This post explores what both games can gain from one another.
Both games have very clear pros and cons, but they also complement each other remarkably well, if they were to be combined on the game mechanical level.
If Fallout 4 and Guildwars 2 had a baby, you’d have get Fallout 76. Well engineered!
If ARK were this pretty girl taking a shower and got bit by a spider, she’d mutate into Conan Exiles. Beautiful and graceful!
See, Fallout 76 solves every single problem that dogs Conan Exiles, yet it’s style, world, graphics, animations and combat remain inferior to Conan Exiles.
In F76 you never run out of things to do, with several intersecting gameplay loops that remind me of GW2 with public events, currency based fast travel, and rewarding exploration and quests found through that.
In Conan Exiles, routines divided by distance are your long term motivators. Go to the volcano, get gold and thralls. On the way to the den, kill a world boss, then get jhebbal sag priest while buying more rocknose eggs, to make goldnoses, which in turn makes more gold for more rocknose eggs, use maproom to get back to base. Mine silver, search for named thralls in Shep city…
Location based routines.
The resource gathering of both games follow a different paradigm:
In F76 you gather scrap. A majority of the scrap is open world however, which means if someone loots it first, you can’t loot it. But everything in chests is instanced to each person. Junk weighs a lot, and you have to salvage this into resources to lower the weight. You can stash the junk simply by “plonking down a C.A.M.P.” , press 'R" on it, and then “T” to “transfer all junk items”. This sort of convenience is incredible.
The resource gathering of Conan Exiles we know. But the encumbrance build offers a genre-unique ability to maintain full movement speed, regardless of weight. If compared with F76’s meta of deploying, then entering power armor when one is encumbered, in order to become un-encumbered, so one can fast travel to one’s base for free, or spend caps relocating the base to your location…… I kind of think CE’s model is better, because you can keep grinding and grinding and grinding until your 600 slots are up, then return to base, whereas in F76, it’s not adviseable to be encumbered at any moment or time, because it drains stamina even when running normally, and when your out of stmina, you mvoe like a snail and are a sitting duck. Not good.
The micromanagement in Fallout 76 is superior by leaps and bounds to CE’s manualist resource management.
When crafting, all resources are directly pulled out of the "player stash" (a player-only access instance of an inventory. All stashes in the world are instances of the same stash) Even if your not anywhere near your stash, any crafting station will magically pull the resources from your stash…which is incredibly awesome.
In Conan Exiles it makes sense that resources are manual and encourages set up like these:
It generates gameplay and makes sense in a dark-ages setting.
But it’s tedious…so painfully tedious. If you play CE for 7 month, you wanna kill yourself everytime you have 12 leathers, 43 bark, 13 branches, 23 oil, etc etc etc…a little bit of everything, and you godda stack that up into a million little seperate boxes each with it’s own categories to make sense of it all.
Fallout 76 is devoid of any tameables. Which is ok. Turrets don’t have to be fed.
The gear in F76 looks atrocious. Conan Exiles is superior in this category by leaps and bounds…
The modability of gear in F76 however, makes up for this massive shortcoming.
Ranged Combat …… Let’s just say shredding a pack of ghouls with a gattling, or headshotting something with a silenced sniper rifle then hearing “cha-ching!” cannot be compared with toinking an arrow. It’s not even Legolas cool. This is subjective though.
Melee Combat… F76 can pack up and go home, cuz Conan Exiles is the king of melee combat in the survival genre. Teliths sorrow makes a PowerSledge look like a halloween prop from the bargain bin.
Character models…. You can re-customize your character in F76 at any time through a menu. But not even that can save the ugly mugs of the Fallout series. But CE needs this feature. Seriously. The character quality in CE are second to non in the survival genre.
Now… a subject very close to my heart.
Griefing and PvP.
Holy shyte Funcom. You’ve got your backside handed to you by Bethesda there.
Let me break this down…
In CE, people have the freedom to frak each other over.
In F76, people have freedom without frakking each other over.
Both worlds are lawless. Both settings send civilization out the window. Both settings put a lot of freedom into the hands of players to customize the world to their liking. Public plots, and private plots. And yet… Fallout 76 is completely clear of player distress without feeling like a holiday theme park.
CE brings the worst out of people, because it plays right into conflict zones such as territory and dominance. This is perfect for creating gameplay in PvP…but for fraks sake… this makes PvE a living hell reserved for pedophiles and mass murderers, locked in a purgatory of torture against which they can do NOTHING against, for not even Funcom will help.
Bethesda doesn’t even HAVE to do any adminning because the system they put in place accounts for human nature.
I played 4 hours of F76 beta… and I have not seen a single person get griefed. People EVERYWHERE, carrying guns, but not a single person shot at one another.
In CE, you got people spamming foundations all over the place in a mouth-foaming territory-grab frenzy of epic proportions, claiming they want to build public market places…. Not a single chest can be shared or PINNED. Only public maprooms make sense.
In F76 you got people defending public workshops cuz guess what…. Stashes are instanced and all amenities are public. OMFG…. WHAT!? Public market places are VIABLE!?!?! People in PvE can ACTUALLY build public market places without ■■■■■■■■ other people over?! No way! That’s actually a thing in PvE? /sarcasm
How is it, that people can have the same experience in F76 as they can have on CE… without the grief?
If this is intended design then… Jesus. CE’s official server days are numbered.
Now. Onto other subjects.
In F76 you know each area has a story and several interiors/dungeons to explore, and cross-over quests and breadcrumbs - It plays like an MMO within a survival game, with a rich layer of crafting. When it boils down to it though, and you consumed all the content in F76, pimped out your power armor, built a fortress that you can take with you everywhere, what’s to keep you going?
In Conan Exiles, this is usually accumulating more resources and land in preparation for future content drops……
In F76, I think it will be more than that, because they actually want the players to play with eachother… not against eachother. Players will eventually build tradeposts and cities of their own on public workshops (plots), and people will join in to defend it against purges and ALL benefit from that.
And even those who want to play against each other will find the F76 PvP system deeply rewarding. I’d know… I usually hate PvP, but I had a blast on F76 doing it O_o . As opposed to the CE system where it is just a total waste of time for one or the other. To have to resort to cheating tells you something about a system… In F76 there will come a day when people will exploit, but by the gods they patch that quick. I mean REALLLLY blazingly fast.
Ya know…. Coming to think of it, I realized now that PvE has been an afterthought in both ARK and Conan Exiles.
For the first time, a build-em-up survival game actually makes a serious and conscious effort of incorporating PvE into it’s design and actually make it co-exist with PvP. I realized how I am hardcore PvE, and that I’ve been playing survival games where PvE was a mod, not the intended design.
This post was originally suppose to put both games in equal footing but I’m at a juncture now, where I’m not sure what to make of CE official PvE servers now, except to thank the team for having provided me with a game that kept me entertained through good and bad, until F76’s release, to whom I’d probably say the same to, when Star Citizen arrives.
Maybe in the grander scheme of things, games are stops between a long journey, more than something one should hope to see evolve with the times.
I’m not going to let me stuff decay on the official servers on CE quite yet. 7 month is a lot of attachment…but something just died inside of me. Like… I feel like I suddenly don’t care anymore. That griefer’s dick structure around my base in CE is but a joke now compared to the power armor I picked up in Appalachia. Ya know what I mean?