New maps aren’t going to happen. Siptah was an experiment that more or less didn’t pass, I have little reason to believe it was even profitable. They also moved away from content locked behind a paywall.
New maps take a ton of time and effort. Officially made ones even more so since they need to have their own ‘shtick’ to them. Like Siptah’s Maelstrom. Otherwise its just a repainted Exiled Lands and not worth the purchase. Isle of Siptah was damn near an entire new game. I remember complaints about it being called Conan Exiles 2 when it came out, rather than an expansion. And that time spent on it should have been put into the game. That’s right, this community was very much against the idea of a new map when IoS was released. And probably would be again if another was in the works.
But then there’s the issue of a new map splitting the playerbase. A free map would still do it since each map is contained on its own map file. That’s a new character, and transferring characters is pretty much impossible. We had character transfers but it was buggy. The reason why is its using database functions on live databases. Its copying a character to a temporary database, deleting the old one, then copying to the new server. There was a ton of moving parts there that allowed for a ton of issues and its one of the reasons why its no longer with us, and well its been years now, so I doubt its going to come back.
Mods can do this, but they require two servers (or at least two instances) and a webserver to facilitate. They do something similar as above except instead of deleting a character, they overwrite instead. This works pretty well, but both server have the same mod running, and they are directly linked to each other.
This method could probably work for Funcom’s servers. But they would need to link a Siptah server to each Exiled Lands server. And a third map would increase the amount of servers they already have. Unless they do an extremely aggressive server merger to keep the number of servers even with each server having 3 servers each, this isn’t going to happen.
Then there’s the whole issue of some players being blocked unless they pay. A new map means a new thing to purchase. A new map will bring back old players, but not new ones to purchase the game. And bazaar items are pretty much already bought so the only revenue worth doing would be to purchase the new map.
This means you have ‘plebians’ stuck in Exiled Lands unable to interact with those hanging out on the newer maps. This can provide for some unfair advantages in PVP or even PVE-C as people get access to gear and resources others don’t.
Isle of Siptah did only two good things for us. The DLC stuff it came with were great additions and alone worth the price. But also the modding tools that gave our map creators something wonderful to work with. This is going to be your best source of new maps. These modders can and have put out maps that literally put both ‘official’ maps to shame.
We’re likely going to see some method of getting custom maps to console before we see a new official map. And that is a far better method. That’s where the effort should be.