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The Biggest Issue With ARK - It Isn't Done Yet. We Need PvE Fun!


HighFlyer15

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The biggest problem ARK has going for it right now is it isn't finished. By that, I don't mean "it's early access, don't play if you don't like unfinished games!" I mean Wildcard is currently so wrapped up in actually finishing up the game that they're missing what would be fun in the game.

None of the boss fights are fun at the moment. Most of the caves aren't entertaining. None of the Alpha hunting is dangerous.
 

Boss fights

Boss fights are nothing but a place where you go to throw away weeks/months of breeding perfect Rexes. Send them to fight the boss, and hope your stats on them are good enough. How come that's the only real strategy worth using time on? All other animals are mostly worthless in comparison since Rexes are so easy to breed. I know some swear by the Theri and some even say the Rhino is good but no. Rexes > All other animals.

TheRightHand stated they always want max stat Rexes to be a viable tactic but why not make that a tactic which would destroy the Easy and Medium bosses? If you put months into a strategy don't you feel it should be a dominant strategy, mostly needed for the Hard version of the bosses? If this was the case, only 1/3 of the endgame would be locked away from most people. Isn't that much better than 3/3 of the endgame?

Currently, the Broodmother has a level requirement of level 30. Why? No sane person would attempt her with a crossbow and pike :|
I am suggesting to make her and the other Easy bosses a lot easier to bring down. I'm not saying super easy to bring down but a lot less than 10-20 great stat Rexes needed. This would enable smaller tribes to get their hands on some of the less powerful Tekgrams, like building parts. It would also make more sense in the wording, Easy. Easy is something the lower tribes should be able to do without having to breed a ton, Medium would be mid-to-big tribes, and Hard only the biggest tribes.
This would also give the people with less time an actual shot at reaching the end credits.

Their reason for not making the boss fights more entertaining than click click click, for now, is AI is very expensive and they don't want people to be able to cheat their way to easy Tek/endgame gear. I get that and that's why it's basically a big left-click battle where the entire challenge is a "can you remove *this* much health from the boss?" deal.
First of all, everyone is currently cheating. Glitching the Broodmother and the Dragon into positions where they simply don't attack back. I've been in a battle where more than half of the Easy Dragon's hp was removed before he decided it was time for another flight, raining fireballs from the sky, and summoning more minions.

Why can't all the boss fights have phases like that? It's the old classic format of a boss taking enough damage and switching his playstyle. The Broodmother could hunker down and take 90% less damage, spider minions could come pouring in from holes in the walls, and ceiling, and she would get upset once you've killed a certain amount of her children and come back out of hunker mode to beat on you some more.
The Gorilla could have his rock throw removed from basic close combat fighting, climb onto the arena, out of reach, and throw rocks from a distance for a few minutes. Snipers still able to deal damage to him.

Just two small examples which I can't see larger tribes cheating their way around but would add just a tiny bit of diversity. Also, how hard would it be to add a "climb" ability to the bosses? The Broodmother getting stuck in the trench of her own lair seems like a silly thing.

Question time for any AI engineers, how hard would that be to code? My simple brain might not understand how hard it is to code (X damage taken -> change behavior from A to B -> return to behavior A when X minions killed).
 

Alphas

A step down from bosses are the Alpha creatures. Some like them, some hate them. I'm in the middle. What I like about them is they are mini-bosses roaming the world. And that's about it :/

They are way too rare. I feel like there should be one of each on the map at all times. If you kill an Alpha raptor, another should spawn somewhere else, immediately or after a short while. Maybe spawning in at a higher level each time? I haven't seen an Alpha Rex in weeks on our private server and we even have the spawnweight on all alphas increase by 300%. Doesn't help as the Alpha spawn is tied to the regular version spawns, so if I increase Rex spawns we might see an Alpha Rex faster.
They're way too easy to kill. I can take on a max level Alpha Rex on my mediocre tamed Rex, not even bred, just leveled a bit from wild. That shouldn't be possible. Does anyone remember the days where you had to bring together the strongest tribes on a server to take down an Alpha Rex and you still lost half hp on all Rexes/Spinos involved in that fight? It was amazing and I really wish that kind of danger would return to the map.

Now some might say "but you just said you don't want the bosses to be left-click spam fest! Why would you want the alphas to be that?" I feel like the Alphas are excused from it because they roam the world at all times. They're not something you have to gather artifacts to fight, look forward to fighting like actual bosses, and the reward for killing them is usually very poor anyways.
 

Caves

Onto the caves, none of them are hard or "fun".
They look amazing but that's it. Putting a higher level on the creatures inside the cave, fine I can live with that. It removes the ability to simply speed through them with a shotgun, that's fine.

