I remember (aging myself here) forcibly pushing and wiggling the cartridge on my Nintendo so I could play Castlevania. Now you can walk I-beams on a skyscraper with a headset. C E needs to evolve. I can’t put my old cartridges into the hand sets. I would imagine software is the same. I believe we need a Conan 2 built on a new engine and a dev team schooled in the art of communication. If only someone could take a crack at it. Hard pass on EA,
I keep seeing this sort of request and all I can think is ‘Why?’. Why would experienced CE players, who have already witnessed what Funcom does to games (and can see the same thing already being done to the new baby, Dune), want to spend more money on a new version that will rapidly wind up being treated the same way?
What needs to happen first is that Funcom needs to un-f*ck the stuff they have screwed up with this game. Start showing some evidence that they are capable of leaving a game in a reasonable state. Then maybe I might have some interest in a possible sequel. But until they show some evidence of care for this game and its players, why would I even consider paying them more money?
Might have a better chance tapping on Elon Musk to buy out the franchise and putting it into the hands of people who really know w.t.f. they’re doing.
Yes, it is. Software has been evolving and so have games:
Be careful what you wish for 
Alternately, they need to make things much worse, to the point of going bankrupt and freeing up the IP for someone more competent. A few years ago I would’ve added something like “and with more integrity”, but I’m not sure the industry even knows what that word means anymore 
After all of Musk’s “masterful gambits”, seeing someone who still thinks he’s some kind of a genius is like spotting a cryptid. 
That already happened. Well, technically they didn’t go bankrupt, but they did get completely purchased and ceased to exist as an independent entity.
FC is owned by Tencent, lock, stock and barrel, has been since 2020. Office buildings, name brand, game titles, all owned by Tencent. FC hasn’t existed as a separate company for about 5 years now, nowadays it’s nothing more than a nameplate that Tencent uses to brand certain games.
There might be a future in which Tencent allows CE to become abandonware, or sells the property to a studio that believes it can refresh the IP profitably, but no one should hold their breath. If there’s one thing Tencent is good at, it’s wringing every last penny out of every IP in their portfolio. As long as there is money to be made by keeping CE “alive” Tencent will do so, then they’ll discard it whenever it doesn’t have any value to them.
I know. I’ve been here much longer than that.
Which is why I said that the other way out of this situation is for Funcom to screw up even worse.
Granted, “bankrupt” might have been an imprecise word, but the idea is still the same: bumble around until the IP is not profitable anymore, then have Tencent sell it for one last drop of profit.
Maybe that’s a pipe dream, but you tell me what you think is more likely, given Funcom’s track record: that they’ll suddenly get their heads out of their nether dorsal orifices, or that they’ll run Conan Exiles into the dirt?
I can answer here brother giving my own point of view, because i have requested this a lot over the years.
Old engine!
So in my clueless opinion…
They cannot add anything to the game unless they have to remove.
Some of the nerfs or useless reason of existence is hiding behind this minor (or huge) detail.
They don’t have the correct tool anymore to advance the game, they abused its abilities for moneymilking with defected franchise and like all the companies, all they focus (so far) is money grabbing.
I am not in this company for years as many others are.
I have seen two different faces, true!
Yet i have not lost my whole faith, neither i believe that such a gem wouldn’t have money milking from other companies, nor p2w policy.
Competence? Strictly from a players view i start loosing faith, but not in the whole department. You see i only have complaints for game breaking bugs, to all the rest i cannot thank enough.
There’s no other game that i played so much and i don’t believe i ever find a game again to give so much devotion again.
Unless…
CONAN EXILES REBORN!
, So that’s why 
.
Yeah…the last thing we need is the guy who turned his AI into “mechahitler”.
HARD FVCKING NO!
While I wouldn’t want Elon in charge of anything (and was considering making a joke about how he would claim to be the best CE player ever, while actually playing like the devs do - unable to even walk through doorways…), claiming that he ‘turned his AI into mechahitler’ is also a complete misrepresentation. He made the same mistake multiple large companies have of training his AI on the internet. Every AI that has been fed a steady diet of social media for a while has at some point turned into mechhitler. It’s almost as if feeding social media filth into a ‘brain’ that cannot make proper value judgements leads to it believing all sorts of toxic cr*p. Which is why it would probably be useful if critical thinking was a little more widely taught… There’s plenty of things to blame Musk for, but blaming him for that is just ignoring every other company that has made the exact same mistake.
No, that is a factual statement.
Indeed, the update did not go unnoticed. By Tuesday, Grok was calling itself “MechaHitler.”
(The Grok chatbot spewed racist and antisemitic content : NPR)
His AI program literally has refered to itself as mechahitler. So no, that is not a misrepresentation, that is a fact.
