This is the sort of thing I realized a few years ago. There was a point in time where even I was like, CE is probably on its last leg. This was near the end of the summer of 2018. Where the numbers were dipping at their lowest. At time I was playing on a unmodded server that routinely was full at 70 players during primetime (you’d have to remember to login early to get a spot), and 40+ during off hours. And then it just died.
Looking at the server list was pretty bleak. Unmodded servers in general were just dead at the time. The server tried a few mods to see if people would come back, but the numbers never really did. Instead I moved to another server that seemed to have a decent population but even it was a shadow of what it was.
For some reason despite those odds, the game rebounded. It never went back to that low point for the next 5 years. Now this sort of follows the population trends. But those don’t always tell the whole story. In the lowest point that I’ve seen Conan I would say the population was at its lowest point, and at the same time, spread out. Which made the multiplayer experience pretty underwhelming.
There’s been some lows since then. But from what my memory tells me, the servers I played on afterwards usually stayed full. And I do remember there being quite a few servers competing for highest players indicating that the playerbase wasn’t so spread out. So while the game has had its low points. They weren’t as catastrophic as the ones at the end of summer in 2018.
We haven’t seen a low point ever since Isle of Siptah. That isn’t exactly a positive comment towards IoS since I do think that just a correlation at best (I don’t have a high opinion of IoS as a concept, even if I do like the map, just being honest). But over all the game has had a healthy total population (on PC) for quite a few years.
So with al that said. Why do people say this is the most horrible game ever? How do you all play a game that is so unfun, unfair, anti-consumer, broken, glitchy, developed by horrible human beings, and is generally regarded as a waste of time?
I’ve seen excuses such as there isn’t any other games out there like it. That its Conan. That the graphics are great. And so on. Here’s the thing… there’s dozens of games like it. Conan is just a generic Sword and Sorcery (how its applied as a game) that has been done hundreds of times, and its graphics are 2015. All the things that the detractors actually say about the game are almost objectively wrong.
When I encounter a bad game. I don’t sit there for years on their forums saying how bad it is, and continue to play for thousands of hours. For example, the game New World. My friends and I played that when it came out, and had a little fun with it, until I guess around level 40 or so (I think max is 60?). And then we got bored and moved on. Beautiful game. Combat was sort of interesting. Characters looked great. But the content was boring.
What did we do? Uninstalled. Left a review and dumped it. Haven’t posted in their forums or even in steam comments. Wasn’t worth the effort.
Oh well that’s easy, right? We only had around a 100 hours or so. Not thousands. No sunk cost fallacy (which by the way isn’t an excuse, and something you should actually avoid doing), affecting the judgement.
I’m don’t play World of Warcraft anymore. Despite having characters that have way more hours played into them than all of mine in Conan Exiles combined. The moment that game got boring and the moment Blizzard turned to crap. Left it, no problem. No issue with doing so.
Same thing with Everquest 1 and 2 on their live servers. Now those two games I wouldn’t say are bad in themselves. But due to both games being out for over 20 years, they are bloated with unnecessary content and itemization bloat that takes the fun out of it. The games themselves are actually quite fun. And I do on occasion enjoy new TLP (EQ1) or TLE (EQ2) server. And both those games I probably have characters with 7-10k hours played (on the character alone). Some of which I’ve deleted recently on EQ2 to make room on the roster for the TLE server.
But this just goes to show that my standard for a game being relevant to me is very strict. If a developer goes down a route that I think is wrong. They will get dumped quickly. People shouldn’t be meandering on a game they don’t like for days… much less weeks, months, or years.
But I would say most don’t. What we see is a bit of sensationalism. Conan Exiles is genuinely a good game. There isn’t a game in my Steam library that even comes close to the time played. Empyrion and Space Engineers are at 1200 and 900 hours themselves which together is only a third. And those two games cheat, since design sucks up so much of the time played. Conan would too for its building if I didn’t streamline it with 3rd party tools. It would be bloated probably by another 50% otherwise.
But I mean if you think CE sucks. Play another game. If you think Funcom sucks, then play games by other companies. It really is that simple.
Don’t be buying and playing Dune Awakening if any of the above sentence is true for you. Because that is unhealthy masochistic behavior. I mean you all do what you want with your money. But if you do something that contradictory, then don’t be surprised when its pointed out. Its not normal to continue to buy things you don’t like from people you don’t like. This is a video game, not your water or power utilities.
fun times
