Is it time for a Second Edition?

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
21

I know you’re not calling me out. I agree with most of what you said, but there are things I want to point out.

I’ve seen that firsthand. The QA team for the project I was on were contractors. Since I was a newcomer to the industry, I didn’t have the same attitude towards QA as the rest of the team. As a consequence, I worked with them a bit more closely than they expected and when I thanked a guy for helping me track down and solve a bug, he looked at me like I was an alien. He explained that they’re usually not thanked for their work and that the devs are normally pissed at them all the time for finding bugs.

So yeah, treating QA as a second-class citizen seems to be par for the course in the industry.

Yep. Even outside the games industry, QA can’t catch everything. And games are much more complex and difficult to do QA on. Unless things changed drastically in the last 3 years, having no unit tests for the game proper is par for the course in the industry.

Exactly. Cyberpunk is a great example here, but we don’t need that example on these forums: I’m convinced that what we keep seeing from Funcom is the result of that same phenomenon.

But therein lies the rub. That is exactly what I’m complaining about. I’m not dunking on the QA people, I’m bіtching about Funcom’s QA processes, policies, and most importantly, corporate culture. In my experience, those are the factors that drive the decision-making process.

Those factors are why Hello Games and CD Projekt Red make drastically different decisions. Those factors are the reason why we’re seeing the quality of Conan Exiles updates decline over time. Those factors are why I believe Conan Exiles, as a game, is slowly dying. All those arguments about the servers being empty or not, about the trends on the graph of the total players and peak players and whatnot, all those arguments are about effects, not the cause. The cause for the decline of the game is, most likely, that the team is hobbled by the management and the business decisions.

That’s why my point was “if you can have profits despite subpar QA, why not?” Of course Funcom cares about profits, like any other company, but the way they let that drive their decisions – on everything ranging from the staffing to scheduling to policies – is something deserving of criticism, because there are counterexamples that show that it can be done differently.

And that’s also why my first post on this thread was an explanation of why it’s not feasible to get a “Second Edition” of this game. It’s a nice sentiment, but come on – look at the decisions this company has been making about this game. How can anyone expect them to take on a project that’s insanely risky from the business perspective?

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22

Like I always say, I would absolutely love to know exactly what the problems with their process are and why those problems are there. But that’s a mystery that neither you nor I will ever be privy to.

However, without improvements to that process to correct those flaws, a revamped version of Conan Exiles will be thematically no different from the current game in terms of the issues. The specific issues will be different, of course, but it’ll be basically the same conversations all over again.

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23

Afterall maybe not, Tried to log in today for a refresh, found out i was banned. No reason, no cause just the message.

Havent played active since latest patch came out.

My first time being banned from a game in 25 years.

Maybe time after 5000 hours to free up some SDD space.

24

Weird. Are you in a clan?

26

Not in a clan no, it seems they working of reports 6,7,10 months ago, when our server had a huge fight with some sekt.

I’m going to a private server, never deal with those discusting people ever again.

27

I fully understand your opinion, and respect it. I just wanted to point out that my opinion is that of a game developer that works in industry.

This post is just going to be my perspective:

The truth is this: Video Games are a HORRIBLY expensive enterprise. Making a game like Conan takes a LOT of money. If the retail price of a videogame (~$60) was the only source of revenue in a modern game, then the margin would be so low that making the game would hardly be worth doing.

For example, when you consider that a (very rough) estimate of a Game Development Team Member’s salary is ~$75,000 (obtained from averaging the LOWEST average QA Tester salary and the lowest average Game Engine Engineer) and that Conan has an estimated team size of ~30 people… that would mean that–once again as a VERY ROUGH estimate, that Conan would cost roughly 2.3 million dollars PER YEAR, just to maintain the TEAM. That doesn’t include, equipment, power, overhead or any of the other things necessary to run a business.

Since we know Conan Exiles sold roughly 1.8 million copies in 2018, we might reasonably presume that Conan Exiles has sold somewhere close to 2.5 mil copies by 2021… roughly equating to 100,000,000 in revenue over 3 years.

Rev over 3 years: 100,000,000
Employee Salaries (over 3 years dev) $6,900,000
Employee Benefits (over 3 years dev) $972,000 ($900 per employee per month (Health,Vision, Dental, Retirement, etc.))
Software Licenses - Art Packages (over 3 yr dev.): $322,200 ($10,740/artist/year * 10 artists)
Software Licenses - Game Engine (over 3 yr dev): $3,000,000 - $6,000,000
Software Licenses - Business Licenses (over 3 yr dev) $1,000
Software Licenses - Developer Tools (over 3 year dev): $20,860 (Perforce + Visual Studio + Jira/Etc)

Total Cost of Development over 6 years: 2 * ($6,900,000 + $972,000 + $322,200 + $5,000,000 + $1,000 + $20,860) = $26,432,120

This number assumes that Funcom treats it’s employees slightly worse than average in terms of compensation and tooling. It also–and importantly-- neglects electricity, rent, water, sewer and internet bills for all of Funcom’s offices during a period of development and ALSO neglects the HUGE marketing budget required to even sell the 2.5 million copies. Which is probably no less than another half million dollars. Bringing the total to no less than around $30,000,000.

