It's been a really long time since Shiny and I went after a real, pay-by-the-month MMO. Rift maybe? I don't know... after SWTOR (Star Wars the old Republic) nothing really stuck for very long. I like to think it's just that there aren't many good ones, and less that i'm just old and jaded. That said I haven't tried many of the ones you're playing, but UO doesn't seem interesting and I absolutely hated WoW.

There genuinely aren't many good ones out there. UO is great and my favourite because it's pure sandbox, but I don't play the official servers as it's become very diablo-like, inflated gold economy and a terrible company running it plus a shitty community. The main reason I end up on a lot of them is because a lot of singleplayer rpgs suck these days, and one thing that is usually better in MMOs is crafting systems. I love crafting systems Most MMOs would be better if the multiplayer part was removed lol. But most of them don't hold my attention. WoW is only interesting right now as it's a dragon-based expansion plus the collector in me still has hundreds of mounts and pets to hunt down

Well there are at least two games on the way I think might be something for you. Or they might be for me and i'm just projecting my interests over to you. Enshrouded and Bellwright, videos below.

Oooh thanks for those Peltz, I've added them to my wishlist. I'll wait until they're out of early access though (unless super cheap) and see what people say. Definitely look intriguing though. Though I just spotted Bellwright is Snail Games... they're the idiots in charge of the Ark devs who are in huge financial troubles right now

So I'm an idiot and couldn't resist in the end. I may have slipped while using the mouse a few times and bought Ark: Survival Ascended. Whoops "Just" 76Gb until I'm playing the shinier version. I figure with the maps being released one at a time it's a way to force myself through them in order instead of getting distracted. Of course I will still just get distracted but by slightly fewer things. 6 hours until it finishes downloading. UK internet really sucks

I was reading about the launch earlier in the morning and thinking to myself "well there is no way pev would sacrifice all her progress for this." So much for that then.

Progress... you forget I don't do progress lol. I tame dinos then randomly breed them while building stuff. I don't do progress Don't get me wrong, part of me is incredibly ashamed for caving in!

Part of me is also curious about the performance. I downloaded Cities Skylines 2 as it's on Gamepass (no way I was buying it straight away anyway, regardless of any reviews). Actually it runs just fine on my computer. I've only got to 15k people so far so it could well drop significantly as I approach 50 or 100k, but aside from the occasional stutter it's incredibly playable. But I'm not trying it on 4k and it seems most of the issues are people who have 4k capable systems who are saying "but I shouldn't HAVE to lower my graphics so I'm not going to... why do I only get 10fps? This is crap!" I get it, we all want it on the best we can have it but I have the feeling some of these people weren't old enough to be gamers when Crysis came out At least Ark has had the sense to say it's Early Access. While Paradox put out a statement about the optimisation for Cities it's still considered a full release, so the performance issues to my mind are far less forgivable in a way.

Either way, we will see what happens. I mainly got swayed as there seems to be more improvements in the game than I expected. I knew there were wild baby dinos now, but there's some improved AI and upgrades to some of the gameplay elements too (like a really weird, but useful, way to attach a torch to your belt). It's far from a new game but I also just got paid my first full time wage in 5 years so I figured sod it, treat myself. Now you get to hear how I died in better graphics

Dying in high definition is tight! Reference to 'Pitch Meeting' on youtube. If you haven't watched them I highly recommend.

I watched part of a gameplay video for ASA yesterday on YouTube. The graphics are definitely a major step up and there seem to be a bunch of small improvements all over the place. Meanwhile you still have dodos cooing and wandering around, so it's still very Ark. However, I won't be buying it for quite some time.

- No private dedicated servers is the big reason. You have to pay Nitrado for an over-priced, under-performing server if you want to do real multiplayer without being on official.
- I bought but haven't played Genesis 1 and 2 yet. No way I'm buying a whole new game when I haven't even played all the expansions for the first one.
- Bugs... I expect this thing to be a buggy mess for a while

All that said, congrats on picking it up. I hope you find it really enjoyable. I'm surprised UK internet is so terrible. I thought US internet was way behind Europe's, and even more so for (parts of) Asia. I suppose UK isn't really Europe.

