Early Impressions

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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So, it’s been a little more than a week and I thought I would get my impressions written down. Bear in mind that I’m still far from having explored everything, so this is just my account so far and my impressions will keep evolving as my understanding of the game does.

Overall, it’s a positive experience. I haven’t had this much fun with the game since I started playing it. The Isle of Siptah is really a much needed breath of fresh air and I’m glad that all the waiting this year has been worth it.

Look & Feel

The Isle of Siptah definitely looks good. The redwood forest is really beautiful, the sunrise is incredible, and all the ruins and dungeons I’ve explored so far have a really good ambiance. Places like the elephant graveyard and the various cursed shipwrecks blend really nicely with the rest of the map.

The frequent complaint that “there are no biomes” is false, but understandable: the biomes on this map blend naturally and they’re not jarringly different from each other, except where it’s done on purpose, like The Barrens.

So, in general, I like the world. But there are two things that I miss a lot from Exiled Lands.

I’ll start with the smaller, much more subjective criticism: I really liked the aesthetics of the newbie river and the desert in the Exiled Lands. I understand the creative constraints involved in making a map that is based directly on Howard’s source material and real world geography. I just wish I could get some of those palm trees and more of that desert sand with scrub plants.

A much bigger problem I have with the Isle of Siptah is the lack of landmarks. It’s especially problematic in the redwood forest, where it’s too easy to get lost and have to stop to look at the map. In other parts of the world, I can at least get a sense of direction by looking at the Tower, but in the redwood forest there are always tall trees and high cliffs, so if I get lost, I either have to look at the map or look way up at the sky to see orient on the Maelstrom (or the “tentacle cloud”, depending on the time).

And it’s not just about the orientation – the landmarks in the Exiled Lands are just awesome to look at, even from afar. And those that can’t be seen from afar are still spectacular to stumble upon.

Which leads me to the next topic…

World Size

I get the feeling that there are fewer landmarks and that they’re smaller, because the whole map is smaller. Fortunately, it doesn’t feel that small because of the lack of fast travel. And that’s something about which I have ambivalent feelings.

On the one hand, it is spectacularly awesome to have to ride from one end of the map to another. Occasionally you run into people, which is always interesting, but even when you don’t, it leads to so many interesting moments on its own. You might be going to a certain destination, but then you suddenly wonder: what’s around this corner here?

On the other hand, I’m getting ready to build my first proper base, and I wonder just how difficult farming will be, especially w/o T4 crafters to lighten the material requirements. Of course, since the whole map is smaller, I’m designing a much smaller base than I normally would, but I’m still apprehensive. I guess I’ll have to try it out before I can have a more concrete opinion.

Speaking of T4 crafters…

Progression

Holy smoke! I can’t gush enough about this! (But I also have criticisms, and I’ll get to those.)

First of all, the harvesting multiplier was a welcome change. So was the adjustment of XP gain. Yeah, the journeys are nerfed, but even with that it was actually easier to get to level 60 than in Exiled Lands, and that’s a good thing, because unlike Exiled Lands, reaching level 60 isn’t “I’m almost done with everything”. Because, well, thralls and vaults and stuff. Which leads me to my biggest gush:

For the love of all 7 in-game deities, whatever you do, please don’t put T4 crafters into wild surges. Never, ever! :smiley:

One thing that always irked me about Exiled Lands was the existence of T1 and T2 crafters. Catching thralls in Exiled Lands always feels like rummaging through someone else’s dumpster in search of an unopened bottle of quality wine. So many T1s and T2s that nobody except true newcomers will ever use, because why would anyone bother when you can run around various camps and get a T4? Getting a T4 in Exiled Lands isn’t a challenge you have to overcome or a goal you have to work for. It’s just running around until you get lucky. In contrast, I’m actually happy to have a T1 crafter on the Isle of Siptah, because I can actually tell the difference.