After you've gone through them a few times, the sense of wonder is gone and you're just speedrunning to the artifacts. How about some danger near the artifact? How about a mini-boss protecting each artifact and the artifact being a drop from them?

Best example right now(even though it's placeholder) is the Tek cave. You can speedrun the Hard Tek cave with grappling hooks and parachutes :|
Am I saying remove the ability to use those things? Nah, it's fine. Once the boss is at the end you'll probably need to bring a ton of mounts to deal with it, so in the end being able to get to the boss fast is fine. But how about removing the "You will lose everything upon completing the cave!" and add the best loot in the game with a very low drop rate to the creatures found inside the cave? That way you would actually want to kill them all.
A Reddit thread suggested the Bionic Skins being a part of the cave with an incredibly low drop rate. Rewards for doing caves again and again is a must to keep the game entertaining, even for the players with thousands of hours. Just look at any successful MMORPG where players don't quit just because they reach the endgame content and beat the final boss once.
 

Conclusion

And with that, we're back at the beginning of my wall of text. The biggest issue with ARK is it isn't done yet. Wildcard can't fully focus on making things fun. Overall, it has to be functional first. Maybe once they've reached 1.0 they'll be able to go back and take a look at everything and change things for the better because right now I've gotten to the point where I don't know what to do. After 3700 hours I damn well should be but I put all those hours into the game without any proper entertaining bosses, caves, and endgame content. I love dinos, what can I say :/
Most of the time was spent building, breeding, taming, and exploring new patches. But buildings have been built, breeding is over, taming never seem to yield great stat RNG, and exploring new patches come once a month(which is fine).

In the end, I wish Wildcard would start thinking more about the PvE community and add features/mechanics/bosses/caves/expansion packs which focus on the fun aspect of things. Who cares if a boss can be cheesed if doing it legit is fun and challenging! Who cares if a cave is ultra easy when you just jetpack across it all, if doing it legit is one of the most entertaining things in all of ARK!

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
 

TL;DR

ARK needs more rewarding fun and less left-click2win on Rexes. Wildcard needs to care less about people finding ways to cheese future bosses and caves, and focus on making endgame content fun and challenging without Wildcard themselves cheesing their playerbase by simply adding millions of HP to a boss. Keeping in mind, millions of HP can be fine if the overall fight is fun.
In the end, I just need more patience so they get a chance to actual add the fun things but I fear they're happy with the boss fights and caves as they are and content in the future will always be focused on PvP, even if it's the smallest part of ARK :(


Play with mods!

Someone on Steam told me to simply get a private server and play with mods. I do own a private server and I do play with mods, S+ and Eco's mods. But in most cases, mods =/= fun/challenge/entertainment. The person probably had a specific mod in mind, like Annunaki Genesis, ARK Eternal or Extinction Core. But to me, the core of vanilla ARK is fine. I don't need neon animals to make it more interesting and it certainly wouldn't make me want to use another 100 hours in ARK just because I could tame a Tapejara with a torpor lightning breath attack. He missed the point entirely and that is, simply adding mods do not innovate on the gameplay. The bosses of ARK won't be more fun just because I can destroy them in a matter of seconds with a modded creature.

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It seems like you want Ark to be quite a bit harder. That is always a double edged sword since you also need to consider new players when cranking up difficulty. Ex - alphas. New players who run into alphas get utterly destroyed. Heck, regular dinos destroy a lot of newer players. 

Once you get established though, you are exponentially more powerful, and those threats go away....unless you tweak server settings (make wild dinos hit harder and take less damage). Always an option for folks who want more of a challenge, which will not affect those that feel like there is enough already. 

As for bosses - I do agree with you. Increased complexity or strategies would add to them. 

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The problem with this game is that It is vast as the ocean, but deep as the puddle.  

Wildcard releases hald done, hald finished content with questionable quality and usefulness. I'm not surprised you reached the point when you have no idea what to do. This game does not have more to offer except for building, taming, breeding and completing caves here and there. If you built, tamed and bred what you wanted, you pretty much did what this entire game has to offer. It has no replay value. Heh, after 22 months in Early Access we have no idea what is the story behind enitre ARK! There are only notes that do not explain anything or explain very little and 2/3 of them are written in latin and chinese, because everyone knows chinese and latin, right?! It's unbelievable to read those notes I would have to tab out from the game and google it and I wouldn't find translation for them anyway.

