Thanks for letting me know someone's still interested in what I have to share and say about it. Recently I was thinking about writing a post "why am I still playing Ark" post. Steam says I've clocked just over 3300 hours! The game has disappointed me. I feel like it started off at such a high point that it just couldn't possibly top itself. It did get better in many ways, but I've run into multiple issues which have not yet been resolved, even though some are years old.

Check out the bottom of my post as I just updated it w/ 2 videos by Anthomnia who covers Genesis Pt. 2 details that Studio Wildcard released during the Extra Life event. He watched it all and broke it down into some what small videos for us to see and I greatly appreciate it. This isn't the first time he's done this. I actually find it kind of humorous regarding the things the devs decide to create Tek versions of. I think they should create a Tek Toilet, there is a regular toilet in the game. Tek items are the highest quality/best items and usually require Element to craft and power. Element is given as a boss reward, but there are other ways to obtain it, such as collecting Element Dust from defeating Tek versions of creatures. Yes, they added those in and they look cool! In my experience, most bosses are extremely difficult to do by yourself, even with "single player settings" enabled, so I usually just use the command console and give myself some Element.

I'm not sure how it would work on a laptop, but I suspect it wouldn't be very great, so you'll have to let me know how that goes. I actually did try to play it w/ a controller, but it just didn't feel right to me. I heard or read some where that the Switch version was pretty bad as the console isn't powerful enough for the game. The game is most definitely power hungry and requires quite a beefy system to run it at max quality even at 1080p/60FPS. It usually runs well for me now, but the main map, The Island, often dips to about 40FPS using the "extreme" preset, so I've sometimes changed it to "high." That puts the game at a good near 60FPS just about all of the time. I didn't really notice this during my recent play through and I played on pretty much every official map except Ragnarok and The Center. I didn't spent very much time on The Island, though.

I'm hoping Genesis Pt. 2 won't disappoint me like all the other DLC except for Scorched Earth did. I once eagerly awaited the release of an Ark DLC, but I've now learned to keep my eagerness in check. I'm not impatient about it now. The game and it's updates never get released when they first say they will, there's always a delay, so that's to be expected. After so much of this, I've learned to be patient.

I wonder what's in store for Ark's future or if Genesis Pt. 2 will truly be the end of it. I really hope not. I saw some movie trailers years ago, but I haven't seen, read, or heard anything about an Ark movie for a long time.

Updated post, added link for forum post showing off what was revealed. I thought this might be handy in case someone would rather take a quick look instead of watch a 20 minute video.