Steven Spielberg made them stars. My almost-3-year-old worships them. They’re wilder than anything writers like Tolkien dreamed up. And they actually existed. So why the heck has no one tried their hand at an open-world dinosaur game before?
No, Trespasser doesn’t count (plus: awful, terrible game). The Turoks were mediocre FPSes. I'll spare you the dossier of forgettable Jurassic Park film tie-ins.
There was The Stomping Land, a multiplayer-angled dinosaur survival game crowdfunded to the tune of $100,000 a few years ago. That might have counted, and its trailer pitch looked promising, but at last check, the game's creator was missing in action and the modeler was abandoning ship.
So now we're looking at ARK: Survival Evolved, a bona fide stab at an open-world dinosaur MMO announced this week by an outfit calling itself Studio Wildcard. A shame about that clumsy name, but hey, ARK is already looking to beat The Stomping Land's sorry track record, with deals signed for PC, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
You can try it for yourself via Steam Early Access on June 2. Here's what it looks like.
The game's premise won't surprise you: You wake on an island, naked and starving, with a bunch of other humans who haven't the faintest idea what's what. Then you have to "hunt, harvest, craft, research technology, and build shelters to protect against scorching days, freezing nights, volatile weather systems, dangerous wildlife, and potential enemies."
It sounds like there'll be dinosaur riding (the game sports 60 dino types at this point), the option to join "tribes" and war with other groups of players, a discoverable backstory about the ARK (sounds a little Dark City, no?), and, for the Steam version, Oculus support. Studio Wildcard's checking all the right boxes, except for a single-player mode.
For better or worse---the worse being fewer studios with the capital to pull them off, and the way they monopolize our play time---open-world games are on the rise. In Ubisoft’s latest financials (via Gamasutra), the publisher of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry said that five of the top 10 bestselling games of 2014 were sandboxes. “Open worlds take a bigger share,” read Ubisoft’s self-adulatory takeaway.
I love open-world games, even if all I'm able to see is a fraction of their sum total. Because, you know, try or try not, there is no finish when a game's main story amounts to the minority share of play hours, and it's insidious activity algorithms spool out infinite gameplay thread.
But that's also part of their allure. And the idea of some developer ginning up a rip-roaring sandbox version of Jurassic Park's Isla Nublar...
...well, someone's going to do it. It's just a matter of time.
