How much experience do you have with game development? I’m not asking this as an attack, but in order to know how to phrase my explanation of the problems that idea has.
There’s a difference between “theoretically possible”, “doable in practice”, and “cost-effective”.
Experience: Outside looking in. I know what I’ve seen and been told. No firsthand experience in the game industry. But secondhand info combined with my own knowledge of software development is enough to fill in the gaps in between.
I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t be doable in practice or cost-effective if others have succeeded at it. It might be beyond Funcom’s abilities for all I know, but it’s not impractical and it has merit, even financially.
The big thing would be time, and how long it would take to develop it. It would be a long-term goal, probably. But I’d rather see it get worked on over time than not at all.
If you’re a software developer yourself, you should already understand that the main problems here are:
So let’s talk about complexity first. Steam already has a lot of this logic implemented. Updates take a diff between what the user has and what the user should have. It even does binary diffs on individual files, so you don’t have to download each file completely. On top of that, they allow you to add multiple branches to your products. Those are meant for beta programs and not for keeping a version history of your game – Conan Exiles uses that to allow you to switch between live and TestLive – but they could theoretically be (ab)used to offer older versions.
Sounds great, right? The complexity is practically solved. One tiny little problem, though. Conan Exiles currently takes more than 100 GB on my hard drive. If Funcom wanted to offer 10 different versions of Conan Exiles, we’re talking about going up to 1 TB of storage. And then you have to take into account redundancy. Is Valve really going to be okay with shouldering that cost?
If Valve isn’t okay with it, Funcom would have to invent their own system that does the same thing as Steam. So they would have to shoulder the cost of both the complexity and storage/hosting. Think about it, one of the biggest distribution platforms out there says “no can do, I don’t want to pay for this”, and now your company has to do it? That’s kinda like Amazon saying “we can’t/won’t do what you want in our cloud” and then you go “Fine, I’ll make my own cloud that’s just like yours, but better!”
Yeah, I’ve seen your claim that others have done it with games of comparable size. Can you point me towards a game of the size and complexity comparable to Conan Exiles, that has the option to select any version you want? Not two versions, mind you. You mentioned Minecraft, so I would expect at least 10 versions to be available.
You didnt even get into the problems of having servers to accommodate all the different pvp/pve combinations.
maprooms, official servers, the ENTIRE pvp community sheesh mate I hope you’re not in a hire/fire position wherever you work
To be fair, he did say “allow people to […] run the version of CE the like on their clients and servers”, so I assumed that meant singleplayer, co-op, and private servers only.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/83zasd/are_games_centrally_stored_on_valve_servers_do/
Yes.
The only game I own that’s as large as Conan Exiles is GTA V, so I can’t offer any perfect comparisons to that scale, but I can certainly do much better than Minecraft.
Not a hundred gigs, but 10 gigs in that many versions is still a big deal. 7DTD is not exactly a polished piece of software, itself, either.
Not sure exactly how big it gets, but the system requirements state that CS:GO needs 15 gb to run. Obviously it gets a bit of bias since it belongs to Valve, but I’d say it still counts.
Stellaris is 10 GB, so still not massive like CE, but comparable.
I’m sure there’s more out there.
I’m not under any illusion that this would be done with the snap of a finger. I’d guestimate a year of development before they (Funcom) could offer this service in a bug-tested and reliable state, if they chose to pursue it.
Its hard enough to keep one version bug free, let alone multiple versions.
“V2.1 textures are bad.”
“V2.3 has missing recipes”
V2.1.1 textures are fixed but now recipes are missing”
“V2.3.1 now has all recipes but textures are broken for xxxx”
I don’t expect any would be ‘bug free’, but with multiple versions, you can pick your poison and choose the one you hate least.
The difference between Conan Exiles and the games you mention is an order of magnitude, in its most literal sense (10x). Given that, I’m just going to give up trying to change your mind and “agree to disagree”.
forget everything
all I ask as a gamer here,is just a damn tested update that won’t bring this kinda obvious massive bugs.
I mean OBVIOUSLY they didn’t test it enough,look at the problems we’re having come on…
I didn’t see you go live to showcase that it’s working for you??
He’s playing on PS5:
They don’t have the 2.4 patch yet, so it’s still working for him.
I am sorry to see you feel like that and i really do not want to look like a smart ass for the X time.
The following was posted by me as a reaction to Siptah Announcement…ofc another wall of text…i just copy/paste the text for you…
"Only by seeing the expressions on Joel Bylos face at the start of the stream, you already understand why this is a simply another fart from Funcom…another unfinished money grab…
We get a new game which is still the same game Conan Exiles: The Exiled Lands. We get probably a amazing map(graphic wise) Thumbs Up to the guys that do this kind of work for Funcom.
