Ark: Survival Evolved?

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I've been interested in this game for a while but I still don't know if it's right for me. I like the whole survive and build aspect but I thought I would like that in 7 Days to Die too and that game was just... weird. So here's my question to anyone who's played this game before: how easy is it to play? I'm not asking if it's easy to beat. I want to know if you're able to pick up the controller and start playing right away or if there's a learning curve.

The game itself is really challenging and it definitely takes a lot of understanding and familiarizing with the environment, animals and the which areas to be wary of. It's likely that you'd end up dying right from the beginning just from how dangerous the hostile animals are in-game. If you do start, I would suggest spawning in the southern parts of the map if you're playing in the default map, I can't really say much for the DLC maps... The southern areas are more "safe" in it that most of the lands are populated with docile herbivores that have low to zero temperament. Although I'd still watch out for things like raptors until you get to taming some animals that can help you in combat. DO NOT START IN THE NORTHERN AREAS! These typically have things like Tyrannosaurs Rexs and other such animals that without proper equipment and a something like a spinosaurus or a carnosuarous, you'd die very quickly. Also, environmental factors are a thing to consider. You can start to lose health from being too cold and too hot, so I would also suggest staying out of snowy areas until you've gotten the right gear to handle the cold.

The only other thing I can suggest is get to making a bed as quickly as you can as you can. Just like in Minecraft, the bed acts as a spawn point, so when you die and re-spawn, you will re-spawn at your mattress and not where you initially spawned at when first starting the game.

It's been a couple years since I've played (can't play anymore because of the crummy optimizations and performance... I've played on PC) so there are a lot of things that have changed and a plethora of animals that have been implemented into the game, but I'm pretty sure it's is still quite rough for anyone new to it. Also, if you don't want to wait for like 6+ irl hours to tame some animals in-game with the potential of it getting killed during it, then I would adjust the settings to make the taming speed at least x2 or higher.

I play this on PC, it's a great game once you get the hang of it, there is a learning curve where you'll die repeatedly, but once you've learnt the basics it's good.
I'd recommend learning the game in singleplayer or on a PVE server, when you play on PVP I'd recommend playing on an unofficial server with boosted rates so you can recover quicker after losses.

How hard is it to learn the basic mechanics? Am I going to be stumbling through menus for days on end trying to figure out how to do the most basic of things?

it's not too difficult, there are shortcuts you learn as you go along that make the game easier, but for basic getting started it's all easy to learn.