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We have been waiting with a keen eye for ARK: Survival Evolved to arrive on Linux. It’s a very popular survival game with dinosaurs that is constantly in the top-10 on Steam, so how is it?

About the game (Official)
As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements. Use your cunning and resources to kill or tame the leviathan dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roaming the land, and team up with or prey on hundreds of other players to survive, dominate... and escape!

Warning: This game is Early Access, and the Linux version has only just arrived.

My initial thoughts
Performance
Be aware that I am testing this on an Nvidia 970 and a decent Intel i5 4670K, so your mileage will vary.

It’s...pretty terrible. On High settings it dips below 10FPS at times, and looking around the world is mainly around 20-25FPS, but it will hit ~55FPS when looking at the coastline.

I’ve had to turn the settings to Medium to get even a remotely playable framerate, and it doesn’t look very pleasing on the eyes.

Graphics
They are good when you turn the settings up for sure, but that's only playable for super insane machines right now, so I took a look at Medium to make it somewhat playable.

Medium settings aren't too terrible, but it is ruined by the constant graphics glitching, and general sluggish performance. Medium settings are still better than most indie games around, so I'm not too bothered by how it looks, it just badly needs the glitches sorted.

Gameplay
I’ve never been a massive fan of many survival games, as most are ugly, or boring as hell. It’s also pretty hard to judge the game when it’s in such a state as this, but I tried it as much as I could to report back.

I have to say, I might actually enjoy this one more than other survival games like it. It already gave me a fright (and death) when trying to get some wood. I was minding my own business, casually pooping and gathering wood, and I peered around a tree to see some sort of raptor making a line for me, and death quickly came after I saw it.

Your character randomly poops (really, fart noise and all), and you can pick it up to use it later. That’s highly amusing, and totally gross, but realistic at least.

Later on I sat around my newly crafted campfire to cook up some meat, I was in a nice little rocky cove for safety, but as I looked above I saw a massive tail swinging around... think I might stay here for a while.

Bugs
Character creation is impossible, since the character generated is invisible, you can only see your character when in-game:
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You also fall through the world, a lot, I keep spawning with the legs in the ground too, although in this case my foot seems to be beside my hip:
image

I sent it onto the developers, and they tweeted back that it’s being looked into, so maybe a quick patch could solve those issues.

I later found more issues, like seeing through a hill:
image

These rocks seem to have never heard of gravity either:
image

I kept seeing shadows in mid-air too, so shadows are a little off as well.

And quite a few more, looks like it will take a few patches to get a playable game for Linux gamers.

Final thoughts: You might want to wait quite a while, seriously. I was going to do a livestream of it tonight, but it’s too buggy, too sluggish and just not good right now, but I’m sure it will get quickly patched up.

Check out ARK: Survival Evolved on Steam now if you dare. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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42 comments
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musojon74 Jul 1, 2015
Bah. Too late, bought and downloading. Will see if I get a better framerate with same gpu and i7, will comment once I've tested it a bit.
musojon74 Jul 1, 2015
It's already updating! Try again.
musojon74 Jul 1, 2015
The i7 doesn't help. Performance is choppy. Glitchy graphics. Epic game mind.
musojon74 Jul 1, 2015
Also I can't log out without it crashing itself.
Xpander Jul 1, 2015
framerate is not that good but its same for windows users when i read the forums..so nothing to worry about... still early access

missing ground issues were fixed when i moved the game from HDD to SSD... it seems to load disks quite heavily


quick gameplay video as well:

View video on youtube.com
ElectricPrism Jul 1, 2015
I think it's good this article lets people know to wait a little bit for better performance.

Seeing as how Storm United and ARK are both built on the Unreal 4 engine and that Storm United runs well, It seems like they just need to do some debugging performance optimizations.

I'm still going to buy a 3rd copy though for my brother, and it is on sale for $5 off so come on in if you don't mind waiting for the optimizations.
marcelomendes Jul 1, 2015
Good try. But it is completely unplayable to me, low settings aren't ugly, they are horrendous, at the point Doom 1 looks better. I can play Dying Light at 1080p on ~25fps, and this one at 10 fps MAX lol.
bubexel Jul 1, 2015
Yesterday i was on the tester team, and the client was totally bugged! millions of glitches, mouse problems, all mountains dissapearing, etc.... it's increible the job they did in just 1 day xD when i saw the client i tought its impossible the release today, but they did successfully! I'm playing on epic and i can't see the same beauty than on windows. Seems that options are limited for some reason. Btw i can't see the rain :P
staticx27 Jul 1, 2015
Saw it was released for Linux and I jumped at it. Wish I would have actually of read the article first. Oh well. I would imagine it will be fixed at some point.
adolson Jul 2, 2015
I have seen about 5 or maybe more patches come down since last night's beta test. They're working hard and fast, so I hope it'll be playable before too long. I tried one of today's patches briefly, and I had a worse framerate than last night, oddly, but I definitely noticed some improvements. The gamepad support is totally absent, otherwise I'd try messing more with the graphics settings and try playing more.

PSA: don't eat dinosaur feces, no matter how hungry your character gets! I tried because I couldn't find anything but wood, thatch, and feces... It ended badly, as you might expect.
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