That said, wild surges really need T2 crafters. Really. Otherwise, just simplify crafters to 3 tiers: T1 would be old T2, T2 would be old T3 and T3 would be old T4. Why? Because once I finally summon a surge, if I get T2s, it will feel just like rummaging through the dumpster again. Take it with a grain of salt, of course, since I still haven’t summoned a surge – you guys might wanna prioritize fixing the Ley Shrine container ownership bug for PVE(-C) servers, nudge nudge wink wink.

The biggest thing I dislike about the progression are the recipes from Exiled Lands. Yeah, I get it, you can’t pack a whole bunch of equivalent dungeons onto the Isle of Siptah. And you shouldn’t, really, because why make things the same. So I’m fine with, say, Khari recipes being locked behind the slot machine mechanics of grinding vaults. But glowing essence? There’s glowing goop all around and there’s the witchfire feat, but you can’t craft witchfire without glowing essence, and you can’t craft the glowing essence because the recipe isn’t there. Yes, I know you can loot it or perhaps get it in a convergence trap, but you shouldn’t have to jump through these hoops just to establish a missing link in the feats.

And specialist cooking and brewing – those could also have been littered around the landscape just as easily as in the Exiled Lands, relics from the time when humans waged war on the elder races.

Of course, thralls and recipes aren’t the only things that I like about the new progression…

New Healing System

I’ll try to be brief here, because I’ve already spouted enough on this topic and I’m just rehashing it here.

In general, I love this change. To use yet again a phrase I stole from Helium3, I love that I can’t Leroy Jenkins my way through all the fights. I love that I can’t let a group of 8 skeletons surround me and stun lock me for several seconds and still bull my way through the fight by spamming the heavy attack and rolling occasionally.

The bandages went through the same kind of paradigm shift as the dodge roll once upon a time: people who keep complaining about them need to understand that they are simply not meant to be used in a fight. That’s really it. They’re very useful, but they can’t be treated the same way as the potions. There are some things that need work here, but I’ll come back to that later.

The sated buff was a bit of a blunder initially, mostly because it was way too low and didn’t show any differences between different foods. Things are much, much better now – there are notable differences between various foods and the buff actually helps – but the cooking system could still use additional work. Not necessarily in terms of healing, but rather secondary effects to reflect the variety of recipes. But that’s really a minor nitpick.

The potions are the workhorse of healing. So far, I’ve only tried aloe extract and I’m switching to concentrated aloe today, to see the difference. In general, they work fine, especially when combined with other techniques, like being sated and having vitality 30. But they also need a bit of work, because of the movement penalty. When I’m fighting a boss or a small group of enemies that don’t move too fast, I can work with potions. But given a group of NPCs from the surge, I have to run away way too far to be able to quaff a potion. Sometimes that’s far enough for the NPCs to get leashed back or to wander into an enemy camp and get slaughtered. So it would be really nice if the movement penalty was lowered from “overencumbered” to jogging or slightly-slower-than-jogging.

And while we’re on the topic of movement penalty, let’s go back to bandages for a moment. Being locked into the animation without a way to cancel it hasn’t been a problem for me, because I try to make sure I’m either far enough to use them safely, or not as busted up that “losing the gamble” would kill me. However, everyone fat-fingers an action from time to time. I dread what would happen if I’m fighting a group of enemies and instead of switching a weapon I activate the bandages.

So not being able to cancel the bandaging animation is a problem. But allowing it to be cancelled opens the door to severe cheesing. What can be done? I’m sure the devs can come up with something better, but I have two ideas I thought I could toss on the table. One is to allow the first 2 or 3 seconds to be cancelled, perhaps signaled by a visible prompt, during which there are no benefits. After that, the player is again locked in the animation and all the healing happens during that time. The other idea is to allow cancelling at any time, but make the bleed debuff return if cancelled and make the healing a curve, where very little is healed at the beginning and the brunt of healing happens towards the end of the animation.

