Interesting interview

An interesting interview with J. Bylos. The interview talks about plans after the release, problems with mounts, sorcery, etc. Also he tells what will happen at the end of the game (the game have an end?).

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Thanks for posting, was interesting to read the following

-----“As long as I have something to say about it, Conan: Exiles never gets loot boxes,” claims Joel Bylos from the Norwegian company Funcom
-----"We want to add new countries. At the moment we have plans for eight expansions, but also for loose-purchase cosmetic armor. “But that will be ordinary, paid parts without a random element and without the equipment giving the player benefits”

I used Google Translate to translate the webpage, so some of this may be wrong. However Google Translate is improving, and these sentences made a surprising amount of sense:

(Quotations are quotes from J Bylos)

“We want to add new countries. At the moment we have plans for eight expansions, but also for loose-purchase cosmetic armor.” But that will be ordinary, paid parts without a random element and without the equipment giving the player benefits.

“We do have more systems in mind that we would like to elaborate. Like sorcery. But at some point you have to draw a line and say: this is the basic game and it must be robust.”

"At the beginning of the game you are an outcast in the Exiled Lands. You wear a bracelet that ensures that you can not leave the country. At the end of the game you get the choice to take off the bracelet and leave the country. If you do that, your character will be deleted. That sounds dramatic and it is. But it is primarily a way to give the player a natural choice to finish the game. You can also choose to stay in the country and then you can continue playing. "

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https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fgamer.nl%2Fartikelen%2Finterview%2Fconan-exiles-een-aanpasbare-penis-is-een-verademing%2F

Translate link.

Also, the original link has a naughty word. Actually the article is NSFW.

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What a great find. All those who were concerned about the future of this game should read this article.

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Oh yes! Just the idea of some purchasable elements is enough to give me lots of confidence. I have a feeling we’ll be playing this game for quite a long time.

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Not sure if the translation was right, but it looks like they said there were plans for 8 expansions. That sounds promising.

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Bad that J. Bylos is not on the forum. He is only on reddite. He could answer.
This part interests.

At the moment we have plans for eight expansions, but also for loose to buy cosmetic armor. "But that will be ordinary, paid parts without a random element and without the equipment giving the player benefits.

thanks for this interview.

““Something like the Radiant AI in Skyrim, where residents have certain behaviors depending on the time of the day.” That was not feasible, but could be added to the game later (like riding animals).”

Very cool, city-life is still planned, I want it so much.

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One thing to keep in mind when reading interviews - especially after the wording used when they added the frozen north - what they’re refer to as expansions may end up being things like the post-launch implementation of features that didn’t make it during the EA period. While it no doubt means that they have plans for separate purchased add-ons; the seemingly high number leads me to think that that is the case.

That’s good. In the initial announcement, they phrased it in such a way for some of the features that, taken literally, it meant they would definitely never happen. It was never clear whether it was intentional or sloppy writing, and they locked down all discussion of it on the Steam forums.

Radiant AI in Oblivion/Skyrim included a ‘sandbox AI’ system, where NPCs would wander around, sit in chairs, and talk to one another. It was based on proximity and pathing to local objects. Not too much of a stretch to add it in, but it depends on whether their AI guys will be available to keep working on it. I almost feel like you can see fragments of that system when you enter Sepermeru, with the neutral AIs wandering around.

I’m definitely hoping for it, as part of a potential Settlement expansion. Part of the draw for a game like this is how much the player can customize their bases — it would be really cool to be able to create your own living, breathing settlement. You would really feel like you had overcome the challenges of the Exiled Lands, if you could create a city and protect the ‘citizens’ inside.

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It all really depends on how the AI is set up. I haven’t looked through the devkit so I can’t comment with how it works in CE (the huge download size of it has always been a major hinderance, especially when all I want to do is just add a few column building pieces); but something like TES’s Radiant system would theoretically be fairly simple.

It handled things by breaking everything into behavior packages which would run at set times on the game clock. Typically most npc’s would have their schedule filled with the generic sandbox package where they would just wander around an area between set coordinates using any activators nearby (anything ranging from chairs, animation spots like leaning against railings/posts, or even items in their inventory). There was always a bit of specificity added into the packages on a per-actor basis, but even those more specific packages were typically categorized into general classes of behavior packages.

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I see you are a Skyrim modder as well!

It would be great to have an interface for tweaking individual thralls’ schedules, while also assigning them to specific Classes. You might have a Day Guard class, who patrols your walls during the daytime. A thrall might be a member of that class, along with a handful of others, on duty during the day and sleeping / boozing at night.

It’s a very deep system, and if they haven’t already started to work on it, then it may never really come about. I guess it all depends on how successful the game is at launch — whether they can keep working on Conan Exiles expansions, rather than starting work on a different game.

I dont know how much experience you have with AI programming, but my friend, it is a pain
 a sinple rulebased ‘dumb’ ai is certainly doable but has limited use. The radiant system in skyrim, hell, even back in oblivion is a very complex piece of code (for that time at least) i do agree that in some ways the ai in conan is lacking, but then again, the real interaction is meant to be with other players.

Either way, a radiant system like in TES isnt feasable for conan, its too much time and effort for something that is not widely used anyway. (
oblivion/skyrim for example have 100s of unique npc’s whereas conan doesnt (need them).

that time is better spend on things like bugfixes etx.