Regarding the bosses, I cannot force myself to care about this "end game content" owing to the fact the entire boss battle you can sum up to "the one who has more summed up HP and DPS, wins". This is very lazy and poor gameplay design of boss battles. The boss battle must require skill to win, not tons of 100% imprinted dinosaurs that only encourages players to hoard dinosaurs and in the end speed reaching taming limits up. In my opinion the boss battle have to looks like fights with machines in Horizon Zero Dawn. Every machine has its weakspots and strenghts, they have different behaviours patterns and attacks. Even though you character might be too weak to fight the most powerful ones, but you can still win, because you learn how to fight them in the most efficent way, using special ammunition, harpoons to trip them over. In ARK the only way to defeat the boss is to have ridiculous amount of imprinted Rexes. This underwhelming to put it mildly. It is the high time for Wildcard to start working on serious AI overhaul, because it is just pathetic. Without proper AI we can forget about any remarkable boss battles and experience dealing with normal dinosaurs. Also I will never do any boss battles if the only way to win them is to grind hundreds of hours to get perfectly imprinted Rexes. I'm fed up with how grindy the entire game is.

Don't get me started on hard Tek Cave... The Tek Cave is the most pathetic end game dungeon I have ever played. Ending it so underwhelming and unsatysfying that I will never play this Tek Cave again. Do you know what you would see at lvl 100 Tek Cave? THE WALLS of lvl 316 hostile dinosaurs. I played it with my friend on local hosted server for fun. Spawned high lvl Trexes with Tek Saddle and went inside. We reached first group of enemies. Around 50 316 lvl animals were standing in the  huge pile of bodies. Then they aggroed at us. That's how entire lvl 100 Tek Cave looks like. Huge clusterf#ck of dinosaurs that attacks you all the time. You walked 20 meters after clearing the first group? There is another one! Plus, your tames will be falling to the lava due to their pathetic pathfinding and AI. And that is what entire Cave is. After you walked through entire dungeon, you go to terminal which works as teleporter and then you will "ascend" with very cheap and unrewarding cutscene and they you will see game credits.  It was completely waste of time. I don't think that QA team even attempted to do that cave without spawning lvl 316+ dinosaurs for themselves and making themselves imortal. It is unbelievable Wildcard thought this woud have been fun experience. This Tek Cave is the purest form of very bad gameplay design of Wildcard. It should not have been released in this state at all.

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32 minutes ago, YJMark said:

It seems like you want Ark to be quite a bit harder. That is always a double edged sword since you also need to consider new players when cranking up difficulty. Ex - alphas. New players who run into alphas get utterly destroyed. Heck, regular dinos destroy a lot of newer players

Overall, it's not exactly about the difficulty. Caves can be entertaining without being super hard, if the strategy/tactic needed is fun. The Center's jumping puzzle was a very nice example of a clever way to make a cave tough and rewarding in the end. Except the jumping in ARK is the most refined and turned out to be too long and way too hard in the end xD I lost count of how many times I tried and gave up in the end.
You could have a puzzle with push mechanics which would change each time you visited or having to stand on the right pressure plates with a group of friends to proceed but first the door which you opened would unleash a large group of whatever Wildcard wants to throw at us(just not Gigas please!). Just a few easy examples.

Yeah, Alphas do destroy new players. It's mostly the Alpha Rex I'm concerned with. It's not as Alpha as it used to be. The Raptor and Carno can still be taken out by a Mammoth or anything with proper knockback, so I guess they wouldn't need a buff. But by god, increase the spawns or separate their blueprint from normal spawns. I went so far as to put the spawnweight on alphas to 100% of all creatures on the island. Still had to wait for one to spawn through normal raptor spawns >_<

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2 hours ago, HighFlyer15 said:

Overall, it's not exactly about the difficulty. Caves can be entertaining without being super hard, if the strategy/tactic needed is fun. The Center's jumping puzzle was a very nice example of a clever way to make a cave tough and rewarding in the end. Except the jumping in ARK is the most refined and turned out to be too long and way too hard in the end xD I lost count of how many times I tried and gave up in the end.
 

In my experience a large group of ark pve'ers dont like "strategy and tactic". They enjoy taming dozens of animals, breeding multiple babys at once, building huge bases and beeing immortal and ridiculously overpowered to the entire wildlife. The concept of thinking and working to achieve something doesnt please them. Not to mention losing any stuff. So yeah if the game isnt beatable brainafk u get some complains, if it is slowed a little == complains, not able to beat it solo == complains, not treated like the special snowflake == complains. (Un)Fortunatly Ark isnt the only game with this problem and app game developers found a lucrative way to use this: Pay to Win.

