Is Conan Exiles really a Survival Game anymore?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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I would like to preface this with saying that these are my thoughts and as such an opinion piece. It is also heavily influenced by my experiences as a PVP Official player.

I know there’s many options out there for alternative experiences, however, this post will remain in the vein of Official vanilla gameplay.

I want to have a discussion with you all. It’s another one of my long winded posts, yipee.

I like survival games and have a list I’ve spent hundreds of hours in. Minecraft, Ark, etc.,… Nothing comes close though to my thousands of hours in Conan.

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This is on the landing page of the Conan Exiles website. Similar tag lines are on the various landing pages/apps where Conan can be purchased.

According to Wikipedia:

“Survival games are a subgenre of action games which are often set in hostile, intense, open-world environments. Players generally start with minimal equipment and are required to survive as long as possible by finding the resources necessary to manage hunger, thirst, disease and/or mental state. Many survival games are based on randomly or procedurally generated persistent environments; more recently, survival games are often playable online, allowing players to interact in a single world.”

I agree with this assessment.

Perhaps because I’m experienced, the “survivability” of the game is inconsequential to me. I can spawn at the desert on a new server or new singleplayer game and simply level to 60 within 30 minutes. I know where to go, what to get, when to get it, how to get it and how not to die.

But wasn’t the game harder?

The elements come to mind.

Surviving a sandstorm without a gas mask was extremely difficult.
Now I can healing wrap or potion through it naked. (Maybe I am misremembering?)

Or going to the snow biomes, you needed very specific gear that provided resistances.
Now I can wear coarse armor in most areas without getting extremely cold and as an added bonus, use the many different means of alcohol drops at my disposal.

Going to the volcano? There’s virtually no prepping required, you can go naked with a stack of ice and simply consume the ice.

Surviving disease, alcohol poisoning or poisoning is incredibly easy too, what’s the point of getting poisoned or diseased if you just have to wait it out or use an antidote? Christ, you’ll overfill large chests with a quick run for zeal since it’s x10 Set antidotes per zeal.

Hunger and thirst can be easily bypassed. Water is very plentiful and much of the picked fauna and flora gives you water and food. Plus of course, the plentiful feasts, food and water drops from NPCs and chests. The timers to die is high as well, having spent a lot of time in Conan simply scouting and watching, I place a bedroll and saunter off to my choice vantage point and can sit there unfettered for over an hour afk without water or food. Die, respawn and go back.

If we look at swimming, it used to be that if you ran out of stamina you would just kinda be stuck there until you got to shroe. I know the verdict is out on whether this was a good change or not but swimming itself is really now completely inconsequential. There’s no risk in swimming whatsoever, even the timers for breath are elongated and easy to bypass. You can also use breath type potions that stop the breath timer from progressing, essentially remaining under water indefinitely.

Loot drops

That brings me to loot drops.

Need water breathing? Easy, you don’t even really need to make the potions for it. You will get tons of breathing potions. Now, all the beast tamer NPCs around Beastmaster Teimos also have a high drop rate of the Underwater breathing mask, and with BMT having been nerfed to oblivion he’s nothing more than a novelty capture from a forgotten time, so no sweat, you kill him and get even more masks! Hey, let’s have 40 of those in our chests huh? It doesn’t even matter. I can easily do the whole Dagon dungeon without the mask or potions, simply swim down before the timer expires…

Need feasts, potions, paddings, weapons, armour, you name it? No problem, go kill a few NPCs or run around cities and loot the chests. Hell, you can even go to the Mounds and get end game gear, weapons and tools.

You really don’t need to make much. Most of it is hand fed to you on a silver platter with very little time and effort required.

Even building materials, you can get a drop of x10 thrones at Mounds and dismantle for end game T3 materials.

This came to an overwhelming head with the introduction of Age of War and the Siege of Al-Merayah. You can easily jump over the walls, pick up a free Musashi’s Black Blade, 4 rams and 4 pre-made explosives. So for PVP, no sweat to start raiding your very first day.

