Skins as new creatures: Bad idea or poor implementation

[Varanus8]

It's fairly accepted that the over hyped arkeology event was poorly received by the community. Two weeks of a countdown clearly teasing new creatures was far to much for skins especially when the final expansion was originally planned to be realesed by now, only Jeremy knows if that was intentional to make the extinction teaser all more exciting or if the trailer was revealed earlier than planned to satisfy the community's expectations.

It is clear that the community was disappointed with the fact that these three teased creatures in the countdown were only skins and not entirely new creatures or part of a new expansion. But does ark really need more creatures for the main game? On one hand everyone likes dinosaurs and theirs a near infinite amount of them that could be in the game or that people want in the game, (just look how large the creature suggestion thread is.) But on the contrary ark already suffers from "bloat tames:" multiple creatures occuping the same role in the game as others. Unfortunately wildcard is pretty terrible at balancing similar creatures without making them nearly identical like the trike and pachyrhino, and creatures like the allo are simply outclasses by its relatives like the rex.

Naturally the best of both worlds is making new Dino's as skins for existing ones so their is no threat of being outclassed by or outclassing similar creatures and that is exactly what the arkeology skins do; they give us more creatures without disrupting game balance and the skins do a fantastic job at that but their is one catch, these skins unlike almost every other exclusive cosmetic in the game are crafted in a descrete quantity rather than unlocked and bound to your gamer tag. So when all of these skins are lost or players move servers this customization option no longer exists which has the effect of making players who have them not use them when their is a risk that they will be lost. 

In short the new skins are really cool and a great idea to give players more content and customization without breaking the game but the fact that not only do you have to craft them individually they are also event exclusive really limits their use.

[Guest DJRone89]

People are upset because of their own overhyped expectations but blame the devs anyway. Ark’s community 101.

[Voidstar]

2 hours ago, DJRone89 said:

People are upset because of their own overhyped expectations but blame the devs anyway. Ark’s community 101.

I would say the devs share the blame. I have never seen a 15 day countdown on a game site leading to a not so big event with some skins...

The skins and idea are cool. Hope they make more. I would like to see new dinos but not redundant ones...I mean a brachiosaurus and a brontosaurus would be the same...they could add a stomp attack to the brachiosaurus... So in this case a skin rather than a new dino seems a better option

[Martellus]

I really liked the 3 dino Skins from Arkaeology event, if I cannot have more dinos I would settle for at least skin variations. The Brachiosaurus has a challenge since its neck is not fully upright as I would like, but it still looks cool enough. Styrac looks awesome and Stigy is an increadible improvement over the original Pachy, might as well be a TLC pass on that one. I also loved the Tek Rex (moving away from a skin), but I have not seen a high leveled one worth my time yet.

I said it once before, I have no problem with creatures sharing same roles as it gives visual and slight variations to whatever a tribe wants for a given task, while certain dinos are indeed outclassed by larger versions I consider these to be progressions and are somewhat expected.

• The example of the Pachyrhino vs Trike, one is a two seat player mount, were as a Trike is not, there are different things you can achieve depending on the situation, however, for a single player they might seem very similar, I would argue that in multiplayer they have very distinct roles, try putting speed on a Pachyrhino and have a buddy fire tranqs at ground animals, its incredibly stable compared to the flyers and an efficient knockout mount. 

• For the other example of a Rex outclassing an Allosaurus, it would make sense, but I had 3 allosaurus that together would chew thru any other animal (imprinted and high leveled), except for Titanosaurs and gigas I guess, I also never tried an Alpha Rex with them. For caves I have been using Megalosaurus at night, it makes runs so easy. I also recently heard about people using a Carno in some caves, I am willing to give it a try as well as I am not fully sold on the Megaloceros approach. 

So in short I do not see a lot of issues with the current animal setups. 

My thoughts on this.

Cheers!

[Quarinah]

I found it odd that they made full dinos, like textures, animations and everything and they ended up being just skins, and then they made a dino out of a existing skin (tek rex).

I think that skins should be skins, like the bionic or skeleton ones, as in modify the appearance of a dino in a funny or cool way, not transform them into a totally different dino.

And tek rex is one of the biggest disappointments lately, for me at least, they either got lazy, or ran out of time to do something new, they could have just twist around the skin a bit so its not identical to the existing bionic skin which most people use on their rex. Nobody can even notice if you tamed a tek rex or its just a regular rex with skin, you almost get no reward for taming it (excepting the rare occasion when you might get better clean stats then the current rexes have).

And what saddens me the most is that in the next months they will most likely spawn the tek giga and tek para...because we already have bionic skins for those...

[prodigy1202]

On 7/2/2018 at 1:40 AM, DJRone89 said:

People are upset because of their own overhyped expectations but blame the devs anyway. Ark’s community 101.

If the fan base does that then that’s a marketing error on SWC’s part. That’s how marketing works. You can’t blame the people the message was intended for for misinterpreting the message because if it were good marketing then it would not have been misinterpreted.

Also to all of the people saying that it’s just hard to make any Dino different from any Dino if it looks similar. It’s really not. It just takes some imagination and some ark-esc fantasy. I’ve made a list of at least twenty dinos that could be added and there are at least a few theropod carnivores on said list (which I’ve heard people say would no matter what be eclipsed by a Rex.).

I’ll give you guys some examples:

Rajasaur: Theropod carnivore that is immune to all status effects.

Albertosaurus: An animal that can be used as a campfire and cooks meat stored in it over time.

Suchomimus: An animal with a rivalry buff against crocodiles, amphibious, gets the Spinosaurs’ Water buff, and is able to turn chitin, keratin and organic polymer into silica pearls and (sometimes) black pearls.

Velociraptor: Able to pounce on prey and cling to them dealing enormous damage over time and can only be removed by a shoulder mount, jumping into a campfire or a small tamed Dino (trike/raptor sized or lower).

Euplocephalus: Able to gather an equal amount of any resource from any stone based resource node and has armor that can deflect projectiles.

and this list doesn’t even START to get into aquatic dinos. I have plenty more land dinos too. If SWC stopped adding dinos because they couldn’t think of what to do with them then that’d be pretty pathetic. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying that they were simply content with the amount of content in the game, which is understandable.