Feedback on pet system

The addition of pets, and particularly with mounted pets, is something I’ve been hoping for a long time. With the recent release of Isle of Siptah I’ve recently spent some time with it and discovered a few major issues in the current design.

I’m playing with some friends and we’ve just got some new pets including one rhino. So when one of us dies while exploring the island we leave the rhino on Guard at his corpse until he gets back so he’ll have an easier time getting his stuff back when he returns. This goes without a hitch and we continue exploring and eventually build a stable to put our mounts in while we go explore inside a cave. However when we return we find all our mounts have just disappeared without a trace. We search around thinking they may have somehow gotten out of the stable but can’t find any sign of them so we finally return home to find all but the rhino parked at home. Still no sign of the rhino.

After a little bit of searching online we stumble across the answer to what happened. Apparently when you put in a pet in scouting mode he will eventually return to his home location, which is reset anytime you put him in guard mode. This brings up three issues:

  1. There is no way to locate a lost pet whom happens to be alive still.
  2. There is no tutorial explaining how scouting/guard works so players will likley only learn about this feature after having went through a similar experience, possibly losing a lot of gear and spoils collected after a long time.
  3. Guarding is a feature which pets which are strong enough to do so, will often be needed when away from home. Using this feature should not change the home location he returns to; there should be a separate option for setting his home location.
    Also when using guard he should stay there and guard until the player tells him otherwise; removing the set home location feature from guard should not cause the pet to return to the home location after some time as with scouting.

Edit: For item 1 above there is a way to find where your pet is. Here is how you do it.

  1. Open the in-game menu, On pc I normally just press ‘i’ for inventory
  2. Select the followers tab
  3. This will list all your pets, even ones you can’t find. On the far right of each one there is an icon that looks kind of like an eye. Click it and it will change to have a ‘dot’ in the middle instead of a slash.
  4. now open your map, on pc this is ‘m’ and look for an icon that looks like person
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Have you checked your follower’s tab? There is an icon that you can toggle to find your lost pet.

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I didn’t even notice that. I’ll check it out next time i’m in game, but i feel like their should be a tutorial covering that too.

Check the followers tab in the menu conan does not have lot of detailed explanation(apart from wikis), but it is safe to assume that if you put an animal or thrall in that case ‘on guard’ it is safe to assume they will stand ‘on guard’… your issue is one of the reasons we now have the tracking option =)

The tracking option will go a long way to reducing the frustration but I still feel that there should be some in-game tutorials for new players, which of course should be skippable because no one wants to do it twice.

Edit:
I want to make it clear that while the tracking option does remove a lot of the frustration, having had to use this in the first place will still make the player feel like the game is buggy unless the player understands how their follower got lost in the first place. This feeling is made worse by the fact that the follower will have transported, potentially a long distance away, requiring the player to spend significant time getting them back every time this happens. It is absolutely essential that developers do something to help players understand how these features work so they can avoid this happening.

For me simply having a separate option for setting the home location from putting them in guard would have made me assume he simply went back home and I would have checked where I set that location last but a tutorial could make this more clear.

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I agree some more things could be explained better… took me months to figure out I could put human flesh in the fluid press for blood lol

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I think the biggest issue here for me is the existing functionality for scouting/guard is not very intuitive, i.e. I would never guess that the expected functionality is expected. If there was a separate option for setting the home location from the guard that would help a lot but a simple in-game tutorial would help too. Although making the tutorial also have a bit of story to it helps make it less monotonous.

montana1
My comment about the follower staying where you left him when on guard was made to illustrate that if developers were to follow my suggestion of creating a separate option to set the home location guard should still work as it does now.

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Exactly montana1, although I’m guessing the lack of a tutorial is at least in part due to wanting to promote a sense of experimentation on the part of the player which can be a very intriguing part of any game.
However, the player still needs to understand the basic game mechanics and no matter how well researched they are some players are just not going to get some of it and that’s where in in-game tutorial comes in.

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