Nobody in their right mind would play this.
Really, our characters sometimes die for no reason, nevermind the current disconnect issues.
Honestly? Play something else.
A hardcore mode works best for a game with rapid progression where you can restart (relatively) quickly if you fail, that’s not the case for CE.
Not my cup of tea, but you could certainly self-impose these things on your own play though: don’t use thralls, make it permadeath for yourself, don’t have clans, and impose limits on how often (if it all) you can respec attributes and/or feats.
Obviously, it become a different thing on a server with other players – because then you are relying more on an honour system that everyone will abide by the same rules. I suppose an admin could impose punishments for those who don’t follow those rules.
If you wanted to get hardcore realistic about some of the survival elements, you could impose some restrictions on use of certain tools and crafting recipes until certain things are unlocked first (like certain vocational journey steps might have to be completed before you can even make basic tools). Lots of things can be self-imposed to give yourself a greater challenge, or to make some things more realistic.
In general, I am in favour of more customization options than less – so yes, in theory, the server settings and admin powers could allow for some of the options you’ve suggested here. It doesn’t hurt the game to have more settings options, to cater to different play styles.
the game is already pretty hardcore and requires an inmense amount of time if you want to avoid getting wiped.
death being permanent and erasing your well earned recipes is one of the most insane things i ever hear.
And before thinking in making more “hardcore” my approach would be to make more focus in the “survival” aspect of the game.
Currently there is no real incentive to stay alive other than to not lose your loot, if you have any.
you can “abuse” many of the death mechanics to travel large distances including dying in the new dungeon to enter in the “matrix” where you simply dissapear from the server entirely. i am saying this because it seems like this is intended. but i do not think that encouraging people to die to save the loot is a good message/idea considering that is the extreme opposite of “survival”.
Hell, you can even summon the loot from your corpse.
look at other survival games and how they manage the survival aspect, is more prominent.
you can break a bone, then you need first aid, and tools to heal you.
maybe you get a disease then you need certain cure
if you run too much you get fatigue, then you need to rest.
food and water are far more important so you need to plan how you are going to survive.
i know that maybe other survivals have a different design by default, but this game is supposed to be “survival” but the survival aspect is what lack the most…
that is how i would make it more “hardcore” but hey, i understand if people doesn’t like any of that and prefer the current version.
Conan was more similar to that way back in early access, you really had to eat those bugs to make it to the river without dying of hunger… and most new players did before they ever reached it…
Same with the temperature system, on initial release it was much more harsh… sure now we got some of that difficulty back with the removal of the old vitality perk making you “impervious”, but you can already see people confused and complaining about cold resistance gear yet it’s nowhere near what it used to be… where you were dying of heatstroke just north of the noob river unless you had heat res armor
Basically what I’m trying to say here is that record shows if anything… the game has been moving more and more away from the survival genre… it’s pretty much a RPG at this point with the occasional need to eat… As such, I’m not sure how much of that will be coming back…
Runescape introduced an optional “hardcore ironman” mode many years ago. These players played on the same servers as everyone else, just with a perma-death option. And yes, lag and disconnects were an issue with Runescape, too.
And there were people who leveled up all skills to max, completed most, if not all, of the quests (some of which required venturing into the PvP zones), and then eventually died randomly to an unlucky lag spike or carelessness. The thing was, whenever one of these “hardcore ironman” characters died, it was broadcast in the chat across all servers, so it became kind of like a status symbol to show off how high you could reach before kicking the bucket.
But I guess you’re right, no-one in their right mind would play that. Takes a special kind of crazy to do that. Thing is, those crazies do exist. Not sure how popular such a feature would be in Conan Exiles, but it’s been done before, in relatively similar circumstances.
That’s what Funcom caters most to. All the videos promoted in the launcher: building. Latest change to the building system with the new construction hammer. Making farming easier (first step golems). Etc. etc.