Is this fun solo?

[Chrisern]

I consider buying this, as I like open worlds and dinosaurs and exploring. Is this fun to play solo? Is it even doable? Can I tweak taming speed in-menu, or do I have to tweak .ini files or use mods. Is there an end game, or is it a forever-type game?

[Paul]

Yes it's fun solo, just make sure to turn the single player settings (that may not be the exact wording) on, so certain time scales are adjusted to account for you not playing on a dedicated server and by yourself (taming, breeding and farming are all faster, there's some other changes too). If that's not enough there's a bunch of sliders that you can use to adjust speeds on various things and you can also change the overall difficulty in various ways. The game is kind of a forever game but it has some bosses if you need an end goal.

[🦊 Hermit]

Depends how much imagination you have. It is very sandbox in nature, kinda like Minecraft, where you're just dumped in the world with nothing and it's totally up to you how to proceed. So if you're the type who needs structured missions to complete and direction to be given to you, then it may not appeal. But if you're the type who can come up with your own goals and write your own story then it may be right up your alley.

I'd actually recommend you don't turn on single player settings myself, because imo they make the game far too easy. Simply reducing the taming time, upping gather rates, and a few other tweaks should be enough to make it playable and enjoyable. You can adjust most of the game settings in the menus, but there are a few more advanced options which would require .ini editing if you want to tweak those. You probably wouldn't need them though, and even if you did changing them is very simple to do.

You can keep your save going as long as you like, but there is an endgame yes. The story is told in notes and diaries hidden around the maps from explorers and survivors who came before you. You have to try to find them all, and piece together the lore of where you are and how you came to be here from those notes. There are also 'dungeon' caves to run, which give you items used to access the map's bosses. The bosses are very tough, so you may need some time to prepare before facing them (searching for high stat weapons and armour, and breeding dinos for mutations which increase their stats too). but once you defeat said bosses, the story has you 'ascend' to the next map in the series to face new and more difficult challenges, and to learn more of what happened before you came. Once you complete all the story maps, there is a final boss and an ending cutscene, but again you can respawn your character after that and continue playing if you wish.

But you do not have to play the story in order if you don't want to. The canon story maps start on The Island, then go to Scorched Earth, Aberration, Extinction, then Genesis 1 and 2. Additionally, there are a number of free DLC maps which started out as mods on the Workshop - they have no story content, but can offer new landscapes to explore, challenges to survive, and even a few unique dinos which don't appear on story maps. You can play one character across all of these, switching maps when you wish or when the story guides you to, or you can have one character per map and play it individually if you prefer.

As to whether it can be entertaining - of my almost 8k hours on the game, I'd say a good 70% or more has been solo play. And I'm not usually a fan of hardcore survival titles like this, so to keep me around for so long it has to be doing something right...

[haumsrob]

in my opinion it's not fun with out friend because almost everything is better with friends