Poop with a friend - ARK: Survival Evolved is getting split-screen

Defecation is a lonely sport, both in real life and ARK: Survival Evolved. In the prehistoric-fantasy survival game, your character, seemingly without warning, will regularly, silently eject a turd through all of their clothes, an act heralded only by the words "You defecated" appearing at the top of the screen. In brown. Some learned players will immediately pick up their stool and keep it for later. It is a shame-sodden, pragmatic, solitary act.

But it needn't be any longer. As announced on the game's official forum (reported by VG24/7), the next, undated Xbox One patch will introduce - among other, as-yet-unannounced features and fixes - a local split-screen function. If you need visual confirmation, it will look like this:

I imagine this will assuage some of that Freudian guilt over your character's need to guff out their last meal. Sitting next to another character, another human who regularly soils themselves and keeps the results for later will reveal the act for what it is. A means of survival, a necessity, a boon. Everybody poops, and it's just great.

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Joe Skrebels
Joe first fell in love with games when a copy of The Lion King on SNES became his stepfather in 1994. When the cartridge left his mother in 2001, he turned to his priest - a limited edition crystal Xbox - for guidance. And now he's here.