An excellent video that should be mandatory watching for all game publishers. Since it won’t be, perhaps a couple of highlight quotes from the video might serve to get the point across -
“When trust is gone, it’s hard to get it back”
“a series of bad updates can be enough to kill what was an amazing experience”
“apathy is the game killer; and without people caring about something it gets more difficult to shove microtransactions in front of their face every five seconds”
I get on to look at the baz almost daily looking to snag that golden throne and standing sarcof outside of the set it comes in and noticed they are not budging it seems with this scholar set at all.
I already have crom coins going to rot leftover for the two items i am waiting on if they are even sold seperately, it’s not new money.
At any rate, they are being very silent over the store.
Lots of people ask i think for a better store layout with all the offerings with multiple pages: no response and the store stays the same.
A what seems to be a spike in the prices for no reason: no response and prices stay the same.
Didn’t have the time yet, but after gym i will!
Tbh I take more issue with the rotating stock than the prices… I don’t buy from it often cause what I want is rarely available. If what I want isn’t there I’m not spending on whatever other random crap is on rotation. I’m just not spending.
Come on funcom and have everything listed already.
It’s funny because I went on a tangent of watching opinion pieces about why movies suck so much now. YT’s algorithm started suggested these types of analysis opinion pieces for video games, I watched quite a few to see what was being said and also trying ensure I wasn’t in an echo chamber or looking at carbon copies for views. Most of them are spaced apart over the last 6 months and while some arguments and references are the same, largely they’re just recognized observations of the issues.
This one was very comprehensive and I felt that sharing it here would be very relevant. It paints a picture on the after effects of what we’re seeing with Conan.
Further to production for media in general and tied in with the movies bit, industry leaders talked about how movies have lost a lot of their lustre because they’ve been taken over by corporations and have lost the pursuit of art. So mentions in this video and others like it being similar in that regard is quite interesting.
Additionally thinking about all the points made much of it seems to be Funcom’s faults as well. Funcom itself is no stranger to corruption either based on their past “mistakes”. I’ve said it before and others have mentioned it recently; the players who jumped on the Conan Exiles bandwagon saved them from financial ruin. Are they close to it now? Last ditch efforts to increase pricing? Will they ride the wave of a currently popular IP? The hope is that they don’t repeat the same mistakes that they have done now with CE but the push to “modern gaming” will inevitably be their downfall unless launch and gameplay are out of this world spectacular and can keep the attention of gamers for more than 2 minutes.
Afaiac Conan Exiles has been ruined. There would have to be serious and demonstrable changes to change my mind.
Sadly the dude is right.
Watching this video has led to a few others being offered to me as well. I did see another one that raised an interesting point about what he called ‘cargo-cult thinking’ - essentially seeing something, not understanding it in context and then emulating it in hope of the desired result. While he covered gamers and movie makers as well, he particularly homed in on games design as suffering from this; studios see a game be successful, home in on a particular feature that they conclude is the reason for its success and then try to incorporate that feature into their own games without accounting for it being a different game. A lot of what he said felt painfully familiar…
Very much so, both in terms of the pitfalls of live service and the cargo cult thinking.
While currently popular because of the new movies, I don’t think Dune is particularly a bigger IP than Conan, so I find it hard to imagine the IP will drive more than maybe an initial burst - beyond that, I’d expect it to be more the hardcore fans that actually stick around, just like CE. I’d be surprised if it’s significantly more successful. It needs to stand out in a fairly saturated field and I’m not convinced Funcom knows how to do that (unless Dune really did absorb all the ‘talent’…).
A hope, but I suspect in vain, at least given the experiences recounted by the former Age of Conan players. It sounds like a time loop and one that will in its turn consume Dune (which I suppose is at least consistent with the Dune novels, so maybe that’s something 
)
and one they seem determined to embrace
at this point I find myself doubting even the most spectacular of launches - the gaming industry as a whole has me to a point of wanting proven track record (I’m finally playing, and enjoying, Jedi Fallen Order, because I’d simply rather put my money and time into a game that I actually know will be good…). But, to be fair, the 2 minute attention span of gamers is also a problem - we still see constant calls for new content and cries that the game is dead if it slows for a moment. We might prefer fixes, but clearly there are not that many gamers interested in playing the same game for thousands of hours…
I guess for me I wouldn’t go quite as far as ‘ruined’ - I managed to jump into a new playthrough and enjoy it for a few hours earlier this month, though I had to ‘make’ it enjoyable for myself (until the latest round of censoring threads blew up and I lost interest in making an effort to ignore the problems). But I definitely view the game (and Funcom) somewhat negatively right now, and would need to see some meaningful improvement to get back on board. I’m willing to give them some time on the new cadence, to see whether it can bring the desired improvement - but I have sadly little faith, because it is not just execution that is the problem, but also the decisions behind it, which aren’t caused by lack of time. Realistically, I need to see some walking back of some of the worse new ideas (like the damn UI), as well as fixes for some of the bigger problems, before I’m likely to even start thiunking positively about the game again.