If Funcom ever wants to make another videogame of even the SAME scope as Conan. Then they have to take the capital for the next game from the Conan profits. Meaning: that out of 100,000,000 dollars in revenue only about 33% of it ends up being true profit (and again, my expense numbers are VERY rough, conservative estimates). If Funcom wants to improve their development processes at all, or keep up with technology trends. That 33% gets eaten up quickly into R&D, etc.

Overall, if they want to continue to support Conan, they have to continue making DLC. That’s the long and short of it. Because every year they work on Conan is another 5 million dollars, and after someone buys the game once they are unlikely to buy it again. If they don’t keep selling content, the game will cease to be viable from a business standpoint.

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28

I know modding has been getting substantially better over time, and I appreciate it. However, it is actually a trend that worries me. It’s almost that–similarly to ARK and other games of its’ ilk–the developers are pushing to get the modding community improving and maintaining their game for them.

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Conan Exiles is a small success story in a genre that has not really found it’s footing yet. Funcom hit it out of the park with the game mechanics (pre dodge nerf). The freedom of movement, and ability to build/climb can’t really be beat by any other game at the moment. Conan Exiles fails in two departments mostly, server size and gameplay loops.

If Funcom wants to become a billion dollar company, they will make Dune a copy and paste of CE, except add a lot of mmorpg elements to it. This means complex skill systems, and an ability to maintain meaningful relationships with other players you meet in game. There should be intra-server areas where some sort of item/experience/tools are acquired/traded.

Players like to earn some level of renown amongst their peers in online games. That’s hard to do among a revolving door type server system.

Conan Exiles (and whatever comes next) needs to host its own servers, PERFECTED to performance for the game it is designed to host. A company unwilling to host it’s own games is one that is not ready, or able to give it’s all to the product.

30

Uh, no. The modding community has scratched and clawed and begged to get the improving modding abilities we are getting today. FC has done a great job in making sure the modding community is more heard then they were in the past. And they aren’t doing it because they are “lazy.”

At WORSE, when FC is eventually done with Conan Exiles (which is still a long ways off), the modding community will help extend it’s life. Just like Skyrim and others before it. I fail to see the bad in that.

I do see irony in this statement too. Every patch, the mod users think “FC hates mod authors, and are doing everything they can to drive them away.” Now it’s, “FC is making modding better so that they don’t need to do any work.” Well, which is it :stuck_out_tongue:

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31

@Multigun , Mods are wonderful, i really envy the pc players, really. Once i watched a video of wak with the lemurian mod and it blow my mind brother. So beautiful building pieces, so many reasons to farm over and over again places that sometimes in your server you visit just once. Moders are making exquisite job, i really wish ps players will have the fortune one day to play mods, i really do :pensive:.

32

To clarify, I never said anything about “lazy”. I do agree that for Mod Authors. FC is doing a great job of expanding the modability of the game. Which is great.

I also agree, creating good tools and encouraging a community around modding is far from a bad thing. However, “which is still a long ways off”, how do you know this? You have some info the rest of us are not privy to? How do you know FC’s dev schedule?
The way I see it, there is no assurance from FC that they won’t turn around tomorrow and decide to Enf of Life Conan in the next year. Without this assurance, it’s perfectly reasonable to consider the possibility (again, one of many) that FC may be making bigger strides to improve modding as they plan to hand the game over to the community.

However, you speak as someone who knows the dev team intimately. I do tend to give people and companies the benefit of the doubt and I for one truly hope that you are right about FC supporting Conan for the long haul, as I love the game and I do hope that the dev team will continue to work toward a more stable base and continue to build on it.

I believe you are mischaracterizing my statement here. I think FC undoubtedly loves mod authors, as any company with a moddable game would. It is a net positive for the game, community, and FC’s business. Hands down. So you will have never caught me dead making the first statement. EDIT: Although I’m sure mod players say this in response to their servers being interrupted every patch until the server owner can update mods.

Secondly, I never said “they don’t need to do any work”. However, there comes a point at the end of every software project’s life cycle where you have to decide: A) Do we keep working on this and pumping more money into it to rework the major issues and revitalize the whole project, renewing it for another 2-5 years (and figuring out a new monetization method like DLC or a new expansion); or B) the game/project is “good enough”, take the profit to work on the next thing, and stop paying to host official servers that cost the company money every month and use that money to host servers for your next game.

Again–I am not saying this is the proper or desired thing to do–but If you already have a strong modding community and you EoL a game, you free up your company’s resources to work on something else, and the modability of your game still extends it’s life and earns you profit (albeit much less, as most players don’t like to play unsupported games unless they were sufficiently polished at EoL). It is a route other companies have taken. I don’t suspect Funcom of doing this necessarily, but I don’t appear to have an intimate relationship with the dev team as you appear to have so I have no idea what their plans are.

