I’d have to let you know when I find one. :laughing:

In seriousness though, its hard to find one that comes close to Conan Exiles. Even among its harshest critics, you’ll see that many of them have been at it for literal years. You’ll find many people here with literally thousands of hours played. And even once you feel like you’ve played it out, there’s mods for those of us on PC. Even just playing a different map will double (or more) the content you have available.

One of the closest games I’ve played would have been Everquest Landmark. It was a voxel based building/survival game. But the voxels were resizable. You could build just about anything you could think of. No game came close to that. The exploration was very similar to Terraria, except in 3D. I used to call that game the 3D Terraria because of the style and aesthetics. Unfortunately that game was canceled in development.

Valheim isn’t too bad. Its building system is actually what I would call somewhat superior to CE. But you’re limited by its limited number of building styles, and by the system being a tad strict. To really get enjoyment out of that one, you need to mod it. Its one of those games where you play it for a few hours and go… ‘ok doing this like that sucks… can I mod it…?’ and yes, yes you can thankfully. Just having Valheim Plus makes the game so much more enjoyable. But I will say every time I do a playthrough, I only get like a dozen or two hours out of it. Where my CE stints will go for hundreds of hours over a spawn of a year or more. It doesn’t have much (has some) exploration for underwater or caves, but makes up for it by having sailing, which can be fun… or annoying for some. I liked it, but then again I loved playing Archeage.

Empyrion is another interesting survival game. Its got a scifi bent. But you build your ships and vehicles block by block as well as your bases. Its very simplified version of Space Engineers building system. Instead of having to pipe every thing together, just placing it makes it ‘work’. You can explore planets in a procedurally generated galaxy, and its surface to orbit transitions are better than Starfields (as in they are there). I don’t quite play this one as much as CE, but if you sort my library by time played, this is a solid second place.

Then Space Engineers is an honorable mention. Its kind of a survival game. But its more focused on the physics and building aspects. You need to connect containers to crafting stations and fuel tanks to thrusters, and all that. I like to call this one legos for us older folks. Not much to explore unfortunately. You have to go into that one with an idea to build ‘something’ and the challenge is to do it, then do it again but better.

All of these games I have played primarily in singleplayer with the exception of Landmark, which I closed beta tested with a few friends before it was canceled. And I did play all of them in dedicated servers locally. Though Valheim doesn’t give much benefit to doing so for singleplayer. But I tend to do so anyway because maybe a friend might drop in to play for a bit.

But I will say this, if you’re even a casual fan of Robert E. Howard, enjoyed his stories, or heck just had a soft spot for the 1980’s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, then Conan Exiles will hit a sweet spot that will be hard to let go. Even if you stop playing for a bit, you’re very likely to come back. I’ve taken up to several months breaks at a time only to return for a year or so. I don’t even get that kind of playtime out of a MMORPG. Many here have very similar experiences.

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