To this point, I started a new playthrough as a test to how Witch Hunt affects gameplay:
But, at least, thrall AI is much worse and combat lag is ever present.
Interesting, cargo-cult thinking. Always learning something new! If you don’t mind sharing a link to that I’d appreciate it ^^
But painfully familiar indeed. While no definitive proof this explanation certainly feels like what is happening; glad you mentioned it.
Sword and sorcery seems to have gone on the wayside of interest. My preference in media, including my own art, I find it’s not as popular as it once was - perhaps exhaustion from LoTR/HP stuff? Sci-fi is holding on though, so ya, currently popular because of a movie that did well enough.
I started playing CE because it’s Conan, having developed core memories as a child about it. Shaped my feelings about art, media and development of my skills; looking back at some of my younger years drawing I can see the influences. No expert in lore but certainly a fan. So me sticking around was definitely in part due to that.
I suppose I exaggerated with 2 minutes. In reality most games see an average of a couple hundred hours per player if they are “good”? I’m just throwing out a guestimate here. Thousands of hours means that either it’s really damn good or it’s niche to that person.
I think that aside from all the problems Conan faces because it is also a survival sandbox with some unique and hard to find concepts. Newer players might have trouble keeping interest with lack of goals. Absolutely a genre thing which most sandbox survivals succumb to - which I also prefer. Brings me back to Legend of Zelda exploration which is one of the best features in my opinion.
The reason I’m mentioning all that is that, indeed, attention spans are small. I try to give a game at least a solid week of game play before I determine if continuing to play is worth it. But Conan it kind of feels like you need more; at least in my experience way back when and subsequently when I’d lost interest the first time.
So to balance this they do what?
Going back to my post about the game being too easy… ya, uh-huh.
It wasn’t really the “DLCs” that piqued my interest; made me want to keep playing to fill a quota in my collection or have a shiny. Siptah brought me back because it felt like an expansion and was even officially touted as such. It was opening up the world of CE for more exploration, more enemies, more experiences.
Ultimately the reason I ended up buying all the DLCs is because I was gifted a few items by a complete PVP stranger. I was able to try them and look even more badass. Ain’t that something?
But the culture of collecting token items/skins/in game currency and paying to advance is most definitely one created by the industry in predatory ways and we’ve talked about ad nauseum. Still bears repeating… My concern with it is that it’s become so accepted that it is an expectation rather than an exception. To the point where there is social pressures in certain IPs especially with younger crowds. I think this predatory measure was attempted here. Except the demographic is largely 30+ who haven’t grown up with these monetization methods - with the exception of maybe baseball cards and beanie babies? Shrugs
Anyway, for me and maybe I’m a minority, I’ve played for the experience. My social interactions were valuable, the feeling I got while playing was rewarding. I wanted to play to escape my realities both good and bad. Live in La La Land for awhile beside my friends fighting to the death. But the issues became overwhelming…
I would have been more inclined to buy into things like BP and BLB, as I’ve said many times before, if I’d felt that I was a valuable player enough to have a reasonably working game, not prevented from enjoying it as intended in multiplayer environments and not punished based on poor communication and infraction processes.
The hacking, ok, really only affects a small subset of the playerbase even though I know it is expanding. But what did it for me, despite EVERYTHING, was when the UI changed. Me adapting is NOT the problem. But changing the UI the way they did just upended it all. Slap in the face. Screw me right?
Total and unequivocal lack of understanding of how the game is played.
They can do whatever they want even if it’s shooting themselves in the foot. Fine. But they better not ever point their finger at me for pulling the trigger. We were never the problem.
Exactly.
The fact that I see companies copy inventory and menu UI styles from stuff like Destiny or Ubisoft games (granted, I’m sure it’s probably due to the fact that it’s just some plugin that was easy to get) leads me to be highly suspect of whatever the hell they’re teaching UI/UX people these days.
Thankfully CE isn’t as soulcrushing as all that, but seeing people lament about the changes makes me glad it all happened AFTER I stopped playing early on in the Age.
Oh man, it’s bad. Aside from the many bugs introduced its just so ass backwards, an unintuitive steaming pile of shit.
In my opinion,now,Conan Exiles is going to a modern time,is not as barbarian as the comics…not as the films…i prefer more barbarian and savage style…sorcceres,witches,tribes,small buildings,villages,etc…there are some games with more medieval style,and some new games with that medieval style are coming,please devs,try to keep that age of war and barbarism…armours and constructions,mostly,but not jump in time between ages…Conan don´t walk inside that modern medieval castles and things like that.
