My two cents worth

Hello,

usually you start with the worst first and then talk about the good things so let me start with the worst here. A confession. I pirated the game around a week ago. Before you judge and stop reading I ask you to please continue reading on.

I am not really a big conan fan but heard of this but never got it or just thought about getting it. Ages ago I saw my favourite german youtuber play it on a livestream for a couple of hours. It looked good but it was an early build and looked like it needed alot of improvements. After starting the game I had no idea what I was getting into or why the next week of my life was divided between playing the game and doing anything not playing this game related. I just fell in love with the world because it breathes atmosphere. Let it compare it to the other big sandbox game: Ark. Both operate on the same ground but both are very very different. I am a big Ark fan but Conan has something that Ark does not have: Atmosphere.

The feeling of really being exiled and carving out a place for you in this world. Especially in the early and middle levels when you find your own place in this world, get thralls and build your own base in this world you just can dive into this. Ark operates on another very different level: The taming of dinos stands at the forefront and the basebuilding comes second. After a certain point in Ark there is really nothing that can make your life tougher, you have your high bred rexes and are on the top of the food chain and reign supreme over everything. As much as I dont like the level cap, it is important so that you never get to the point where you can just mow everything down in your way without losing any health. While there are still OP builds it never feels like you are god and everything dies when you look at it.

I bought the game today because I really want to support the people who made this game and this is why I am confessing here. This is not a threat made to discussion pirating games vs anything, I just want to say that the game is great and wish to support the people who made it. You can see that alot of love was and is being poured into the game. And you can see that it is still very rough around the edges. There are many things that are in the game that were thought it would be cool to add them but do not lead anything good, many things that are there but there are better alternatives out there for this. Cooking for example or crafting. BUT that is one of the best things about this game: It gives you alot of choices to find what you want to do here. Weapons, cooking, crafting, potions. Instead of giving you one choice it gives you 10 or 20. Most you don’t need or won’t ever use but it is this liberty and this choice that it gives you that just adds so much to this feeling of being stranded in this world and carving your own home out there.

This is why I dearly hope that Funcom adds MORE to this instead of trying to up levels and create more endgame content. Please make the game broader instead of higher. Please find a way to make the frozen north more interesting, to make the highlands more intersting, to get this survival and etching out your corner up there like in the beginning and middle way. Please add more options to customize your bases, new buildings, new pure atmosphere breathing stuff that you can place, more unique thralls, more of this please. And this is why I think that the Eastern DLC is the right path for this. I do not know what people think of this but I think its the right way into this direction.

Now if you could make the north more interesting the same way and add more stuff to it that would be one more way into the great direction. More of cooking, building, items, crafting etc. Like beekeeping. It is kinda useless but its fun and gives you more choices! How amazing would it be if you could make an indoor garden, if you could make your own trees, maybe have your own waterwheel? Finding more unique ways to produce food, craft things and so much more would just make this the best survival sandbox game out there! And this is why I think that Ark has reached the maximum potential of what it can do but Conan? Conan has so much potential because it is still such a rough game. You can clearly see the vision where they want to take it at every corner of the game. This is why I think Conan can be this game that would be the dream of everyone who loves sandbox games. Who wouldn’t want to ride on a Tiger through the desert to your castle, where a huge ramp winds upwards a big rock, guarded by your archers left and right on the towers, greeted by 2 fighters with spears at your Front Gate, to go inside the long hallway with pillars on the left and right. Lighted at every pillar with braziers, the walls full of wall cravings and carpets. A garden in the middle full of Tigers and dancers. where you can cook a hundred meals, build a hundred decorative things and expand towards the heavens in an unlimited fashion. This is why Conan is so great and this is why it can be the best Sandbox game ever.

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Thank you very much, Asparagus! It really means a lot that you liked the game so much, and that you expressed that on the forums here :slight_smile:

We are working on adding in more content, to make it broader, as you say. There’s going to be a pets system, new dungeons, more DLC ala the Imperial East Pack, and some additional quality of life improvements down the line.

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Despite some of the salty threads you see. CE is actually a great game. I bought it back in December and played nearly 1100 hours. Its my most played game on my steam library, rivaling games like Terraria, Space Engineers, and other similar games that I’ve had for years.

I’ve even made a mod for this game, my first one for any game.