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achievement unlocked. i read this whole thread :D

 

a lot of points i would agree on and also the opposite. there are many discussed about solutions to the problems you've raised up in here, and actually all not so hard to implement. but first and foremost, i want to make clear that these solutions have to apply to pvp also (not because it's the targeting group but because they suffer from the same lack of content/pleasure). so...

stat gains are too efficient, both TE bonus and experience points wise. that's why you feel so much safer after your first 150 rex. leveling hp and melee linearly only exaggerates the situation. solution is down-curved progression of experience points .ie the more you put into 1 stat, the smaller the % gains will get. humans too.

durability on saddles! because i'm evil. or dino teamkill because realism. both would significantly raise the level of difficulty and change your everyday gameplay. 

more variety in dino abilities. yes, WC has recently applied more functions to our dinos (harvest for moschop/theri, scout for trood and steal for pego) and hopefully the dino TLC pass will upgrade some of the old and useless dust collectors into unique creatures alike. but definitely not the way they have handled oviraptor or lystro where a lvl 5 is just as effective as a lvl 150.

penalty to transfers. 

taming/breeding competition. for example, you scan your dino stats into the obelisk (or beacon) and would be able to compare your stats with 10 other on that server or 50 around the globe. like a "top 10", "top 50" chart for each species. hopefully that would make you cherish your own dinos more and prevent you from exporting them. perhaps a community bank for the rewards with game giving a share as well. 

more color regions and palette.

dino AI. wilds are dumb, tamed even more so. poor at following and obedient enough to starve. seriously, low food should force them on wander and look for substance. especially since eating is broken right now.

bosses too need a rethink with more strategy being needed other than simple DPS. tek cave is a fail. i mean even BF1 has easter eggs that require more interaction than this end-game content. or Final Fantasy using over 20 years now elements like water/wind/thunder/earth to add another angle to the plain world. doesn't even have to be a magic attack. like use full waterskins to weaken the broodmother, throw poop at the gorilla to aggro it in a benefiting way, bolas against dragon and fire against manticore. has to be done in a way that even after 10 fights the procedure varies ever so slightly but still remains that uniqueness. 

"side quests" and "minigames". more of those. fishing is a good start and with some slight improvements can make a huge different to the enjoyment factor.

 

 

...lost my train of thought so will be back for more nonsense :P 

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3 hours ago, Ballmann said:

In my experience a large group of ark pve'ers dont like "strategy and tactic". They enjoy taming dozens of animals, breeding multiple babys at once, building huge bases and beeing immortal and ridiculously overpowered to the entire wildlife. The concept of thinking and working to achieve something doesnt please them. Not to mention losing any stuff. So yeah if the game isnt beatable brainafk u get some complains, if it is slowed a little == complains, not able to beat it solo == complains, not treated like the special snowflake == complains. (Un)Fortunatly Ark isnt the only game with this problem and app game developers found a lucrative way to use this: Pay to Win.

Sounds like a lot of uninformed opinionated garbage right here. 

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1 hour ago, 7Eleven said:

Sounds like a lot of uninformed opinionated garbage right here. 

Sounds like there would have been better ways to say u disagree, but anyways lets discuss this. If u have followed this forum, steam forum and ingame chat u might have noticed a lot of complains about stuff like the flyer nerf, melee nerf, nerf to the giga that slowed the game down and or made it more difficult to faceroll the environment. Also u will find complains about troodon taming. And im still not getting the point why someone would complain about a unique taming mechanic? Because they need to sacrifice a tame or do something different then shooting arrows and forcefeed narcos? Then ask people about taming pens and offer some suggestions how to make knockout tames more challenging by removing the ability to trap or stuck the animal, u wont make much friends with those ideas. I have even heared complains about quetz taming, how it is nearly impossible without a tamed quetz, suggest to group up to shoot it down with a person carrying another and find urself insulted because ur not going to help with ur quetz. So in the end i came to the conclussion a lot of people want the game to be easy because they dislike challenge. Log into the ark turn the brain off and enjoy the graphics while taming another trapped dino or hatching the 5th colourmutation for the same colour region.

And if this snowflake statement offended u, im sorry but a lot of complaints sums up to  "i have to be able to play the game the way i want to play the game but still be able to get everything in the same amount of time then every other player". Well life isnt a pony Farm.

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6 hours ago, Ballmann said:

In my experience a large group of ark pve'ers dont like "strategy and tactic". They enjoy taming dozens of animals, breeding multiple babys at once, building huge bases and beeing immortal and ridiculously overpowered to the entire wildlife. The concept of thinking and working to achieve something doesnt please them. Not to mention losing any stuff. So yeah if the game isnt beatable brainafk u get some complains, if it is slowed a little == complains, not able to beat it solo == complains, not treated like the special snowflake == complains. (Un)Fortunatly Ark isnt the only game with this problem and app game developers found a lucrative way to use this: Pay to Win.

