if you compare Conan Exiles with other survival games, it is quite simple.
What I’ve always noticed is that every puddle of water seems to be absolutely enjoyable and healthy.
You start on Siptah at the edge, right by the sea… Salt water? Not very tasty and healthy.
In the Elder Vaults you also drink what, where they have been going through for decades, no water movement not exactly healthy?
I jump from 10m high ledges down, there is an “ouch” sound which is like a bone fracture. Nope, just keep running fits already eh?
Would wish me if in Conan Exiles the “survival” is capitalized again.
Sure, depending on the server settings, you could die of thirst every few minutes or be knocked back into the desert by NPC XYZ.
I’m talking about the “vanilla” factor here though.
Dirty water
Infections from bites such as the hyena
Broken bones
Sprained arms when you hammer on shields like a madman or cut down trees non stop.
As beautifully as the game has evolved, survival has pretty much fallen by the wayside over the years. Besides water and food - which is available at every corner - there is nothing in this game that justifies the word “survival”
Absolutely agree. I long for the days in the first year of early access where the environment was actually harsh. You couldn’t even get off noob river until you actually had gear that protected you from the head of the desert above. You could not venture beyond the nordheimer or cimmerian camps until you had some level of cold protection.
I remember before they launched, there was comment that in the swungle, you’d have to watch for disease…
I’d love for the game to have more survival elements. And originally it did.
But does dealing with finding clean water, potential diseases, and other survival elements fit with the endgame of fighting dragons, powerful undead entities, and demons?
Survival has always been a low level affair and one that has gone to the wayside as many of us have characters that have been played for 3-6000 hours over 5-6 years and have been level 60 for 99% of that time.
Progression dictates that those elements become standardly overcome by matter of course of establishment of one’s character and having been established for years. What’s the point of bringing in survival when our every day foes are so much more prominent?
I’m playing devil’s advocate here as I said I do wish for survival to be more of a focus. But with access to such high level equipment, means, resources, and fighting such powerful foes. Survival seems like something that has been conquered and should have been conquered and dealt with long before facing the threats we do every time we play.
Yup though one aspect of the survivial would have to be in the food create a vitamen and protein intake.
What one could do is to have check on is the water safe to drink … even well water would be slightly risky. What i would do , is create a percentage risk … like raw water would be at a 100% when drank from a river or a ocean to be a buff call parasite and infected … It stacks … for example… Level 1 = no damage penalty but with a start for every 15 min of not cure … its goes up with per level of it reduce max water and stamina by 3% …by stack 3 its adds on 5% reduce max health. By stack 10 you start to get drunk vision … weapon damage is now at 40% reduce damage … and if you reach to stack 15 … you are dead rotting away and thus have to create a new character.
But keep in mind that having a water well that isn’t Mitra blessing one you still get a 5% chance of this buff. Now i would add in a way to cook the water safe to drink to turn that down to 0% chance.
For cannibalisms , if you didn’t start with yog… then human raw meat consumption or cooked raw meat now introduce prion disease. but this time its a Drunk vision only leading up to having vision tainting seeing eveything in red. you get whispers of yog every 30 min doing random names.
For broken bones … you get a start stack of five the first one is you are ok but in 15min past if you didn’t treat it right away… it starts to accrue the stack … you receive 3% movement penalty and your max carry weight is also being affected by 3% less. if you get up to five stack then you suffer 30% stamina penalty max reduce. Then at ten stack max … you are unable to move much 70% move-speed and dodge is no longer possible you start to bleed 1% of current hp per minute.
You get the language here … the longer untreated the worse in stats it gets.
The question is, how enjoyable would the game be with all that added “realism”? And I’m not even suggesting that it should take months to heal from a fracture or that it might not heal properly.
Drinking water every now and then is a chore. It adds nothing interesting to the game. Now, if that same uninteresting chore took me longer than a single button press - say, 30 seconds to check the water and perhaps filter it - would it make the feature more interesting? No, it’d just make it more tedious.
Or injuries. I hurt my leg from a fall. Until it heals, I can only hobble slowly. There’s already so much boring and tedious running around in the game that making it take more time doesn’t feel like an improvement.
Sure, the game is pretty light on the survival side, but it has a focus on the cinematic action rather than simply staying alive. Robert E. Howard didn’t spend pages upon pages describing how Conan was bedridden by diarrhoea after drinking from a pubble of rainwater.
I agree that some water, such as the “mineral water” at Shattered Springs, or the sewage in the Dregs, should be undrinkable. But I don’t want survival features that only make the game more tedious.
It wouldn’t be. This game is survival-lite, as it should be. It’s not particularly story driven, and the realism is pretty limited in every other aspect of the game. This game is far more action oriented than a hardline survival game should be.
I don’t have any desire to see the survival aspect of this game increased, it’s not the enjoyable part of this game for me.
The only added state I’d be interested in seeing added is diseases or illnesses, e.g. long term stat debuffs (as opposed to the short-term health debuffs of poison and bleed) that require specialized treatment to cure but otherwise need to be waited out. It would add more strategic depth and even possibly help address issues like the furor over the Goomba-stomp build in PVP (e.g., use a weapon or spell that gives them a disease which debuffs their expertise, etc). It could also segue well with zombie and necromancer builds by making those companions more liable to inflict disease states.
Let’s share opinions and gaming experiences here then!
I really loved stranded deep. I really felt the survival aspect in this game, the agony, it was cool, but you are very correct my friend, no matter how nice it was on the beginning ended up really monotonous and boring in the end. Especially in the hard mode that i had to drink a barrel of water every day!
