Welcome to... Jurassark Park! Ark's VR spin-off Ark Park
You bred rubberbanding raptors?
Open-world dinosaur survival sandbox Ark: Survival Evolved is getting a virtual reality spin off, named Ark Park [official site]. It'll offer a theme park to wander around gawping at dinosaurs, obvs, and players will even be able to import their own dinos from Survival Evolved to hang out. I don't know why they haven't gone with the clearly-superior name of Jurassark Park. Could've got a low-framerate Dickie Attenborough lookalike clipping into the terrain, a Jeff Goldblum rubberbanding as he pummels dodos to craft himself a damn shirt.
Here's the score on Ark Park, as blurbed in a press release:
"Players begin their ARK Park adventure at a visitor center surrounded by life-sized holographic dinosaurs where they'll learn about these creatures that they've only read about & seen in books and summer blockbusters. From there, players will have the option to explore multiple interactive attractions on-foot or in vehicles & on Dino-back, including a swamp, forest, desert, snowy mountain range, and more. Each attraction features stunningly rendered and realistic environments of the period inhabited by ARK creatures, which can be found and captured through use of items, weapons, and puzzle-solving."
It will have multiplayer too. Top tip: when you play, set your voice chat up to continuously broadcast this.
And yes, folks will be able to import their collected Survival Evolved dinosaurs into Ark Park for what I'm told is "an up-close and personal, full VR experience!" How personal are we talking?
Ark Park is not being made by Studio Wildcard (nor indeed any other of the squillion teams that have chipped in on Ark), rather Snail Games have licensed the #brand to make Ark Park themselves. One would hope they're not building Ark Park upon Ark: Survival Evolved as lawks, that game struggles to run even on monitors, let alone with the extra load of VR. Survival Evolved does support cybergoggles but no.
Ark Park is coming some time in 2017. If you want VR dinos now, hey, Crytek have released two VR dinotech dinodemos, though their full VR dinogame Robinson is not slated for a PC launch.
I'm going to guess Ark Park's announcement trailer is not in-game:
