Studio Wildcard are holding a free weekend on Steam for their online survival game, ARK: Survival Evolved.
Players can try the game out for free on Windows PC, Linux, Mac (all via Steam) until Sunday, and the base game is discounted by 80% until the 10th. The DLC is also discounted, with the previous season of DLC packs 65% off, and the Genesis Season Pass marked down by 20%. The game is also available on PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
The free weekend coincides with a few events. First, the developers will be holding another 24-hour Extra Life charity livestream on November 7th at 10 a.m. PST. The livestream will feature various giveaways, interviews, information about the next Genesis expansion, and mod community highlights. Players can also get a wide range of perks and other bonuses for donating.
November 7th also marks the release of the free Tender Loving Care 3 update. This update features an overhaul to the Stego and Mammoth, along with a variety of quality of life enhancements. You can read more about the livestream, and the update, here.
You can find an abridged rundown of the game (via Steam) below:
As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements. Use your cunning and resources to kill or tame & breed the leviathan dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roaming the land, and team up with or prey on hundreds of other players to survive, dominate… and escape!
TAME, BREED, & RIDE DINOSAURS, IN A LIVING ECOSYSTEM
Dinosaurs, Creatures, & Breeding! — over 100+ creatures can be tamed using a challenging capture-&-affinity process, involving weakening a feral creature to knock it unconscious, and then nursing it back to health with appropriate food. Once tamed, you can issue commands to your tames, which it may follow depending on how well you’ve tamed and trained it. Tames, which can continue to level-up and consume food, can also carry Inventory and Equipment such as Armor, carry prey back to your settlement depending on their strength, and larger tames can be ridden and directly controlled! Fly a Pterodactyl over the snow-capped mountains, lift allies over enemy walls, race through the jungle with a pack of Raptors, tromp through an enemy base along a gigantic brontosaurus, or chase down prey on the back of a raging T-Rex! Take part in a dynamic ecosystem life-cycle with its own predator & prey hierarchies, where you are just one creature among many species struggling for dominance and survival. Tames can also be mated with the opposite gender, to selectively breed successive generations using a trait system based on recombinant genetic inheritance. This process includes both egg-based incubation and mammalian gestation lifecycles! Or put more simply, raise babies!
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LARGE-WORLD PERSISTENCE AND META-UNIVERSE
On the 100+ player servers, your character, everything you built, and your tames, stay in-game even when you leave. You can even physically travel your character and items between the network of ARK’s by accessing the Obelisks and uploading (or downloading) your data from the Steam Economy! A galaxy of ARKs, each slightly different than the previous, to leave your mark on and conquer, one at a time — special official ARKs will be unveiled on the World-map for limited times in singular themed events with corresponding limited-run items! Furthermore, you can now design or randomize your own unique ‘Procedurally Generated ARKs’, for infinite replayability and endless surprises.
Image: Steam