I won’t speak about green hell, i play it only because i pay it, didn’t like it at all. Forest was more balanced than green hell.
But, i do agree with the op, the game could accept some extra survival tweaks!
For example!
Water!
We have wells, purified water, water skins and multiple other ways to hydrate our selfs! Even straight berries and eggs hydrate you in the starting river .
Adding a tool that filtrates a bit the water, an animation that i drink water from my water skin wouldn’t hurt the gaming experience i think. This tool could be a piece of cloth, or we could just place in the inventory of the campfire the water skin to clean our collected water.
I don’t think it would affect so dramatically the joy of this game and it would add in the survival aspect!
Food!
Our food pool should be bigger.
Meals should fill this pool and snacks could preserve it. Now we use food to push our stamina regen, when i fight sometimes i eat 4 or 5 steaks or meals .
So since we have cooking and campfires, we could eat more properly. The penalty of hunger should be just reducing our stamina points, nothing else!
Bath!
After fights we should have blood stains on cloths and flesh.
These stains especially from our body should be removed from a bath animation either in lakes and rivers, either in our brand new Aquilonian bath set .
The armorer bench on the repair order would clean our armor too .
Great fall.
We already have a cripple effect, so after a grear fall we could be simply crippled for awhile. I never understood even in other games how ten sticks around my leg fix automatically my leg and i can run again .
That’s hilarious, no cripple is good enough, we need nothing more, after all we are heroic toons, we never die .
Extreme temperature.
We should not be able to run as fast as we can normally, so the player who cannot escape easily a situation like this would think twice to go unprepared on extreme temperature biomes.
For gods sake i play this game since 19 and i have used only one stygian potion just to test what it is doing! Let’s use stygian alchemy i say! But fix this potion as well, make it useful so a user can use it in both temperature conditions to exit volcano without the fear of frostbite! (maybe they did change it however i didn’t test it lately).
Food poisoning and infections!
Give me farts ! This function, no matter how disgusting it is, it produces big laughter! I still remember Abe, drinking brew, leaving farts, enchanting them, teleport them to guards and explode them . I remember playing this game almost 25 years ago (maybe more) with my cousin and pee from laughter. It was the definition of LMAO!
Gaming should be fun, so adding mechanisms that produce laughter it’s only good!
This one fixates on internal consistency.
It’s a painful condition.
There is food poisoning from eating steak tartare and oysters… But drinking centuries old sewer water is fine.
This rankles. Severely.
There are already the mechanisms for many complications in the game.
Broken leg?
Crippled status.
There are even mechanisms for altering how long a status lasts.
See Bleeding + Bandages.
This one wishes a better sweet spot had been found between outfits that protect from cold or heat, and accidentally freezing to death at noon on Noob river because Aquilonian clothing is so light and airy.
So, a thought.
Diseased could just as easily be a negative status like sundered.
Given that Sorcery in the Hyborian Age frequently inflicts plagues, it fits.
Infected could also be a condition. One that blocks HP recovery until removed.
Now, how do we remove them?
They fade over time like all conditions.
But perhaps a new admin setting…
Persistent Afflictions
If this option is selected, adverse conditions do not go away on their own and must be dealt with.
Bleeding wounds must be bandaged or you exsanguinate (or have the blatantly magical sigil that staunched it). Poisons require antidotes.
Diseased or Feverish linger until you eat a meal, drink clean water, and use a bedroll or touch your bed/refresh spawn point to represent a good night’s sleep.
Or consume an alchemical/sorcerous concoction.
Just a side thought, by default, this one would suggest this toggle be turned off on most official servers.
But perhaps on a few, they could be turned on. But then again, this one has long been in favour of having some officials at easier/quicker modes than others.
I’m personally not in favor of tedious chores that take away from the action. Preparing to go out adventuring can take long enough, I don’t need to encumber myself with anymore curatives, or make additional considerations for what I might need. If I’m doing something like grinding the unnamed city for loot, I’m already thinking about water, food, and corruption. I don’t need to consider other ailments and circumstances. Additional realistic survival elements always sound interesting on paper, but end up just alienating most of the player base. My friend tried to get into the game a while back and quit after one day because it was taking so long to go around my base and gather up the necessary items to take with him before just going to kill stuff. Do you really think the game will be better with MORE of that? I don’t. I’m gonna have to pass on all this. No thanks.
Lol, for sure, first time i went to shattared spring i run out of water in my bag, i as desperate then i drunk the salt water by accident wile running and tadah, your thirstis gone , i tought wtf, you could not breath here but can drink the toxic water
Did you happen to check my ale barrels .
I do remember a post from a member that fixed a mod for “children Conan exiles”.
Alcohol is bad…
Get out of here dude, leave us be! We love alcohol and nudity, slaves and slays, go play minecraft for God’s sake!
Apologies for the filtration idea:rofl:. Raise the alcohol poisoning to 20 shots, what’s 5?
Tbh, i looooove cooking in this game. So some years ago when i joined my pvp clan the first thing i said in the vocal was, guys i am the chef of the clan.
They all got frozen and Pauline only answered, ok we can discuss it Stelios…
I didn’t think a lot and continued, why? I have already all the cooking recipes, why not?
They all started laughing and they say ok!!!
Then i asked what’s so funny?
I love cooking!
The explained me that chef in French means leader!
Omg!!! How many aloe soups i have cooked back then .
I shouldn’t be so exited for the job i guess!
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