stupid
New member
Hey OP, I agree. I have about 1400 hrs in the game, the game is not particularly difficult, its just monotonous. Its a re-roll of the same content but with different rules.
I was surprised with the direction the devs went with A17. I remember Ark becoming popular during A12 and when the A13 overhaul was released we saw a game which used many Ark-style mechanics. And while the devs tried to be more like Ark, they didn't fully grasp what gave Ark its longevity(even in single player or co-op).
Many of the updates we've seen over the last few years seem to be based around a central goal of making the game last as long as possible before you get bored. That's a good thing, but there's a couple ways to go about it:
1. Don't expand the content and instead put everything behind level gates and reduce loot and add new debuffs, therefore making the same game take longer.
2. Expand the content, even presenting near-impossible challenges. The devs seem to like Ark, but missed the whole part where Ark's longevity isn't based on level-gating, its based on having certain areas of the map occupied by things you could never overcome without spending days, weeks, or sometimes months preparing. You could still visit those places and get a few things if you were cautious and lucky, but you experienced real fear knowing that something vastly outleveling you was around the corner.
A16 was a good game, but I guess I hoped for longevity in the form of difficult challenges....I dunno, maybe bandit hideouts where the further away from 0,0 you got, the more powerful weapons they would use and the better loot you could get. Or the more powerful and mutated the zombies would become. I feel like instead the game is in a perpetual state of receiving graphical updates to keep up with the current year, as well as level gating existing content, and introducing old bugs.
In other words I don't see them moving forward, I see them rolling the dice over and over, reinventing themselves instead of building on what they had, while breaking and changing things that weren't broken or didn't need to be changed, but ultimately not making much progress. Imagine if they stuck with the A13 or even A12 foundation, fixed the bugs, and focused only on new content and challenges.
Maybe we can wait another 1.5 and see "Hey, get ready for A18, we rolled the dice again and changed the mechanics, get ready to do the same things but in a different way, you get a diabetes debuff when you drink a jar of honey, btw the game is only $4.99 this time."
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