The Chasm’s most prominent characteristics are:

A focus on encouraging ground travel through underground areas which make up 50% of the map. They are unaccessible to flyers, rich in minerals and loot and house the more valuable creatures to tame. Your favorite flyers are not banned on the map, however, special speed boosting plants now give ground dwellers a chance to match their speed. With the player now spending more time on the ground, cliffs, valleys, bridges and level design in general, all become important. Instead of skipping over all the challenge with a flyer, now you are face to face with predators and the map itself.

Map of the Chasm’s underground areas

Map of the Chasm’s underground waterways

A focus on giving the ocean/water more importance. Instead of going for an ocean far away on the edges of the map, the Chasm has a underground ocean connecting all biomes together. The water can be used as a highway to reach the furthest parts of the map this way. Waterways are also rich in resources, even having some that are unique to them. This encourages player to use water for one of it’s oldest attributes, ease of transportation. Flyers are still the safest, however, water tames now occupy the niche of getting you whereever you want.

A focus on giving unpopular creatures a chance. A lot of creatures in ark have overlapping niches, and player gravitate towards the same ones due to familiarity. In the chasm, creature spawns break this familiarity, by encouraging spawns of less popular creatures and by diminishing spawn overlap between creatures having similar niches. This is even more prominant in spawn areas as the early-game is when players are more likely to choose unpopular creatures due to their inability to reach all areas of the map for stronger tames. Additionally, unlike on other maps featuring creature bans, the Chasm bans only a very few creatures. However those select few have been deemed detrimental to proper player progression through the map