NPCs, Bosses and Animals

So defeating the Red Mother slot machine means that you’ll get the possibility of a pool of loot. There’s no changing of the Red Mother. She’s ALWAYS the same. So you get good with muscle memory and the expected same lunges, tail swings and fire breath. Now she’s even easier than she used to be, I think 1 minute or so of stacking bleed and poison? No sweat dude.

It’s the same with every single spawn. While we have the possibility of demonic and boss spawns for regular spawns, they’re not really that hard to defeat. It’s not like they have variances in levels or abilities.

I recall when fighting hyenas was actually scary. I remember them being difficult to defeat. Is it that I have become more adept or is it because animals and monsters are just… easy?

So a level of boredom can be elicited here. This is the reason why I moved from PVE in the early stages of my playthroughs to PVP. I wanted the added element of risk from other players because I did all the PVE things.

PVP

That leads me now into PVP. If it wasn’t for hackers and exploiters, the PVP game mode is stupid easy - to raid.

Need raid materials? Go to the Seige of Al-Merayah and respawn the boss for limitless bombs and rams.

It used to be HARD to get everything you needed to successfully raid or defend and not because of other players exclusively. Sometimes weeks of smart planning, evading and server relations.

Now I can have a fully functioning, defendable, stocked base in about 72 hours with x3. With x4 you could do it in less than 48. I can raid within the first couple of hours of being on an Exiled Lands server. If you’re on Siptah, you just farm the explosive crates.

You can now even get Dragon Powder from drops on Exiled Lands.

Combat

Aside from the many gripes about combat PVP, combat in PVE feels just so inconsequential. Things that should cause me to be more vigilant about my choices such as the many negative status effects feel like they can be ignored. I can either treat them easily or outright wait them out for a small period of time.

Do they really even do much anymore?

I know Funcom has been trying to make NPCs harder to fight but it feels all so fake. It is probably the limitations of AI and coding at play but was it really that good/bad before?

The Purge

Sigh.

Interesting concept. Community is divided on it, some like the old purge and some the new.

The old you filled a purge bar located in your inventory UI based on actions performed, such as building and crafting. This could randomly see a band of NPCs, beasts or monsters attack your base and followers. The type of purge, faction and difficulty was dependent upon your position on the map.

But it was easily cheesed, halted or erased. If you let it flow naturally sure it could feel like you were surviving.

Now, you call the purge with a treasury. It needs a lot of work, from bugs with it not initiating to the same variety in thralls and while the difficulty has been boosted, is still a far cry from what it once was.

Neither is really true survival imho.

Thralls

Such a controversial topic.

Funcom has stated that they nerfed thralls because they wanted to make the player the hero of the game. There’s also an upcoming system change of “down but not out”, meaning essentially you can resurrect your dead thrall.

There was some artificial survivability for the time required to convert an NPC to a thrall with the Wheel of Pain… this was good for PVP in some senses because you had to be smart about keeping your converting thrall safe and the triumph of having captured them, kept the building safe and then able to use the thrall follower or crafter meant a triumph all on its own. They changed it so thralls are broken in an hour or less.

Now thralls are meat shields or useless puppets for the most part. Some of the crafting thralls don’t even do A THING. Like the various levels of priests. The T4 carpenters don’t speed up crafting like their other specialty counterparts and since AoW Ch4, a lot of the benefits of certain crafter thralls such as repairing epic armours and weapons are broken.

It appeared that thralls were supposed to make your experience in the deadly Exiled and Siptah easier but now they feel like a micromanaged chore and addition to a dollhouse.

But did these changes create an unintended consequence? Did making you the “hero” also oversimplify the concept of “survival”?

