I would like to preface this with saying that these are my thoughts and as such an opinion piece. It is also heavily influenced by my experiences as a PVP Official player.
I know there’s many options out there for alternative experiences, however, this post will remain in the vein of Official vanilla gameplay.
I want to have a discussion with you all. It’s another one of my long winded posts, yipee.
I like survival games and have a list I’ve spent hundreds of hours in. Minecraft, Ark, etc.,… Nothing comes close though to my thousands of hours in Conan.
This is on the landing page of the Conan Exiles website. Similar tag lines are on the various landing pages/apps where Conan can be purchased.
According to Wikipedia:
“Survival games are a subgenre of action games which are often set in hostile, intense, open-world environments. Players generally start with minimal equipment and are required to survive as long as possible by finding the resources necessary to manage hunger, thirst, disease and/or mental state. Many survival games are based on randomly or procedurally generated persistent environments; more recently, survival games are often playable online, allowing players to interact in a single world.”
I agree with this assessment.
Perhaps because I’m experienced, the “survivability” of the game is inconsequential to me. I can spawn at the desert on a new server or new singleplayer game and simply level to 60 within 30 minutes. I know where to go, what to get, when to get it, how to get it and how not to die.
But wasn’t the game harder?
The elements come to mind.
Surviving a sandstorm without a gas mask was extremely difficult.
Now I can healing wrap or potion through it naked. (Maybe I am misremembering?)
Or going to the snow biomes, you needed very specific gear that provided resistances.
Now I can wear coarse armor in most areas without getting extremely cold and as an added bonus, use the many different means of alcohol drops at my disposal.
Going to the volcano? There’s virtually no prepping required, you can go naked with a stack of ice and simply consume the ice.
Surviving disease, alcohol poisoning or poisoning is incredibly easy too, what’s the point of getting poisoned or diseased if you just have to wait it out or use an antidote? Christ, you’ll overfill large chests with a quick run for zeal since it’s x10 Set antidotes per zeal.
Hunger and thirst can be easily bypassed. Water is very plentiful and much of the picked fauna and flora gives you water and food. Plus of course, the plentiful feasts, food and water drops from NPCs and chests. The timers to die is high as well, having spent a lot of time in Conan simply scouting and watching, I place a bedroll and saunter off to my choice vantage point and can sit there unfettered for over an hour afk without water or food. Die, respawn and go back.
If we look at swimming, it used to be that if you ran out of stamina you would just kinda be stuck there until you got to shroe. I know the verdict is out on whether this was a good change or not but swimming itself is really now completely inconsequential. There’s no risk in swimming whatsoever, even the timers for breath are elongated and easy to bypass. You can also use breath type potions that stop the breath timer from progressing, essentially remaining under water indefinitely.
Loot drops
That brings me to loot drops.
Need water breathing? Easy, you don’t even really need to make the potions for it. You will get tons of breathing potions. Now, all the beast tamer NPCs around Beastmaster Teimos also have a high drop rate of the Underwater breathing mask, and with BMT having been nerfed to oblivion he’s nothing more than a novelty capture from a forgotten time, so no sweat, you kill him and get even more masks! Hey, let’s have 40 of those in our chests huh? It doesn’t even matter. I can easily do the whole Dagon dungeon without the mask or potions, simply swim down before the timer expires…
Need feasts, potions, paddings, weapons, armour, you name it? No problem, go kill a few NPCs or run around cities and loot the chests. Hell, you can even go to the Mounds and get end game gear, weapons and tools.
You really don’t need to make much. Most of it is hand fed to you on a silver platter with very little time and effort required.
Even building materials, you can get a drop of x10 thrones at Mounds and dismantle for end game T3 materials.
This came to an overwhelming head with the introduction of Age of War and the Siege of Al-Merayah . You can easily jump over the walls, pick up a free Musashi’s Black Blade, 4 rams and 4 pre-made explosives. So for PVP, no sweat to start raiding your very first day.
NPCs, Bosses and Animals
So defeating the Red Mother slot machine means that you’ll get the possibility of a pool of loot. There’s no changing of the Red Mother. She’s ALWAYS the same. So you get good with muscle memory and the expected same lunges, tail swings and fire breath. Now she’s even easier than she used to be, I think 1 minute or so of stacking bleed and poison? No sweat dude.
It’s the same with every single spawn. While we have the possibility of demonic and boss spawns for regular spawns, they’re not really that hard to defeat. It’s not like they have variances in levels or abilities.
I recall when fighting hyenas was actually scary. I remember them being difficult to defeat. Is it that I have become more adept or is it because animals and monsters are just… easy?
So a level of boredom can be elicited here. This is the reason why I moved from PVE in the early stages of my playthroughs to PVP. I wanted the added element of risk from other players because I did all the PVE things.
PVP
That leads me now into PVP. If it wasn’t for hackers and exploiters, the PVP game mode is stupid easy - to raid.