Sorry, took me a bit to find the link (somehow managed to log into the wrong youtube account and then couldn’t remember the password for my regular account, lol) -
Certainly could be - though I wonder if the exhaustion is on the audience or studio side. It sounds like House of the Dragon is doing well, so there may still be an audience there, if the studios have good ideas (but, as in many areas that seems to be lacking…). I kinda wish we still had more of the lower budget stuff - that at least allowed for a steady stream of cheap (often cheesy) sword and sorcery movies. I’m particularly thinking of things like Hawk the Slayer, but even the Roger Corman movies at least kept something going.
Me too - I still remember being about 9 years old and finding a battered copy of Conan the Wanderer on a secondhand book stall, which started my love for the more ‘low fantasy’ end of the genre. (Probably far too dark and brutal for me at that age, but certainly formative .)
Oh I understood the exaggeration - I just don’t think it’s entirely inaccurate (I have a teenage niece and nephew - 2 minutes sounds about right ). I think for many games, even good ones, hundreds of hours may be on the generous side. I’ve dragged out Fallen Order to about 40 hours so far (by being a survival gamer/loot goblin and having to explore absolutely everywhere) and I doubt I can get more than another 10 hours out of it - and a lot of reviews I’m seeing are more like 15-20 hours (heck, AC4 Black Flag I remember seeing people talking about as 10-15 hours (though I got about 60 hours per playthrough…)). Obviously, these are story-driven single-player games, which is quite different from sandbox like CE, but I think it fits with the attention span issue. (Battle Royale maybe fits too - allowing players to get a ‘PVP hit’ in 20 mins and then go do something else - not my area of expertise, obviously - and we even see players from time to time claiming CE should have a battle royale mode.) Thousands of hours is, as you say, either an amazing game or very specific to the individual - mostly I just think we are a particular breed of wierdos
This is exactly it. (Setting aside CE’s specific problems of individual bugs or decisions) the survival sandbox as a whole is a genre that really can only ever have a comparatively smaller ‘audience’ - most players simply will not want to spend the time needed to get into the meat of what makes (made?) CE so great. The new Journey, for all that it can be frustrating, is much kinder to beginners than what we encountered, but it still takes many many hours to go through - a lot of gamers, I’d say the majority, just won’t be interested in that.
And it’s easy to see the ‘logic’ they are working off to get here - the game is grindy and takes hundreds of hours, a majority of gamers don’t want to play for hundreds or thousands of hours, thereforeif we make the game less grindy/easier we’ll attract more players. I think the problem with that ‘logic’ is that a majority of gamers still won’t be interested because it will still be a sandbox survival game, so they still won’t want to play. But, in the meantime, existing players and potential new players who do like sandbox survival will have been put off by it being made easy and thus less interesting (to the twisted minds that enjoy sandbox survival 
).
I think it is a mistake for a game like CE to focus on targetting the casual gamer - because I don’t believe that any sandbox game will really be successful by doing that. I think the more realistic approach would be to focus on attracting ‘sandbox gamers’, drawing them in with quality and the game’s unique aspects - maintain that audience by maintaining quality, so that the experience remains good, and then you can successfully monetise the playerbase, because the dedicated players are the ones that are most likely to carry on buying extras for the game.
Unfortunately, that seems to be more of a fantasy than Conan ever was…
Exactly. I’ve resisted this interpretation for years, but it has become clearer over the past year or two that there is a meaningful disconnect.Many (most?) of the devs may be ‘gamers’, but that does not mean they are ‘sandbox gamers’ and they may (quite reasonably) not be interested in spending hundreds of hours playing the game - but without that direct experience they can only ever estimate the gameplay impact of a change, and they can easily be wrong in that estimate. It would be hard enough to predict these things even with a solid understanding of how the game is actually played. (But then 'nobody uses ‘Custom Sorting’, right?..)
Conan Exiles feedback pc xbox ps4
Veja isso, Se a Funcom sair do foco bárbaro certamente não terá o atual número de 9K e tenho certeza que apenas no máximo 3K que faz a compra fixa de todo bazar e passe de batalha. 
A maioria de nós somos raiz que apoiamos o bárbaro que conan sempre foi, se mudar ou tentar modernizar terão wipe no jogo de conan exiles, então podem desligar os servidores 
Your guess is incorrect.
Remember that some people don’t know you can do that, and some people don’t always have time to get through all the BP content quickly, and some may not be able to do it at all. Just because you can doesn’t mean everyone can.
to honor the truth, most people that i know of if not all of them , did use the single player admin powers to do it.
i can understand it was not finnancially viable, but i am not buying the BS of we are doing it so we can use people in more important tasks, the real reason behind the Mkt Spin was : financial reasons, they were not making enough $ ,
Can’t wait for Dune to release so I can look at the 80$ price tag, have a good laugh and move on with my life.
This is the future of gaming: greed and poor quality
Here’s some inspiration:
This is as real as it gets. Gta6 will be 100$ in 2025 and all companies will follow the same trend.
