Worst game I have ever played in my life. Combat is complete trash in this game. Magic rules the game. Bows suck no reasonable way to kill things actually at range with the bow and no way to slow incoming enemies. Bows are WAY too weak.

Melee combat is complete trash. Mobs lock on to you and if you try to roll away they will glide along the ground in their swing animation until they hit you. There is literally zero skill involved in trying to parry with a shield. If you have any sort of swing animation going on then you can't parry. However the enemies can swing at you through their flinch animation from being attacked.

Simply holding your shield up does NOTHING for you. The hit is blocked by the shield but you still take the damage unless you get a perfect parry. Every creature has multiple attack animations all at different speeds so you'd have to play the game for 50 hours in one area to reasonably be able master how to parry the creatures in that area.

So combat just isn't worth being involved in.

As far as the survival side of the game goes. There is literally zero survivability involved. Food/water is WAY too easy to get so it basically just becomes a chore that you have to do pretty frequently instead of being a valuable game mechanic.

Building in the game is terrible currently. Constant camera issues with trying to place building pieces. They attempt to use the valheim structural integrity system but it is poorly implemented. Not that the valheim one is all that amazing to begin with. It is a janky system that could be so much better if done properly.

I have thousands of hours in Ark Survival Evolved and many thousands of hours in the survival genre in general and this is easily one if not THE worst survival game that I have ever played.

Unless you are getting into this game just because it is named Runescape then I suggest avoiding it at all costs.

Even after their changes to the combat system it is still complete crap. This dev team doesn't understand what a good survival game is all about. They are clearly being expected to throw out some shovelware just to have a survival game under their umbrella without having developers that actually enjoy survival games.

I don't personally see this game ever getting any better as both of their "major" updates haven't done anything to fix any of the glaring issues that the game has at all.

Dead game is dead.

This game is a buggy piece of crap. 3 hours spent gathering materials for a large rover to have the thing disappear for ZERO REASON. Quick google search shows that this has been an issue in the game for YEARS and this crap company is too lame to fix it or even have backup saves so you can reload in an attempt to recover your lost items.

How do you make a game like this and have a bug that is this much of a huge deal and not fix it for YEARS? Don't buy this game. Avoid it and it's crappy DLC.

Game is garbage. Has been out for quite some time and their new season is a giant train wreck. Servers lag constantly, game is extremely new player unfriendly. Made it into the 3rd phase and completed all the content the game had to offer even though most of it was extremely buggy.

One of the first bosses that you could get access to when they released hard mode you couldn't even finish the fight because it would bug out if you had 2 or more people in the group. Took days for them to fix it. They literally didn't even bother testing their own content, happened to anyone who tried to do this in a group and happened every single time.... No QA for their team what so ever.

Didn't log into the game yesterday because I was busy with other stuff and then log in today and my thermal tower has just disappeared. It wasn't destroyed, there is no pvp here and no chaosweavers spawn close enough to do any damage. Thousands and thousands of personal materials just gone. They didn't want people littering the area with these towers so they added a system, obviously without testing it so that if people weren't around the towers would despawn. Someone else had the same issue in my "guild". He was out for 2 days and came back to his tower being gone as well.

Tried to submit a ticket regarding the issue and the ticket system just loaded as a white page and would never progress past this. If you care about your time at all then avoid this game.

There is really no way for me to express how broken and disappointing that this game is other than to uninstall it and warn others to avoid this game at all costs. Free to play or not, it's trash and people shouldn't support a company in any way, even playing their "free" game if they don't have the ability to develop any better than this.

This game is absolute trash. Do NOT buy it.

I'm getting so sick of companies releasing their uncooked trash and calling it E.A. How do you launch a game in this kind of state and think it is reasonable to call it E.A.?

Where has game development gone? Where has quality gone? Where have developers that care about their products and their reputation gone?

This game has simple stuff that doesn't work in it, like nearly 1/4th of all the icons are missing.... This is like a couple hour fix at max.