I definitely agree on this point when it comes to the Youtubers you see the most. None of them, literally none, enjoy a proper challenge. They all want overpowered creatures and if something dies they absolutely hate on the game for being buggy :| 
Most even play with the old dino stat settings to feel even more powerful. Having creatures with +2000% melee and millions of health. It's a collection game to them which is fine, but they use super tranq darts to avoid the challenge of getting the creature down and then a insta-tame food depletion potion to get them to eat fast.
None of these ever touch the endgame of vanilla ARK because they already know they wouldn't be able to beat it. Just take Sl1pg8tor for example. When they went up against the Megapethicus they got absolutely destroyed and instantly started bringing in Gigas via teleportation(Dmac).
They do not enjoy challenges and luckily that couldn't be further away from how I play PvE and the people wanting actual PvE content with fun challenges.

Poking at the Pay2win concept. I honestly don't care if this proper PvE content would come in the form of Paid DLC. I would gladly pay to be entertained properly.

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6 hours ago, Ballmann said:

In my experience a large group of ark pve'ers dont like "strategy and tactic". They enjoy taming dozens of animals, breeding multiple babys at once, building huge bases and beeing immortal and ridiculously overpowered to the entire wildlife. The concept of thinking and working to achieve something doesnt please them. Not to mention losing any stuff. So yeah if the game isnt beatable brainafk u get some complains, if it is slowed a little == complains, not able to beat it solo == complains, not treated like the special snowflake == complains. (Un)Fortunatly Ark isnt the only game with this problem and app game developers found a lucrative way to use this: Pay to Win.

So OP made a thread about wanting more strategy and a harder challenge and your response is that snowflake pve'ers don't want more challenge or strategy?

 

Back to the post: I completely agree with OP. Bosses need more strategy, alphas could spawn more in more difficult regions and caves could use a tougher challenge that keeps the artifac.

 

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55 minutes ago, HighFlyer15 said:

Poking at the Pay2win concept. I honestly don't care if this proper PvE content would come in the form of Paid DLC. I would gladly pay to be entertained properly.

Would be interresting to see how succesful a paid dlc that increases the difficulty will be.

 

31 minutes ago, Lancelot said:

So OP made a thread about wanting more strategy and a harder challenge and your response is that snowflake pve'ers don't want more challenge or strategy?

 

Dont get me wrong i totally agree with the OP just wanted to state why i think an increased difficulty is not going to happen. Would love to see actual boss fights, cave minibosses, alphas as group content, nerfs to tamed dinos, buffs to wild dinos, increased building costs and some challinging taming mechanics.

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10 minutes ago, Ballmann said:

Would be interresting to see how succesful a paid dlc that increases the difficulty will be.

None of it would be allowed to be "Wildcard difficulty", though, which up until now has been nothing but "more levels", "more hp", "more damage", and more animals together in one bit pile of body parts. Definitely looking at you Tek cave. I don't mind the swamp cave so much as it kind of makes sense with lots of ew creatures together in a cave.
The most challenge any cave has presented me has been the jumps during the old cave designs. Especially the carno island cave. Mostly due to the fact that the walls had hitboxes you couldn't see, so the actual jumping required at some parts demanded a fair bit of skill/knowledge of these hitboxes xD 

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Fine. When PVE guys get to a point where they are bored with easy mode, they get a button to push, no backsies, no oops.

Instant base and dino teleportation to a PVP server that has that exact base location open.

No way back.

And if they are feeling really sporty, they push the button next to it marked Ludicrous Mode.

See above, but they are taken to a hardcore server.

Life won't be so boring then.

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Not sure if the game can be as fun as when just starting out. There is lots you can do afterword, but nothing compares to the beginning. There is a different "feeling" for a while that makes it really fun. Not talking about grinding, just being killed etc that makes you look out for stuff.

The constant nerfing is a bit annoying because it takes away from that. Like starting out on scorched, you just die until you figure something out. There aint no way to just start out and "make it".

 

PVP can be hard too, just different rules.

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5 hours ago, HighFlyer15 said:


None of these ever touch the endgame of vanilla ARK because they already know they wouldn't be able to beat it. Just take Sl1pg8tor for example. When they went up against the Megapethicus they got absolutely destroyed and instantly started bringing in Gigas via teleportation(Dmac).
They do not enjoy challenges and luckily that couldn't be further away from how I play PvE and the people wanting actual PvE content with fun challenges.

