Is it time for a Second Edition?

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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It is time for a second edition of Conan Exiles…

Please hear me out… I am aware I am asking a lot but might just worth a thought.

The Game Conan Exiles is not like any other on the market and so many people love it even it has a ton of bugs still running and some returning on a regular basis.

I believe to fix all that the game/code needs to be thoroughly reworked and assessed – which would mean a major overhaul.

I am wondering why can you not make a “Conan Exiles SE” – a second edition of the game?

I would happily Buy a new version if you brought one and I am sure I am not alone! If you can upgrade on the old one how nice would that be?!

You could run this on the newer version of the Unreal Engine and so have more capacity for all the things that make this game great.

You start with a clean code and you can fix many of the core issues known from the old game.

You could put more attention to detail in the building system and improve the quality of life for the PVE and PVP Player Base! You could easy expand the Exiled Lands and rework the map to a whole new standard.

New Admin Panels with features helping private server owners would create an even bigger core community in my estimation.

I believe it would be well worth the effort to create something new and better along the line of the old Conan Exiles.

You did an awesome job on the Conan Exiles we know but it is time you step up to the plate and give your Conan community something improved – something better – something that will blow our minds again - we deserve it!

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That might be one way to take care of issues with the game but the player base would blow a gasket. This should make for interesting conversations.

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I would love this, not changing the core mechanics. Like dont change what works, but fix everything that needs a fix.

Clansystem
Grouping
Dungeons
Perks
Feats
Buildsystem / Landclaim system with upkeep.

Remove battleye and make one urself that reads feat and perk points, and limit cheats properly.

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Sorry to be that guy, but this idea, although well-intentioned, is a recipe for disaster of epic proportions.

You’re proposing a complete rewrite from scratch. That’s a project that would take months of work. If you’re expecting the current team to do it, that would mean months without any updates at all. No bugfixes, no new content, no new mechanics, nothing. Over that time frame, how many people do you think would maintain their interest in this game and be ready to pay for the Second Edition? And how much would those handful of faithful players be prepared to pay?

And if you’re expecting a separate team to do it, that’s a whole different can of worms:

  • Where and how do they get their know-how? (Hint: endless meetings are not the most productive way to do your job.)
  • How are they expected to deal with changes that the current team will keep making to the First Edition?
    • Are they supposed to take all those changes into the Second Edition? (Hint: a project with constantly moving goalposts will never be finished.)
    • Or are they supposed to let the editions diverge? (Hint: players won’t be happy if they can’t take their stuff from First Edition into Second Edition, after paying more money for it.)
  • Most importantly, how can they get their work approved by Funcom management in the first place? How are those costs justified? (Hint: at the time of writing, only 3 people pressed “like” on your suggestion. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that people will want to buy this game.)

A rewrite from scratch is almost never the right thing to do. It’s as true in 2021, as it was in 2000.

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On the other hand, the current game is made of duct-tape patches over duct-tape patches over an older UE core. Some issues Funcom has been trying to fix since Early Access have been hard-coded into the basic structure of the engine, and they’re basically impossible to fix by adding more duct-tape.

Of course a complete rewrite from scratch is going to be a Herculean effort. Perhaps it’s an unrealistic wish. But for the long-term health of the game, it might be required at some point.

Conan Exiles has been a massive learning process for Funcom. Many things they’ve done to the game have been bending the core system in ways that were thought impossible. Some things they’ve done haven’t worked exactly as planned and have caused more problems than they were supposed to solve. “Oh, wow, we did it!” and “Oh dear, that did not go as we intended. Does anyone know how to put this blue smoke back into the machine?” are both valuable experiences from which the company and the programmers can learn.

The things that work, keep. The things that didn’t work, reconsider, and if necessary, rebuild from scratch.

I had a winter coat that I used for over 20 years. It was a very good coat, basically weatherproof yet still comfortable to wear, and I loved it. Over the years I had to sew some torn seams and add a few patches to it, but it still served me as a winter coat. But eventually came a time where the seams were all tearing, the cloth itself was worn and torn, and it would’ve taken too much effort to keep the coat together, let alone weatherproof. So last year, I got a new winter coat. It’s not as good as the old one was when it was new, but it’s better than the one that was old and broken and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t make it as good as new anymore.

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But maybe a next gen edition (and pc obviously), updated with features and things what old gen power can’t afford. Without changin engine, or anything what demand a lot of work, just adding features, possibilities

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I don’t know how people would react if Funcom would ask to be paid again for the same game, or the same dlcs. I cannot answer for them, only for me. I belong to the persons that would pay again as long everything was fixed, everything. The reason is simple, I play this game thousands of hours, thousands, so I get my money back more than 10 times, so I wouldn’t mind to pay it once more :wink:. @tokatec I beg you to fix a pole so members of the forum can vote about it on the general discussion section, thanks m8, nice suggestion :+1:.

