Awesome / ARK: Survival Evolved

• Anytime you, the Player and your team set off on an epic journey riding on the army of creatures tamed.
• The very ending of ARK: after performing ascensions on The Island and the Aberrant ARK, proving your worth to the Overseer and eliminating Rockwell's threat, you return to Earth, defeat the massive Titan King that is the heart of the Corrupted Element hive mind, and complete the cycle, calling every ARK in orbit home to land all over the world. The ARKs embed themselves into the planet's crust (cleverly ensuring their massive oceans do not spill out), drop their shields to release every animal and human within them, and begin to slowly absorb all of the Element still embedded in Earth's soil. You effectively save what's left of Earth so that its biosphere can be restored, and are treated to an Island-type ARK - the very one you first woke up on - slamming down next to Sanctuary, and completely flattening the entire city with its purification pulse.
  • Heck, the "Ascension" ending scenes of the original game and Aberration are incredible on their own. Each gives you a breathtaking glimpse of the giant ARK network in orbit, set to glorious fanfare, as you are launched through space to your new destination. Aberration shoots you through a giant railgun made of portals! Fans have frequently requested an Ascension scene for Scorched Earth, they're that cool. And with the game's story update in 2022, it got one, with none other than Rockwell actively snatching you out of the ARK network's predetermined path to suck you into the Aberrant Ark.
• The first time you get to ride on one of the apex predators can make you feel outright invincible. The Rex and Giga even give you achievements the first time you climb onto their backs.
  • Getting a Titanosaur is even more of a power trip. Even on Official servers where it will eventually die, while it's still breathing you have the ultimate mobile base, atop a beast so powerful that it can annihilate anything known to exist on any ARK, bosses aside. As one of only a handful of non-boss creatures that can damage the Element-powered TEK - meaning everything else would simply shatter in seconds under its feet - literally nothing can stand in its way. Properly armed and smartly crewed, a Titano will functionally delete any tribe it is loosed against, leaving nothing but rubble, corpses, and very likely a server power vacuum in its wake. On the flipside, being in a weaker tribe and successfully slaying this living avalanche will make you feel like a god - just remember that the tribe whose Walking Tank you just killed is probably going to be pissed, and they'll be hellbent on erasing your tribe for its audacity. In fact, merely attempting to tame a Titano on Official Servers is literally considered a declaration of war by virtually all Alpha Tribes! But on Unofficial Servers or your own single player walled garden, complete with mods... you have the only Base on Legs you'll ever need, that nothing short of the Titans can do serious harm.
• Getting your hands on any of the powerful DLC tames for the first time. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to get creatures like Wyverns, Rock Drakes, Golems, Reapers, Deinos, Megachelons, or the Titans, and successfully acquiring your first one is a odd mixture of overwhelming triumph and crushing relief.
• Being witness to a mega tribe war can be an epic spectacle in and of itself. The sight of two huge armies of players blasting away at one another with endgame-tier energy weapons and crashing entire scrums of Gigas, Wyverns, Basilisks, Golems, Meks, a Titano or two, and even titans can, for a new player, be utterly breathtaking. A spectacle matched only by fighting in said mega tribe war... and winning, proving your tribe's utter supremacy and earning the coveted status of Server Alpha Tribe.
• The backstory of the Aberrant Ark, although it ended badly: Santiago's tribe built and used Element-augmented nuclear weapons on the Overseer. Granted, nuking it backfired and damaged the entire station, but the sheer scale of the damage is absolutely worth noting: the explosion completely destroyed the Overseer's platform and blew the arm it hung from in half, breaching the Ark's atmospheric shielding and causing all of its ozone to leak out, resulting in the surface getting completely melted by the sun's radiation. Further still, the Overseer of this Ark deserves an honorable mention for salvaging the situation before going offline from its damage and later getting assimilated by Rockwell: it reconfigured all of the station's lifeforms for subterranean life, and was even able to give some of them immunity to radiation so they could live in areas contaminated by the station's leaking Element reserves. The AI managed to save the entire station by thinking on the fly even as it was essentially dying, allowing future survivors routed to this Ark to, well, survive long enough to escape it.
• A properly leveled shoulder pet can become an unexpected lifesaver if you get ambushed by anything capable of stunning you or inflicting huge doses of torpor, and don't have a mount or other large tame nearby. With enough levels placed into health and attack, the loyal critter can handily lash out at any predators who attempt to approach your prone form, even potentially killing smaller threats. Jumped by a Purlovia or Thylacoleo and getting helplessly mauled, only for your attacker to suddenly drop dead and possibly even despawn from getting harvested? The otter, compy, monkey, or small flyer on your back might have just spared you an embarrassing death and a long corpse run to retrieve your gear. This is especially true with otters, since their attack stat is leveled up to boost their insulation bonus, making your average tamed otter into a Killer Rabbit that will literally devour anything that gets too close to its owner. And then there's the Fjordhawk, who, even if it can't kill your attacker, will grab your things and meet you on the beach should the worst occur, robbing any other players of the opportunity to loot your corpse.