Hey Funcom.
I know you’re probably not going to read this. And I’ll admit, this post is mostly for myself. But I’m going to go ahead and toss it out there anyway so I can walk away from this with some closure.
(I’m sure some readers might chuckle simply at the overly-serious tone of that. Read on and know the depths of my mental illness at your peril.)
So where to begin? The beginning, I guess.
I picked this game up in March of 2021. Got caught up in the Isle of Siptah early access. Valheim had come out right before then and I had been playing it into the ground. One of my favorite things about that game was the building, and a friend that I gamed with suggested I check out Conan Exiles, because the building system was supposed to be really great.
Sure enough, CE got its hooks in me for 300 easy hours in singleplayer alone; well before I even dared dip my toes into online servers. It was a good-feeling game at the time. Yeah, combat was a bit floaty, but the exploration was definitely there. The building was absolutely there in terms of customization. I loved the thrall system, even if it felt janky at times. But the game was fun, and the prospect of getting an entire new map to explore all over again was great. I picked up four DLCs within a month.
When Siptah came out, I enjoyed it. It didn’t seem ground breaking by any stretch, but the design of the areas was neat. I regret that it didn’t have the same narrative exploration highs that the Exiled Lands map did, but the new biomes were cool. It felt like more of a sandbox with some interesting features, and I spent plenty of time planning out how I would run a server on it. For a while, Siptah got regular updates, including a map expansion. This all made it feel like it was a good investment for me. I never regretted purchasing it or any of the other DLCs. I own all of them now.
CE got another 600 hours or so out of me before I started to lose interest. This was around the beginning of 2022, before I was even hearing whispers about 3.0 and “Ages” being a thing. Interest just petered out after about 1000 hours, and there wasn’t anything wrong with that.
When 3.0 and Sorcery initially got teased, I remember any excitement being distinctly overshadowed by talk about “seasons” and a cash shop. Folks were worried that Funcom was going to start charging for mod access or even completely disabling mods so that they could sell their own. The theories were wild, but the general concern from the community was enough to cause me to hold off on coming back right away. I didn’t end up picking the game back up until Age of Sorcery Chapter 3 dropped, and woof. It was a bit of a doozy.
Golems were very underwhelming. The Journey revamp seemed unnecessary and prone to breaking (it still is, to this day). The offerings on the battle pass weren’t great, but I picked it up anyway to try it out. But the challenge system seemed super clunky and unrewarding. I wasn’t initially sure I’d be able to even complete it with the amount of time I was able to give the game. And there were a few other things that really left a bad taste in my mouth.
Firstly, there was the much-lauded “expansion” to the Turanian building palette. This was awesome, except for the fact that it was a paid expansion to a DLC that I already owned. And although I can’t remember the exact price at the time, I believe Funcom was asking me to pay at least the same price that I did for that DLC ($10 USD) to get a handful of building pieces. Whereas the original DLC had 39 building pieces total, plus 15 armor pieces, five warpaints, nine weapons, ten placeables, and two pet skins.
Then there was the general quality of the battlepass rewards. They did not seem worth the amount of time required to get them. The last ten levels of this particular battle pass were pretty egregious. This is supposed to be the reward for really investing and grinding right? So why were all of these things so boring:
- A few pieces of scaffolding
- Two really simple wall painting decals
- One really simple floor paint decal
- A warcry emote
- A set of golem craft schematics that is so large it is practically unusable without mods to reduce the size
- Potions of Lightning Storm (arguably the most useful part of this tier)
- The Turanian Nomad Spear
- A very simple straw basket placeable that only holds foraging materials
- A very simple golem skin
- 240x Crom Coins
I should probably note that - in the grand scheme of things - 240x Crom Coins is not enough to even buy the box of carrots placeable that was on the bazaar a few weeks ago (it goes for the kingly ransom of 250 coins).
Overall, the quality wasn’t a great look. The battlepass content was content, but it was bland content. The Journey rework and golem crafting were content, but not the kind I would have looked forward to had I been told about it all in advance. And it didn’t make me feel very good as a player of the game, and it made me feel pretty disrespected as a customer.
And so, I did what was logical at the time, of course. I jumped ship, and never paid for a battlepass or anything from the Bazaar again. Right?
Right…?
Oh no, dear reader. Of course I did not.
And that lack of quality paled before what was to come with the Age of War.
Yes, here we lie. One full year later and things have continued largely on this same trajectory that they were. Every update seems to bring more odd “rebalances” or “reworks” of existing systems which - while not perfect - were working well enough to not be broken. But every single Age of War update has done this in some form, or introduced some kind of half-baked content that caused a resonance cascade of issues. I’m not going to blather on about specifics because the forums are already stuffed full of bug reports. Cue general handwaving at everything from stamina changes, to Al-Merayah, to repairing items, to taverns, to a two-week event that randomly spawns enemies in your base that your thralls won’t attack.
Someone in game development once said “…[O]ne of the many reasons we find games to be fun… [is] the contrast between stress and relief.” I think this is a very poignant observation given the current state of the game. Console players need to hold R3 to run. Turtles are crashing Siptah servers. Thralls and players are falling through floors randomly and losing the ability to interact with all containers. The UI has become smaller and more difficult to read and navigate. Players are being hammered with changes that they view as unnecessary. That’s a lot of major stressors. Where exactly is the relief?
Is it in the Dyer’s Bench?
(That quote is from Dennis Douthett by the way: the Lead Designer for Conan Exiles.)
The changes that have been implemented over the last year have actively made the game no longer fun for me to play. And a game is only worth playing when it entertains you. So the time now comes for me to put it down. That’s a shame, honestly, because the community that plays this game has given me so many amazing memories. But with this perpetual combination of poor quality control, lack of effective communication with the community, and abysmal direction from whatever management is in place, I have learned one thing: Funcom has zero respect for my money, and even less respect for my time. I can say with 100% certainty that I have no desire to see what is coming next with Conan Exiles. Knowing that Funcom’s signature is on this upcoming Dune game makes it dead on arrival to me.
I don’t harbor any ill will toward the average person at Funcom. I’m honestly sorry if you read this and you work on a team that tries to communicate with the community in any capacity. There is a lot of outrage directed at you. Not all of it is justified. I lay the blame for all this squarely at the feet of your C-suite execs and your Ubisoft-alumni Director of Monetization, who are actively killing off a game that once had tremendous potential. The new battle-pass content for Chapter 4 was nice, even if I disagree with the idea of introducing a building tileset on a battlepass platform for ethical reasons. There are obviously a number of talented artists who work for Funcom. And who - according to reviews on places like Glassdoor - are probably not being paid decently enough for their work.
(This is me tactfully saying you should find gainful employment elsewhere. You are worth more.)
At any rate, that’s the end of my TED. I won’t be around here anymore. As I’ve previously stated, the community has always been a delight.
Farewell, my fellow Exiles. May your L’s be many, and your T4 thralls few.