Our internet is total balls. I do believe it's generally better than the US if taken as an overall, since you still have tons of rural areas that only have incredibly shitty satellite internet as an option. However the UK is still mainly on a copper infrastructure (being switched off next summer if they hit the deadlines) and that is run entirely by one company (BT) so there are very few options there. We do have fibre in the bigger areas now; technically I'm on fibre but it's only to the cabinet. I'm in flats that are only 12 years old yet they still just installed regular copper phone lines, no fibre in the building. The most my provider (or any in this area, which is just outside Birmingham, second biggest city in England) can give me is ~28mbs which I do tend to hit. For my daily usage it's more than enough; we can have both of us playing an online game and still stream a video with no issues but when it comes to downloading games it can be a real ballache.

Compare this to France. My parents live in the middle of nowhere, a 13 house hamlet. Yet France has been installing fibre to every area. They have had fibre into the house as a FREE upgrade, no need to buy a new package, for at least 2 years now. Knocked a hole in the wall, installed all the cables and patched everything back up, even set up the new router. I don't know what speeds they get, I've never actually checked when there as I only connect via wifi on my phone. I don't know if all of Europe is as on the ball as France but it puts us to shame for sure. Extra annoying as many businesses in France still don't care about the internet and don't even have websites

Ox needs to come and tell us how 1337 the connection is at EU HQ

Anyhoo as I have just been saying to Satis on Steam chat, I've got Ark working. Taken a few tweaks to the video settings because as usual they never tell you what that shit actually does so I've looked up a few videos about it and am getting a decent framerate now with low but nice graphics which isn't bad on a 4 year old PC. And hopefully it will only improve as time goes on. I really do need more RAM though, still on 16GB and everything seems to require 32 these days. I know what I'll be treating myself to for Christmas.

As someone who actually worked for an ISP, here's the deal. Copper connection is perfectly fine as long as the technology run on it is good. Modern DSL connections can offer speeds of 100mbps. The thing is that most people bitch and moan about low speeds but when given the cost of upgrade they fuck off so fast one might think they portalled away. Inside apartment buildings they will use copper for quite some time. CAT6 is perfectly capable of supplying speeds up to 10gbps. Also most home appliances don't have SFP port to connect fiber to. Plus everything 'fiber' costs a way too much.

In estonia the government is so far beyond stupid on this matter that we might as well hire trained chimps. They gave a ton of money to Mobile operators and guess what happened?! They 'fibered' their celluar masts and the general pop just got a fat middle finger. But then again Estonia is one of the least densly populated countries in EU.

That's the beauty here. BT has been the only company for so long that the technology on the infrastructure is shit. Very, very shit. So we could have the latest cabling invented and probably still fail at decent speeds. East Yorkshire is having fun at the moment with retarded government/council decisions too. It's the only place in the country that isn't run by BT for telecoms infrastructure; instead it's a small company called Kingston Communications (based in Kingston-upon-Hull so they get the monopoly in Hull and surrounding areas). Why this is the case I have no clue but it's been like it since I lived there. Anyway right now they're refusing to let other companies use their poles so there's uproar because some small villages have 3 or 4 'internet poles' on their tiny village greens or stuck on the pavement right in the way of people!

Telecoms are hilariously awful over here. The company I work for is in telecoms, mostly selling phone systems to companies but of course that includes phone lines, broadband and now cloud systems. So much shit that goes on.

Anyway back to Ark. I got it running, it doesn't look or feel like ass and it has stopped the couple of random crashes I had (edit: I take that back. Going in the water made it have a fit). So now, for the glory of all, behold! The Fire Crotch! Now you can use a tool AND have lighting around you, provided you don't mind an uncomfortably warm groin.

