When comparing Far Cry Primal vs ARK: Survival Evolved, the Slant community recommends ARK: Survival Evolved for most people. In the question“What are the best open world games on Steam?” ARK: Survival Evolved is ranked 23rd while Far Cry Primal is ranked 30th. The most important reason people chose ARK: Survival Evolved is:
Ark has hundreds, if not thousands, of great custom servers. You can control things such as PvP, experience, gathering, and taming rates, set things up so there's no griefing (constantly bullying a player or group of players), and the difficulty of the creatures.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Humanized upgrade system
Instead of some static menu where you pick and choose what areas to upgrade skills the player need to find characters in the game, who can build and improve items for the character. This way the player is interacting with the upgrade system by taking part in finding and interacting with AI.
Pro Recaps when starting game
Each time the game is started there will be a recap of the story progression so far of the user time spent in the game, this makes for a good way to catch up on what was accomplished last and what is next when spending any long amount of time away from the game.
Pro Focuses on survival
Being that the game focuses more on animals in the wild as enemies instead of humans (like past games in the series) the player must survive when out in the wild by avoiding or fighting these creatures. An added day and night cycle adds on to this gameplay by making the animals more aggressive at night. The animals can be warned off with fire, but this means the player needs to collect animal fat in order to create torches. All of this adds up to more of a focus on survival, especially at night.
Pro Increased customization thanks to player-created servers
Ark has hundreds, if not thousands, of great custom servers. You can control things such as PvP, experience, gathering, and taming rates, set things up so there's no griefing (constantly bullying a player or group of players), and the difficulty of the creatures.
Pro You can share materials, dinosaurs, and structures by forming (or joining!) a tribe with your friends
Users can form a tribe with other online users to for a community. This community can now band together in order to build and grow as well as team up against other tribes. This makes for a fun experience with friends and other players as it requires teamwork in order to be successful.
Pro You can tame and mount nearly every creature in the game
From the small, quick raptor to the massive, vicious giganotosaurus, you can mount nearly any dinosaur in the game. There's huge, flying dinosaurs, aquatic dinosaurs, some that are like walking fortresses, and others that can take those down.
Pro The game makes you want to explore, craft, and fight to make the most of its progressive crafting system
Ark is unlike many survival games in that you attain levels as you progress. As you level higher and higher, you gain access to more craftable items. Some are just more powerful versions of lower-tier items (such as leather armor vs. cloth armor), but most are brand new (such as firearms, scuba gear, and saddles for more powerful dinosaurs). This really drives you to explore more areas to find rarer resources and fight stronger dinosaurs.
Pro An absolutely fantastic community
The community for Ark is simply great. Whether you're talking about custom servers, the modding community, or just the playerbase in general, there's always people around to help out with any questions you might have.
Pro Stunningly beautiful
The landscape, creatures, structures, even other players are all gorgeous. The textures are seamless, and the character/dinosaur models are just great. The environment ranges from lush green forests, to snowcapped mountains, to incredible coastal views. When you combine all of these things, it adds up to being simply breathtaking.
Pro Good character creation
When starting a new game the player is allowed to choose between a man or woman, from there is a plethora of options for making a character with a personalized look.
Cons
Con Barely expanded from Far Cry 4
The game has taken many aspects found in Far Cry 4 out to focus on things such as hunting and crafting, sadly the hunting and crafting mechanics are barely improved over Far Cry 4, which does speak to the level of development the game received being that even areas that the core gameplay focuses on is not really improved or expanded in any way to make for a more in-depth experience.
Con Poor performance
The game does not utilize multi core threading very well and even on the highest end of PCs with a Titan GPU the game may still dip below 60fps when on max settings at 1080p.
Con Same map as Far Cry 4
While the art has changed to look more stone age, the map size and areas are pretty much the same. This of course makes for way less development time and people see it as a shortcut for a full priced game.
Con Really short
The game only has 4 main missions, which can be completed quite quickly. This shows how much this game should have been DLC instead of a full priced title.
Con No color blind option
Bad guys are marked in red and friends are marked in green, the most common color blindness is in the red a green spectrum's meaning that those that are affected by this will have quite a bit of trouble playing this game.
Con Difficult to connect to characters in the game
There is zero real language used in the game, it is all made up, which makes it difficult to connect to any character in the game since nothing is spoken that anyone can understand. This may have been to save money on voice actors, but no matter the reason it does detract from the story of the game and connecting to it.
Con Anti-cheat issues
ARk has started using an anti-cheat tool called Battleye, this has so far broken Linux and Mac support for using official servers. Battleye has also had some issues with banning legit users and does not have a very good reputation. These issues add up to many angry players who paid for the game but now can not play it.
Con No more Early access, still buggy
Ark has been fully released on August 2017, but bugs are still easily found and many areas of the game lack polish.
Con The game can become a grind
At the higher levels, it begins to take a very, very long time to level up (unless you're playing on a custom server). This can make the game tedious to play for some people.
Con Hard for some PCs to run
Ark is kind of a resource hog - it's not very well optimized and that can cause many players to experience slow graphics.