I have a simple question Funcom. Why do we even get Early Access? Again?! Really?!
Meanwhile…
Conan Exiles: The Exiled Lands is still in Early Access, in no way it’s looking like a finished game…without the MODDING COMMUNITY you would NOT have a game, Funcom. BY allowing modders to create their own game, really , Thank You(x1) Fancon.
What happend with “We will only put dlc’s under Buy to Play model and any other additions to the base game will be for free?” Oh no, they give us a “new game” in Conan Lore…Lucky, very lucky Funcom to own The Conan World…only so they can ask for even more money. Thank you(x2) Fancon 
Now that Conan: Isle of Siptah comes on Early Access, we get to test the same core game once again!Thank you(x3) Fancon!
Seriously? No way 
or maybe still?
The modders already achieved, what and how, Funcom failed to do…For FREE(y1)!!
US the ones that PLAY your game we got all of this for FREE(y6) from OUR AWSOME modders.
Thank You(x4) Fancon for giving us the chance to keep on testing current unfinished Conan Exiles: The Exiled Lands! And the new unfinished Conan: Isle of Siptah! Thank You(x5) Fancon!
Now… i will most likely buy this one also, making Conan Exiles game the most expensive piece of unfinished crap i own… Thank you(x6) Fancon!
I’m a real Funcom supporter. Age of Conan, Secrect Worlds was not enough for me. Thank you FANCON(x7).
X wins over Y by 7 to 6. GG FANCON! "
DO IT WHEN IT MATTERS, NOT WHEN IT IS TO LATE!
And i was only asking for a free beta status for Siptah…and only have it sold at full price on release…This would have avoided a lot problems that are now present on Exiled Lands, but i camed to realize that they could not find another way to fix/rework then Early Access 2.0 .
I will quote myself.
Savage Wilds?
You know what i mean now? And we are only at the begining…
I will permit myself to quote @Multigun for a last time and ask for a map of it’s own 
. Maybe @Testerle
Here’s how the testing works.
First they test it in their dev environment. Pretty much to make sure the thing can even start up.
Next they push it to a beta-test environment which a few people help get some bugs reported and make suggestions.
Next they push it to testlive where the rest of the CE community can do their testing.
Finally they push it to live.
The dev environment isn’t going to find the bugs listed in this thread. There’s simply not enough people. For an update to come out bug free in this sense would take literal years between updates.
The beta as mentioned in the thread about Chosen of Asura, has a few dozen players, modders, and whatnot. Again, its not enough to fully test for an adequate amount of time. This would take months between updates and up to a little more than a year (and still wouldn’t catch everything).
Testlive is open to the entire population. Its opt in, and has the best chance of catching bugs and would take only weeks between updates to ensure all the bugs are hammered out.
Here’s the problem. That last one isn’t getting enough players. Let me explain why.
Its not enough to go ‘game broke fix it.’ Like many people in the forums do. Its not enough to say ‘this is bugged when I do this’ like even many reasonable people try to do.
What they need is reproduction steps. So that they can cause the bug in their test environment. If they can’t reproduce the bug. It effectively doesn’t exist. For example, if you have a crash when you craft an item. This is an example of bad reports:
I crash when I craft
I crash when I craft this item
I crash when I craft this item here.
You get the idea. They get progressively better. But we need to narrow it down. Try this:
I crash when crafting X item at Y station, but not Z station. I am playing on X map, at the coordinates x, y, z. When I play at Y map the crash still happens. My computer specs are xxxxx, running OS version Y.
That gives them a great starting point. It points to a particular station, and shows it is not map related. Also they get system specs so they can determine if its something with how the station interacts with the system. Say for example the report is an AMD card and they do it with an Nvidia and get no crash, but when they test it with AMD and see crashes, they know which part of the code to deal with.
But even with all that. Even with every information on reproduction, and the ability to see the crash happening. Sometimes the fix isn’t immediate. There’s no check boxes in the devkit that says ‘fix crashes’. If there were, they’d check them all. But no, they have to figure out solutions to the best of their ability. And they truly do their best. They want the game to be free of crashes, bugs, exploits, and other issues. They DO play the game too. And they DO want it to be a game people want to play.
And then there are times some bugs can’t get a fix. I’ve seen games that have been in active development for over 20 years with bugs that date back to 1999. Bugs older than some of the forum users here. Its not that people don’t care, some things just don’t have evident or even feasible solutions. It happens.
Repeatedly asking modders to make you a whole new map is… well, let me quote Simon Travaglia:
Made me chuckle as well…arguing about mods with the one guy that creates the finest available
LOL, you dont get out that easy. Just sit back and let the thread go crazy, and welcome to CE forums. 
It was heavily tested.
