The Joy of Balancing Ark

 

Tits.

Ark does some stupid shit, because it rarely knows wtf it even wants to be. There are lots and lots of dinosaurs, some (and only some) as scientifically accurate as you can get right now, but then you get fantasy creatures like dragons, wyverns and a comically huge spider with 'little spider anatomy', which would crush itself under its own weight. And then there's that whole thing where you put a bunch of old-timey ship cannons, but also gun turrets and laser guns on your dinos and half of them are actually robots or some shit.

The only thing dumber than this random, arbitrary combination of stuff is the explanation for it. "Aliens, right?" is what most players said, so the developers kept stressing, "it's definitely not aliens, we promise!", so people kept going, "Okay, but still, it's definitely aliens tho", until they wrapped it up with this nonsensical story about how the last remaining people of earth chucked random people and creatures from all sorts of different times and places together to teach them about nature and peaceful coexistence or whatever. Because humankind had gone extinct and so have the dinosaurs and even though they never existed alongside one another, it's somehow helpful to bring them both back together, but there's also dragons and cyber-dinos because CORRUPTION or wtf do I know.

Just smile and don't question it.

It's also hilarious how the message behind Ark ultimately wants to be this thing about how people have to learn to live with and alongside nature instead of exploiting it, when the entire game is about murdering dinosaurs, keeping dinosaurs in captivity, then forcing them to murder even more dinosaurs and every other living player on your server. Also, rocket launchers, gatling lasers and machine guns, because, you know, peace. But story is often added as an afterthought and usually written by people, who don't actually play the game a whole lot. I know, because I wrote quests, stories and content for games I don't play.

It's nice how you can customize Ark with mods and either fully embrace or maybe even attempt to fight the stupid. Claire goes for the former. She uses a dino collection, which adds a whole lot of really high-quality community-created beasties to her game. The model and texture work is top notch, they come with lots of custom sound effects and special abilities. They're also really dumb. This mod's idea of a cryolophosaurus is that it should freeze its prey with arctic breath. Because hurrdurr, cryo. It adds a really cool-looking concavenator, whose special ability allows it to blast other dinos with sand to suffocate them. It can kill a titanosaur in less than a minute that way. Most of the critters in this mod are silly or completely broken in this way. Its dinos also follow a weird visual trend, which... 

Why?

Look. If you believe every creature in this game should glow in the dark, shower you with particles and have so many overpowered element-based special attacks that even wyverns and dragons become obsolete, more power to you. I see the videos showcasing these mods and more often than not, it's someone constantly playing in GM mode, summoning in and force-taming everything via console commands. And that's ... fine? It's a game, games are meant to be fun and entertaining and I'm not telling you how you should play. Just not how I would personally do it. I can still remember how and where I've tamed most of my dinos, how many attempts it took, how many times we died, how long we spent actually playing the game for hours. You know, the hours you skip by copy-pasting console commands, riding around on everything for five minutes, maybe spawning in 500 random dinos for your tames to fight for a YouTube video, then instantly getting bored. But you do you. 

At the end of the day, setting up the version of Ark you personally enjoy is all about finding the right balance. Modded dinos have to fit in, visually, thematically and mechanically. I'll draw the line at bleed and venom-based attacks, I'm also not adding any more dragons, gorgons, minotaurs or other high fantasy or ancient mythology stuff. We play on Ragnarok, a certain mythology is already there and implied in this ark's very name, and that's okay. But if I'm adding stuff, I want it to be dinosaurs. I also want the game to remain challenging without becoming impossible, which requires a balancing act of a very different kind.

This bitch was ridiculously tough to tame! I'd never just spawn them in.

Stuff needs to be difficult, there always has to be a threat, a challenge, death has to be a real risk, because otherwise I don't need to fire up a videogame and I can just watch a powerpoint presentation about dinosaurs. Setting this up in Ark is never easy, especially since most of the time we're only two players. Our dinosaurs are set up to get fairly chunky health boosts when leveling up, because we treasure them, we don't just consider them tools and we also can't mass-produce them like large clans, which breed tons of dinos for mutations. 

Of course this creates a risk of trivialising the game. If most tames can simply face-tank any threat after enough levels, things are at a risk of becoming a little braindead. So that's where all those toxic, bleedy and generally nasty dinos come into play, which impale you, drag you off your mount and find all sorts of fun ways to kill you, even when you're sitting on something that's relatively unkillable. We've also doubled the spawn rates and amounts of active dinosaurs, so you're gonna need some tanky tames when the entrance to an artifact cave is guarded by literally 100 bats or more.

Bigger challenges require bigger tames. Like this flying mantis.

Death is a very real possibility at any given time. And since our server doesn't hibernate dinos the moment you're a few inches away from them, getting murdered in one of those situations will put even the tankiest of tames at risk, because they will continue to sustain attacks while we're trying to get back to them. We're also not using any of those 'keep all your stuff when you die' mods, because why even try to avoid death if it doesn't sting? Every decision should always be balancing the risk vs the potential rewards. We might die, lose our stuff and our dinos. Is it worth it? Is it too dangerous? Some people enjoy themselves more when they don't have to think about these things. We don't.

