Originally game was okay, and liked it, albeit a bit repetitive, shallow, and bare-bones kind of empty.
However, I've now uninstalled this game and refuse to keep supporting shady developers such as this. Early-Access is a business-deal promise, that the consumer promises to put up the money for the product, so long as the developers continue to develop and flesh out the products.
These developers have grossly violated and manipulated that promise. It seems the devs went ahead, and took the money paid for this product, and rather than use it to keep developing THIS game, they chose to use said money to develop a "paid-DLC" with all sorts of "extra awesome features", and then had the gall to come forward, with this "project" and thank the early-supporters, but inform them that if they wanted the fruition of their initial-investment, it'd cost them an additional $19.99 for a seperate and price-tagged DLC, when the original game isn't even finished, rather bare-bones, and gets mind-numbingly a tad boring after a bit.
Granted, I loved being able to hunt/tame/train dinos, I loved being able to build mutliple bases, I love the fact you can go fishing in the game, and some (myself not included) like the multiplayer aspect. But that's about all the base-game, originally priced $29.99 gets you. If you want the "guts of the game", that'll cost you another $20 on top of the original promise.
So ultimately the devs ROBBED us early-adopters to fund their special dev-team to make this other content, just to charge us again, while never fulfilling the original contract/promise. Absolutely disgusting, ridiculous, and one of the giant banes that's bringing down the gaming-industry, and why so many gamers feel anxious/cautious about seriously believing what devs claim, promise, and plan for "their game".
Bottom-line... do yourself a favor, don't buy this money-trap, and check out one of the plethora of other decent survival games out there. Some might even have dinosaur-mods, especially in the upcoming future, to try to pave over the blemish this game leaves on the community!
PS - Forgot to add, base-game still hasn't even been properly optimized, so it runs like horse-dung even on beastly machines. Poor processor/core utilization, poor memory-handling, and massively obnoxious graphic-load brunt (seriously, look it up, there's full fledged extensive guides on just how to get "average" FPS in this game!). Not to mention all the many bugs and glitches, like disappearing dinos, dinos and/or your character glitching through the world, etc, etc, etc, etc...
EDIT: Did some scouring of the web for FINALLY some talk about it from TechTimes, check out this quote from an Ark dev: "But what I would say to them is that this expansion pack represents much more closely the final look and feel and polish of the game. We've been working on it for a long time. We always planned to release it close to the launch of the game, so why sit on it?"
Ultimately, the PAID DLC "represents more closely the final look and feel and polish of the game"... that WE ALREADY PAID FOR!!!
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