 

obviously you don't understand what the YouTubers are actually doing. they aren't here to play the game fair/ it isn't a walk through. they make video's that are entertaining to watch no accurate. I wouldn't watch videos of them constantly getting smashed by an unbalanced ark game. if I wanted to watch videos or ark being unbalanced I would watch my own recordings 

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5 hours ago, spacejam said:

obviously you don't understand what the YouTubers are actually doing. they aren't here to play the game fair/ it isn't a walk through. they make video's that are entertaining to watch no accurate. I wouldn't watch videos of them constantly getting smashed by an unbalanced ark game. if I wanted to watch videos or ark being unbalanced I would watch my own recordings 

I understand perfectly fine what they're doing.
They're simply showing off the mods and creatures. I do see why people find them interesting and I do find myself watching them once in a while to check up on different mods which I can't be bothered installing on my server.

What I'm asking for in ARK would not benefit them and that's fine. Mods bringing colorful animals to the game doesn't benefit me either. There's room for everyone. They find entertainment in simply taming a new creature every other day and showing it off to the world. I find entertainment in being presented with a challenging cave or mini-boss/boss, either doable solo or in a group, but not when that challenge is "locked" behind the only viable tactic of having to breed for months to get perfect stat Rexes only to lose them all to the Hard version of the Broodmother doing +6k damage per ball of acid, unless you glitch her into not attacking :| 

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i agree with alot of what you are saying. ARK definitely gets stale after some time and the way the bosses are implemented is far from optimal. but they have to work with what they got, they cannot just make a new AI appear magically. And thats the biggest problem they have, their AI cannot make boss fights as interesting as a single player game (like horizon for example) there are so many more things that come into the equation when you add multiple people in the mix. so in the end they work with what they got.

what i do not agree with is the fact you said they shouldnt care the boss fights could get cheesed as long as the 'legit' way is fun/challenging. its all fine and dandy for PVE, bob across the map flying around permanently in TEK armor because cheesing the bosses is so simple it takes no preparation wont hurt you directly. BUT if that same bob cheeses these bosses on PVP we get a completely different story. Right now the only way they can assure its not being exploited is by inflating the numbers to an ammount it becomes ipossible to do without the proper preparations and even then when something goes wrong you lose everything.

i would really like to see all of this tweaked and changed and i think you have some good ideas with the mini bosses in caves etc. Maybe they will be implemented into the main game but we cannot expect the AI to change on the bosses because WC have said themselves its not something they can do.

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23 minutes ago, BobRoss said:

i agree with alot of what you are saying. ARK definitely gets stale after some time and the way the bosses are implemented is far from optimal. but they have to work with what they got, they cannot just make a new AI appear magically. And thats the biggest problem they have, their AI cannot make boss fights as interesting as a single player game (like horizon for example) there are so many more things that come into the equation when you add multiple people in the mix. so in the end they work with what they got.

To fix the pinning u wont need a better ai just adjust the collison boxes of the boss and rexes (rexes have on of the most terrible boxes if ever seen they can walk trough normal gates although they are obviously to large). If u want to prevent it a little better let large animals push smaller animals around based on their drag weight so if a boss or a bronto moves into rex they wont get stuck but instead push the rex to the side.

But i agree pathfinding seems to be a huge task if they want to improve that. Detect the obstacles, calculate the alternate route and im not even sure if cliffs are detectable. Harvestable ressources seem to have a collicion box at least.

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14 minutes ago, Ballmann said:

To fix the pinning u wont need a better ai just adjust the collison boxes of the boss and rexes (rexes have on of the most terrible boxes if ever seen they can walk trough normal gates although they are obviously to large). If u want to prevent it a little better let large animals push smaller animals around based on their drag weight so if a boss or a bronto moves into rex they wont get stuck but instead push the rex to the side.

But i agree pathfinding seems to be a huge task if they want to improve that. Detect the obstacles, calculate the alternate route and im not even sure if cliffs are detectable. Harvestable ressources seem to have a collicion box at least.

i dont know how the hotboxes work, if it would be so easy i expect them to have fixed it along time ago, same with squids mosas basils etc. 

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4 minutes ago, BobRoss said:

i dont know how the hotboxes work, if it would be so easy i expect them to have fixed it along time ago, same with squids mosas basils etc. 

Might not be that easy as i think they would need a better 3d-model for the boxes and an improved 3d-model with better physics might need more performance. This could be a point to make it impossible. But just speculation perhaps improved ai is just a lower priority on their schedule.

