I think what made the majority of us fall in love with this game was its early and deep roots core game.
Asside from the countless bugs the game had a thing many games missed. It had a sense of discovery and testing. You felt like if you were raided it was just an excuse to be better, build better, but most importantly play politics better.
In the new game primitive will be a cancerous word, we dont need to reinvent the wheel here. I believe having a core 2015 progression system would be the best thing they can do for the health of the next title. We dont need tek suits but quality of life improvements like incubators fridges fabricator tier weapons were never an issue.
*Forgot to Note* Game Balancing;Ark 2 should consider having more options of DPS Herbivores.
Limited breeding could also bring back the core of wanting to go taming with the tribe, this doesnt mean 0 breeding there should just be limits of what you can do. Mutations should be a appearance only feature not stats. You should have to tame to improve stats in your lines not just hatch 300 eggs until you crack the mutation coding every 12 hours.
Events, wildcard has done an amazing job with their holiday events, anything to make a pace change is welcomed by almost all. My belief is non holiday events and just seasonal events would help make the fresh for a long period. Make migration, extinction, breeding season, Evolution, droughts, variant events.
Examples:
Migration: Certain groups of dinos spawn rates have changed, some have moved to giant herds with a surplus of variety of stegos in the plains. (I will get to a point where I later discuss more variety of dinos rather than high populations with easy location of dios)
Extinction: Certain dinos are missing for a period of time, for example there is a story board reporting gigas have gone to the risk of extinction, only highest of levels are spawned being they are the strongest survivors of food chain demands. Their spawn rate in this event drops to .1 of the norm as well]
Breeding Season: Dinos lay eggs quicker and raise faster, Baby wild dinos are also available but the parents are stronger and deal more damage to protect their precious young
Drought: No water in certain biomes has lead the dinos in that particular biome away where could they be?
Variant: This is something I have wanted in the game for years. To counteract the breeding that has become rampent they should steer into the variants they have had previously, they should make variants of some creatures with different appearance features and higher stats/buffs that you can breed into your lines. For example a A;Rex has a scalier appearance and is a tad bulkier (has 3% to wild health increase, will also have a higher health scale and lower overall stamina) B. Rex has feathers and seems slimmer than other variants (has a a 3% stamina and has a quicker turn radius, also a 5% decrease to melee)
This is examples that I believe would make breeding more balanced and fun.
There will be multiple parts to this I just have a feeling I will get hate for this post but I am an original 2015 player that wants to see this new game succeed. I have a ton of fond memories on this game as well as some pretty mixed feelings at times. The one thing I know is this game was great and can be again. We want better optimization of course but balancing has been huge issue in this game for the last few years of its cycle. Cautiously optimistic to see what we have in store with Ark 2.