Another part of balancing is convenience vs repetition. When we started our adventure on Ragnarok, we had a small selection of very powerful tames, which we kept around for most of our playthroughs of all the other arks. We kept them inside our castle, set up some feeding troughs, then made sure these troughs were always full and each dino had access to one. Then we set up a second camp and placed a bunch of new dinosaurs there. So more troughs, more food to collect. More diverse needs and wants. Fish, berries, vegetables, meat, cake, honey. A fucking buffet. Some days would simply begin with maintenance - split up, one of us gets meat and fish, the other goes for berries and such. Place new troughs, move dinos around, make sure nobody goes hungry.

Tiny tribe and lots of tames means lots of stress for very few people.

Now that we have access to tons upon tons of brand new dinos, many of which we're taming simply because they're new, interesting and/or we want to learn about their abilities, we've got such a large amount of tames, that keeping all of them fed at all times is becoming less and less realistic. On top of that, I have to keep feeding Claire's family. Her mother's and sister's characters are sleeping in our tavern and I frequently have to feed them in order to prevent them from starving to death, because survival sandbox games are stupid.

To cut a long story short, I've finally given in and installed a mod for self-refilling troughs. Park a dino next to it and it won't die of starvation and you don't have to constantly refill them and spend half your day gathering groceries for virtual animals. It does take away an aspect of the game, removes the whole feeding and caring for your dinos bit, but once you're sitting on a hundred or more of these guys, feeding them becomes a full-time job. And seeing as we're already spending more time harvesting materials and converting them into repair kits and tranquilizer darts than we do actually hunting dinosaurs, there's got to be some added convenience somewhere. 

I'd rather actively tame my own gigas and titans and skip some of the grocery shopping via mods than console-tame everything in order to manually harvest berries all day.

Of course it's not all tits, troughs and rainbows. We've made the game more interesting and challenging in other ways. Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and saviour, -preventhibernation? By default, if you play Ark solo or on a small, non-dedicated server, the game hibernates everything that isn't immediately surrounding you. Remember that bright-red Tek rex you spotted near the volcano the other day, but left alone, because you didn't have the resources to tame it? Come back to the exact same spot a week later and that same rex will be sitting right there. Everything that isn't in your vicinity gets hibernated by the game in order to save resources. Wild babies (if you have mods for those) don't grow, alpha predators don't roam and murder everything, tames you leave out in the wild don't die of injuries or starvation, unless you stay very close to them. Move away from them and they just remain in the exact same state you've last seen them. 

This is pretty neat, because not only does it help preserve memory, but it also lets you control areas of an ark to a point. For instance, our keep was mostly surrounded by harmless sheep and sauropods. At some point a giga showed up, so we tamed and (re)moved it, causing the game to spawn something else in its place. There are only so many different things that can spawn in each biome, so we just kept removing all threats until they had all been replaced by sheep. And since there can only ever be so many creatures in any given area at a time, once everything is filled up by sheep, no nasty predators will appear out of nowhere to take their place.

There are certain things you simply don't want to spontaneously appear.

You can disable this hibernation effect. Dinos will still 'pause' in time at a certain distance, but it's far less strict and you'll frequently come to a previously-visited area, only to realise that new dinos have moved in during your absence, certain predators have killed a bunch of stuff, perhaps some of them also managed to get eaten and so on and so forth. You may find that the strongest predators surrounding your base have eaten all of the weaker dinos and suddenly things have become considerably more dangerous on your home turf. This is great!

One problem with having a reasonably safe base is that the majority of your dinos will only serve decorative purposes. Sure, you can take them on a boss fight or squeeze them inside a cave, but even then, how many of them will you realistically take on an adventure? Our bases are now under constant threat, so we've set up our strongest dinos to guard them. You also have to tether them to tanky, stationary dinos or to a specific spot you assign to their tame group, so there's a bit of a tactical element involved, unless you want them to go walkies and potentially never find them again. We like to assign our dinos to certain spots around our camps to make sure they're protected from all sides.

You can try to take our castle, but you'll have to get past the royal guard first.

It's actually pretty cool when each of your tames get jobs, not just the ones you use for harvesting and getting across the map. Now some of them actually get to fight, even when we're not grinding out caves and bosses for the nth time.

Turning off hibernation also allows us to use a mod called Rare Sightings. With this thing activated, every so often you will get a random broadcast, informing you of a rare creature, which comes with unique colours, effects and abilities. Something may spawn in with horns or antlers, which looks particularly dumb on a dodo, but nothing's ever perfect, I guess. You can try to tame and keep them, even pass on some of their freaky shit to potential offspring if you mate it, or you can kill the rare critter for some extra juicy loot. So if you ever had one of those days where you just sat there, trying to figure out what to do on Ark, maybe give this one a go and hunt down some freaky, mutated critters for a bit of extra challenge. There's an alternative called 'Shiny! Dinos', but their random critters can be frozen, on fire and literally ghosts or skeletons and that's a little too freaky for me. But you do you.