Is Ark Survival Ascended Worth It???

so Ark survival ascended is officially out I've had some time to play around with it and now it's time to answer the big question was all this fuss and effort worth it in the end all right before we get started just want to go through a couple disclaimers first off it's impossible to make a video like this that's completely unbiased right at the end of the day it's a subjective question is something worth it well it depends right the game just came out I'm not going to try to put too much weight into things that are probably going to be changed or fixed later on though I will make a mention of a couple of them so without further Ado let's address the elephant in the room the graphics the main selling point of Ark survival ascended and looking around there's no way to deny this this is certainly a upgrade everything just looks better I'm not one of these guys that's like super deep into textures or whatever but it just looks better right particularly the water which I'm going to gush over a little bit later into the video though with the graphics update there is also sort of an ackn M that needs to be made that this isn't the same kind of vibe I guess I can't think of a better word for it they didn't just take the textures make them look better and improve the water physics very clearly the game looks different right it looks much more tropical much more kind of jungly right the color scheme and the palette they're different and whether this is a good thing or not that's really going to come down to the individual person right I mean which art style do you kind of like more but these Graphics do come at a price so let's talk about performance here are the the minimum and recommended specs for arcc survival ascended for those that don't know anything about Hardware basically you need a pretty good computer to run it at recommended and a good computer to run it at minimum personally here are my PC specs and on the lowest settings the absolute lowest settings I struggle to get above 40 FPS personally I don't care but if you do this is really something to consider in order to run this game on good quality settings and at a decent FPS you're going to need at least a $2,000 computer and while we're on performance I would like to mention it does crash a lot right now though I do expect them to fix that in next couple weeks if that's something that bothers you just give him a little bit of time now speaking of the actual game itself first thing you'll notice when you boot it up is they have completely overhauled the UI everything looks completely different although it is functionally pretty much exactly the same just with the Fresh coat of paint on it and with the new UI with one big exception I think it looks pretty good it looks clean the layout of everything is almost exactly the same it's just sort of different squares and different text in different places but functionally very very similar The Only Exception is the main menu I really hate how the new main menu looks I don't know it just looks like something out of fortnite to me and I don't know but who cares right the main menu it's a nitpick and then as soon as you join a server the first thing you'll see is a new character creator and I got to say by far this is one of the best parts of Asa now you know I thought the same thing you did when I heard new character creator and I thought no they're not going to let me make my deformed freaks anymore but no no it's actually it's perfect cuz you can actually make even more deformed Freaks and you can kind of modify the exact ways in which they've been hit with like Chernobyl level radiation it's actually quite a good character creator it lets you customize like how much fat your character has and how much like of each specific muscle group they have right like how big are his lats how big are his traps like this is this is cool I like it and if you're you know weird and you want to make a character that doesn't look like a freak you actually have quite a lot of freedom to make a character that looks sort of like a human being almost so I think this is a a big upgrade no matter where you stand on the spectrum of how you make your character and as soon as you spawn in of course the first thing you'll notice is the new graphics looks great you also notice very quickly that the island has been changed this version of The Island really really does stradle the line between an update and a new map entirely um some of the parts to me as someone who almost only plays the island on Arc survival evolved are genuinely unrecognizable I mean look at this footage right here they've added a lot of these kind of Rock pillars sort of just adding verticality I guess to the island which is a pretty flat map normally they've also added a lot of ruins that weren't there before and the map has just been changed a lot they've they really really went hard with these like kind of rock pillars again this is a thing to sort of make up your own mind on personally I don't really like it I prefer just kind of having a simple map where you can get around nice and easy but I can totally see how some people would think this is adding spice to what is otherwise a boring map and now for the part of the map that they really made look amazing the underwater sections my God I don't know how they did it there's not really anything to do underwater in the game still but they made it look so cool that I want to just go down there and find a reason to be down there I mean like look at this right just the lighting is perfect the darker it gets it it really feels scary down there which is perfect cuz that's what it should feel like when you're at the bottom of the ocean I can spend the next 5 minutes talking about how fun cool this is but you get the point I mean you have your own eyes right you can see this looks sick one thing to note however I don't know if this is intentional or not but if you put Shadows too low you can see just straight through the entire ocean I don't know if this is intentional if they're going to patch this you know just something to know I guess now as for the actual game play this has been changed very very little everything still cost the same amount of stuff to craft armor still protects you the same weapons still do the same damage they look a little bit different but that's about it so as for actual gameplay you can pretty much just assume it's the same as Ark survival evolved the one big exception is your player character you can no longer upgrade the movement speed on your character to me this is the biggest literally the biggest downside of the whole game it changes how you play the game at a very fundamental level like it just sucks moving around on foot now cuz every creature can outrun you and chase you down maybe if you play PVE this might not be such a bad thing cuz you can just view it as extra challenge but for me as a PVP player that's more focused on fighting and killing players than fighting and getting killed by every Carno that AGR to me this is a very very bad change now speaking of getting chased down and killed by wild dinos they have updated the pathf finding for all AI to a very very good degree so here I have a moss chops that I've just tamed and I'm going to take him through the woods and this is a pretty dense part of the woods we got rocks we got trees normally in Arc survival evolved I would not trust the AI to go through this it's going to get stuck on every tree every Rock so here we go I'm just kind of running around it like you might normally and you can see the Moss chops keeps up with me perfectly so I decide okay that's a huge Improvement already so I go and I decide I'm going to actively try to lose this guy so I start jumping over rocks running around like doing my best to