I've treated myself to new RAM that's coming Monday. I only have 16gb so I've bought 2x32GB. Looking on canyourunit my PC is actually only low on that and the video memory. 16gb ram is the minimum for A:SA and 32 is recommended so 64 should be good. The video memory was barely below the recommended and I'm not switching out my entire card when the other bits it showed against that (I forget what) were all fine. It's been behaving itself today for the past 3 hours but when I first logged on it kept crashing. I've had a look though and the error it keeps giving is D3D device lost. Seems it's a fairly common thing with multiple possible reasons why it happens but it's not game exclusive. Hopefully the extra RAM might solve it.

Yesterday I made it over to Herbivore Island so I'm setting up base there. I had tamed a moschops and lystro who are now sitting at my old base (no cryopods and no mods right now so they'll just have to stay there). I nabbed a pteranadon too for the safe journey over to the island. Then the fun started. Just when you think Ark can't get more cruel and weird than incest I tamed a wild baby today. Two actually. The first was a phiomia that I killed the parent of because I needed hide to make an anky saddle. If you tame or kill a parent dino the baby can be instantly claimed. It then raises up the normal way and gives imprinting options as it would if you'd bred it. Free poop machine so that's now sat at my base. The second was an accidental orphan. I'd taken the anky up to the top of the island to farm up the metal nodes and caught a stego with the swing. Next thing I know there are 2 stegos attacking. Then while killing them I hit a baby phiomia so the adult joined in attacking. Killed them all successfully but only 1 of the stego babies that kept getting in the way. About an hour later I found this pretty baby stego with no parent so I guess it's the one that got away. I'm going to raise it and get it a mate as there are currently 3 brontos stomping all over my base that are really getting on my nerves. Stego army should sort them out if I can drag them away.

There are some nice QoL improvements if you do ever get it. S+ has pretty much been programmed in with the snap points. When you place structural components such as a wall you can cycle through variants so it's just one engram for a thatch wall but that includes door frames and windows as well and can also change height on foundations. They've also done away with pipes and wires. Intake pipes now have a radius so you place that in your water supply and everything in the radius counts as being supplied with water (so similar to S+ with them in the walls). Water wells act as relays so you can use those to extend the radius if your base isn't near the water. Same with electric I assume but not up to that yet. You can also 'pull' materials into some crafting stations, again like S+. Saddles now have durability; not an issue if you're just riding but if you get hit I assume they'll take damage. No more sponge tanks just because they have a high armour saddle so that could get irritating if it breaks mid-fight. I assume you can repair them. GPS trackers are gone and you can now track all dinos on the map that you own or are taming (which may explain some of the performance issues). There's an actual, zoomable map that you can add notes to and view those tracked dinos plus see the co-ordinates.

Some random screenies. It doesn't look bad at all considering most of my settings are on low. One huge help is annoyingly a console command so needs inputting for each session. r.VolumetricCloud 0 and r.VolumetricFog 0 really helps stability. The clouds look awful when on anyway so no loss there.

I think you might've jumped the gun there. Much more powerful systems than yours struggle with the game. That extra ram ain't gonna fix anything. As far as I can tell from all the "how much ram I need" videos out there, going from 8 to 16 gives meaningful boost to 1% lows FPS in games. Going from 16 to 32 does not give any meaningful or noticeable gain in 99,99% of games. As you are fan of this title i'll keep my fingers crossed that they optimize it but my gut says they will prioritize the sequel and this one will run like shit for some time.

Meh a more powerful computer is never bad and RAM is at least cheap. I'm not expecting to suddenly run it on ultra high graphics but a little buffer would be nice for stutters. If the GPU had been an issue I certainly would not be upgrading! I've been considering it for quite some time anyway. It runs and that's my main concern, I've never been someone that needs top of the range graphics, just a non-stuttering/crashing experience and it's so close right now. The struggles mainly seem to come with 4k and I'm not remotely interested in that. I'm also not expecting very much from the game so disappointment isn't as likely