Its not without its issues, my main concerns are mostly in biome diversity. The biomes in CE are great, they look good and they’re quite diverse in theme and feel. But there’s no reason to set up in most of them. The best place in the game to set up right now is near the Mounds of the Dead. From there you have access to everything you need. Brimstone just to the south, Black Ice to the north. And starmetal (if needed for anything) in your backyard. The only hardpart is dragonbone if you need that for anything.

What I’d like to see is a reason to want to travel to the Jungle or even a means of setting up there. Insulated Wood and Black Ice structures are head and tails much easier to craft than stonebrick and reinforced stonebrick. Tier 2 and 3 structures should be better balanced in cost and difficulty.

Then there needs to be materials needed by everyone in everyone biome. If you live in the north, there should be SOMETHING from the desert and jungle you need. And vice versa. This could lead to players from the north trading or raiding players from the south and vice versa there too. As it stands right now, you can set up near the mounds, get some of the better thralls, and never have to leave.

Its just a bit weird to have a tier 3 fighter from Dafari have 450hp and a Hyborian from the volcano has 2400. Should both be the same IMO. Make each biome have the same difficulty, but have an easy part and a difficult part. The easy part requires little equipment and effort to thrive in, but the hard part requires perks and armor to resist effects or harder creatures. Easy part has primarily tier 1-2 thralls, and harder is 3-4.

That’s how I’d handle it anyway.

I fully agree with you. I used at last 100 hour to set up my first real home right next to the Sinkhole with the obelisk. I love the desert, the landscape, the getting resources, the crafting and the making the base bigger, taking trips to the pirate stone ship to get thralls. I raided that place easily 50 times to get all the named thralls, fighters etc. But this place is a dead end as you cannot get anything over the higher tiers.

My new base is right in the south of new asgard, right next to Stormwatch. How easily you can get 200 steel bars in just half an hour is really astonishing. Used to grind 500 steel bars in a day and now they just throw at at you. Just like an hour or so ago I found Tulwar of Amir Khurum in the chest in the tower in there.

But I fully agree with what Taemien says. Divide each Biome into easy (stone) middle (iron, steel) and hard (star etc) so that you give players a choice to stay. I can’t see myself go to the jungle because it has nothing that would bring me to the endgame. Which is a shame because funcom put alot of work in creating this but in the current progress level of players they just dont stay there. Most players will go desert and the highlands and frost, leaving probably alot of places in the game untouched or unused.

Just this progression is not fitting for this game in my opinion. This game is all about freedom so please give players the freedom to go from easy to endgame in all biomes regardless. I know that this is not an easy thing to accomplish but I am sure that there are ways to go about this.

Plus, I think there should be different kind of tier I,II,III buildings dependant on the Biome. It strikes me as weird to have a sandstone building in the highlands. It is just so out of place. It would only be purely cosmetic but a northern themed Tier I building, a jungle themed Tier I and an Iced themed Tier I. This could be used for Tier II or Tier III. This would give the game even more atmosphere and Immersity. When you start in the deserrt you build with sandstone and simple but when you are in the highlands you build with alot of wood and stone and make norse themed buildings.

Imo Ark is as atmospheric as Conan Exile, especially in Aberration. One thing that Conan Exile is lacking is the sense of danger. Sure in Ark once we are on a strong dino it’s practically a walk in the park, but the sense of danger is still there only supressed because we’re on a strong dino, at some point we still have to unmount from the dino to do stuffs, and Ark is the only game where I feel unsafe outside of a wall. I ever went to the surface in Aberration, riding a Karkinos and carrying an Anky to farm metal, and I thought there wouldn’t be any reaper there, turned out I was wrong and a reaper emerged from the ground, growling, and approaching my character, I was totally scared to death. No game had ever done that to me lol. I thought to myself is this how i’d feel if suddenly a tiger appears in front of me.

In Conan Exile there is no sense of danger because we can outrun everything in the game, I even went to learn Cartography in Unnamed City at lv 30, naked and only carry food and water because I didnt want to lose stuffs if my character died and I couldn’t find the body. Even when I was chased by a dragon, skeletons etc I could outrun them all. Sure they’re scary and yes it’s atmospheric, especially at night time but knowing that I can just outrun them all made me at ease.

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