base, go blow up other people’ gameplay with these type of games, and ARK is interesting for sure.
ARK also has a good character progression model, where every level you not only pick a stat to increase, but get some points to spend on unlocking new crafting blueprints. You can also find blueprints, but it’s nice that as you play more, you character is able to craft more, and also gets a bit stronger.
The downside of ARK is if you played Rust or games like it to death recently, not enough is new to get you hyped IMO. Like I said, the main object of the game is still the same, just with dinos and other details changed up. Plus from a software maturity perspective, Rust is much further along, so if dinos aren’t a make-or-break for you, I’m not sure why you would go with ARK over Rust, or start up ARK if you are already playing Rust.
Hardcore Casual 
I thought it was an Unreal 4 game..
You are correct, which makes the game feeling the same as Rust even weirder to me.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/535152276592415802/
This is the fix for being stuck in spectator mode, it’s a single command line.
Game is what you make it, really, along with what server you play on. If you play solo it’s going to be incredibly dull and you’ll hit a wall really quickly once you want to do any major dino storage and taming past a sabertooth, because the ability to devote people to tasks simultaneously dramatically increases the potential to do anything.
Also if you make it up to a flyer don’t try anything with it, most birds will die in one gunshot these days unless you level up absurd amounts of health on it.
Fixed my issue, thanks!
And I agree, games like this are way more fun as a group.
No doubt, but ARK generally is a lot better than every other survival game atm in terms of actually living in the world rather than just logging in every now and then to regear, kill people and die. If you have a group of people who would usually avoid survival games but love MMOs, you can probably get them to play ARK, because (oddly) the most unforgiving and hardcore servers are the official ones. Pretty much every unofficial one has some sort of enforced raiding protection, boosted gather/tame rates etc etc, and even on the official servers you will virtually never be KoS’d. You’ll be raided offline, sure, but someone actually coming up to you and killing you is extremely rare.