The Future of Survival Games Begins with Ark 2

Ark 2’s main narrative tells the story of a father and a daughter, Meeka (played by Auli’i Cravalho), of betrayal and broken promises, and the strength of the family bond — and of course, it’s a story of awesome giant dinosaurs. But even more importantly, this is about players’ own stories — like any good persistent-world online survival game, Survivors in Ark 2 each have their own unique path through the game, as they form their own tribe, make their own friends, and attempt to build their own creature-aided civilization.

With a focus on primitive-era combat (Santiago and Tek have a complicated relationship…), Ark 2 draws heavily from Souls-like action for its human-scale combat: an emphasis on dodges, blocks, light and heavy attacks, combos, and player-reflex skill — a rarity for the PvP survival genre. For creature-scale combat, suffice it to say for now that when you attack something with your T-Rex in Ark 2, the results are visceral: the animation of the attack actually hard-impacts on the target (not “passing through” it), the victim’s flesh is torn, and the target physically reacts at that location to the hit – all to convey the feeling of the raw power of such a ferocious creature!

Another area that we’re particularly excited about is the World Event system. Rather than simply having a more-or-less static environment with easily predictable or repetitive occurrences from the first game, the new World Event system is designed to ensure that unique things are always happening around the world, whether you are there or not. Events include procedurally-dynamic scenarios like watering hole gatherings, wounded creatures, tracking the signs of advanced prey, stampedes, herds, defending endangered creatures to earn their trust, finding dens of parent creatures and their young, and more. Whether you choose to engage with these events is up to you, and each can yield unique rewards and challenges.