Other than that, the healing system is really nice and it makes fighting much more fun, as long as the lag isn’t abysmal. Which leads me to my last point…

Bugs, Damn Bugs and Performance

Yeah, I know. It’s Early Access, which means it’s beta. I get it. But if people don’t yell enough, bugs won’t get fixed, so this is the yelling portion of my wall of text.

I already mentioned the PVE(-C) Ley Shrine container ownership bug. Yeah, I’ll bring my clanmate to help and do the whole “kick out of clan, do the thing, invite back” song and dance. We know each other from Exiled Lands and trust each other. But it would be reeeeaaaaallllly nice if you guys could fix that sooner rather than later.

Then there are chests. Explore a ruin or a wreck, get jumped by undead or other enemies, fight them off, finally approach the chests aaaaaand… they’re all empty. Sit around long enough for everything to respawn. Kill it all again. Chests are still empty. That’s a bummer, but a minor one. A much more serious one is running through a whole vault to find the end chest empty. That is really frustrating.

But the worst offender are the horrible, horrible performance spikes. The server FPS on the official server I’m playing on generally hovers in the “middle teens” – between 13 and 18 – but it goes down into “orange territory” way too often. And then something happens, who knows what, and it tanks down to 1-3. For an extended period of time.

Yesterday, my clanmate and I went into the Sanctuary of the Snakemen together, and the FPS hit the red and didn’t stop until we were finished. And yeah, the chest was empty at the end, but never mind that. I suspect that the AI is killing the performance. The most common times for the FPS to hit the floor like that Drowning Pool song are: during the Maelstrom and inside the vaults.

So, yeah. Performance. It’s a real joy-killer.

Conclusion

Like I said, I’m really having more fun than ever. Apologies for the wall of text, but I thought that Isle of Siptah is excellent and I wanted to gush about it properly, while still being a crotchety crank criticizing clunky characteristics of my favorite game. :wink:

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PS: One thing I didn’t know where to fit into that whole rant was the already confirmed transfer mechanism between Exiled Lands and Isle of Siptah.

Please, for the love of everything in this game, make it an option that can be enabled on private servers but remains disabled on officials. Or if not, make it impossible to transfer inventory and thralls.

People are worried about Siptah players going back to Exiled Lands, for some reason, but that’s a minor problem. It’s vice versa that is a horrible idea: I can’t think of any better way to kill the map than allowing a bunch of level 60 players burdened with tons of T4 crafters to come in and start building mega-castles.

And yeah, that’s coming from a guy who built this in Exiled Lands. But that’s my point – I’m not going to build that on Siptah. Ever. It’s just not okay.

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I can’t speak on Siptah, since I haven’t begun there yet, but there’s a lot you say on the new mechanics that I agree with. Certainly cooking needs some work, but it seems the devs have said similar themselves, suggesting it should improve at some point. I can live with it as it currently is if it’s not going to stay this way.

A bit of the desert scrubland look would be nice on Siptah - it feels like home :wink: - I don’t feel it would be too out of place with the geographical location (it is after all equatorial) - maybe a slight variation, like an island that accumulated out of a reef. I can imagine maybe part of the reason they didn’t go for it at this stage would be precisely because it is the ‘iconic’ landscape of CE - easy to face accusations of being unimaginative if Siptah featured too much of the landscape most familiar from the Exiled Lands. But I certainly hope they find a way to work a bit in somewhere, for that nostalgic experience after a while in a new environment.

I was actually thinking about that idea a bit in the context of another thread I saw about the idea of the Midnight Grove being accessible from both maps. In theory this would be a good move in terms of economy of work (and drive space) (I’d guess it should only require a rework of the entrance and exits, rather than the whole dungeon) - and adding an old, familiar dungeon, at the right time (once enough time has past for it to be nostalgic - the old ‘we can’t miss you if you never leave’), in the right way, could prove popular (and even, at the right moment, trigger a burst of nostalgic players starting fresh games in the Exiled Lands). But done too early, or with poor communication (such as announcing two dungeons being added to Siptah, but then it turns out one is the Midnight Grove…) could just cause frustration. It’s a difficult line Funcom has to tread, as always.

