You can swap the journey you are on freely, without losing progress in the other.
Having to have one active though is very immersion breaking. Before, I could just do things and then get “oh, you did a thing!” Now, I have to bounce back and forth in the categories to get credit for things.
Farmer and Dismantler both have “put bone in the grinder” as a step in their category. But, of course, I can only have one active at a time. So I have to do it, switch categories, and do it again to get credit for both. That pulls me right out of playing the game and just becomes a chore.
And yes, yes, I know I don’t have to do it. But, even for a new player, I can see them getting confused when they finish one and go to do another and, we have to go backwards for stone tools because they’ve outgrown them and already have crafted their religious tool or whatever.
It’s a good start and I like the backbones of it, but I do think it needs more refining.
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Imagine that the majority of players have no idea that you can capture thralls in Conan Exiles. The journey steps re-design will help with that.
But now you also get rewarded with in-game stuff so the question is more about is going through the motions worth the reward.
So we have a different method of journey but significantly different outcomes (a hearty thumbs up and trophy potentials vs tangible in game rewards) so do you like the idea of able to skip around and complete these things without the rewards or do you like the linear process task completion event that rewards you? Or is your argument you should be able to just complete these things like the old way and get rewarded when you complete the check list?
Sarcasm 
No issues, unless it is broke, or the have some absurd prerequisite to finish the steps.
Yeah and I agree that seems silly…especially with the yellow lotus bug still in effect.
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The notion that “going through the motions” is an acceptable form of a gameplay is just sad to me. The beauty of Conan, for me, was the exploration and discovery of things. You can never quite recapture the magic of stepping foot into any game world for the first time again, and I fear that the journey steps strip away some of that magic for new players. Additionally, a lot of the discovery of the game has been reduced to a formulaic approach, step-by-step with little room for freedom to find things out and made worse by the requirement to repeat steps in multiple different categories.
Journeys were imagined as a kind of tutorial, according to the dev stream. But putting certain things in multiple journey categories (I go back to grinding bone) assumes the player…forgot how to grind bone? If it’s required for multiple things, acknowledge if the player has already completed it in a different category if it exists in both. I’d even be fine with not popping up as “Complete” for a journey that’s not highlighted, but it auto-completes once that journey has been toggled on.
So no, my argument is neither option you’ve presented. I think the new system CAN be good with some tweaks. It can still be rewarding, still break different things into categories, but do so in a way that acknowledges each player’s unique experience as they play, rather than giving them a chore list to check off step-by-specific-step with no room for variation.
I’d actually highly recommend reading this post because I think it’s a really well thought out discussion regarding the new system.
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I don´t like that they bound feat releated items to the journal. This might be ok for pve, where most people are playing for a longer time on one server. But its terrible for pvp, where you get your regular wipes almost every 30 days.
It doesn´t matter if the gain from the items/workstations is impactful or not. Its simply the fact that if I want to use them on pvp I have to do the journal again and again. This is not fun.
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The results from steam’s own achievement tracker page
Looks like half the population of this game has no idea what a wheel of pain is. Gues the new re-designed journey step will help in it’s current format, given the rewards and all that liniar format.
More than anything, players need hand holding.
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Achievement trackers don’t take into account the amount of people that just never played the game long enough to meet the prerequisite for said achievement. I would assume that the low percentage for this particular achievement would be from people that got the game for free, booted up spent a little while messing around and decided it wasn’t for them.
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Feedback: After playing with the new journey steps and trying out the new system, here’s what my experience was like:
- I love the new art of the cards. Great visual improvements.
- I love the detailed instructions on how to do each step. Excellent guides for playing the game.
- I am enjoying the variety of the sub-steps under each category.
- However, I am not enjoying the repeated “same” steps not completing. If I access an Alchemist Bench once, that step should be completed for every journey card that requires it. I would recommend keeping the step in each category, just gray it out and mark it as complete.
- Also, I am not enjoying the linear requirement of completing each step. If I gather rocks, I should get credit for gathering rocks regardless if my current journey step is “selected” or not. Or whether I have completed all the sub-steps before the “next” step or not.