Actually, the “mistake” that he made, and it has been already proven what the mistake was, is that he trained his AI very specifically using his own tweets (or whatever the hell he is calling them now) as well as other “approved” sources that he deemed were OK. AKA, the man making the ■■■■ Salute at the Presidents Inauguration turned out to be…WAIT FOR IT … A ■■■■! Who would have guessed it right? So no Dan, this was not just a “mistake”, this was Elon training his AI in a rather purposeful way and you are simply making excuses for the results which is exceedily disturbing.
Thank you for providing the source. Since I deleted my Xitter account a while ago, I rely on other sources of news about what’s going on there and I actually missed that particular tweet.
For anyone who doesn’t have the time to read the whole NPR article – or just doesn’t want to get depressed further – the article provided this link to the archived tweet, so you can see it for yourself.
And yeah… even though I didn’t want to believe it, that really did happen 
PS: Since we have flag-happy people on the forums, let me clarify a few things before someone smugly flags my post because it’s “political”. AI is not sapient and has no intrinsic understanding of satire. Therefore, an AI calling itself “MecaHitler” is not “satire”. Therefore, the only “political” aspect of my post is the fact that I consider it bad to make a program that portrays Nazism in a positive light. If that’s what you want to flag me for, knock yourself out and live with your own conscience.
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. Old engine is, indeed, a huge problem. It places some really heavy constraints on what they can add to the game.
But old tech alone isn’t what makes the devs careless.
It’s true that nerfing stuff is what you have to do when you can’t balance things in a better, more creative way. But designing something that is poorly balanced from the start, then nerfing it into uselessness is not something you do because of old tech, it’s something you do because you are either incapable of doing careful game design, or not given the time and resources to do so.
Conan Exiles is littered with elements that are useless and/or make no sense. I can’t think of a single system, a single gameplay mechanic, that doesn’t have at least one exemplar of “WTF? Why is this like that?”
It’s not the old engine and if there are people out there who are hoping that Conan Exiles 2 will be better because a newer engine will solve this problem, they need to let that hope go.
What we’ve seen in Conan Exiles is a result of organizational problems. Which ones? That’s a can of worms that I don’t want to open in this post.
You’re absolutely correct brother, but at the same time this has happened to me…
My friend Pauline has called me to create new characters on elder scrolls online. On my day 3 i am already bored no matter if the game is perfect and the content is endless.
I often enjoy 7d2d too, or other games. Yet like is like nothing like “this one” if you’re getting me. They did something right too not everything was wrong, is it? I still have fun playing this game, especially when i play with friends or role play.
Oh, they most certainly did. Conan Exiles captivated me right from the start, back in February of 2017. The ambiance was incredible and the gameplay was engaging.
There’s nothing wrong with wishing for a newer, better Conan Exiles. What I’m fervently opposed to is a newer Conan Exiles done by the same company that never changes.
I respect your decision to keep playing, but it’s not something I am willing to do. For me, personally, it’s like an abusive relationship, clinging to someone who keeps abusing me just because I remember what it was like to love them and keep hoping that things will change back to that. But in an abusive relationship, things don’t change on their own. They can change, but a lot of work has to go into it. And Funcent doesn’t put any work into improving.
I found better games to spend my time and money on. Better for me, obviously, but I’m glad I’m free from Funcom.
I’ve never had that in the first place.
Jokes and hate speech aside …
I was being sarcastic.
If you only had lived during the time of Hitler especially if you survived one of his concentration camps.
Now, who’s going to say that never happened?
There was a time when it was a good way for me to get news about my favorite book authors, from the authors themselves.
That time is long past. Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived 3 or 4 separate lives already, the way things have been changing over the not-quite-fifty years of my life.
No. That is you refusing to read what I wrote, taking a tiny part out of context and pretending that I denied what happened, just so you can continue making false claims about a political figure that neither of us like. This is a prime example of why I usually give up trying to engage with people who supposedly support the same political ideals that I do - falsely representing the other side does not make our position stronger, it makes it weaker.
I will explain it one more time so that you cannot claim to misunderstand - Musk did not chose to train his AI to become ‘mechahitler’ which is what you originally claimed. He f*cked up. THe exacty same way virtually every major company that has produced a public AI has f#cked up. Every single one of them has at some point gone rogue and started spewing insane (usually N#zi-based) propaganda. I am well aware that ‘grok’ called itself ‘mechahitler’ - I am denying your claim that Musk did it deliberately.
Deliberately misrepresenting political opponents is really bad practice, and it justifies them doing the exact same. Musk is a smug, arrogant, entitled tw#t. But trying to pretend that he is a N#zi devalues that word, and denigrates the very real experiences that my family and many others went through. Don’t do it.
Or you can just continue to deny the reality that is directly in front of your eyes. You do you, but anyone who actually looks into the situation will know what the fvck actually took place.
You can CLAIM one more time what you CAN NOT BACK UP, and what his own words prove otherwise. But sure, keep making those claims.
Except I haven’t. While deliberately justifying horrendous actions of individuals on the other hand has real actual repercussions. It enables them to continue their horrific atrocities at the very least. So in your own words:
And I do not pretend that must is anything. His own actions reveal him for what he is. And yes, I am well aware of what happened in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Both of my grandfathers fought in that war to stop those monsters.
