ARK: Survival Evolved Interview
With ARK: Survival Evolved hitting Xbox One's preview program, we sat down with Kayd Hendricks, Senior Technical & Gameplay Designer behind the dino survival game.
You guys created a dinosaur survival game in a time where zombie survival games were more prominent, what made you decide to go out on a limb and go with dinos over zombies?
Besides the fact that zombies seemed to be reaching their saturation point and becoming kind of a “me too” theme, we really felt like dinosaurs had a much broader appeal worldwide than zombies do in the West - and I think our bet paid off!
Ark seems to be a game that is updated almost once a week if not more, and on release was updated on a daily basis. This is not like most other Early Access alphas, what made you decided to update so consistently? Was it your own frustration and experience with other early access games where the company took money but only updated every few months ?
For our customers and fans, consistency of updates and transparent communication is extremely important. Not only is there an existing stigma around Early Access games being quickly forgotten, but in general, there’s nothing that better reflects our commitment to seeing this game through than to actually… do it, you know?
It’s not just that, though. In fact, the largest reason our patch schedule is what it is, is because that’s how our development process goes; we like to create some amount of content, commit it, test it for functionality, QA to make sure that it’s as close to “complete” for this phase of development as possible, and then move along. Our release schedule just mirrors our development schedule, the only added step is that we release the snapshot of our build at a given time to the players. This is why our ETAs are historically… less than perfect, so to speak. It’s because we’re developing the content on our schedule, and releasing it when we feel it’s ready to be called “done,” for now. If the dates we aim for with an ETA are wrong, and they almost always are, we just push it.
We can already build houses on dinosaurs like the Quetzal and Mosasaur, however we see our oxygen drop while underwater. Will we ever see a waterproof, oxygenated house that has air reserves, so that we can keep our bases underwater for extended periods of time, without diving gear?
Sure will. It’s been planned for quite a while, actually, having some kind of mechanism for making underwater structures air-tight. Just haven’t gotten to it yet!
When we spawn in the game for the first time, we are naked and find a strange gem embedded in our arm, will we ever actually get hints as to what happened to our character? For example will there eventually be books or notes we can find around the island that will tell us bits of the story about who left us on the island?
We have a number of things planned for story reveals; not just future content, but also Explorer’s Notes, old ruins, and a number of both atmospheric and directly gameplay-related elements that will speak to just what is going on, and why.
We've heard that the Xbox One version of ARK will actually have a split screen mode, what inspired you guys to go with this, when so many companies are abandoning the idea in favor of more frames and performance?
This is one of those elements of gameplay that a lot of people overlook; the ability to sit down in one place and play with friends or family together. ARK has a lot of cooperative elements to it, and anything we can do to make it easier for people to enjoy the game together, we’re going to at least try. Most of us working on the game remember playing games like Goldeneye 007 or Perfect Dark, Mario Kart, etc. And we remember the fun we had with friends playing these games all grouped up on the couch together. There didn’t seem to be a really good reason not to add it.
Are we the first to inhabit the island itself? Or will we eventually find abandoned buildings or houses that were built by those who lived on the island before our arrival? Even a small abandoned village would be something cool to add to the backstory.
Now THAT would be telling, wouldn’t it?
At the moment we are taming dinosaurs, exploring caves, and building bases, will there be a progression system for summoning bosses. For example we can currently summon the Broodmother, however will we need to gather something from the body of it to summon a higher level creature, such as the dragon? Almost as a progression system to work your way through different dinosaur bosses.
There will in fact be some elements of progression and late-game play around the bosses, but it’s a bit more… involved than just collecting trophies. Bosses are very important to us, and we want to make sure that they’re meaningful when the full systems are put into place.
At the moment we can build bases around trees, however the base isn't actually a part of the tree. Will we see the option to build bases specifically for tree forts and tree bases that make it so that the tree can't be cut down? This seems inevitable considering the Thylacoleo has been previewed.
With the foliage and trees you currently see in the world, this is probably not very likely, but we’ll see how the island evolves as we add more interesting ways to play the game. A baobab tree would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?
Thanks for your time!
COMMENTS
GarySheppard - 02:49pm, 29th December 2015
The more I read about this, the more awesome it looks. I think I will have to pick up a copy of this when my PC is working again.
Acelister - 11:19am, 31st December 2015
Or, of course, for Xbox One if you buy one of those in the meantime.