My original Steam review:
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 304.6 hrs on record
Posted: Feb 17 @ 9:57am
Updated: Feb 19 @ 7:48am
EARLY ACCESS REVIEW
“Y’know. Before this very last community update, I probably would’ve recommended the game. They’re finally working on getting some not garbage combat, adding much needed replayability to the game. They were on a good path with lots of promising content for the future. Then, all of the sudden, they decided that once the game is launched, that’s pretty much it. They decided to cut basically all of the planned content, reducing the game to a less interesting reskin of ARK without the tames. The stuff they’ve already put in was a good start, but without more expansion, it’s worthless. You’ll get maybe a handful of hours (relatively speaking) mostly spent just hacking and slashing for the level grind, and then there will be literally nothing more to do.”
Community Manager (Jens Erik) [developer] Apr 27 @ 4:43am
"Hey there!
Just wanted to jump in and let you know that we rolled out a new patch last week that added a huge amount of new content to the game. The combat’s been revamped, there’s farming now, fast travel, the Purge, World Bosses, new building pieces, and a vast amount of bug fixes, crash fixes and optimizations.
When we leave Early Access we’re also adding two new play areas: A swamp and a volcano. We also plan to continue supporting Conan Exiles after Early Access launch. We’re not ready to give the game up just yet.
You can find a full list of everything we’ve changed and added here .
I would love to hear what you think about the game with these new changes"
Yes, Daddy Apr 27 @ 5:22am
"Community Manager (Jens Erik) I’m well aware of the update that rolled out. Like I said in the review, I think the combat overhaul is a good start, if still needs work. My problem is not with the existing content of the game, it’s with the amount of content that we’ve been told was supposed to come for the game that was then cut in favor of releasing it WAY earlier than it ever should.
If you’re looking for my review of the content itself and not the game state, I think it’s good for an early access game, a bit buggy but that’s the be expected. I think the game has a lot of potential. But like I said, without more expansion to make that content worth playing in the first place, I just can’t in all good faith recommend someone spend full price money on the game knowing everything that SHOULD have been.
If this game continued to stay in Early Access and continued to develop itself towards more of the larger scale content people wanted, I’d absolutely recommend it. I think the distinction between Early Access and a full game is important here because while there’s just as much chance the development can be abandoned while in Early Access, the whole point is to trust these developers to use the funding you gave them to build a game that meets the expectations given (not meaning a game’s bad if it doesn’t live up to people’s overexpectations, but that if something is said to be coming and then is cut purely to meet launch faster then that’s a problem).
Once the game hits full launch and all sales are made from the people who waited to see it out, there’s nothing to promise us that the devs will continue with anything significant for the game, which is especially worrying when the wording we’ve gotten every time cut content was brought up is basically “If we get to it” which to me means that if the game flops like it kind of did at first release, then it’ll likely just have its resources diverted elsewhere.
Namely, the city life content likely would have saved the entire game for me personally. I don’t mean things like the Set City, which while a good addition, is not what city life was described to us as. We were given the idea that the intent was for our bases to eventually become more expansive than a simple base and thralls were to become more complex than just a glorifed turret. We were lead to believe that we could build at least somewhat an imitation of a living, breathing city or settlement. This content alone would have given me actual REASON to go out and farm and fight mobs for certain drops: to keep my settlement alive and thriving.
At the moment, there’s no point to do much of anything except for expanding for the sake of expanding. If you’re not into PvP/sieging then the game quickly loses value because even if the combat is significantly better than it was before, it’s still not on a level of games like Dark Souls or a more recent example of Horizon: Zero Dawn where the combat is fun and fluid enough to justify playing the game just to play it.
In short, yes, I’m mostly happy with the last update and I’ll be playing the launch content as well to see what it’s like, but that’s because I already own the game and got it at one of its lowest price points when all of that sort of content was still believed to be in the works. That’s why I can’t recommend it in the current state without a more solid promise of future content that isn’t just small tweaks or minor content.
And yes, I’m aware that release dates and the like aren’t up to devs, and I’m not trying to target them, but they ARE our only direct line of communication with the people who ARE in charge of these things."
Called out the moneygrab that was cutting content to push launch, got the usual “Nah we just added some stuff, see? Let us know what you think!”, and then pointed out a whole bunch of larger issues and specific cases to which I got no response at all. So much for that, huh?
