I’d probably do something like ARK: Survival Ascended; but rely less on ‘realistic’ dinosaurs, and do something closer to Horizon: Zero Dawn - where the creatures were still able to be somewhat freeform/modified from real species.
From there, I would toy around with a couple of ideas - such as semi-procedural maps (where say, The Island is the same up top, but each of the caves can be generated in different places, and the caves that generate are themselves procedural in nature). I want to be able to tell a story where necessary, but make 1:1 walkthroughs impossible - in order to force people who Google everything, to actually have to explore - while still getting some use out of the searched information.
I’d add a little bit of pal-world to the mix, requiring certain creatures to integrate/operate certain crafting tables, and also some RPG-ish elements where gear could be found that had special traits, such as run speed boots, etc.
Then I would rework boss battles and tames so that you didn’t just zerg them with the “strongest” creature, but would have to mix stuff up - you would need a creature that helped reduce damage, a creature that could hold aggro, maybe some creatures could stack debuffs, and others could remove debuffs from your team, etc. Balance it so only 1 of these things couldn’t defeat a boss, but some intelligent combination of them could do it pretty easy.
I’d probably do something like ARK: Survival Ascended; but rely less on ‘realistic’ dinosaurs, and do something closer to Horizon: Zero Dawn - where the creatures were still able to be somewhat freeform/modified from real species.
From there, I would toy around with a couple of ideas - such as semi-procedural maps (where say, The Island is the same up top, but each of the caves can be generated in different places, and the caves that generate are themselves procedural in nature). I want to be able to tell a story where necessary, but make 1:1 walkthroughs impossible - in order to force people who Google everything, to actually have to explore - while still getting some use out of the searched information.
I’d add a little bit of pal-world to the mix, requiring certain creatures to integrate/operate certain crafting tables, and also some RPG-ish elements where gear could be found that had special traits, such as run speed boots, etc.
Then I would rework boss battles and tames so that you didn’t just zerg them with the “strongest” creature, but would have to mix stuff up - you would need a creature that helped reduce damage, a creature that could hold aggro, maybe some creatures could stack debuffs, and others could remove debuffs from your team, etc. Balance it so only 1 of these things couldn’t defeat a boss, but some intelligent combination of them could do it pretty easy.