Healing - I like your suggestion on the bandages. It does feel to me that there needs to be some way out of it if only, as you say, for those fat-fingered times. Getting most, or all of the healing benefit during the later portion of the animation wouldn’t alter the between combat healing aspect, but would still prevent the quick spam use. Another suggestion that I saw and quite liked was the idea of wraps de-stacking bleed progressively - that way you could hurriedly staunch a major bleed just to reduce the flow a bit, but still be bleeding because you don’t have time to bandage properly, which seems like it could be quite cool. Though, again, tough to balance, since you probably don’t want players on say 20% health with a couple of stacks of bleed to apply a wrap and still bleed out. On the other hand, all of this is mitigated somewhat by Aloe Extract now healing through bleed - mostly not having a solution to bleed was why I felt bandages ‘needed’ to be able to be cancelled. Now the aloe should cover most of that - and maybe the situations where it won’t are just situations we have to try not to get ourselves into… (Who am I kidding, there’s a part of Leroy Jenkins in all of us :wink: ).

Enjoyed reading your thoughts, hope mine added something :slight_smile:

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I don’t agree with T1 thralls being a real difference to having no crafting thralls.

Because there is no difference.

Materials are the same. Times are negligible. With them or without them, who even cares?

As a result, crafting is awfully grindy and super boring. Because there is no RNG on the map, there is no point in exploring the Wild Surges. No point to the lighting your hear on the map all the time. It’s just not relevant for the entire game but you have to put up with it anyway when you are ready to farm vaults. You’re not excited to go and explore where that lightning just hit. You know what’s there. Wild Surges give the same garbage thralls every time and honestly, it’s not dynamic at all.

Isle of Siptah feels vastly more static than the Exiled Lands ever were. Far more “fixed”. Lifeless. Not reactive to the player. Purge mechanic is sorely missed.

As for the combat, players still feel anemic compared to even T3 thralls, enemies are still a giant HP bloat time sink, and overall, combat feels very wonky. It’s either too hard or too easy, there is no comfortable midrange. Hitboxes on enemies are incredibly out of sync with their attacks while making it very hard for the player to connect their attacks. This is no Dark Souls in terms of dodging very clean hitboxes.

The healing changes are the real bummer here because of combat being ^^. That’s what keeps them from being a winner for me, because it just highlights how off the combat feels. It is not visceral, it’s a guessing game of dodging the wonky hitbox with the added burden of using a nerf stick to chisel away at a health bar. Combat is punitive and unfun because of this combination. Wonky combat and poor healing mechanics. The potion based healing is very burdensome because once again, this is not Dark Souls. The quality is just not there for this kind of chore. And the HP bloat is an archaic form of “difficulty” that Dark Souls never uses.

If you’re going to adopt the Dark Souls system, you need a) quality, and b) remove all the other archaic forms to this design philosophy, such as the HP bloat. Or, remove durability costs from weapons and armor and perhaps add a random element to crafting or acquiring them instead. Sort of how New World does its crafting. You cannot keep it grindy.

Again, you are mashing together various designs from other successful skill based titles, without having the foundation for what makes them tick underneath these systems. Quality hitboxes. Good, visual telemetry for when to dodge to survive. Conan Exiles has none of these. But you are trying to turn it into Dark Souls. The excessive healing from food under the old system was a bandaid solution because of the lack of these elements. It was necessary, because this isn’t Dark Souls. As a result it is not only punishing, but punitive. Life is not enjoyable.

Not allowing buildings to survive in the storm goes against the trailers selling stormglass as a means for buildings to survive the storm in the isle, which is honestly false advertising. I thought if we built that specific T3 in the storm we would have to contend with having to live in a constant purge mechanic and having our thralls need to defend our walls in order to have a base near higher end resources and/or be rewarded for surviving in a base by having said resources come to you instead of the current grindfest.

