It is nice really, from a development stand point it is a very curious case that has much to teach to the future developers, but I think the problem is that those who are developers today did not learned from the other developers of the past that solved these issues.
Unreal Engine, be it 4,5 and probably the 6 will also be the same, is good at one thing natively, and one thing only: Graphical Enhancement and Systems that deal with it.
It is amazing to make things in Unreal Engine, for me for example, because it is really good in everything I am not good at: Art, Animation, Animation Blueprint Control, and Integration of your art assets with code through C or C logically mirroring blueprints.
That is it. That is all Unreal Engine does for you. The networking native to Unreal Engine is terrible. The database support is basically the same we have in 1980s from DBase and Dataflex. The AI is probably worse than AIML from the 70s.
What this have to do with your problem ? Conan Exiles uses native Unreal Engine systems to do all that which Unreal Engine is good doing, and all that Unreal Engine is bad doing. It has very little “in house developed systems” which fundamentally work using the Unreal Engine native systems.
For a single NPC in a game like World of Warcraft, and old game that uses AI systems developed in the 90s and 2000s, if we were to compare the AI trees, one could say each NPC in World of Warcraft, which is like less than half those in Guild Wars, is like 10 times those used in Conan Exiles.
Not only that, but what Unreal Engine calls “blackboards” has much less data to work with.
While Unreal Engine is capable of using sensory data (meaning you can use the render system to actually render triggers like sound, smell or visual cues simulated to feed the attention system in characters to simulate their detection) Conan Exiles does not make correct use those systems, because it is not coded to create them. While the system is capable of using them natively from Unreal Engine, they are not used.
For that reason, the fewer Trees have the possible actions the NPC can perform, but the NPC dont have enough information to correctly choose which one, so it basically is coded to “try this”, “try that”, “try that other” and if nothing suits the “few data points” they have, they “wait”.
That is why an archer for example stumbling on a rock will keep trying to distance itself from the target, and if that specfic target never gets to them, they will take all the attacks they are targeted from other sources before changing their “idea of tactic” to get a weapon. And good luck with that by the way. Because the system is so nice that it detects the enemity by weapon drawn, but do not select the weapon drawn by the type of enemity, which makes your thrall “punch an armored sword swinging enemy” even if it has a weapon.
Of course, someone will ask “well, how can you know that if you cant know the source code of the game”.
Anyone can know the source code of anything that is in their computer. Specially someone who actually work on development and has the tools to do so. Plus, a lot on the modding kit only works because it has the code of the game, otherwise mods would not be able to know what classes or methods to call if they needed to call game systems.
But I do know that is also not that easy to change, because to change what fundamental parts of the game already exist, you need to change the fundamental parts of the game that use those, and the ones which uses these which uses those. So if you want to change how a player deals with the Thralls of another clan or another player not in their clan, you need to go back up until you find the changes needed on the fundamental code for the class of EVERY CHARACTER, and changes there might require changes on how EVERY NCP CHARACTER class work, and that might require changes on how thralls work.
It is not easy to make those changes, unless you create another actor from scratch and use the characters on the game as puppets that do what they are told. But even that wont solve the problem of interaction, UI, controls, and triggers, because those need to be in the character, and need to be passed to the controller to work.
And still, you will need to change how the environment gives information to your thralls. Like for example teach them that an obstacle to them is an obstacle to enemies, and use the oh so nice Unreal Engine math for rendering to also read the environment. Create a spline from the line trace for a wall and that NPC position, and then it can use that information to know how to entrap enemies.
Then you get the environment to teach them about other allies, which weapon they use, and where they are, so they do not fight like each of them is fighting everyone else, and they maybe they start to funnel enemies from one to the other, like basic NPCs in World of Warcraft crappy dungeons.
But it is very easy to get work done and just tweak the parts that do not work. So the devs did not made a “garbage work”, it is just not that easy to build up work that was done before, with tech from before, mindset from before, and keep it on par to things that are made today with resources of today. It is easy to get a game made today and trash a game from 2019, even if updated, there are things you cant really update without making another game, the thing people talking about Ark do not understand.
There was never “Ark upgraded to Unreal Engine 5”, the Ark made on Unreal Engine 5 is another game made on the image of Ark that was made in Unreal Engine 4. The garbage the people saying this argue is like arguing the “New Bettle” is an “Old Bettle” upgraded to the Golf Chassis, which is a stupid thing.
