Dropping the game, so here are my two cents

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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.

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The community manager is much like me and reads most everything.

My opinion battle pass content is just participation awards. Neat stuff but most are ornamental and my builds are pretty spartan. But after buying the first one they are self perpetuating. And I absolutely refuse to shop the bazaar till they change the buyer beware policy. I think everyone should quit it till the policy changes.

:100:

You are not wrong.

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Very well written, and I think much of what you have written is true in one form or another for many of us. I’m still here (at least for the moment) - I guess my willingness to endure the crap is still just enough - but it is noticeable that I spend about 10% as much time playing CE as I used to.

Rather than responding to every point you raise (which would result in a post of similar length to yours but mostly just saying ‘I agree’ over and over) - I thought I’d look at a couple of specific points.

240 crom coins from the battlepass - this one has me slightly confused - I get 1200 coins, which is enough to get the next battlepass (and is one of the few factors I view as positive about the way Funcom has implemented the battlepass system - an objectionable system, but one I feel Funcom has been as un-objectionable with as possible).

Turanian Building expansion (and similar sets) - I agree that the price was too high, but would like to clarify that I don’t think direct price comparison to the DLCs is entirely fair either (not that I think you were being unfair, nor that I think you would not have accepted a more moderate price increase). In the same period the cost of a loaf of bread or pint of milk where I live has nearly doubled - so I would have to accept some increase in the price of a DLC as being reasonable. Since it is a luxury item, the increase should maybe be a little smaller - but perhaps 30-50% increase on the price of a DLC would have seemed reasonable to me. However - the increase seems far steeper than that (and for far less). The irony of this is that previously I bought every DLC, even at times when I took a break from the game (even bought Riddle of Steel, despite having pretty much no use for any piece in the set, just for the ‘completion’ element). But now the Bazaar system taught me that I cannot have that ‘completion’ and, as a result, I am far more selective in the few things that I do purchase. Looking back over the ‘Ages’, I have spent around half as much money on the game as I did previously (and received far less than half the equivalent value of course). So the result of the shift in monetization strategy has been that Funcom receives less money from me than previously.

Jumping to the quote from Dennis about “the contrast between stress and relief” - I think you are entirely fair in your argument based on that quote (we’ve got the stress, where’s the relief?), but I would like to add an additional point: that may be why Dennis plays games, that is not why we play games. Personally, I don’t want a lot of stress from games - I can understand the point he is trying to make - but mostl;y I play in my free time for relaxation and enjoyment. Stress provides neither of those.

100%, and in my view the most important of all the points that you raise.

And, like you, I find myself with no interest in even looking at Dune, as a consequence of my experiences over the years with this game.

I agree entirely with your sentiment of not wishing to blame anyone at Funcom. In fact I might even go further and say that it is good people like AndyB who have kept me interested and involved through some of the ‘worst times’ with the game. But then there is the ‘monetization expert’… (Rant incoming)

I do not know this person (people?) - maybe they are a decent person trying to just give the best advice they can. But I doubt it. My opinion is that they are almost certainly just a scam artist who has taken Funcom’s money and provided nothing of value in return. This stems from two primary reasons. Firstly, I know quite a lot of people that work in these fields, and it is almost always a scam. They are trained ‘mentalists’ (stage ‘mind-readers’ ‘fortune-tellers’ and ‘mediums’) and they very rarely actually make any suggestion at all. With that skill set, it is easy to walk into a room of execs and tell them exactly what they want to hear - because they will tell you what it is that they want to hear and then you need only repeat it back to them in slightly different words.

Secondly, nothing new was suggested - battlepass and in-game store is the ‘greed’ model used by virtually every big game studio, and widely detested by many players. Anyone can walk into a room and say ‘do the same thing everyone else is doing, even if your customers hate it’ - that hardly takes an expert. (And in fact it is Funcom that opted to tone this down, by making the battlepass so reasonable by comparison to those in other games.)

What makes this worse is that there is no proof that any of this actually brings more money to Funcom. Some might say ‘clearly Funcom is making more money that they did the previous couple of years, therefore the new system works better for them than the previous’, but the reality is they only released one DLC in that period so there is nothing meaningful to compare to. It is my belief that they would have made the same money or more if they had released a DLC with each chapter instead, even with a price increase. Between BP and bazaar they would have had enough pieces to release as a DLC, but they would have generated less ill-will. I know I would have bought each hypothetical DLC - so the result would have been that they would have made more money from me at least. Without re-running the exact same period of time (difficult unless someone has a plan for restarting the universe), we’ll never know for sure whether I am right or wrong, but I do not believe the ‘monetization expert’ has gained Funcom any money at all, rather I think they have cost them players and good-will.

Anyway, this was supposed to be just a quick reply - guess that failed, lol. I’m still just about holding onto something, but my whole feeling about this game has drastically shifted over the past couple of years and I can entirely see why you (and so many others) have opted to move on. I suspect there will soon enough come a time when I do the same.

The best I can say, in the end, is ‘Farewell and may you some day find the game you seek’ (May we all some day find it.)

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As you can see from conan exile map civilisations rise and fall we are all like warmaker kleal looking around and wondering how things got so bad. If the game goes off-line we should all log off near war maker kleal maybe we can show him humans aren’t all that bad :smile: And he does not like the smell of humans LOL

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Very well said and covers most of the important points. As DanQuixote mentioned about stress, I really think Funcom needs to understand why people play this game, what they enjoy about it, and try to meet the desires of as many people as they can (…and not just Dennis with his “I’m from another planet” perspective on what the game needs to be more enjoyable).

For me I enjoy that in the beginning this game has some semblance of balance between stress and relief, but honestly, what gives the game longevity for me is reaching a place of very little stress. I have played the game for way too many hours over too many years and once I have reached endgame I enjoy that stress is no longer much of a concern. There are some opportunities to invite a bit of stress, but I like knowing that with my player equipped with the best gear and my thrall in the best gear as well I can dominate any challenge in the game without much stress.

I do not play games to invite stress into my life, I play games to relax. Conan has become nothing a but stress-fest with all the bugs and terrible gameplay changes dreamed up by Mr. Extraterrestrial (hyper armor changes and so much more :imp:).

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Very well said.

I had a similar conversation on my stream on Sunday.

Be well.

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Largely agreed.
And in many cases echoed.
This one is just lingering until an update allows this one to efficiently deconstruct and then disperse.
Perhaps maintain a shanty in case the game becomes fun again in the future.

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Well said.

Don’t share every point, but the overall sentiment.

The phase you missed was possibly the best of Conan Exiles in my opinion. The Age of Sorcery updates were pretty cool. In retrospect, they may have been the beginning of the end, but at the time, I enjoyed them.

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My two cents a well.
Its not even worth the time and effort.

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