Ark Adds Dino Big Enough To Carry A Fortress, Also Poo Flinging Monkeys

Dino foundations

News by Philippa Warr Former Staff Writer

Published on June 15, 2016

The thing I remember most strongly from the Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] segment at E3 was the ridiculously massive Titanosaur which you can build on and wondering how long before someone modded that to reference the Discworld arrangement of the space turtle A'Tuin and elephants. Oh, there's also the introduction of the upcoming Redwood Biome and an explanation of why/how you can fling poop.

Now I've had time to actually go back and watch the segment properly so here's the deal - watch from 40:15ish:

Right! The main things for the base game as far as I can tell are the addition of the Redwood Biome and the Titanosaur (that's the creature doing the prehistoric dino version of a wheelie in the header).

The Redwood biome is pretty much exactly what it sounds like (I figure Alice might end up enraptured by it so I'm banning her from Ark until after E3). Lots of redwoods and lots of treetop base building.

The new dinosaur is that Titanosaur and it's enormous. They've had dinos capable of carrying structures in the game for a while but this one is apparently enormous to the point where you can build a fortress on its back and then ride it round the map while the dinosaur attacks stuff. Actually, the word they used in the official blog was "superfortress".

I haven't really played Ark, I just really like looking at the animals as they add them so I'm not really getting a sense for how much this will impact play, but apparently the Titanosaurs are rare and require special forms of takedown before you can tame then (or start jamming a building site onto its back).

The monkey poo segment was about an official mod which lets you play as the different animals of Ark called Primal Survival. The microphones were a bit iffy onstage at that point but I think the mod started as an April Fool's joke but it now a legit thing which is being build by the partner dev studio, Instinct.

You can play as the aforementioned monkeys, but also as birds or dinosaurs or frogs. I'm most interested in playing as an ant, though. Especially given the dramatic collapse of Ant Simulator earlier in the year.

The main focus of this mode seems to be keeping a healthy family, mating and breeding and so on with variations as per who you're playing as. Co-ordinated raptor attacks is one thing I've seen mentioned, but there's also webspinning and prey capturing as the spidery Araneo and colony building as the ant-based species Titanomyrma.