The survival sandbox game "ARK: Survival Evolution" was launched on the Steam platform in 2015, and once set a record of maintaining the top spot in the Steam Global Sales Weekly List for 14 consecutive weeks, and to this day, "ARK: Survival Evolution" is still the "evergreen" in the field of survival sandbox games, ranking at the top of all kinds of rankings.
In June this year, just three days after the release of "ARK: Genesis Season 2", it became the runner-up of the steam sales list that week, and the game itself also ranked fifth in the list, which became a hot news reported by major media for a while. The success of ARK: Survival Evolved owes both to the efforts of the development team and the contributions made by players in the development of the game.
Players make their own mods to transform the game experience
In "ARK: Survival Evolution", MOD is an important part of the player's game experience, such as the ACM module, which can refresh resources and create dinosaurs in the single-player mode, allowing players to freely change the game environment and create their own Ark world; and the teleporter module allows players to achieve resource and dinosaur teleportation between groups, saving a lot of time running maps. These mods are all self-made by the player, and during the game, players can load through a subscription within the Steam Workshop to change the game experience to their liking.
ARK: Survival Evolved currently has thousands of mods in the Workshop, and in addition to the instrumental mods, many players are also keen to develop larger map mods to create a completely different Ark world. The development team is friendly with these creative mods, especially for map mods, which tend to take the best parts of them and make them into free DLC to give back to the player.
The origin of free DLC, the content ecology of benign interaction
ARK: Survival Evolved's current free DLCs include Wonderland, Crystal Island, Valghero, etc., these free DLCs have their own characteristics, and the main features are also hidden in the naming of DLC.
The Wonderland DLC is a scenic map of 144 square kilometers and is dominated by a unique island. The map contains all the mobs of "Isolated Islands" and "Scorched Earth", and players can explore challenging dungeons, feel unique tree platforms, go to the ruins to explore the ruins, and even experience hot springs. This DLC can be explored from the sea, land and air, and there are different biomes in different areas, which is very magical.
The Crystal Island DLC was previously the most popular player-made map in the Ark community, and was adopted and released as a free DLC by the development team. The map covers an area of 150 square kilometers and is picturesque. The map is full of life, with unique biomes such as large valleys, woods, rainforests, horror islands, fengshen islands, volcanic landforms, where players can even build homes on floating islands and tame unique crystal dragons.
The Varghero DLC has an area of about 60 square kilometers, and on this map, players can feel the unique environment of scorched earth and distorted terrain. The map has the White Cliff biome, the tundra biome, as well as the Savannah biome, the aberration biome, with different vegetation and biological distribution in different environments; this is a map with obvious height differences, players can explore the ocean, land, cliffs, and even make their home on cliffs and snowy mountains, and the map's unique dinosaur can be tamed.
"ARK: Survival Evolution" player creation mod, in addition to reflecting their own creativity, providing interesting gameplay materials for other players, can also provide creativity to the official, which has played a positive role in promoting the DLC production of the game, players and games complement each other, forming a good content co-creation ecology, and the upcoming "Lost Island" DLC is also the same.
The latest DLC exposure, the "Lost Isle" made waves again
According to the latest release from the ARK: Survival Evolved development team, the Lost Isles DLC is expected to go live later this year. The map covers an area of 150 square kilometers and has a vast open world. And the DLC is also a map created by community users, and new creatures are also voted out by players.
The Lost Isle is a unique island with a high-low drop that seems to hide the civilization of previous generations. According to the currently known information, the island has different terrains such as waterfall valleys, redwood forests, swampy wetlands, snowy mountain caves, tropical jungles, coral reefs, and trenches. Extrapolating from this, these terrains are likely to appear in different parts of the island according to the law, such as snow mountain caves are likely to be on higher peaks, while redwood forests and swampy wetlands are most likely near the island coast. In these different terrains, there will be different biological and vegetation distributions, forming a unique ecological circle.
The new creatures of the Lost Isle were created by player voting, and the development team received thousands of submissions from players, and finally after the voting of the community players, 3 new creatures were selected, namely Amaga dragon, pedophalon, and Chinese big-eyed pterosaur.
Amalgalong is a sauropod dinosaur with a unique shape, with two rows of parallel spikes growing from head to tail, which can release heat or cold air with spikes to attack enemies; the pyog is similar to the Zhu Wei in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas", which looks a bit like a monkey, can attack enemies with feces, and even invalidates Tektronix's armor; and the Chinese big-eyed pterosaur is a small pterosaur carved by the development team based on dinosaur fossils found in China, with a curious and friendly personality, good at hunting insects, and has a strong load-bearing capacity.
As a textbook-level work in the field of survival sandbox, the content ecology and community atmosphere built by ARK: Survival Evolution and players are very good. We have reason to believe that with the joint efforts of players and the development team, this game will have a broader space for development in the future, the launch of the "Lost Island" DLC, may be a solid step on this development road, let us look forward to the launch of this free DLC, interested partners may wish to seize the time to start the game itself, then you can experience the "Lost Island" for free!