Dying

Now I remember a time when you couldn’t climb in the early stages of the game. It was introduced in July of 2017. This wasn’t a backwards step for surviving, it was a new feature that actually opened up the Exiled Lands in diversification of building spots, hiding, defence in PVP and exploration. This is the type of stuff that made the game better. The risk of falling is high but dying itself doesn’t really matter much now does it? You can retrieve your corpse as long as you return within approximately 30 minutes.

There’s no consequence to dying other than time and BUGS.

Was there ever a true consequence to dying?

Sorcery

The introduction with Age of Sorcery was highly anticipated. Being a fan of Robert E. Howard’s Conan in Hyboria meant that sorcery had to be implemented with care and Funcom did it right by not creating a contradiction with high fantasy.

But did it really better the game? Not in terms of the concept of Survival. Perhaps for storyline and new things to do with Kurak.

Die?
Summon your corpse or teleport with a transportory stone.

Evade raiders so they can’t get your loot?
Summon your corpse or teleport with a transportory stone.

Make tower bases in PVP completely useless?
Summon a bat!

Now corruption can be used to your advantage and absolutely is a step in the right direction. But there’s just so many ways to get rid of corruption. Visit Conan, visit your dancer or the dancer of another player/clan even if they’re hostile or consume special drinks.

QOL and UI

I would never believe that making the User Interface difficult leads into a sense of survival. You’re already battling the game, so a good UI should always be a goal.

The recent UI changes are a what appears to be an tone deaf attempt at that. But we’ve seen some in the past that have made the game better. Not easier, better.

Same with Quality of Life. Artificial sense of survivability for time and effort is as simple as making something 10 steps when it can simply be 1 or 2 steps instead.

Focusing on survivability based on the environment and threats feels more natural - imho.

So I’ve said EASY a lot.

Because it is. Even with my experience the only difficulties I have experienced recently are imitations of “survivability”, bugs or being a victim of cheaters. For newer players, it’s not even knowledge anymore since everything is practically thrown at you.

Now I have questions for you:

Do you find that you’re playing a survival game anymore?

What used to make progression harder in respect of being a survival game? I’m sure I’ve missed some things.

What has changed that you might think has made the game too easy?

Do you prefer the game being more survival based or easier to play?

*I’ll probably edit as time goes on for grammar and typos

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Not really.

1). Legendary weapons before lvl 60. And not only this, now you can craft from low levels end game epic weapons just by dismantling “useless” legendary weapons.
2). Very easy attribute system allowing you to be ready for everything from lvl 30.

New content that demands too much grind, so they lower the basics grind.

This question is incorrect. The game was always easy even when survival was more difficult. Dont forget how powerful was the old dodge system when you were light armored or naked. But bleeding and poisoning back then was fierce, i cannot recall how many times Cooks killed me :rofl:.
But tbh, i enjoy more solo fights now than ever.

I give you an hour, do it.

Edit. Volcano is hard now, please encourage this decision devs did for other biomes too.
Like more sabers on north with main greaters on packs.
No more staggering on blue skeletons.
Frostbite or poisoned hits in new Asgard.
Definitely poisoned hits in Black galleon.
Heatstroke hits on Darfari.

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I can’t really consider this a survival game any more. Food, water, and the environment aren’t the concerns they use to be, or aught to be in a survival game.

I think you level far to fast. Or at least it seems that way in PVE. I’m sure you can hit level cap from 0 in a chapter with out hardly trying.

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Ugh. Don’t even XD

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Do you have more than x1 xp on official pvp?

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x3 now, was x4

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It makes sense then :rofl::rofl::rofl:. Xp should be x1 no matter the mode.

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100% agree with this.

It’s been a huge gripe of mine since they increased XP and gather rates in summer of 2022 and never reverted them back to x1.

It was never announced that it would happen. Never announced it wouldn’t revert back. Was not announced to change to x3 with AoW ch4 until after the fact.

They just do it.

Originally I was in favor of the change. I thought it would help players to pick back up quickly but it makes no difference. It has negatively affected PVP instead of benefiting from it.