Balance is more punishing than ever on the player, and honestly everything has become super linear and a chore.

Which brings me to the last point:

Isle of Siptah is simply not rewarding enough. Exploration is not rewarded. Eventually you just ignore the Wild Surges and go about your chores. Ichor is nerfed but you can find brimstone everywhere. Sometimes even in steelfire form, but never any stone consolidant. Fishing traps are nerfed to make it very hard to acquire ichor considering how abundant brimstone has become.

Good luck building the T3 DLC tile sets now. We are back to needing 2 iron/steel per reinforcement days. How awfully tedious. The grind is awful. Everything has become a real chore! The weight on stuff is also painful. It’s painful to manage all the things you need to carry on you all the time now. Never mind carry this stuff back to your base, as you go about your daily chores.

Do you, devs, play this game? Or do you have hardcore players decide what “feels” best to them and then relay that gameplay experience to you ? Isle of Siptah is NOT for solo play, it’s for small clans that alleviate said grind and normalizes combat for having another player to share the burden with.

Conan Exiles has now officially shifted towards small group PVE content in mind. The solo experience is miserable to non-existent. Crafting is a nightmare. It’s just plain abusive for a solo player. I can say for a singleplayer, you have ruined the game for me. I can’t even go back to the “old map” because the new changes are just unsupported by what we currently have.

Isle of Siptah was NOT ready for primetime, not ready for early access because you have ruined the rest of the Exiled Lands for everyone else who is not playing this awful expac. It’s not like they are a separate experience and you can always “go back” to the old map if you don’t opt into early access.

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Agree with most of this especially the surges, the most boring thing on the map!
I did however run around to every single one and kill all the thralls for a few days just to level all the religions to tier 3.

The Ichor problem isn’t real though, i can get thousands in 30 minutes. There is 3 world boss spiders all next to each other that gives about 500, then go hit the sand reapers all bunched up in the center, ichor central.

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I do. A T1 crafter gives a 50% bonus to crafting speed. Queue up enough things, and the difference adds up.

It doesn’t. It gives “garbage” crafters. You can, however, get fighters, archers, dancers and bearers that go up to T3. It would be nice if it also spawned T2 crafters.

Isle of Siptah has notably fewer of those than Exiled Lands.

Look, I get it. The combat is wonky. It’s never been anything but wonky. But I really wish people would stop this “Dark Souls” nonsense. It kinda feels like you want to play Dark Souls, not Conan Exiles.

If I started complaining about how I can build a cobblestone generator in Minecraft, but can’t make anything like that in Conan Exiles, most people would tell me to go play Minecraft instead.

No, they aren’t. Just because people are comparing it to Dark Souls, doesn’t mean the devs are trying to turn it into Dark Souls.

And I think that’s part of the problem here. We’ve got a bunch of players complaining about the changes because they’ve grown used to skipping all the progression and having everything easier. The crafting costs might need tweaking – I don’t care about 2 bars per reinforcement as much as I care about 5 iron per 1 steel – but that has been the case for a long time now. We all just got used to crutches too much.

Incidentally, one of the planned major updates for Siptah will be the “economy” update:

Aaaaand that’s where you lost me completely. I mean, up to this point, you were raising valid concerns, but claiming that the changes ruined the Exiled Lands, too? It’s hard to see that as anything but knee-jerk griping.

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I like that when you get a thrall, it’s an achievement. In the base-game, you could get a T2-thrall to help you get Lian and the Cimmerian Berserker, and wham! You’d jump straight to T4-thralls.

The biome makes sense and blends into each other.

And as I never used the healing-wraps in the base-game, now they’re part and parcel of how to not die. Even the lowest-tier wrap is good enough to heal up before boss-fights. If the wraps bugs out and doesn’t heal you, place your gear somewhere safe, and remove the bracelet. It’ll reset the buffs, and the wraps will start working again.

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