Ark: Survival Evolved Adds Babies And Battleships
Life found a way
As a wise man once said, "Life, uh, finds a way." In Ark: Survival Evolved [official site], you can now help life along: the survival game's latest Early Access update adds the ability to breed two dinosaurs, creating a cute new baby dino with a mix of traits from its parents. Also, an underwater dinosaur with a floating platform on its back, which looks like a battleship. You can find a video below.
The breeding sounds like an extension of taming, in that once the baby is born, it takes a lot of effort from players to raise it and keep it alive till it's a thing you can ride, or use to gather your crops, or take to war. The babies themselves "will have a random selection of traits from both parents, along with a degree of arbitrary mutation." This means that you can selectively breed your animals for their "desired qualities," creating dinosaurs faster or more vicious than those you'd find naturally. Which is about when the plot of Jurassic World kicks in, I guess.
As for the dinosaur battleship, it's called a Mosasaurus and it can swim underwater and then surface to provide a large, moving platform for base attacks from sea. It's the largest underwater creature now in the game - which should mean the "Ultramegalodon" has to change its name - and the video below shows it swimming around with auto-firing turrets launching spears from its back.
Very silly, this game.