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3 hours ago, BobRoss said:

i agree with alot of what you are saying. ARK definitely gets stale after some time and the way the bosses are implemented is far from optimal. but they have to work with what they got, they cannot just make a new AI appear magically. And thats the biggest problem they have, their AI cannot make boss fights as interesting as a single player game (like horizon for example) there are so many more things that come into the equation when you add multiple people in the mix. so in the end they work with what they got.

what i do not agree with is the fact you said they shouldnt care the boss fights could get cheesed as long as the 'legit' way is fun/challenging. its all fine and dandy for PVE, bob across the map flying around permanently in TEK armor because cheesing the bosses is so simple it takes no preparation wont hurt you directly. BUT if that same bob cheeses these bosses on PVP we get a completely different story. Right now the only way they can assure its not being exploited is by inflating the numbers to an ammount it becomes ipossible to do without the proper preparations and even then when something goes wrong you lose everything.

i would really like to see all of this tweaked and changed and i think you have some good ideas with the mini bosses in caves etc. Maybe they will be implemented into the main game but we cannot expect the AI to change on the bosses because WC have said themselves its not something they can do.

As far as I remeber they said better AI for bosses will be very difficult to implement and will take some time thus they focus on other things, but I don't think they said it would be impossible to change. I talked with author of ARK Survival mod about AI the other day and he said Wildcard was using out-dated version on UE4, which does not support dynamic navemeshing thus AI in ARK only sees the mesh of the landscape as obstacle, but nothing else. It can't see other obstacles like trees and rocks. It was fixed in the newer versions of UE4, but updating from older version of the engine to the newest one may be problematic and takes time.

They must redo AI anyway, because current AI will decrease reviews scores significantly on well-known gaming websites after the premiere. It's not time when people turn a blind eye to primitive AI like they used to in the past.

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5 minutes ago, Lewiatan said:

As far as I remeber they said better AI for bosses will be very difficult to implement and will take some time thus they focus on other things, but I don't think they said it would be impossible to change. I talked with author of ARK Survival mod about AI the other day and he said Wildcard was using out-dated version on UE4, which does not support dynamic navemeshing thus AI in ARK only sees the mesh of the landscape as obstacle, but nothing else. It can't see other obstacles like trees and rocks. It was fixed in the newer versions of UE4, but updating from older version of the engine to the newest one may be problematic and takes time.

They must redo AI anyway, because current AI will decrease reviews scores significantly on well-known gaming websites after the premiere. It's not time when people turn a blind eye to primitive AI like they used to in the past.

im going to directly quote TRH from reddit.

Just going to come out and say it,

We do test them, and we test them with a couple of different mechanics, and the players are free to come up with whatever else they want to do to beat them.

We make sure that a group of 10 people with access to whatever dinos they want can go into each fight, and defeat the boss, using whatever techniques they want, but we ABSOLUTELY make sure that "bring 20 max stat rexes" is viable.

AI in ARK is extremely expensive. Like, really, really expensive. It's also extremely hard to develop good AI, it takes a lot of time and iteration, finding edge cases, solving edge cases, etc.

AI in ARK is also NOT robust. Which means that to develop better AI is even more time, and more iteration, and more testing, and more edge cases, etc.

You can take the shot and call it "lazy", but without completely re-designing the entirety of how we do the boss fights, how dinos behave, how the abstract idea of a "creature" behaves, more gameplay programmers, an AI programmer, serverside AI optimizations, and more time, boss fights will never have "good" AI or fights like WoW raids.

Here's the crux of the issue: For every extra step of complexity in AI, we open up a HUGE pool of potential ways to exploit that AI. Our game doesn't have a confined set of rules for engagement, it has completely free and open engagement. The player can do nearly ANYTHING they want to. So how do you plan for that?

Players will ALWAYS find the LEAST expensive and MOST efficient way of defeating ANY obstacle in ANY game, and in the end it comes down to us deciding if we think that a specific strategy undermines the point of the boss fight, or if it's simply very clever, and fine, the players are clever.

I would posit a challenge to any aspiring modders out there: Write a clean boss fight with one of our bosses in one of our arenas entirely in even semi-optimized blueprint, and make that fight match the criteria of "not just a slugfest".

Make that mod, and release it, and then send me a message here on Reddit, and if it's good, and players really think it's super compelling and way better than our fights and not just a cheese-fest/glitch-fest, I will bring your mod directly to the studio leads and suggest you be put in our modding program myself.

Making a boss fight that is "awesome" with ARK's mechanics is a nightmare of complexity and a nonstop battle against millions of clever players.

