After being frustrated realizing the "favorite server" function doesn't work at all and having to start over multiple times, I just hopped into single other. All the official servers were laggy and I didn't know the favorite functionality didn't work so I did not take notes on the names of the unofficial servers I played on.
I almost file this game under the Resident Evil 4 remake category of "it's good, but wasn't necessary to begin with", but it definitely does not meet the standard of RE4R in this analogy. There's no doubt improvements to the game, and I have no doubt that it will get better as development progresses. It looks great, but again, I do think it's a bit superfluous. The quality of life changes are more interesting to be though. I really like the way building has changed, having the same type of structure go one after another automatically. Being able to choose style of walls instantly changing to doorways or windows. Once I figured out how it worked, the ping and waypoint systems are amazing. It's nice to click the map instead of eyeballing the coordinates and then being off if the map isn't drawn to scale properly (I know this happened on some maps in the original). In my single player game, I put gather, XP, and tame rates all on 3x. The officials rate is unbearably low IMO. I tamed a Ptreranodon already, but I am not quite level 38 yet for the saddle, but almost there. I haven't found proper metal rocks, so I will be looking for those once I can fly. I am curious to see how different the metal rocks look in this game.
The game is good, no doubt, but I also just raise the (rhetorical) question of "Why?" Why did this need to exist?
Why couldn't this just be ARK II with new content? What even is ARK II if they're developing this at the same time, a different genre?! It's very bizarre, and can partially be chalked up to Snail Games' little financial snafu, but it's still just bizarre.
I have to wonder if back when they initially said the UE5 upgrade was free, if it was going to be simply bringing ASE into UE5 with some improvements, not being a full on remake like ASA is.
Going back to my analogy of the original Resident Evil 4 and the remake, the original was great and there wasn't really anything wrong with it. It didn't NEED a remake. The remake came out and it was quite good, but I consider it an "alternate" take on RE4 where it doesn't replace the original for me, but I like both for different reasons. In ARK, they want to have ASA eventually make ASE obsolete. Hell they're already trying to make that happen now by taking ASE's official servers offline. However there wasn't anything majorly wrong with ASE that only a remake could fix. That's not to say ASE doesn't have problems, as it absolutely does, but they were problems that didn't need to be solved with a full on remake.
I'm past the 2 hour refund window and I am enjoying it enough to keep playing. I had used an extra old PC to host an ASE server a while back with a friend, but I might just back up that server, wipe the drive and create my own ASA server, and if it's viable, maybe even open it up to people on Era via password. We will have to see how well this PC can maintain it.
