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More focus on PvE and dino AI


JJacky

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Ark 1 pve becomes trivial after:

1.  you have metal walls, or your base location is difficult for dinos to enter

2. you have a high level dino tamed, imprinted and saddled

After this point, pve becomes really boring and repetitive. You're mostly just sitting in your base, breeding for dinos for boss fights or grinding for materials in an environment that offers zero challenge because no wild dino can touch a proper high level imprinted dino.

 

My suggestions to improve playability from a pve perspective:

1. better AI would solve a lot of problems when encountering wild dinos. My usual taming method in the early game is to sit on a high enough ledge and shoot tranq arrows into a dino below. The AI is just too stupid to go around or flee once it realizes that it can't get to me.

2. More dino groups and group behaviour. Many carnivores, like raptors, hunt in packs. Maybe increase the pack sizes and/or give a significant buff to the dinos that hunt in packs.

3. Bases should always be under some degree of threat. Maybe there could be some random events on each server where carnivores or cave men or cannibals whatever, become more aggressive, receive a buff, and start hunting for players and tames. The enemy would actually try to break in to your base to get to your food supplies and tames.  You would actually have to think about base defences (turrets/defensive dinos) and not just surround everything with metal walls. There shouldn't be any material that is completely indestructible by wild dinos.

4. More utility for dinos. Right now, all you need is a bunch of rexes, a yuti and a few gigas and you're all set. Everything else is fluff. What would really improve the gaming experience for pve players is that you actually need to vary what dinos you use.

5. Don't allow tames to become too powerful vs. wild dinos. Change the way taming levels are gained. A kibble tamed dino would get 100% of its original level, so a level 150 kibble tamed dino would become a level 150 tamed dino. If you use weaker food to tame, the dino would actually lose levels. Also mutations should be looked at particularly in terms of health and melee. No more stupid 1000%+ melee dinos or super soaker stegos.

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1. Yep, better AI would be nice and i am sure we will see that in ARK II. A good AI could already change the pve balance a lot.

4. I guess you are just talking about tames for fighting. What i dislike in that regard is how the giga made rex, spino and theri useless. Those three are very similar in strength, it would give players a choice based on situation and personal preference. But the giga just makes all of them useless (except for bossfights or narrow caves). Other than that, I am fine with dino utility in ARK 1 personally. There is a variety of transportation and farming creatures giving the player enough options to choose from. And that there are many creatures without a use is fine as well to me. Its good to have many creatures to create a rich environment, but you cant and dont need to give every one of them an important utility.

5. I think this is the biggest point. Removing bonus levels from taming and keeping it a bit challenging by allowing to even lose levels is a good idea imo. The main factor tho is the breeding. You simply cant have breeding with unlimited mutations and keep pve a challenge at the same time. I would like to see mutations removed from breeding entirely, so you can only combine stats into one creature. Would keep taming more important late game. But i guess breeding became the main thing to bind players to the game, so maybe an actually working 20 mutations limit would be better, i dont know. In that case, a mechanic could be added in ARK II, to slow down the process to get to those 20 mutations. Making male breeders only accept a limited amount of females in their group for example, some creatures could be monogamous, others can mate with up to 8 females or whatever. And then only one breeder per certain area or something along those lines. Such a mechanic would work against all the negative aspects of breeding as it is in ARK 1. No hundreds of females making the server lag, requiring huge amounts of space and therefore supporting the cave meta, no stupidly op tames as you already said, that just shouldnt be a thing and are neither fun to play with nor against. And less of a time sink that almost feels like a second job with completely boring mechanics if you do it to stay competitive on pvp servers.

 

Edit: Ark was a lot more fun when wild creature level was a lot lower and breeding wasnt implemented yet. People on foot could actually do something against your tame, but it was still a big threat to roll up with a rex. It was simply well balanced. Also, because it took a lot of effort to tame a higher level creature. I hope ARK II makes is somehow like that, but instead of making the tame process take ages (boring), make the preparation take the main amount of time. Preparing includes a variety of tasks and can be done i steps, while sitting next to an unconscious dino for 7 hours is boring, cant be paused and can be super frustrating if an enemy comes along and ruins it. Back in the earlier days, wild vs tamed creatures were also more even. Levelling, imprinting and buffs are all percent based, so the higher level wild dinos you have and tame, the faster you get a misbalance between wild and tamed.

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