Yikes. Calling it now, stay away from this one. I remember they were selling full priced DLC for Ark while it was still in "Early Access" e.g. a janky broken mess. It doesn't sound like they took the right lessons from that.
Agreed wholeheartedly. I played about a dozen hours of the first one just because taming and riding dinosaurs is so fckin cool. It's tragic that it'll never live up to the potential of the idea.
Just checked Steam and yeah, 59.5 hours, last played May 2021 (I think I was using it to test GeForce NOW). It was kind of fun with friends, but we got to the point that we had guns and a pterodactyl and i felt like I'd seen pretty much everything the game had to offer, so when life happened and we all fell off, i just never reinstalled it. That was before all the DLC got released, so quite a bit further back than 2021! And it doesn't look like the bugs and jank ever got fully ironed out, even after all this time.
Yeah same jank is still there with added grinding on breeding your own dinosaurs. However it's still a good game. We have our own server running ATM and are on road to open first boss of the island.
The company behind it is greedy and doesn't really care about players but nevertheless you can play first ark and all it's DLC:s with only the main game which I like. Also no micro transactions.