Then you have things like half the seeds that you can plant don't work. The growing system exists and the seeds exist but half of the seeds don't grow.... So this isn't an unfinished mechanic in the game. This is complete and utter laziness or greed wanting money for a product that isn't finished.

Where would we be today if car manufacturers were like, hey I hope you enjoy this new E.A. car. The brakes work some of the time. The handle for the emergency break is there and the brake is there but we haven't gotten around to connecting the cable yet. We'll see how things look in a few weeks. The engine works but sometimes it won't start....

This may sound like an outlandish example but this is really the type of crap we are paying for these days. All due to F.O.M.O. It has grown beyond acceptable now. The last 5 games that I have played have been E.A. titles because nothing is actually coming out finished anymore and 4 of them have been complete garbage.

Aside from these problems the game has tons of mechanics that don't work. The follower A.I. is complete trash. They do everything exactly opposite of what you would expect them to do. Then tonight I had my follower of 40 hours just "disappear" on me. It was carrying hours worth of harvested materials. It completely disappeared from the map. I teleport back to my home realm and there it stands, but it is no longer my follower. I have to walk up and claim it again. Upon doing so I realize that everything it was carrying is gone, including all of the gear/equipment I had made for it.

Harvesting mechanics are completely broken. Do not enter the swamp under any circumstances. It is the most unfinished zone and has more bugs than all the others combined.

The crafting system needs a LOT of work to be fun. The excessive amount of menus that you have to go through and the absolute lack of information on how crafting works and the excessively convoluted upgrading system including tons of addon upgrades for work stations that come in multiple tiers and don't even work like they claim they should.

I won't get into the always online issues with the game as that has been done to death but the fact that sometimes you have to wait upwards of 5 minutes for a realm to load while you are sitting there looking at a loading screen.

There is easily 500+ hours worth of stuff wrong with this game at this point and this crap should not be allowed to be on steam and should be removed and all purchases refunded until this game is in a better state.

Do not buy this game until you fully research if it is the game for you. The developer has lead you to believe that it is another large open world game similar to Ark Survival or many other opened ended survival games but this game is NOT.

This game is NOT multiplayer friendly.

- You are limited to the number of bases you can have in the game at a time.
- The story is based on server progression meaning if one person progresses the story and others aren't on at the time then they miss out on the progression.
- Vendors and NPCs can be summoned around the map but there is only one instance of them. So if you are crafting something and your friend summons him to another location then he poofs along with your materials.

This game is far more similar to Valheim than any other survival game out there and far more restricting with the single progression story line. At least in Valheim you had to get item drops from bosses that could be repeatedly summoned in order to progress so the allowed for more individual progression. In this game if you have a quest and someone else completes it while you are off line then your quest will never progress as the things you need to use to progress it don't exist in your game anymore. Your quest does not update to whatever is current either. Only the person with the highest level of progression can continue the quest line. If you are online for all levels of progression then you are okay but if you miss one then you are done with progressing the story.

This game is a massive catfish, buyers beware!

I will say that the game looks good if you plan to play alone, or with a small group that always plays together, but that is not what I was led to believe this game was about.

Most of my information comes from spending hours trying to get a dedicated server running today while listening to the developers and moderators respond to people in the official discord.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!

If you have ASE already then just play it. This game is not worth even $5 USD. It is 100% not stable, as if you expected anything else from Wildcard studios but many of the Mod developers either haven't commented or are not planning to update their mods for ASA which means most of the things you love about Ark won't even be available on ASA.

Also due to being in debt over their ears Wildcard has signed an exclusivity deal with Nitrado servers to run ALL private servers from a rental aspect which means you MUST use Nitrado servers if you want to rent and run a private server. You can't use the 100 other companies out there that put Nitrado to shame.

Here is a link to an article that explains some about the debt they are in and I'm sure if you are more interested a simple google search will easily uncover more.

https://massivelyop.com/2023/09/05/sec-filings-reveal-the-multi-million-dollar-debt-ark-survival-evolveds-publisher-owes-nitrado/