intentionally get him stuck keep in mind the Moss chops is a creature that cannot jump and so I I go a good distance away and here we go this finds his way back to me they really really did a good job with the pathf finding I might you know I might even start allowing my creatures to follow me now instead of having to individually ride each one of them through a forest that I guarantee that was not easy to program next thing to talk about is the building overhaul not really anything too revolutionary about it they just made every wall basically 50% taller and they changed how the structures look not a big thing actually if you're making just regular bases and regular houses however I will say this does invalidate and reset every little building trick and technique we've learned throughout the ages I mean there's guys out there that have made insane structures and there's no way those can be remade on Arc survival ascended outside of that they also introduced a couple quality of life features to me the two biggest are this show tab button that you have in your inventory that shows you every debuff you have and explains it as well as an updated death marker to make it even easier to get back to your dead body to experience Arc players it doesn't really mean a lot cuz you already know what the debuffs mean mean and you're pretty good at getting back to your dead body but I think for new players especially this is going to be huge they also introduced this sort of photo mode where you press Escape press photo mode it like pauses the world around you you can go a certain distance away from your player character it's a pretty wellb built out photo mode and you can actually get some really good shots with this not a huge thing for me but I know there's definitely people out there that that alone is enough to just buy the game there's also kind of some miscellaneous things that don't really fit into any of those categories like your character when you're low Health he's got like visible cuts and scrapes on him there's baby dinos out in the wild drops have been given animations for deploying the loot and after they've been looted and the contents of their inventory has been changed to contain more kind of General use stuff that's useful to more people but there's quite a lot of disappointment too that I have in this game a lot of the bugs that have been in the game forever are still there and it's just such a a bad sign cuz one of the big reasons that made this game was to fix a lot of the bugs I mean you have stupid bugs like Titans still fall from the sky when you make a new character you have to log out and back into the server to be able to grab notes with them to me hit reg still hasn't been fixed you'll shoot an arrow at something the arrow will hit don't get a hit marker and then you shoot an arrow on your screen Arrow misses you get a hit marker the still happens also there's a lot of new bugs um you can get this sort of bone cancer looking thing on your character they broke the favorites tab on the server browser you'll press refresh it'll say no servers press refresh again it'll show a server very disappointing that the the game is actually almost more buggy than Arc survival evolved because it has all the old bugs and then it's actually got a couple new ones too and that's not including that it crashes like a lot it crashes about every 20 minutes that I play granted they'll probably fix that last one but with the other ones I I really am not hopeful some of these bugs are at this point literally from the previous game literally 8-year-old bugs at this point they're not going to be fixed they promised us that there would be a q system for the servers which is just a lie there still isn't a q system if you try to join a server and it's full it'll just give you an error message and that's it the only way to get in is to press the join button keep spamming it and hope that you get lucky that when someone leaves you press it at the perfect time to get in it's just it's very very very disappointing to release a new game and say all right we're starting fresh this is a good opportunity to fix all the old bugs and then you don't fix any of the old bugs the server situation is also just abysmal there's no two ways around that and this I think is going to be the real killer for most people so the long and short of it is that nitr which has for a long time been acknowledged as the worst server hosting company has a literal Monopoly in hosting servers in Arc survival ascended a while ago Wild Card gotten a lot of debt with Nando and I think this is them working it out right now but basically what it means is that if you want to host a dedicated server you can only host it from NR every other server provider is not allowed to host servers for this game and you go okay well I've got a decent spared computer in my back room I'll just host a local dedicated server that's funny because what you have to do is you have to apply for a license a license to host a local dedicated server and let's say you decide okay well it I'll just buy from them the minimum slots that you are allowed to host on an atando server is 26 slots imagine it's just you and three of your buddies that occasionally want to hop on the lowest you can get is 26 slots meaning the cheapest possible option and really your only option for a dedicated server is going to cost you $26 a month they really are absolutely squeezing you dry here take away your ability to host the server yourself and then force you to buy way more slots than you need this is an insane downgrade it it really sucks cuz it's not a technical problem it's not that they couldn't fix something in time this is just they owe someone a favor and now they're us over so they can pay off that favor now keep in mind it doesn't cost anyone anything to just allow you to host a program on your your own computer but you know they don't get they don't actively get money out of you doing that so they don't allow it however there's an exception if you're a YouTuber with at least 10,000 followers and 5,000 views per video you are allowed a license to host your own server hooray okay andless just say you're a PVP player who you know what you don't really care about hosting and stuff you just play on official servers and your main concern is the cheating please dear God tell me to fix the cheating that was absurd no it's just as bad as before people have figured out how to aimbot and disable inii already and disabling ini is going to be even worse in this game cuz look at how thick a jungle is for someone that hasn't gone and around with their files and then look at this guy he can just see around like it's like it's Kansas or something so then we come to the final question is Ark survival ascended worth it and the answer is maybe for some people you know someone like on single player they don't worry about the servers they don't worry about the cheating yeah I mean it probably is worth it for them but it really is hard for me to actively recommend this game to anyone just a lot of the things they promised they would do they didn't cheating still sucks there's no Q system and servers are so bad and that's assuming your computer can even run it in the first place right if I had to just boil it down to the simplest terms possible I would say two steps forward two steps back a lot of areas that desperately needed Improvement have been improved and they've made some changes that I really didn't like with movement speed and then there's a lot of things that they just broke with the servers especially so all in all make your own decisions I really cannot recommend Arc survival ascended

Channel: Trafalgar

Views: 85,074

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Id: YQncH_7XPpc

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023