All true, but I don’t hope for those things to improve significantly.
There’s this update loop some developers follow, where each update they want to change the meta so that “content” online gets more views and content creators get something “significant” to hype about (positively or negatively, they benefit equally - nerf it one patch, revert 2 patches later, each time you get a spike in views, reignite interest).
As you said, when the foundation is set, you can do these things all day long, tweak the meta every 3 months, sell new stuff, etc. - many MMO games do it with success for a decade or more. But the problem is they tweak the foundations themselves every 3 months because the AI and animations were wonky to begin with, and each new change feels like adding more duct tape, and there’s so much duct tape where their only solutions are to either rebuild the combat from the ground up, or add more duct tape.
Everything but the building system (which is extremely fun and addictive) is half-arsed.
This characteristic half-arsing is most clearly obvious in encounters with NPCs, where they have less life and personality than a vending machine. Conan Exiles NPCs make Oblivion look like The Witcher 3.
Which is weird, with so much source material and possible dialogue, characters, quest lines they could get inspired by (without necessarily using the same names and locations if those are the issues).
But hey…back to respawnable thrall(s)…if they ever introduce thrall respawning, I really wouldn’t like if all thralls became respawnable - it’d shorten the gameplay loop and ruin the “endgame”. There would be no stakes left in the endgame. That’s why only one respawnable thrall should be enough.
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