A high paying contributor to the original fundraising campaign of ARK ($3000+) voicing his concerns about the new paid-for DLC.
Developer response to said high paying contributor.
Worth noting a few things here, outside of the obvious, for those who don't know anything about ARK:
-The first DLC was The Center map. It was a fan-made mod that was put into the game as "official DLC" for winning a contest. Wildcard did not create the map, that was all due to hundreds of hours of modeling and creativity of the mod maker, all they did was adjust some things such as dino spawn parameters and level scaling and put it up on Steam as a DLC. The map is quite buggy and performs very poorly in this official DLC version, most of which being introduced via Wildcard's tampering.
-The second DLC was Primitive+ survival total game conversion. It essentially locks your game to the primitive technology level, adds a few new items, and is a gigantic buggy mess. This was also a fan made mod that was turned into an "official DLC". Once again, Wildcard had no hand in the primary legwork of making this.
-The third DLC, Scorched Earth, is a Wildcard creation. It introduces a multitude of new dinos, items, environments, weathers, and gameplay systems that are not present in the base game (The Island or The Center maps). The things from Scorched Earth can, however, be transferred over to the other two maps to "show them off and make people who don't have the DLC jealous", according to the devs:
(Posted on the Steam page for the DLC,
http://store.steampowered.com/app/512540/):
Quote:
TRAVEL BETWEEN ARKS
Survivors can take their character, favorite creatures and items between the Island and the new Desert ARKs, making their Island-dwelling friends jealous with all of the amazing new items, structures, creatures and secrets they find in the Desert.
They went as far as to say on their reveal stream, where dev team members were playing the DLC, that "you will never get the experience that we're getting right now unless you buy it" as well as several "why haven't you bought it yet", "go and buy it now", etc. every 2-3 minutes. This raises several concerns with existing backers, funders, and fans of the game as Scorched Earth holds far higher quality assets, both artistic and gameplay, than the base game that they had originally paid for and funded.
For a Developer to go out of their way to ***on valid criticisms by a concerned high-value backer of their project (and not just one, but many) is ludicrous to me.