Is it ARK: Survival Evolved worth as a Single Player game?

Nerd³ played some single-player and it looked pretty fun.

If you had fun playing Minecraft in SP, ARK is more of the same.
Just much more demanding on your PC and Creepers are called Dyphlosomething and they don´t explode but eat you alive.

Depends on each; I enjoyed it both alone and with my friends on my tiny server hosted by myself. For some reason I stopped playing because of the updates (way too many creatures who make your life a hell, and for some reason after each update the game tended to eat all my 16 GB of RAM...).
Maybe one day I'll play it again, but not right now...

Minecraft > ARK

Ark survival evolved it's an early acces game whose developers launched an early access DLC and publicly said customers should say thank you to them for launching it (20$ I think it costs).

ARK is not worth it. Period.

Only minecrafty type game i've played is 7 days to die. is ok playing alone. i think ARK is ok too based on reviews

Have you checked out Empyrion: Galactic Survival?

I picked it up on sale and it's a lot of fun. A little bit similar to ARK and Minecraft, I guess. But awesome. :)

I have a friend who hates PvP and such so he either plays with friendlies or alone, he has 2600 hours in it. He's also crazy into dinos, that surely would help to make your game more enjoyable :)

Yeah SP on ARK is alright, but if you want to beat any bosses for tek gear and what not you might run into an issue.
Amazing game with a update tomorrow*~ =)

I'm torn on how to answer this question, because I'm highly ambivalent where this game is concerned.

I would say the game is quite good overall, but there have been a number of significant caveats to that. The one you'll probably see the most salt over being, of course, the release of a paid DLC for an unfinished game where they have clearly taken the money of the people who have been supporting it in Early Access and, rather than finishing the game, made a separate DLC and decided it was fair and proper to then also charge for it as much as they charge for the base game. There was much rage over this decision. Personally, I got Ark from Humble Monthly, so I am far less ruffled by this, but it is of note.

Then I have also seen a bunch of people raging over some changes made that only effect the multiplayer aspect which would then be irrelevant to you. Evidently they made it so people can freely switch servers or something, so tons of full alliances and the like have swapped around taking places over and generally harassing the community or preventing new players from even being able to enter the worlds and so on. I don't do the open multiplayer stuff in any survival games after seeing nothing but harassment, abuse & trolling in the past, so I can't actually add anything from personal experience to that part at all.

As to the game itself being good for single player only, I mostly find myself immediately tending towards no. I've played a bunch of survival games, and virtually all of them almost exclusively single player, and I feel like Ark is one of the best of them mechanically, but also the one that I've enjoyed playing the least. So many things are so incredibly slow and tedious without having friends around to help. It felt like the progress made in that game can't even be rated on a human time scale, but rather on the geological time scale. I tend to imagine that Ark is flipping amazing with a handful or more of friends all working together, but I feel like it's pretty torturous alone. However, a ton of people out there actually LIKE when your food and water gauges go from full to empty every 12 seconds whilst accomplishing anything requires that you stand in the same place performing the same actions and never screwing up for 12 solid hours (I'm heavily exaggerating here in reference to the effort required to tame a dinosaur), so the things I have complaints over may be exactly what you desire. Plus the world building options menu for starting a new game let you customize most things to exactly how you're most comfortable playing, which is fantastic.

Ark is a really well done game, and it gets very regular updates. Sometimes too regular I should maybe point out, as if you have a download cap for your net it could potentially be problematic. There's generally been at least one fairly substantial patch per month, usually accompanied by regular hotfix patches for a couple days or so around it as well, and sometimes the combined totals on all of it can be like 7-10GB. Probably not a concern to anyone unless they have seriously low data caps, but if a person does have a cap and is regularly close on it, Ark might be enough to cause some problems... Also it's just kinda frustrating sometimes when I finish a patch only to find a new patch is immediately waiting as the old one completes, or just seeing another new update to Ark every time I happen to glance at Steam on a day off because it fell after they did a major patch and they seem to find it a better answer to drop 250 small patches, each one immediate to being complete I would assume, instead of wait to find all the bugs and patch them all together. I don't, especially since often bug patching creates new bugs, so I'd be surprised if they didn't end up with situations where they've dropped a dozen patches on us in rapid sequence over a two day period after a 4GB major update and some quarter of those little patches are actually hotfixing the hotfixes.

So, all in all, your mileage may vary which is true of all games. If I was going to recommend a survival game to someone explicitly going in wanting to play single player, I don't think it would be ARK. Probably Empyrion since I find the different vehicle types and exploring multiple worlds, etc, to be far more engaging, and almost nothing in that game tends towards the speeds that suggest it is the tortoise to a Glacier's hare. Ark is very definitely well done so far, and in very active development however, so I also don't find myself wanting to really answer "No, it would be bad" either, because while some things it does feel super slow to me, it's very nicely done, very complex in some systems, quite beautiful, and easily one of the best done survival games I've played. So in the end I can't answer either yes or no to this, mostly because I can't answer to what you, personally, would actually enjoy. Best I can do is the above: give you the info I can think of to help you answer for yourself.

I have played 49 hours, most of it in single player and I am enjoying it.
If you liked The Forest's single player then maybe, like myself, you will find ARK better.

Yes it is, just remember to adjust some of the configurations on the Single Player creation and it will be awesome (Like the time you need to tame dinos and things like that, on the normal rate some can take hours to tame and to do that you would need a entire tribe, but you can adjust it to take only minutes on the start of the SP)

Oh, and the DLC is pricey but while the gameplay reamains almost the same, its looks like another game (a map with new theme, new dangers, new creatures like dragons that change the gameplay a bit and etc) and they will launch some cool free DLCs too, so i dont see why dont buy it if you like the game

Depends on your style and what you look for in a game.

Singleplayer leaves half or more of the game outside- but also some of the worst and most infuriating of the game.

I found it challenging enought in SP and prefer to play it SP (less random kills, no drama, better performance).
But i like it for the immersion, feeling like some lost explorer in a beautiful world.

When I first bought it I was only playing SP, but my computer is a potato. It used to take like 12 minutes to load a game. Now playing online on PVE servers is a lot smoother. I prefer playing online now.

I play ARK:SE single player. SO much better then the griefing caused by multiplayer. I have a huge stone house (4 stories so far), A small army of Sabres for hunting, two bronto's for moving large amounts of goods to my summer shack, a TRex for fun, a herd of Ptero's for exploring, 3 Argies for transporting stones/metal/flint from my Doed/Anklos who mine by themselves and a few sheep for shearing when I feel like making cold weather clothing - oh and my sharks for gathering silica.
Set your own tame speeds (mines 3x so i don't have to spend all day taming), and best of all - I don't have to log in every day - when you exit the game all timers are paused. no starving dinos if I get called into work, no pvp bastards destroying my base, and me coming back as a prisoner or having to restart building my estate again. plus no lag.