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I would be willing to pay half for a flawless game but it would be proven first no more think we have a fix crap here been on this forum to long am beginning to understand the animosity that is happening and I am not affected by most of the problems and we are taking about ps4 how many people can I invite to my server or send to others not to have this game expletive this is bbbbbsssss…getting tired of trying to help people that Funcom doesn’t seem to give a ■■■■■ about

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Ouch, @sestus2009 . I’ve been reading your posts on these forums for a long time now. If Funcom managed to piss you off, they’re definitely doing something wrong :frowning:

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Well just gave this to 2 more people who can’t loginfe3bb1e83d9148a154e7f1ab699c798090c98bcb_2_690x1226 hopefully it is not a black hole of no return we barely see any Funcom Admin any more. Alot of ps4 players can not get online and it’s go visit Zendesk witch doesn’t seem to help anyone or they never get a reply. Look at how many of our old friends no longer come on the forum not going to put out names but several are in the asura list plus others. Folks are getting tired of the way things are being handled. Can’t login to a server in the evening is crazy. And as I mentioned my wife and I are not even having problems getting online it’s the other players having problems that has me ticked off it’s not right. Spent several hours yesterday playing and chatting with people on my server that is what this game should be not bouncing around trying to get on a server. And I realize That I am on a ranting rage. If I wasn’t a one finger texter it would be more…

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@CodeMage, we both agree that some private servers are excellent and this is because their admins are devoted to the populations fun in there. These admins are heroes for me, because they pay for others to have fun and they spend their free time to help everyone in there. Now that the population on this game, especially in consoles, is low, the admins are through another enemy except the multiple bugs, some persons for reasons we cannot explain, cannot log in to servers. This happened to me in the beginning of my online gaming, I thought that admins were banning me and I couldn’t understand why. Now I realize that maybe it was this bug. I always was building normal homes, very carefully not to destroy spawns and I was always kind and helpful to others. But after some days I was getting a message that I cannot log in to this server anymore. I didn’t try a lot to log in again and ofcurce I never returned to this server again because I thought that admin was banned me and I was upset with a big WHY (?). @sestus2009 spend a lot of time in this forum in the bugs section trying to help (again) new players with problems and players of his server for problems he doesn’t has answers. After so many years of service in this game he has every right to go upset :wink:. But I am sure we both agree to this one.

Ps, once again, sorry for my English m8, reading my posts must be difficult and I cannot thank you enough for it :+1:.

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We do. I really wasn’t trying to criticize @sestus2009 , I was just sad that the things got so bad that even a guy like him – always calm, helpful, and friendly – would get angry. He has all the right to be angry. It just sucks things are this way.

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Yes I realized you were not being critical and I believe he did also. Stegall no offense. Some times his thoughts and typing don’t match. He is seriously cool to talk to. Spent much of the day helping people on my server and learning from some also.

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I approve. But if @Funcom does this: they should adopt the workflow that Epic has promoted for Fortnite, that would allow them to upgrade the engine underneath the game. That way, as new engine features are released, Funcom can selectively roll these new features into the game. I would love to see what the Conan art team could do with Nanite and Lumin in UE5. Fully dynamic lighting would be DOPE for Conan.

If anyone at Funcom is curious about this, feel free to reach out to me. Not to advertise here, but I own a small indie company specializing in Unreal Development and I would love to work with you.

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I was with you on everything except removing battleeye. They should keep battle eye, but actually write their code in such a way that it actually checks for inappropriate edge cases and corrects them. Most of the game’s worst exploits could have been avoided with proper error/invalid state handling.

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I liked the post. Came in late. But the reality is, I don’t support a full rewrite of the game, but rather a rewrite of some of the core systems in Code.

If FC wants Conan to be modabble, they shouldn’t have so many of the game systems not exposed to blueprints. Additionally, the 1,000,000 data tables approach isn’t really working either. The big problem this game has is in it’s source code. I can’t tell you WHY CE can’t handle 40 people on official servers without lagging horribly and bugging out. But I can say that it’s not a limitation of C++ and/or Unreal Engine.

The reality is: FC needs to start the project over, or give some TLC to the backend codebase and get some stronger public servers. This game is most interesting with more than a handful of players on a server, but the game is VERY latency sensitive. I am convinced that most of these issues could be fixed, but not without a ton of effort for the dev team. Therefore, it only makes sense for them to charge more money, Players might not like it, but someone has to pay for the code rework.

