If by “map expansion” you mean JUST the upper right quadrant of the Exile Lands, and not the typical “expand the map” comments we get every other day, then I’ll answer that part.
If this is a two part meaning that you think they should do both (expand the Exile Lands as a whole and fill in the upper right quadrant) then I’ll refer you to the search feature on this discord. Like pretty frequently (especially when Isle of Siptah was first announced and later released), people kept asking or saying on repeat “why did the release a new map, they should have just expanded the Exile Lands, cash grab, blah blah blah.” I’m not going to rehash that topic yet again, so, I’ll once again refer you to using the search tools if this was your intent.
Introduction - Upper Right Hand Quadrant of the Exile Lands
It’s not so much a can’t (on filling the upper right quadrant), and it’s not a simple answer. There are a lot of variables, and probably some I’m forgetting or not even seeing myself. The lesson that people should take from this is that game design decisions are rarely as simple as players believe.
Part 1
In the beginning days, yes it was reserved for dungeons. There in fact, 2 or 3 (I forget how many now) dungeons hidden in that region. Some mods that went and expanded the area (past and present mods) you can actually see those dungeons floating off in the distance (Darklands I believe even had this problem at one point, I don’t know if it still does). There’s not a whole lot of room where they could be moved either.
Part 2
Next, is time and resources. Expanding the area takes time and investment (see Isle of Siptah revamp as an example). They also need reason to do so to make it justifiable. Isle of Siptah had its southern regions expanded and there are unique features to those areas (and not just biome differences). I’m sure all the creative talent at Funcom could come up with a reason, but you are still investing heavy resources into making the area unique. By devoting resources to that, you are pulling resources from elsewhere.
“But mod authors did it,” you’ll probably say. Uh ya, even as small as the Conan Exiles mod creator community is, we still heavily outnumber the dev team. We have, more or less, infinite time and resources we can devote to our ideas and creations. Our only limiting factor is motivation, personal time, and energy. Funcom has limited resources in personal, budget, and etc.
And most importantly, a bazillion features players demand all the time that they want to see added to the game. And usually those same players Armchair Quarterback how they think resources should be devoted, despite having not a single hour of real game dev time under their belts. But that’s the internet for you, players truly believe they know better then employed Producers do; Producers who usually have tens of thousands of hours devoted to their craft and job.
Anyhoo, I went on a little rant there, so back on topic. Funcom talked about how they determine what to target for features in an interview a while back (I believe it was the Cursed Sands interview in April of 2021, which I wrote a summary of if you want to go search for it). They have a priority list of things they want to do, and they are going to target the things they feel is most important.
Part 3
Next, performance concerns. You actually kinda brought it up, you said “mods do it.” Yes, mods indeed add to the area. Do you see Armor Stands in the game? (Sorry Croms_Faithful, lol) Mods did it there too, right? That topic has been discussed to death, and basically, there are performance concerns with Armor Stands and that’s the biggest hurdle for Funcom. Many modded servers have in-place rules limiting the number of Armor Stands players can use. The ole “well mods did it, why can’t Funcom” is a more complex answer then what most players insist that it is.
Mod creators very often don’t care about performance concerns (and the few that do may or may not have the proper experience or knowledge to properly optimize our mods to focus on those performance concerns. I know I don’t. I do some things that I know how to do to help with performance, but I only know a few things). If some Minimum Spec computer can barely run our mods and are having crazy FPS issues? Not our problem really, we are in most cases, amateur hobbyists.
But let me ask you, do you honestly believe something like DarkLands would run perfectly fine on PS4 and Xbox One? Keep in mind, these consoles struggle to run the game as is, and that’s despite the endless parade of performance improvements Funcom has been doing (despite what the haters out there think). No, in fact a majority of mods would never be able to run on those platforms.
“But Funcom can do it better” I hear you say; well naturally they could. But you are still adding a significant chunk of area that is now going to push the memory costs for the map to run. The Exile Lands map was made when Funcom didn’t know as many “best practices” when it came to map design and performance. That’s why Volumetric Fog/Lighting is on Isle of Siptah, and the Exile Lands does not.
Now Funcom has been doing a lot of things to help improve memory costs, including to the Exile Lands itself. So maybe someday they could reasonably add to the area, but then I’ll refer you back to Part 2 of this write up.
Conclusion
This question gets asked a lot (like, a lot. And I fully plan on bookmarking my own explanation so I don’t need to write it up all over again for the billionth time). It started in 2018 and continues to today. For the longest time, the answer to “is the Exile Lands going to see the upper right quadrant filled in” has been a resounding, “No, the map is done.” Only very recently did a different answer show up in an interview, in which it can be summarized as “no plans to right now, and we still have a lot of performance concerns to address, but maybe someday if we feel it’s needed.”
In the introduction part of this write up I said,
The lesson that people should take from this is that game design decisions are rarely as simple as players believe.
This may (and probably will) be completely ignored by future readers, but my challenge to you is to think critically about why a feature in Conan Exiles (or any game really), is the way it is. It’s almost never a simple answer.