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No, far from it.

You already covered most of it and is hard to think in something else, one thing you may have missed are the Stats and skills of the character.

Character builds were never that complex for a survival game and some perks makes some aspects of the surviveability part meaningless.

Skills, or knowledge points were never really polished, most of the weapons and armor are practically useless and are only meant to be a decorative item.

Also, building insulation, i remember black ice being more important back then to build in the volcano or any hot areas because it will keep the place cool and to actually live there. but with the current temperature system is basically useless.

practically everything, the game is still fun but is not a challenge on the default state

Survival, for sure, if i wanted it to be easy i would go to SP and make me god.

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Conan Exiles was never meant to be just a survival game. That’s how it starts. Then you build and become established. The nature survival aspect gets surpassed by then. That’s how it should be. Finally, you dominate, which means different things according to the mode you are playing.
Survive. Build. Dominate. Not just survive. This has been clear from the start.
That is not the problem of the game.

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lol I think a lot of people already know where my thoughts are but here they are again. I think Conan is a survival game that definitely needs to be tweaked. (Not everyone will agree with these and that’s ok) but I really feel the game is mostly too easy. Once you get to 60 and are setup it gets kind of boring outside of fighting other players. I say make the game a bit harder and give us more things to do.

Here’s a list:

  • The Environment should be much harsher which players can also use to their advantage
  • water isn’t dangerous and should be. Add rafts/boats too
  • wtf is this no kill volcano lava? I want a castle of doom surrounded by insta kill lava.
  • There should be long term diseases.
  • you should be able to capture other players at least temporarily and lock them away in a personal dungeon
  • Death should have more meaning and loss but this could easily be its own topic
  • climbing is too easy, Make people craft the right gear
  • leveling is too easy which devalues being max level and surviving to the top
  • limit XP gain to slow down leveling
  • you should be able to poop/pee and throw it at others
  • t3 Buildings should cost more in time and mats but once built should make for hard to raid bases
  • make bombs to be pieces you have to carry in hand like treasure with risk of accidental explosion (ie archer shoots flame arrow and you go boom)
  • make larger battering ram vehicles to ram gates and walls repeatedly
  • rooftop pieces need HP buffs b/c flying on top of a base and placing bombs down before raid is cheese -or-
  • Disallow the placement of bombs before raid window on server
  • make exterior wall pieces thicker and with more HP to cut down on foundation walls
  • Thralls should be buffed at least for base defense but harder to get in general
  • buff animal followers to be actually dangerous but also dangerous to keep lol
  • give players an official way to hide things through burying loot in chests instead of body vaults
  • get rid of body vaults
  • sorcery should be slightly harder to obtain but some spells should def be buffed
  • One human sacrifice should provide more than 1 orb of blood. I’m glad you can still glitch summon bodies tbh
  • Make thralls/tames breedable so that you can get followers with better stats than you would normally get out in the world.
  • Bring back wights and other undead monsters to go with sorcery perk buffs
  • introduce search dogs that can track and identify players to some extent
  • Hide player list and only show player count on server for pvp
  • Event log should only record hostile actions by other players by name if a tribe mate or thrall was there to witness it (was in render)
  • underwater Ice vaults, why is this still a thing?
    *Add backstab, parry and finishing moves in PVP

I’m sure there’s more I can think of but there’s a list for now

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I remember playing Conan Exiles in early access. The first time I was coming out of the desert, I had my stone sword. I approached a green Scaleback. Back then, they were all aggressive. He turned to face me and one-shot me. It was humbling, and exciting to be living in a “brutal” Conan world.

Today, the green Scalebacks are only defensive, ignore anyone passing by, and hit like a wet noodle “if” they even decide to attack something (often just going through the “scream” animation before deciding to do anything).

I miss the brutality of those early access days.

