What to expect

>>323488119
a shitty game unless you have friends to play with. kinda fizzles out quickly playing alone, imo.

>>323488119
Dinosaurs, terrible optimisation, and grinding.

>>323488119
Awful optimization.

memes, bad ones

I've got some friends I'm gonna team up with eventually

atrocious framerates even on top end hardware

>>323488119
long loading times and an average of 30 fps

>have 5 friends who play this
>hate early access

Is it even fun? Last (and only) early access I played with friends was Space Engineers, and that held up like diarrhea in a colander.

I've heard the servers are clogged up. Can anyone confirm?

Fun, generally speaking. The beginning is pretty rough in a good way. It's true that it's not as fun alone but stay the fuck away from the official servers. They're just awful.
Also, r.shadowquality 0 r.lightshafts 0 and r.bloomquality 0 are things you'll probably use a lot.
>>323488637
They recently fixed the long loading times. Took ~5 mins for me previously and it's down to less than a minute now.

>>323488119
grinding is awful

you can't literally play alone, especially if you want to build advanced stuff and tame cool dinos. Especially the latter, it takes so much fucking time and resources it's unbelievable.

>>323488828
Ok, but the optimization is still dogshit.

>>323488119
Lots of fucking patches.

>>323488119

Your experience in this game is highly variable depending on the server you join. Join one with really high farm, xp, and tame rates, like 10 or 20x at least. Default rates are absolutely ridiculously low. The first thing you should tame is a bird (fast traveling) or a frog (decent traveling and farms cementing paste)

Turn general shadown on low, its the biggest fps killer. Distance field shadowing in the checkbox is good enough. Also keep post processing on at least medium because it makes a huge difference in how the environment looks. .

>>323488774

What servers? Don't play on the official servers.

>>323488932

There is literally no reason to play with low farm and tame rate unless you're a masochist

>>323488983
Not gonna disagree with that. I can't go near buildings unless I want to just suddenly drop to 20 fps. Sucks but I deal.
>>323489134
>Join one with really high farm, xp, and tame rates, like 10 or 20x at least
Jeez, that's not very good advice. Join on higher than default, sure, but anything over 7 is ridiculous. Especially XP. Bird as a first tame? Really?

>>323489769

Some people don't like to waste time grinding, esp with mods like increased level cap and tweaked stat modifiers etc.

And why would not you get an argent or at a ptera as first tame? Flying dinos are far more useful than all the others and pretty easy to tame.

>>323488119

Waiting literally all day to finally tame the one dinosaur you've always wanted because the server tells you it will be going down for maintenance / patches in 15 minutes only for the deadline to come and go so they push it back another hour.

This will happen several times before they actually take them down to patch. You will have no warning when they're telling the truth, it'll just go down on one of the warnings.

>>323490347
No, my first dino would be a trike so I can get the narcotics to get the other guys easier. I don't like having everything handed to me like that, especially since in a 10x xp server you can hit lvl 60 in about 2 hours, really, where is the fun in that? I can understand tweaked modifiers and even run a weight one on my server, but damn why play if you're gonna just be max cap in a day and have everything?

>>323490816

or play on a 50x tame server and tame in seconds or a few minutes instead of hours

Punching trees and tamagochi in 10fps

>early release games

>>323490907

I've played on servers with like 400+ level cap which you won't max out quickly even with 50x XP, and the reason to rush through leveling and unlocking stuff, which gets REALLY tedious if you do this over and over on different servers, is so you can focus on stuff like base building, high tier weapon and explosive making, and epic dino army amassing for pvp and raiding.

>>323491596
See, that just sounds horrifically boring to me, but hey that's the way you like it. For whatever reason.
Though OP should probably try a moderately modified server at least before trying such servers though, just to get a little taste of vanilla ARK in all of its framerate issues.

I bought it in Steam sale. It's pretty good to be honest but I usually always play with one or two friends.

The framerate and graphics aren't shit if you just turn it down to medium and optimise it yourself a bit. My graphics card isn't even that good but I'm getting decent fps and it looks nice.

I think the grinding is a bit much (especially for taming dinos) but it's fun to build bases. Wish my friends wanted to go on PVE rather than PVP because I wake up every day not knowing if my base has been destroyed or not yet. :<