Are we super happy with how the fights play out? Often times, no. Are we going to just give up and ignore them? Almost certainly not. Are we hiring and working really hard to make future fights much more interesting? Absolutely.

tl;dr, AI is complicated and expensive, players are clever, we have limited time and resources, make me a really awesome mod with a boss fight and I will make sure the people with money are well aware of you.

  • The Right Hand

 

What i get from this is that its almost impossible to do this with the current team and way ARK is designed.

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18 minutes ago, BobRoss said:

im going to directly quote TRH from reddit.

Just going to come out and say it,

We do test them, and we test them with a couple of different mechanics, and the players are free to come up with whatever else they want to do to beat them.

We make sure that a group of 10 people with access to whatever dinos they want can go into each fight, and defeat the boss, using whatever techniques they want, but we ABSOLUTELY make sure that "bring 20 max stat rexes" is viable.

AI in ARK is extremely expensive. Like, really, really expensive. It's also extremely hard to develop good AI, it takes a lot of time and iteration, finding edge cases, solving edge cases, etc.

AI in ARK is also NOT robust. Which means that to develop better AI is even more time, and more iteration, and more testing, and more edge cases, etc.

You can take the shot and call it "lazy", but without completely re-designing the entirety of how we do the boss fights, how dinos behave, how the abstract idea of a "creature" behaves, more gameplay programmers, an AI programmer, serverside AI optimizations, and more time, boss fights will never have "good" AI or fights like WoW raids.

Here's the crux of the issue: For every extra step of complexity in AI, we open up a HUGE pool of potential ways to exploit that AI. Our game doesn't have a confined set of rules for engagement, it has completely free and open engagement. The player can do nearly ANYTHING they want to. So how do you plan for that?

Players will ALWAYS find the LEAST expensive and MOST efficient way of defeating ANY obstacle in ANY game, and in the end it comes down to us deciding if we think that a specific strategy undermines the point of the boss fight, or if it's simply very clever, and fine, the players are clever.

I would posit a challenge to any aspiring modders out there: Write a clean boss fight with one of our bosses in one of our arenas entirely in even semi-optimized blueprint, and make that fight match the criteria of "not just a slugfest".

Make that mod, and release it, and then send me a message here on Reddit, and if it's good, and players really think it's super compelling and way better than our fights and not just a cheese-fest/glitch-fest, I will bring your mod directly to the studio leads and suggest you be put in our modding program myself.

Making a boss fight that is "awesome" with ARK's mechanics is a nightmare of complexity and a nonstop battle against millions of clever players.

Are we super happy with how the fights play out? Often times, no. Are we going to just give up and ignore them? Almost certainly not. Are we hiring and working really hard to make future fights much more interesting? Absolutely.

tl;dr, AI is complicated and expensive, players are clever, we have limited time and resources, make me a really awesome mod with a boss fight and I will make sure the people with money are well aware of you.

  • The Right Hand

 

What i get from this is that its almost impossible to do this with the current team and way ARK is designed.

FFXIV is a game that I play that treats their boss fights smartly. They use game mechanics and DPS checks to make something challenging and also fun. Frustrating as all heck. I think this is the most viable option for Wild Card to do with boss fights. Also it would be nice if you had to fight boss's at Obelisks instead of being transported. The boss's could be tethered to the obelisks and only able to go a certain set range from it.  Would also add to the every day survival aspect and be a potential hazard for people who build and close them up. 

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20 minutes ago, Kaoslion said:

FFXIV is a game that I play that treats their boss fights smartly. They use game mechanics and DPS checks to make something challenging and also fun. Frustrating as all heck. I think this is the most viable option for Wild Card to do with boss fights. Also it would be nice if you had to fight boss's at Obelisks instead of being transported. The boss's could be tethered to the obelisks and only able to go a certain set range from it.  Would also add to the every day survival aspect and be a potential hazard for people who build and close them up. 

you mean like it used to be? obelisk boss fights were so easily exploited in the past, they were an even bigger joke than they are now

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1 hour ago, BobRoss said:

 

Are we super happy with how the fights play out? Often times, no. Are we going to just give up and ignore them? Almost certainly not. Are we hiring and working really hard to make future fights much more interesting? Absolutely.

The Right Hand

What I get from this fragment and previous ones that they aware it is a pain in th butt to make complex AI, but not impossible to do so. They need only time and resources to make sofisticated AI and they won't ignore that issue. They just don't feel like doing that now owing to the fact they have huge pile of bugs to fix, entire game to optimise and release the final missing content. 

However It is quite unfair to challange modders to make better boss fights owing to the fact they would have the same primitive AI to work with.

All in all this is a matter that would have to be solved sooner or later. It would have significant influence on people's exprience when the game is released.

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