I didn't play ARK long. Didn't care enough to. You'll note that I didn't put anyone on a pedestal, but simply pointed out that if someone wants sex and dinosaurs, it exists already. This un-optimized mess doesn't need to be praised blindly by people with no standards.
I have no issue with inconsistencies in things like specific era difference that would separate two species if the contents of the media is good. Jurassic Park also fumbled a lot of things about dinosaurs that we knew back when it came out, and the first movie is still considered a work of art by many. To quote some wise movie cinema critics, "if the sum of something is bad, it's a lot easier to point to the little things that might not have mattered much if it was better." Basically, you can call me a hypocrite, but that doesn't make me wrong. It just means you never had an actual argument.
I've never seen something so vapid and devoid of value, and I've watched MovieBob's content.
No, it's called competent world-building. In Mushoku Tensei, we learn the basics of magic in that world from the first episode. In An Echo of Things to Come, Augurs are named and explained before chapter 5. You can explain your magic system early in your story if you're not a chalk-snorting idiot.
The writing is not good for a narrative experience. The line reads are incredibly cringe, and that's being kind. The way people have been talking about the books, the writing is incredibly juvenile and smacks of someone who has never interacted with a female before, and that trailer confirms it for me. If that's how low someone's standards are, I'd be telling them to consider never interacting with media again. They can't be trusted to form a valid opinion.
An author with potential improves over time. The fact that the dialogue in the trailer sounds so bad, and that he presumably hired people to voice those lines, it tells me that he hasn't improved. For a bit of perspective, the writer of Shield Hero has stated he hated the Turtle arc and that he regrets it. SAO's writer has noticeably improved with the other series he penned, and has stated that SAO was his weakest work. A good author knows where their earlier works failed and even finds faults in parts that are clearly weaker than others. It's not unreasonable for an author to, during the adaptation process, change certain things to make the story more focused and engaging. Stephen King has famously been present during the filming of his book adaptations and changed things, for better and for worse.
I don't see the potential. I see
You must be registered to see the links
as his one fan meetup.
Chopping it all up at this point will make this stupidly long, so lemme hit a few bits.. I'll be jumping around a little bit it seems.
I've never been to or even bothered to look at his meetups. Honestly, I'd never go. I'm part of his facebook group from back when I still followed him actively and I basically muted it at some point. It's very odd to me in regards to the amount of ego-stroking the folks give over there. I feel his fan base is one of the reasons he's not matured into a better author. Those last two sentences took me about 5 minutes to word in a way that isn't overtly offensive, partly because I'm an asshole and partly because it literally is young(ish) minded men basically congratulating him for adding to their wankbank. I also find it equally as odd when the female narrators for books in the haremlit genre get the creepy fans who do the same. Some of those narrators also voice adult audio specifically for that purpose, however to me I feel there's a split between that and audiobook work.
I'm able to forgive an indie project being unoptimized to a degree. Most people tend to do so as well. Renpy as a whole is a mess in that regard. Many titles here have uncompressed images or video.. or just tank framerates. I can't point to a specific title, but I know for a fact several have had memory leaks if you dive into some of the much older titles.
But really, I don't think the "Dinosaurs and Sex" niche, if you want to call it that, has any real entries. Ark definitely isn't one of those, a nude patch didn't make Tomb Raider into basically Spelunky Anal Explorations.
This part will be multiple paragraphs, probably.
As for the world building, many stories, especially in this genre don't spell out the entire world systems in the first couple of lines. If this game follows the books remotely.. you should have a pretty good basic definition of what skills entail at an early point. Again, I
believe that is before he ever meets the girls. Or it might be pretty close to the first half of the first book. I know he uses his skill unintentionally early on, but the more immediate concerns of security, food, and water take up most of his time at first. Which narratively is fine. You learn about the world and the system as he does while he tests and speculates.
Requiring an author serve up all the details and mystery when the characters know nothing of it would ruin stories where a character is yanked out of their element. You'll see this in Cultivation Isekai novels quite often. You see it in authors of all stripes honestly. World acclaimed authors like Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson and, yes, even your example of Stephen King (Who I feel is a bit of a hack most of the time, sorry but I feel burned when I bought
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) don't explain it all out the gate.
As for this title, or rather this game, I may check it out when it fully releases. I don't tend to deal with betas or alphas. I realize the jank inherent to pre-release test builds.
TLDR:
I think most people's issue with your post isn't that you simply didn't like the product, it's that a lot of your gripes are.. I wouldn't say "Bad".. but sorta made in a bad manner or very weak since you are seeing a very small slice of the story I imagine and from the sounds of it the demo doesn't start at the very beginning of said story. That form of vertical slice can give bad impressions, I'll admit.
Let me number these cuz I'll circle back:
1) You did bang on about species not living near each other or in the same time period.
2) You complained about everything not being explained before the MC even learns anything about the world.
3) You did sorta lift up ARK onto a pedestal, and really no one (not even the dev or author I imagine) expect this little indy project to be better than ARK at being ARK. No one looks at all the RPGM games and says "Pfft.. Final Fantasy/Phantasy Star/Etc exist. So this must be shit."
As for 1 and 2 both those have a reason. The answer to the first was a theory with more and more evidence as the books go on. Even the MC makes note of some of your concerns there if I recall. The second is answered within book 1 pretty early and the characters' understanding of the system increases as time goes on, they even have a good hypothesis on why so many different races are about.
That's far more typing that I figured I'd do at 2 in the morning. I'm to bed.