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Combat setting - NPC to Player damage 10x
Done

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The survival aspects still exist, the same way the always have. The problem is that nothing was done about them from a long time.

Sure, now hunger and thirst is an afterthought unless you set the server for it. Since Siptah that resources are not a bother, unless you set the server for it.

The main thing is: Why ?

Project Zomboid is an interesting game in a premise for a survival game, “That is how you died …”.
One of the metrics in the game is how long can you survive, because no matter how long, eventually you die. That is a hardcore survival game.
Conan Exiles was never close to that.

Conan Exiles was always pretty much what its “subtitle” tells:
Survive, Build, Dominate.

Survival is the “first phase” of the game, and went being pushed back and back to the first phase, as in “first 40 minutes”, “first 20 minutes”.

Once you survived a certain point, it stops being a thing. I had a server set for the regular difficult, and I had time and time again people complaining that the enemies “hit hard”. That is because most servers are 4x, 8x, many more X, and each multiplication of progression shortens the “survival phase”.

Guys at Funcom decided to “raise the X” themselves. Maybe to get “more players”.

Then it attracted all manner of theme park MMORPG dropouts and Funcom doubled down to get the new crowd. Now this game is a MMORPG that cant support massive players in the same server, but no one tells it to the players.

I still play because I can mod it and make the survival game I always seen it to be.

What I find funny is the people saying Ark is better. Ark did the MMORPGzation long before Conan Exiles.

See what I mean ?

Survival has nothing to do with NPC damage.

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The survival aspects of this game have been pretty wonky since early 2017. I’m not surprised many of them have been mitigated or in some cases removed.

Sandstorm was a major plot point and a major obstacle early in this game’s development. It was also incredibly prominent because of its presence in the trailer and intro.

In the intro and in some of the lore pieces in the game, we were supposed to get ambushes during the Sandstorm much like Conan and Ramza had to deal with. I dunno if there was ever a development goal for that to be in game or not (I assume so) but we sadly never got it.

But I want to talk about the Sandstorm a little more. In the beginning it was this thing that would simply kill you if you got caught unprepared for it. It was infamous so no one really got caught by surprised by it. It was deadly, everyone knew it was deadly, and only those who got unlucky got caught in it and died.

Here’s the issue I had with it. It was this thing that would make the map impassable during its duration. You could wear a mask to deal with it.

But is that really adding to the game? For levels 1-29 (before you can make steel) is being unable to venture out into the southern part of the map really adding difficulty? When a Sandstorm happens and you don’t have protection, you either die, or sit and wait it out.

Sitting and waiting doesn’t sound difficult. It also doesn’t sound fun. Well, no surprise there, it isn’t.

Once you’re 30+ you can simply don a mask. And then its a nuisance when it happens. Which sucks because the sandstorm looks cool. Its got lore behind it, and its something that should have some substance to it. But in reality, it doesn’t.

I want to talk about night next even though it wasn’t addressed in the OP. But its a big thing with survival games.

Night won’t kill you but like the sandstorm it alters your equipment. When night is sufficiently dark (and depending on the update it is or it isn’t), you now have to use one handed items with torch or carry potions to see at night.

Again its an annoyance that for a portion of the day cycle, you simply can’t do your normal thing without some other arbitrary effort. Does it get ‘harder’? I don’t think so. Its not like in other survival games where night DOES get harder and you have to make decisions on what you need to do in order to deal with that.

Weather effects (cold and heat) have been roughly mitigated and it sadly happened after they revamped the armor. The armor revamp was a good idea, it used to be that temperature resists were a positive value or negative value. Meaning if you wore armor made for heat resistance (like Shemite light armor) and drank water, you could freeze to death in the newbie river. This made zero sense. So they seperated the values.

But at the same time they utterly gutted the map’s temperature system. If they left the map alone, then temperature would have mattered and the armor revamp would have worked well.