- And, I am not enjoying the requirement of having to select a journey step. While it is nice to have one selected to keep my attention on what I’m doing, I do not like that nothing gets accomplished unless that particular journey step is selected.
Overall, I find the new journey step method a “mixed bag” of some good and some bad experiences. I like the direction in where the new journey step is going, but I would really like to see it improved to allow a less “linear” experience and more of a “sandbox” approach which was the original design of the game. Allow players to complete the journey steps in any order (partial or in total). If a player has completed all but a few steps, the directions provide great detail, not only one what’s missing, but how to finish that entire card.
TLDR: more sandbox freedom and less linear restrictions please
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You seem to forget that not everybody who buys a game is necess. playing it. You seem to forget that a lot of people have multiple accounts and use this accounts to bodyvault in pvp.
Also you miss was is also stated in your picture. That only 34.717 gamers where tracked in this statistic. Funcom sold 1,4 million copys alone in 2018 and we can asume that the amount of sold copys has at least been doubled over the last 5 years.
So 34.000 out of at least, if not more then 3 million people is not representative enough to get reliable numbers.
If they don’t see the wheel of pain right there while spending knowledge points, just how did they manage to figure out how to do anything? Not much auto unlocks, it all has to be chosen to be unlocked.
Then how do these people know about building material types, work benches, animal pens, or anything else in game?
I’m not buying those states. There is something throwing them off like they count players that quit before they got to the level to unlock the wheels. I want to see how many 30th levels don’t have that.
Level 10.
They don’t. When you operate as a server admin, you get the wonderful time of explaining these sorts of things to players.
If the system feels too hand holdy, good. It means the game is teaching players how to play it instead of me. If veteran players don’t like it, they can skip it. Treat it like other newbie things you routinely skip.
That’s exactly right. It means they quit playing before they got to the point where they even thought about unlocking the wheel of pain.
You can see similar behavior in the statistics for achievements in other games.
Frankly, I wouldn’t want a game to “take into account” whether or not an achievement is “reasonable” when it’s calculating the percentage of players that have that achievement as doing that can make a game look healthier than it actually is.
“Give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day, teach a man to fish and he can feed himself for a life time”.
And why I am a against spoon feeding newbies. If some one needs their hand held that much through Conan maybe they need to go back to animal crossing. I mean if you can’t manage to hit TAB and check the players menus maybe you need to go back to putting together puzzles on your kitchen table.
I’m sorry, I’m not buying the idea most players are so ignorant they need to be hand held through the basics of a game.
I’m curious. How did you figure out how to make steel and hardened steel?
FC isn’t in the business of designing jigsaw puzzles. And yet there is many of such players. One I know has nearly 3k hours across 3-4 accounts and has purchased all of the DLCs on at least one of those.
The Journey System doesn’t make Conan Exiles easier. Let’s be honest and clear about that. Its simply an optional system that has some neat little awards and gives struggling and new players a bit of help that doesn’t require them tabbing out to a wiki or a google search.
Honestly can’t recall, been playing since the game dropped so probably the same way and time as everyone else, probably on the steam forum before I got banned. But I knew there were steel weapons that is why I was looking for how to make them. Not like I was totally oblivious to their existence.
Well what do you expect from being hand held and spoon fed. But I ain’t buying it. I don’t see how anyone can have that many hours in, have that many accounts, with out having seen a wheel of pain, a stable, or an animal pen in the world.
Actually it makes it harder.
So not teaching them how to research a game so they need further spoon feeding when the answer isn’t right there in front of them.
Fact is, out side of the broken bits and need to allocate attribute points to unlock some, I like the new journey system. Hell I’m already benefiting from it because I just started a new game on private server; 35th level now? And taking very little time getting the journeys done that aren’t broken, or have ridicules prerequisites.
I think you’re also overlooking the point that FC updated the journey system for a reason. Companies don’t just spend dev cycles (they aren’t cheap employees) on random changes to their game just because.
They probably got feedback that led them to conclude that a significant reason new players quit playing was because it was too difficult to figure out in game what they were supposed to do to “progress.”
You can look down on those players as being stupid all you want, but that doesn’t change the “fact” that FC considered that outcome to be more problematic than the “problem” of coddling these supposedly “low intellect” players.