Ark 2 - Creature Ideas

[Voltrexx]

Looking to start up a clean discussion on what changes could be made to the dinos to make them even cooler, fun to play as. Below are just some ideas of what I'd like to see in the next game. Hoping that Wildcard can scale up the Rex and Spino to match their sizes , but to where it's inch for inch; it's more over Spino>Giga>Rex. Even make them at strong enough to challenge a Giga.

Apex  Land Carnivores

Dinos included are: Rex, Spino and Giga

Imposing - Dinos here have an AOE that prevents smaller wild predators from attacking their owners as long as the player is within a certain radius. Yutyrannus is unaffected by this.

Immense - Apex Dinos receive less damage from small (60 - 75%) and medium sized Dinos (40 - 60%). Large Dinos deal 20 - 40% less damage. Other Titans deal normal damage to each other.

Ferocious - Apex can break through stone walls and damage metal structures.

Extraordinary Tames - These Dinos are all tamed with extraordinary kibble as opposed to Exceptional from the last game.

Rex

Chargeable Bite Attack - Deals massive damage and applies a Bleed Debuff if executed successfully. Bleed lasts for a few seconds.

Grabbing Capability - Can hold prey in its jaws and either chomp down on them or carry them around. Can hold small and medium sized creatures.

Crushing Bite - Rex can instantly kill small creatures in its mouth by biting down. Larger creatures take damage as normal.

Roar - Smaller Creatures in the line of fire will poop and stay frozen for about 8 seconds.

Passive Abilities:

Meat Harvester - Can harvest more meat than other Apex Predators.

Scavenger - Rex can gain a regeneration buff proportional to the size of a carcass it eats. Small corpses provide healing for 8 seconds, medium sized corpses provide healing for 16 seconds and large corpses give Rex 25 seconds of increased healing factor.

Challenge -  If Rex is fighting an opponent with a higher level than that of itself, it gains a melee damage buff that increases melee damage. By how much, not sure.

Spinosaurus

Stance Change - Spino can change between a Quadrupedal and Bipedal Stance.

Quadrupedal - The Spino can run fastest  on four legs, but cannot attack as fast as it can on two legs. Neither can it his as hard.

Bite - On four legs, this bite attack can be lethal to fish based enemies both in and out of the water.

Bipedal - Spinosaurus can attack faster and hit harder on two legs, but cannot run as fast as it can on four legs.

Claw Swipe - On that note, Spino can deal a large amount of damage very quickly and can apply a bleed debuff some of the time.

Passive Abilities:

Piscivore - Spinosaurus gains a regeneration boost when it eats fish or has fish in its inventory. Also deals more damage to fish based enemies.

Hydration - Spinosaurus can move faster in the water in addition to dealing more damage than before. This also means that it can become more sluggish in hotter, more arid areas of the map.

All Terrain - The Spinosaurus is better at traversing difficult and rocky terrain in its Quadrupedal Stance.

Giganotosaurus

Stance Change - Giga can switch between defense and offense.

Defense - Giga can take less damage in this Stance and build up a meter than can cause it to go into Rage Mode. As a trade off, he attacks slower.

Offense - Giga can deal more damage in this Stance, but as a trade off here, it can take more damage from others.

Roar - The Giga can roar and knock back enemies with the resulting force of the cry.

Passive Abilities:

Rage Mode - In this mode, Giga’s attack and movement speed increases in addition to his stamina which will drain more slowly.

Thick Hide - Giga’s thick skin, especially in its Defensive Stance is resistant to projectiles and poisons.

[Voltrexx]

As a side note, I wanted to add that I did take some of these ideas from the Ark Additions Mod that was released a while back. If you see any similarities you know why.

[Fresiki]

This post will be more general in nature.

Ark 2 takes place on another planet, where our Genesis ship seems to has crash landed. We have seen some kind of native being to  the planet trying to kill the survivors in the teaser trailer. Presumably, there are more native life forms like plants and critters, that we've never seen before.

- Some creatures will be dinos and other "earth" creatures we've brought with us in the ship.
- Some creatures will be "new" fantasy creatures that are native lifeforms to the planet the game takes place on.
- Though scientifically unviable, I almost feel certain we will see some Frankenstein-ey creatures that are mixtures of earth creatures and alien species.
- The new environment (plus the fact that we don't know when in time this new game takes place, but seems to be long after the ship crashed) could cause earth creatures to evolve slightly.
- Rockwell will be "creating" some species within the ship. They will also follow. Maybe they will have the ability to corrupt other creatures, or maybe Rockwell will survive and will continue to twist life forms on the new planet. Or maybe some other boss will. Maybe element takes over the new planet like it took over earth, since there's no technology there to protect it. In some way/shape/form, we could be seeing "twisted" life forms as well.
- They could just have most earthern life forms go extinct in the crash, and somehow a few lucky survivors and dinos managed to survive. That would let them come up with a whole new set of creatures and creature types, while retaining some popular originals.