I know that you’ve been around that long, and that you’re savvy. It felt strange writing that reply to you because I was was pretty sure you already know this. The reply was mostly for the benefit of anyone else reading who thinks that FC is an independent company when they’re not, and just on the small chance that you weren’t aware of this business nuance.
I believe that the history of Tencent tells us this isn’t going to happen.
Some reasons:
- Intangible, non-financial value:
An IP that is not directly profitable in and of itself can still have value to a company. Whether one thinks of it as a “loss leader”, an indirect form of advertising, or just a way of maintaining the reputation of the FunCom name because of the size of their portfolio, there are multiple ways that a non-profitable IP can still have value to a company. How much money would CE have to lose before Tencent would shut it down or sell it of? I don’t know, have no idea what that dollar figure looks like, but I’m of the opinion that CE is already in the red and has been for quite some time so Tencent is keeping it alive for reasons other than direct profit.
- Training and testing employees
This is another intangible value, but worth discussing as it’s own point. An application that requires ongoing development and support is a great place to hire in new employees who are not established in their careers.
It provides two functions:
a) To test your new recruits to see who’s willing to put in long hours for “special projects” (which is to say, crappy business-as-usual that’s disguised as “projects”, because every project is “special”. You get a bunch of people who are fresh out of school, or at least early in their career, who are willing to work 60 hours a week in a salaried position that doesn’t pay much and you run them through the gauntlet to see who comes out the other side.
b) To train those new recruits who show promise before assigning them to applications that are actually important to the company.
Applications that are financially dormant, or even losing some money, are perfect for these two functions. Old, well established applications are a great place to assign your new development and support folks who don’t know the company yet. Applications that are in “harvest mode” (just running out the clock until they become too unprofitable) are a favored place for companies to assign employees who are still early in their professional growth. If they break the product that’s not ideal, but at least they’re not breaking something valuable.
Personally, I think we’ve been seeing this for many months with CE. Ever since Dune became FC’s top priority it’s been quite clear that they have moved their best people to Dune and are just throwing whoever they have left over at CE. This doesn’t mean that they’re assigning people who they know are incompetent to CE, I don’t mean to insult the people who are trying hard to keep CE working, but it does mean that they are (in my view) treating CE as a proving ground and training area for newer and less experienced people. The people assigned to CE over the past year might be smart, and have potential, but they are not the seasoned veterans who know how to keep the product in tip-top shape.
How much longer can CE continue like this? I don’t know, but even when it reaches the end of its usefulness I’m pretty convinced that Tencent would not sell it or allow it to be taken over by someone else.
If you try some web searches for questions like, “Which games has Tencent sold to other companies”, what you get instead are a bunch of pieces about what Tencent acquires. From what I’ve seen, Tencent really doesn’t sell games, it seeming doesn’t even sell divisions, every thing I find talks about their acquisitions. As far as I can tell, once Tencent owns a company (or even a large stake in a company) they don’t sell games or IP’s, they just discontinue the game while retaining ownership of the IP. They’ve shut down a lot of games but I can’t find examples of them selling games.
And even if they did sell a game/company, it would take some more searching to figure out whether the “buyer” is another Tencent property because boy do they own a lot of companies.
Even when they don’t own a company, they usually own the most important parts of that company when they are a minority investor. For example Ubisoft. While on paper Tencent only bought a 25% stake in Ubisoft, in reality the transaction involved Ubisoft spinning off a new subsidiary that Tencent is a partner in, but that “subsidiary” has their most valuable IPs and is worth more than Ubisoft itself. It’s a business-fiction to call that a 25% stake, the reality is that Tencent bought more than 25% of the value of Ubisoft with that “25% stake”.
Now I know that will feel like a tangent to some people, it might even feel like a separate discussion - the the reason it’s pertinent is that Tencent doesn’t sell things, they buy them. And if they’re not profitable they get shut down, not sold off to some other company.
I used to hope for this same “pipe dream”, but after doing some reading about Tencent I don’t think it’s going to happen because I don’t think that’s the way they do business.
FunCom has been slowly running CE into the dirt for the past 5 years, after they were already owned by Tencent. If Tencent wanted FC to do a better job with CE they would have made that happen already. There would have been personnel shakeups, changes in marketing, revamping CE accompanied by a lot of fanfare or making a serious effort to build CE2.0, but none of that has happened.
We basically have no choice but to conclude that running CE into the dirt is apparently part of Tencent’s plan, and has been since they day they bought FC. Tencent doesn’t let franchises die by accident, they make business decisions about how they can either revitalize the IP or how long they can squeeze money from the IP before shutting it down completely. Sadly, however, they don’t sell IP’s, they just choke them to death and then shutter them.
From my point of view, that’s what I see they’ve been doing with CE ever since they bought FC.