Add Ark Survival and Atlas the asset flip to the list of game companies being completely stupid this year.
(ADMIN NOTE) ^This is something that deserves mentioning. It was originally posted by Hollister elsewhere, but it really deserves its own thread. Trying to save you guys some buyers remorse. Some alternative sources about the same subject:
As much as we harp on EA and Activision, at least they were decent and honest game companies at one point. They worked their way up and slowly became corrupted by their success. These asshats just jumped straight to being shady and greedy.
It's hard for me to agree with that only because I personally know Jesse Rapczak (one of the core founders of WIldcard) and used to work for him... and also dated his sister for a time (long story). The team working on Ark were actually a pretty solid group of people that had their hearts in the right place. I think where things started to derail was when they had to put persisting issues on the backburner in favor of generating new capital. I still believe that the experience in Ark improved progressively with each new DLCs (especially the last two). It just sucked that you had to pump so much money into DLC to enjoy the more interesting game mechanics. I don't think it is right for every game, but I think Ark specifically could have greatly benefited from a $1 cosmetic store that gave you new models for existing objects and gear, rather than locking important game features behind expensive DLC pay walls that split up their community. Aberration was the first DLC where the game really addressed a lot of problems in the vanilla game, but few people were willing to shell out $20 more for DLC on a game whose core experience still felt very unfinished (myself included). Also, it is my understanding that Atlas was developed by Grapeshot Games and that they only licensed the engine from Wildcard. To what extent Wildcard knew this was an extremely lazy reskin, however, I cannot say. It is worth noting however, that Wildcard was not involved in publishing the game either, so it is certainly plausible that Wildcard's involvement may have been very small indeed. Perhaps they jumped at the opportunity to license the engine and did not ask too many questions about what Grapeshot had in mind? I don't know. Regardless, the blame does appear to rest mostly with Grapeshot. The comparison video Hollister posted looks particularly damning. Clearly Grapeshot did their best to hide what a turd this game actually was. Also, fuck Polygon. They somehow managed to spin a positive article about this shitty game without ANY mention of its too many similarities to Ark: https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/26/18155944/atlas-game-early-access-preview How the fuck do you manage that and still expect anyone to take you seriously?
I understand that he's your friend, and I'm not going to say he's a jerk or anything, I just don't have much faith in Wildcard's products. After several years worth of updates, Ark never felt like it was worth the asking price. And the business with the dlcs made that worse. I don't doubt that there was some heart behind it, but if I had not got in early - and cheap - I would have felt seriously burned by the whole thing. It's going to take a herculean effort to convince me to buy anything made by or in association with Wildcard again. It just isn't good business.
Less of a friend and more of an acquaintance (and former boss), but I think everything you said is fair. I was pretty disappointed with their choice to lock the best gameplay content behind the DLCs. They really should have found a way to improve the overall experience and find other measures of revenue that didn't require splitting the community across multiple paid DLC packs.
