Ark: Survival Evolved vs My Time at Portia
Ark: Survival Evolved
Ark: Survival Evolved is a hardcore, prehistoric-themed (this means dinosaurs... lots and lots of them), survival sandbox MMO set in an astoundingly gorgeous persistent world where everybody is fair game. There is insane amount of resources that you can harvest, items you can craft and dinosaurs that you can tame. Not to mention, you can and will probably need to build shelters for yourself and your tamed beasts, and of course, defend it from other players.Being a hardcore survival game, you'll also need to take care to feed both you and your dinosaurs and that death is pretty permanent in this game. Even the tools you craft has durability that will gradually wear down when used. It might be difficult to be a solo player and thus, you are often encouraged to team up whenever you can.
Ark: Survival Evolved is definitely not the sort of game to play if you're easily frustrated. The learning curve - let alone the "survival curve" - can be pretty steep especially when you keep getting killed or harassed by other, better equipped survivors.
My Time at Portia
My Time at Portia is a charming fantasy-themed adventure RPG that is set on a gorgeous, revitalized world after a post-apocalyptic event wiped out the previous technologically-advanced civilization. In this game, you play as an up-and-coming Builder, a respected role in society, whose sole purpose is to help solve the town's problems by engineering a solution.With a gameplay which may fondly remind you of games like Harvest Moon, My Time at Portia may be grindy in an RPG sort of way (think repeated dungeon runs or resource-harvesting), but the game has a nice relaxing pace, where its quests (both main and side quests) are slowly revealed as you progress. Being a Builder, you can also complete a commission request daily to collect some cash. The game also features an elaborate gifting/relationship-building system, fun ruin-diving areas, tons of interesting characters to meet, and challenging dungeons. You can even romance and eventually marry an NPC (not all though) you like!
The best part of the game is definitely its in-depth crafting system. There are tons of machines you can build to help you generate a wide variety of materials to build other stuff. You can also unlock new machine technologies via the Research Center.
My Time at Portia feels a lot like an adorable MMORPG minus the MMO part. It has the grind, the dungeon runs... but of course, this game places a lot more emphasis on its resource-collecting, as well as crafting and building aspects. Sounds like a game you'd like to play? Well, despite still being in early access, the first chapter of the game is already ready and bugs-free, so if you do buy the game, know that you can at least get a good 40 hours or so out of it.