I’d be happy to pay for another expansion or another copy of the game if it would fund the dev team to actually fix the game.

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No, I can’t see this. Sorry, I have to disagree. People are buying the game now. If they fix the bugs they have/created, that sale point is only going to go up. Use that money to fix the game more. You can’t charge more money to people for a game that is broken.

I personally think they have enough money from the game to fix it. All I want to see is bugs fixed. No more new content or DLC’s until that happens.

This is just my opinion mind you. You had some good points.

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I believe that the CONAN COMMUNITY deserves better than what they get - that simple!
It is not good enough to fix one issue - creating another or even bring back an old issue that had been fixed before…
a “clean” core would possibly fix a whole lot of issues and moving to a different engine as well.
I am aware that money has to come in to finance something major like this - that is why I implied to do a Second Edition… It does not have to be that - but something major has to happen.
I have played this game for more than 5000 hours and it has so much more potential I could see - Why can´t Funcom ? Don´t they believe in their own product? Or did they stop caring enough to do something major? what worth have the people that spend money on that game and every single DLC they delivered? Why is there not more weight on the Quality Assurance side of this Project?
What does the Conan Player Community mean to Funcom?

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Only Funcom can answer that. My own cynical, bitter opinion is that it’s a case of business ethics that places more weight on business than ethics: “If you can have profits despite subpar QA, why not?”

As an aside, I got a really weird vibe from all the replies to my post, almost as if you guys think that I don’t want the game to be better :smiley:

I enjoyed playing Conan Exiles for many, many hours stretched over long months, and maybe I’ll enjoy it some more if it gets better. I don’t hate it and I don’t wish it to “die”. There’s no animosity in pointing out that a rewrite from scratch is extremely unrealistic for a combination of technical and business reasons. Especially business reasons, since that’s what drives Funcom.

We all want this game to be better, that’s why we’re hanging out on these forums. But that doesn’t mean our dreams will magically come true. If I’m not optimistic about it, it’s because I’ve seen my hopes dashed too many times. For me, it’s a matter of a difference in perspective:

I agree with @Kapoteeni, but my conclusion is that if it becomes required for the health of the game, then the game’s health will keep deteriorating until it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. :man_shrugging:

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Only part I’m going to comment on with regards to your post, though please know I’m definitely not trying to call you out here CodeMage (as usual, I’m silent most of the time until something makes my eye twitch and I can’t help myself).

So bagging on QA, in any game, is like THE norm (here or elsewhere, it’s about the same wherever you go). QA gets attacked by the players if any bug in the world exists. QA is seen as a “lesser job” commonly in the industry (though there is definitely a modern push to do better).

The reality is far more complex. QA obviously can’t cover every bug found by players under the sun. That’s impossible. Things are always going to fly in and not be detected, by any QA, no matter how many QA personal there are or how well funded the project is (cough Cyberpunk cough).

Furthermore, a bug existing DOES NOT necessarily mean QA didn’t find it. It could mean that the bugs are known, but the version of the patch/game was shipped anyways (cough Cyberpunk cough). QA/community team people could be begging not to push out something until x is fixed, or y is included, but are otherwise overruled by someone (or someone’s) higher up the chain (who are they themselves sometimes pressured to push by people even higher).

Anyhoo, I’m ranting a bit here. But the tldr is, QA always being the punching bag does them a massive disservice and doesn’t take into account the complexities of their job.

There is a extremely recent lesson to go by. Mass Effect Legendary Edition, it’s official release date (May something) and a lot of the details of the project was released yesterday.

In it, the developers were interviewed and they discussed on moving the entire trilogy into UE4 (Mass Effect trilogy, not Andromeda, was built on UE3). They even contacted Epic early on the remastereds production to determine the feasibility.

The answer was a resounding not going to happen. To put the game from UE3 to UE4 would have been a massive undertaking. Arguably, fans would ha e loved it. And very much, very much, EA (of all the companies) has the personal TODAY, and the funding to go for such an objective. And it was still decided as a big nope.

Mass Effect, one of the biggest IPs in the world (owned by one of the biggest game companies in the world), played by millions and millions and millions of people, and it was thought to be too much of an undertaking.

So, could Funcom fix several issues with Conan, via making a Conan Exiles Remastered (or whatever is being asked here)? Ya, they could. But how feasible is it, realistically?

Agreed, but there’s reasons for why that happened too. However, modding support has grown considerably by FC over the last year though. Like, it’s far, far, better today then it was in 2018. I expect that to continue to evolve and improve.

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