I'm one of those people that think back fondly on the times before all the mythological creatures. It was the dinosaurs that got me into the game. Nonetheless, I've grown to accept that Ark continues to have a lot of new/freaky creatures that don't actually exist.

 

Some further thoughts:

- If the Genesis ship was supposed to save the earth and its life forms, I have to believe that every creature we've seen so far is represented on the ship. Unless the "makers" decided some creatures are not worth saving, every creature has to be on the ship. For gameplay purposes, I suspect there will be some creatures missing. Then again, Gen 2 will be the biggest map so far, so maybe they actually squeeze in every previous dino into the map. Or since the map won't represent all of the two rings, but just a portion of them, maybe they will not include map-exclusive dinos like Rock Drakes and Magmasaurs, and in game the explanation will be that those creatures lived in another part of the ring than where the expansion takes place. But I am making the argument that in-lore, it doesn't make sense unless every living creature from Earth (at least) is represented on the ship. If it's a Noah's Ark kind of thing, it doesn't make sense that they let some species die out on  Earth. Though last we saw Earth, it looked like it was going to heal up fine, so I'm not exactly sure why the ship is moving through space and why we crash on another planet. Nonetheless, the basic assumption here is: in-lore, every living creature is somehow represented on the ship, and thus makes it to the new planet.

- Which has me thinking about Ark 2 creatures. On the one hand, it doesn't make sense unless all of the earth creatures made it to the new planet. On the ohter hand, they can't possibly include all the dinos we've seen so far in Ark 1, plus a whole new ecosystem native to the new planet as well. So what they could do is, some species could have stayed in limited sections of the ship that got destroyed during the crash landing, and went "extinct" on the new planet in the crash. Presumably, they still also exist back on the Earth we saved in Extinction. Some species could have gone extinct due to simply just not being able to survive in the new environment. How could a Phiomia ever protect itself against an alien space snake with alien space snake venom??? So there are ways they could trim certain "filler" dinos to "make room" for new and more interesting species. I would expect to see "staples" like the Anky, Doedic, Argent, Wyvern, Rex, Giga, Raptor, Stego, Bronto, Triceratops etc. make it into the game. But I could see them letting the Shadowmane take the place of the Sabertooth, and I could see them just fully doing away with the Diplodocus for example. I'm sure they will want to keep the list of creatures on a healthy scale. While I hope they include every creature so far + add new ones, that doesn't seem very feasible. But here's to hoping.

[Voltrexx]

I do agree that some of the dinos act as filler. Rather than doing away with some of the original dinos, however, we could also suggest a revamp on the way some of the dinos work. Then weed out the ones that really can't do anything.

For example: I recall someone on the forum mentioned something interesting about giving the Smilodon a pounce abiliity, accompanied by some sort of stalking ability that can make a sabertooth rider harder to see/hear. If you attack without the dino seeing you, you can deal massive damage to your enemy. Something like that would be fun to use, IMO.

In regards to the other more general statements, I haven't touched the game past the vanilla game. It was all just the original dinos for me, lol.

[Kaiseror]

I an idea I had is an alien organism that once tamed fights primarily using specialized drones it produces from its body, a venomous one that overwhelms its opponents, one that heals itself and allied tames and tribe members and one that can be used for spying on enemies.

[Infernal568]

Some of them are cool but some others sounds like skills from a mmo😄which is a no no for ark. Example 

"Rage Mode". Maybe if it was Adrenaline mode would less mmowy. Also I think Wildcard is keeping Ark 2 as realistic as possible even though they will still have lots of fiction. 

[Maelfurious]

This sounds cool

[bigc345]

I hope we see a balance of old dinos redone and new dinos. The devs have an incredible capacity for thinking of dinos but I hope balancing is greatly improved (PVE and PVP) in ark 2. Every tame should have a niche and PVP should be complex. It would be a shame to see one or two tames dominate all the others in the ark 2 pvp meta. For example, I think gigas have been just far to overpowered. They completely overshadow many interesting dinos simply by the fact that their base damage is like 4-5 times greater than almost anything else. Ark 2 should avoid making any single dino that much more powerful.