But the issue with temperature systems in CE is they were never really fully developed to begin with. The way it should have worked is the more severe the temperature, the more rewarding things in the area you could find. I’ve said before that the map should have tiers instead of level ranges. T1 would be the newbie areas where you don’t need much temperature resist at all. T2 would require some protection at night (for cold areas) or day (for hot areas). T3 would require protection all day and night but more depending if its a cold area (at night) or hot area (day). T4 would require heavy protection day and night.

The Tiers would be where you find the corresponding thralls. Just for example a T4 area wouldn’t have -all- T4 thralls but this is where you would get them. And they would have a higher chance of spawning there. In T1 areas it would be all T1 thralls with an occasional T2. Same thing with T2 and T3 areas accordingly.

And thralls wouldn’t be the only thing. T4 areas would have the materials you need for the highest equipment. And you’d need materials from different T4 areas requiring quite a bit of planning to farm up required materials. The idea is it would be difficult to have a decent supply of the hardest to get materials. Requiring a player to decide to ‘live’ near one of the areas and boost themselves accordingly to survive there. And either building a complex network of bases to cover everything, or trading with players (or stealing it depending on server type).

Speaking of materials, one of the biggest issues I have is once you have top tier tools smacking a node gives a mint. Like if you have a Star Metal or better skinning knife or cleaver and you smack a corpse, you get enough food to feed yourself for a very long time. I feel like the benefit of higher tier tools should be durability and ability to harvest higher tier things. But doesn’t give a bonus to the amount got. This would help rain in some of the ease of gathering for some parts of the game.

Obviously costs would need to be rebalanced around this. But that would make things quite a bit easier in the long run since you know how much everyone is going to get per click or press of a button. It also makes upgrades and tool modifications more valuable.

Hunger and Thirst are weird mechanics in a survival game. Find this stuff or die. Until you don’t need to anymore. What’s the point?

Let’s be honest a game where you’re constantly staving off hunger and thirst means you’re always living in a leaf and branch hut, not an established set of buildings. If you’re living in an established settlement, why are you worrying about hunger and thirst?

See when we finally get established we still need to eat and drink, because its a game mechanic. But at the later point of the game its a button we click. Not content to engage with, because its already been engaged with.

I don’t think hunger and thirst as it is belongs in this sort of game, even as a survival element. Because if my settlement has a well, and a preservation box of food with no way of running out ever. Why do I need to click a button not to die? Oops I forgot to eat and drink, I guess I just die now. That’s immersion breaking AF. It makes no sense. It doesn’t make the game hard. Its just annoying.

If this game was a survival game where you never get out of the stone age, never build an industrial base, never get a self sustaining farm and you’re constantly running from predators, then yes, the hunger and thirst system we have would make sense.

But we hit level 10 relatively quickly so that sort of game this isn’t it.

Instead I think we should have a food and drink system that gives substantial buffs instead. Buffs you don’t really want to leave home without. But now you don’t feel restrained by having to click a button every 10-15 minutes or get sent back to respawn. Now you actually are rewarded in the hunger and thirst system for having a substantial built up industrial base. And not merely be a step you have to do to avoid respawning at your bed/bedroll/desert.

But over all, Conan Exiles hasn’t been a survival game in well over 6 years. Its had survival elements, but has never been a true survival game since it was in Early Access, and its survival elements weren’t good.

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nope ,

it is NOT.

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It’s a Survive the bugs game.

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Hmm…
So people can get from 0 to 60 in 30min, 1 hour and if it takes 3 hours you are already bad I guess. At least I have not seen anyone like this.
Sure private servers are another story, but on official… I am unsure if it would be possible to do it while farming exclusively Black Ice or even better Starmetal.

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No. After a certain point it’s just a game of hoarding.

I miss the panic of not being able to get to water or slamming bugs because I forgot food.

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No. Conan Exiles has nothing to do with survival anymore, that aspect has been diminished severely during the last few years. Everything has been made so easy that it’s not interesting to play.

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