It's been at the top of the Steam charts for a little bit now and there's been zero Giant Bomb coverage on it. I'm incredibly curious.

Also if there are movers and shakers looking at this post, please do a feature on this game. I'd like to see what all the fuss is about. Also I don't wanna hunt around the dark places of the internet to find out more.

It seems to be a survival game in the vein of DayZ / Rust / Reign of Kings / The Forest . What makes this one special is that there are dinosaurs in the game.

Did you ever think of looking on YouTube? There are a bunch of people doing Let's Plays and other types of videos about Ark.

I doubt giantbomb is the place you would want decent coverage of this genre, they all seem pretty dismissive of it, despite it being a new hugely popular thing, born on PC. That doesn't happen often anymore. The Stranded Deep Unfinished, was pretty worthless content.

Obviously when I say 'new' take it with a grain of salt, because it's a genre born with early access. Meaning none of them are done and theres 100 crappy clones for every decent one.

It is a survival game (DayZ, Rust, etc.) but with dinosaurs.

twitch and youtube should be more than enough to get a feel for it and aren't 'dark places' of the internet.

Similar survival and build mechanics to Rust, with a leveling system, choose your own recipes to learn, and yes dinosaurs. Hunt, tame, and ride em. Quite a few species already in the game, more to come of course. Environment is a jungle style island with a few mountains, rivers, and caves, surrounded by ocean which has underwater caves to explore as well. Three giant, different colored obelisks provide landmarks, and below them tribes or groups of players can summon a boss-type monster to fight, provided they found the materials needed. PvP and PvE servers. Official and Unofficial, some modded (will support Steamworks) servers as well.

Tons of people are streaming it on twitch from what I've seen just browsing around. You can get a feel for it there. Think of it as a survival, collect, and build kind of game. DayZ with dinosaurs. Why no one thought of adding dinosaurs to this formula before now is beyond me, but apparently it works.

It is dinosaur pimping game as far as I have seen on the twitch streams.

You can drug dino's with berries to enslave them into becoming your mount so you can ride them. Survival games not my thing so probably never play this game.

in other words another survival game which won't be out of beta or early access soon. I can say I'm getting bored of em.

Gamespot covered it, Rob & Kish played it

http://www.gamespot.com/videos/now-playing-ark-survival-evolved/2300-6425050/

Seemed Kinda alright! If it weren't in Early Access , I'd probably would have picked it up on the Steam Sale.

Strange this game never got any coverage here it's absolutely huge, by far the most popular survival game if you ignore minecraft, and in my opinion the best.

Not everyone's cup of tea but personally I think ark is my favourite game of all time, nearly 100 hours in 2 weeks and only just scratching the surface of this monster!

Anyone who plays this have an opinion on the whole expansion pack situation with this game? As someone who plays and enjoys Rust, I would be pretty pissed if they had the balls to put out a paid expansion pack for an early access game.

@ssully: it's a map a fair bit harder than the 2 free maps, its completely non essential extra game for people who have already played a lot and want something new, and maybe a way to support the devs further.

It's actually a really good version of the typical "survival" nonsense that has been flooding Steam lately. The only issue is that it runs like horse-sh*t. No reason I should be getting sub 30 fps with a $400 CPU and a 960.

@sarcasticmudcrab: I am all for supporting devs for their work, but it seems wrong to dedicate resources to a paid expansion before the main game is out of early access.

@ssully: on paper ye sure. It's on consoles now though, its not alpha by any means it's perfectly playable at this point.