[First Time Posting] New Player/Main Plot (Exiled Lands)

Hello exiles!

First time post, about 500 hours played.

I recently got a friend into Conan and we delved into the main exiles plot- I played completely ignorant and let him figure it all out. Some points that came up:

1) The Diadem of Kings is not really clear where or what to do.

  • The staff of the Triumvirate mentions that the Priest King went north to battle Tyros, but it was unclear beyond that (“someone probably smelled him”).
  • Friend was drawn to the circle of swords and mistook the death of the Archivist as the priest king. Nearby tablet pointed towards Xullan.
  • After Black Keep, went towards Mounds of the Dead (“smell them”), interacted with the NPC there.
  • Mostly on a whim/exhausted other options that my friend decided to go west/check out the tomb.

Suggestion: Finding a scrawled note/journal on the dead explicitly saying Priest King was interred to the west would be enough to make everything click. (If this already exists we never found it).

2) The Shining Trapezohedron

  • The staff doesn’t really help here (“Dangerous line of questioning”)
  • Couldn’t really find hints leading towards the Well of Skelos outside of it being “the obvious final dungeon”. (Between Staff/Warmaker/Archivist)

Suggestion: At this step, the staff could say “Bring me inside the well within the tower in the volcano. All will be revealed!”. Use the dialog originally meant for the Well of Skelos (“You will be cleansed”). Upon defeating the Degenerate/getting the Trapezohedron, the staff’s dialog updates to a “Ok fine, you win… now what do you want to do?”

3) Post “Main Plot”

Nothing really wrong here, it’s just kind of an underwhelming ending.
Suggestion: Have the final step be to meet Conan and talk. He could offer 2 options:

  • A) Further adventures in the Exiled Lands (Essentially pointing towards other dungeons like Wine Cellar); Collect the 10 Maguffins. Possibly give Fragments of Power; Hard content stuff.

  • B) “The Player, Conan and Razma set off for further adventure, taking a ship towards XXX, before getting shipwrecked on a mysterious island…but that’s another story (Upload character to the Island of Siptah?)”

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Yeah, the main “plot” has always been kinda vague. I mean, if you keep exploring, you’ll eventually run into something that tells you what you need to do to get rid of the bracelet. But a lot of the time you’ll just be groping in the dark.

The plot, of course, is not really a main part of the game anyway. I don’t think we really need quest journals, or exclamation marks on the map pointing us to quest locations, or any of the other features so common in modern adventure games. But it would help if there were more consistent hints towards the critical locations.

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I think the clarity level along the lines of the other hints would be ideal. Or on hints towards the scourge stone (where the other-voice-elemental tells us where the 3 pieces are, but not specifically).

It’s a solid game overall, and I had a hard time not spoiling it for my friend…but it was fine in the end.

I think even just putting a journey step to check out the barrow would be enough (that was essentially all he followed to get him to the Dregs), so that does work.

I agree- don’t want “!” marks or icons pointing. Exploring kinda blind is part of the joy in this game!

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I think the main thing is that some of the connective bits are on npcs you may entirely miss. I mean, if you’re exploring around the mounds it’s a bit hard to miss Braga as he’s standing by himself out in the middle of a pond, but I think he’s the only one who mentions that the area was an ancient battlefield (and therefore, the ‘battlefields’ mentioned by the staff). I get that Funcom probably didn’t want too many friendly npc’s in the game but the current austere amount isn’t quite enough.

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This is true; Conan basically works on the “Dark Forest” concept where you just have to assume everyone and everything is out to kill you…so even if you DO see NPCs, there’s really no reason to think they are have dialog until you’ve already come in swinging and realize you don’t hurt them.

This was a bit of a problem for my friend- the way we entered Sepermeru was near the “Bad” end of town, so my friend just assumed the entire town was hostile and avoided it entirely most of our play. There really was no reason to think otherwise, as every other “town” we had come across up to then was hostile, so why would this be different?

This was too bad, as he missed out on meeting Conan for a large chunk.

The easy solution would be a few more NPCs, maybe ones that call out as you get near “Easy there exile, come and warm yourself by the fire”.

A more complicated solution to this could be a renown system of some kind where you can bring X to the faction (like Scout Reports to Valeria in Siptah). Give them what they want, gain renown… take from their chests/take their members as thralls and lose renown.

With enough renown, they stop attacking you.

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In a similar vein, a while back I suggested a sort of ‘disguise’ system to be added onto outfits as a full-set bonus. Wear an entire outfit (i.e. Darfari, Hyena, Black Hand) and you can walk into that factions hub without drawing aggro on the same level as Sepermeru.

I mean, with the game as-is it’d just really be a way to walk in and get things like cooking recipes/lorestones/whatever without having to ape on everyone. There’d have to be some kind of npc overhaul adding a bit more meat to them from a ‘has more than just battle taunts’ aspect for it to have any real legs to it rather than just being a novelty.

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I think this is the most jarring issue of the game that they should fix before adding new content. Fixing the giant Mummy of the Ring plot hole in particular (how do you not include/mess up the climax/final boss?). I don’t want complete hand-holding and agree that really obvious quest markers are not my preference, but they would be an improvement to what is currently not there.

I think they never intended there to be clear signs as to where to go in the “main plot”, at most a breadcrumb trail so player would have to explore by themselves.

Keep in mind that finishing the main quest will delete your character, so its not something most people even want.

I will tell you this!
You cannot imagine, especially in pvp servers, how many players never end the story!
I believe that the greatest reason above all is the end!!!
It just doesn’t worth it :man_shrugging:.
Me personally I may done it countless times, but it’s me :laughing:, I didn’t follow the lore of the game however the first time, not even the signs :rofl:, I follow YouTube! Others wiki!
It seems like a work under progress however, they didn’t polish it for a reason we are about to find out not in the far future I guess…
Yet again, this is just a guess :wink:

That’s me. I never ended the story because I always find more interesting things to do on the Exiled Lands. And I’ve played CE on PS4, XBox and now PC for three years now.

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Oh I met decades, I know my dear friend and I agree 100%

Thank you for that. It was a very pleasant read and I loved your suggestions.

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