Need raid materials? Go to the Seige of Al-Merayah and respawn the boss for limitless bombs and rams.
It used to be HARD to get everything you needed to successfully raid or defend and not because of other players exclusively. Sometimes weeks of smart planning, evading and server relations.
Now I can have a fully functioning, defendable, stocked base in about 72 hours with x3. With x4 you could do it in less than 48. I can raid within the first couple of hours of being on an Exiled Lands server. If you’re on Siptah, you just farm the explosive crates.
You can now even get Dragon Powder from drops on Exiled Lands.
Combat
Aside from the many gripes about combat PVP, combat in PVE feels just so inconsequential. Things that should cause me to be more vigilant about my choices such as the many negative status effects feel like they can be ignored. I can either treat them easily or outright wait them out for a small period of time.
Do they really even do much anymore?
I know Funcom has been trying to make NPCs harder to fight but it feels all so fake. It is probably the limitations of AI and coding at play but was it really that good/bad before?
The Purge
Sigh.
Interesting concept. Community is divided on it, some like the old purge and some the new.
The old you filled a purge bar located in your inventory UI based on actions performed, such as building and crafting. This could randomly see a band of NPCs, beasts or monsters attack your base and followers. The type of purge, faction and difficulty was dependent upon your position on the map.
But it was easily cheesed, halted or erased. If you let it flow naturally sure it could feel like you were surviving.
Now, you call the purge with a treasury. It needs a lot of work, from bugs with it not initiating to the same variety in thralls and while the difficulty has been boosted, is still a far cry from what it once was.
Neither is really true survival imho.
Thralls
Such a controversial topic.
Funcom has stated that they nerfed thralls because they wanted to make the player the hero of the game. There’s also an upcoming system change of “down but not out”, meaning essentially you can resurrect your dead thrall.
There was some artificial survivability for the time required to convert an NPC to a thrall with the Wheel of Pain… this was good for PVP in some senses because you had to be smart about keeping your converting thrall safe and the triumph of having captured them, kept the building safe and then able to use the thrall follower or crafter meant a triumph all on its own. They changed it so thralls are broken in an hour or less.
Now thralls are meat shields or useless puppets for the most part. Some of the crafting thralls don’t even do A THING. Like the various levels of priests. The T4 carpenters don’t speed up crafting like their other specialty counterparts and since AoW Ch4, a lot of the benefits of certain crafter thralls such as repairing epic armours and weapons are broken.
It appeared that thralls were supposed to make your experience in the deadly Exiled and Siptah easier but now they feel like a micromanaged chore and addition to a dollhouse.
But did these changes create an unintended consequence? Did making you the “hero” also oversimplify the concept of “survival”?
Dying
Now I remember a time when you couldn’t climb in the early stages of the game. It was introduced in July of 2017. This wasn’t a backwards step for surviving, it was a new feature that actually opened up the Exiled Lands in diversification of building spots, hiding, defence in PVP and exploration. This is the type of stuff that made the game better. The risk of falling is high but dying itself doesn’t really matter much now does it? You can retrieve your corpse as long as you return within approximately 30 minutes.
There’s no consequence to dying other than time and BUGS.
Was there ever a true consequence to dying?
Sorcery
The introduction with Age of Sorcery was highly anticipated. Being a fan of Robert E. Howard’s Conan in Hyboria meant that sorcery had to be implemented with care and Funcom did it right by not creating a contradiction with high fantasy.
But did it really better the game? Not in terms of the concept of Survival. Perhaps for storyline and new things to do with Kurak.
Die?
Summon your corpse or teleport with a transportory stone.
Evade raiders so they can’t get your loot?
Summon your corpse or teleport with a transportory stone.
Make tower bases in PVP completely useless?
Summon a bat!
Now corruption can be used to your advantage and absolutely is a step in the right direction. But there’s just so many ways to get rid of corruption. Visit Conan, visit your dancer or the dancer of another player/clan even if they’re hostile or consume special drinks.
QOL and UI
I would never believe that making the User Interface difficult leads into a sense of survival. You’re already battling the game, so a good UI should always be a goal.
The recent UI changes are a what appears to be an tone deaf attempt at that. But we’ve seen some in the past that have made the game better. Not easier, better.
Same with Quality of Life. Artificial sense of survivability for time and effort is as simple as making something 10 steps when it can simply be 1 or 2 steps instead.
Focusing on survivability based on the environment and threats feels more natural - imho.
So I’ve said EASY a lot.
Because it is. Even with my experience the only difficulties I have experienced recently are imitations of “survivability”, bugs or being a victim of cheaters. For newer players, it’s not even knowledge anymore since everything is practically thrown at you.
Now I have questions for you:
Do you find that you’re playing a survival game anymore?
What used to make progression harder in respect of being a survival game? I’m sure I’ve missed some things.
What has changed that you might think has made the game too easy?
Do you prefer the game being more survival based or easier to play?