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33

Genshin Impact does the dodge/climb better in my opinion. You can jump upwards when climbing and the dodge makes for a very fun and fast paced combat, although the game doesn’t have building.

34

No, I’m not “privy” to something you all aren’t. Funcom did an interview session with the Cursed Lands Discord in April of 2020 (which they did the year prior to that as well). When I found out, an admin for the Cursed Lands sent me a recording of the Q/A, and I wrote a summary for (and is public) in which Scott said they plan on investing into Conan for a long while still.

Here is how I summarized it at the time.

  1. What does the company see as the future of Conan Exiles?

Scott started off with saying that they have been working on Conan Exiles for close to 5 years total now. They plan on continuing to work on Conan Exiles for several more years. The three biggest events for Conan Exiles in terms of player impact was the first EA launch of Conan Exiles, retail launch (May 8th, 2018), and the launch of mounts in December of 2019.

Conan Exiles had its third highest population overall (using internal metric data) with the mount launch. With Covid-19, they are also seeing high numbers from that as well. Conan Exiles is very healthy, Scott says, and they intend to continue working on it for a long time.

Side Note: What I wrote was accurate, at the time. The early access release of The Isle of Siptah later surpassed the launch of mounts for total player count.

Full write up is here. The part I snipped out is at the very bottom.

You are welcome to doubt me if you so choose (as admittingly, the recording wasn’t posted anywhere public that I’m aware of, but their were well north of 100 people during the discord event, and I’m probably under valuing those numbers just because I don’t remember those details). But due note that I work very hard to ensure the summaries I’ve written are as close to 100% to what was said during a stream (or in this case, Q/A on the discord server) as I humanly am able to.

Could something happen where they sped up their time table and said, alright, we done with Conan now? Sure, but I have seen zero evidence to suggest their goals for the length of development has changed.

Sure, and as I said, someday that will happen. They aren’t going to develop Conan forever (nor should they be expected to). Modding availability won’t be the cause though. We already know Dune is a thing. We also know the acquisition of Tencent created a huge spike in employment over in FC land. Their CEO said, I believe it was in their very last financial stream if I remember right, that they were going to expand their original goals of Dune, and focus more into Conan due to the Tencent acquisition. They even shelved a couple projects they were working on for those reasons, so they could devote more of the resources to Conan/Dune.

So yes, someday they are going to move on from Conan. There is no evidence to suggest that “modding” will speed up that process however, or be a catalyst. I do know that several of their developers have stated their admiration (publicly) and encouragement to mod authors. Robtheswede, as he’s known by in many of my past dev stream summaries, has been an advocate for mod authors for years. It wasn’t a recent thing. More accurately is that they see the value in modding, and they want to support their mod authors and finally have the resources to do so properly.

Whenever they stop developing Conan, modding will surely help extend the life of Conan for it’s players. And yes, it will bring in some dollars here and there when new players are interested in diving in. I fail to see the evil in that. Thousands of games are no longer in development, without any modding, and continue to see purchases for many (many) years.

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35

I’m glad to hear this. I wasn’t aware of these streams. Thanks for the links.
I don’t doubt you @Multigun. I simply was not aware of these interviews.

To be clear. Once again. I don’t see any evil in that either.

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36

FC got my money ONCE for CE, never again…whats to say it wouldnt be just another messy sideways sh!^, like the current CE…

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Of course, the whole point of the second edition would be that it wouldn’t be a messy sideways piece of manure.

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The foundations are taped and glued together… there certain point of reworking it that just comes hard and costly to do.

Personally, I just want Conan Exiles II at this point, redo foundation and rebuild knowing what they know now. They could rework stuff with out breaking stuff to get Land Claim Fixed, PVP balance in better direction.
They could make up there mind what they want the game to be instead of changing it every few patches. =/

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39

A second edition will not work here’s why: 1, the base game is still getting content upgrades. 2, any upgrades after a SE could bring back any bugs fixed due to codinb issues. The only way it would work if they finished developing the game.

40

This, this right here. I think now i have seen multiple posts by others with teh same basic issue, no true directive. Almost afraid to communicate a final destination that may upset some of the base. Look, if they choose PVE and go that direction, at least let us that don’t want that to finally move on. Instead we get small crumbs on the pvp, and vague teases on changes that may finally make raiding an actual mechanic.

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41

IDK what you’re talking about here. Raiding is totally a mechanic already. Not trying to be rude here, but you can blow open just about any base in a day or two. You’re not the only Barbarian (i.e. my pet name for people who love to raid) I’ve heard on these forums saying this, but It’s easier to destroy a strong base than to build one with the current mechanics. I say to all the barbarians out there: if you wanna raid, get off the forums and get good at the game. A good raiding squad can currently break every base in this game. Hands down.