This is going to be a long and comprehensive post on my experiences with this game since downloading it in April 2019 with the free PSN+ games. I have sunk countless hours into this game, and have since purchased every DLC for it. I play primarily in official PVE PS4 servers (3501 and 3512 to be exact), and that is the experience I am going to discuss (not PVP). I’d like to say before I start that I love this game, and my reason for posting this is to provide honest feedback in the hopes that major issues with the game can actually be addressed so this game can live up to its full potential, and prevent loyal players from leaving.
I’m going to list every single issue I have catalogued over the course of playing this game, but the major two that need to be fixed are Building Stability/Decay Issues and The Purge. All of it amounts to 10 pages on a Word doc, so if you as a player only read the 2 game-breaking issues, I’m more than happy. You may not agree or experience everything I discuss, and that’s okay (I’ve seen evidence of multiple other players, in and not in my servers, at least experiencing the first 2 game-breaking issues though). I just hope these issues are seen by at least someone from Funcom.
-------------------------------------------------Game-breaking Issues-------------------------------------------------
Building Stability/Decay Issues
Recently on both servers I actively play on there seems to exist a game-breaking bug where random structures are losing stability for no reason and then just disappearing. This occurrence has been backed up by other players in my servers, as well as in forum posts and reddit comments of players not just in my server. Sometimes this shows up in the event log, and sometimes it doesn’t. Entire bases have disappeared for no reason whatsoever. Bases that have taken over 48 hours purely to build, and countless hours to accumulate high tier resources and gear to store in them. In one server, we lost 6 separate bases, all which had been refreshed in the past 2 days (I actually maintain timers to make sure nothing decays). No changes had been made to the structural integrity of any of the bases in that timeframe, just randomly one day they decided to disappear. Some said there were loses in stability in the Event Log, and some had no evidence of anything happening in the Event Log. It is extremely gut-wrenching when all the time you put into building that base and gathering those resources/gear just goes poof due to no fault of your own, but just because the game glitched. One of those bases was built by a clanmate and had been maintained for over a year, but it was gone in a few seconds. That clan had around 8 members in it. Pretty much everyone except me in my clan have decided to stop playing the game because of it (my base survived somehow), and one has decided to just focus on PVP servers instead. I’ve significantly cut back on playing the game now because I worry all of the resources, thralls, or items I gather in that time may randomly disappear rendering the time spent gathering them basically wasted. If this issue doesn’t get fixed, I’ll stop playing the game all-together, and I know everyone else experiencing this bug will too.
Secondly, and as a somewhat separate but similar issue, the decay timer is too short. One week is not long enough, especially when you have multiple buildings across the map that often take hours to reach just to refresh. The decay timer was temporarily at 2 weeks for a little bit, and that was a perfect amount of time. Having it at 7 days makes playing this game almost like a second job. It has thus far been easier for me because I had other clanmates to help update everything, but now that they are gone, it makes playing the game a whole lot harder. I understand that Ark, a similar type of game, has structures that have a decay rate of 35 days and they even have dinosaurs you can fly across the map on. The best Conan has are mounts and map rooms, which definitely help, but they aren’t sufficient in allowing players to quickly refresh their bases all across the map especially if you are not close to an obelisk.
The Purge
This is the feature that could really make this game shine in the late-game. After you’ve fought every boss, got your full set of Godbreaker armor, and built your massive T3 castle base, there isn’t a whole lot to do except prepare for Purges (again, this is my opinion, I’m sure many might disagree). Besides that, there is that massive incentive to trigger Purges to get the best thralls in the game, some of which are required to even make certain items/gear. Yet the entire system is excruciatingly painful to deal with for multiple reasons.
- It takes forever to build up the purge meter, especially if you play solo. I can play for 3 hours straight murdering everything in sight and the meter barely moves a tick. The fact that Funcom hasn’t said officially how it all works currently makes it even more frustrating to try and figure out.
- The decrease on not logging in every day is insane. If I miss a single day of playing, the purge bar moves back the amount comparable to about 1 week of 3 hours a day playing in my experience (rough visual estimate). Again, this makes trying to trigger a Purge like a second job.
- Sometimes you get Purges that don’t even have thralls you can capture in it, or just have animals. I’ve had a total of 3 purges ever in my entire playthrough of this game on official servers. All three of them were stinkin scorpions. It took non-stop playing to finally get them to trigger, and all I get is some worthless chitin from farming their eventual dead carcasses. I live near sand reapers and scorpions, so I already have an unlimited supply of chitin! I know I’m not the only one that can get frustrated by this mechanic.
- From common knowledge, it seems as though actions that increase the Purge bar are only counted every 15 minutes, and it doesn’t matter how many of them you do, they all only count once. Why? That makes it very hard for someone to raise the purge bar without playing the game for an insane amount of time every day. A small tick every 15 minutes, only if you actually perform one of those actions each interval? That seems really convoluted for no reason.
So how do we fix this? First, remove the automatic decrease on the Purge meter when you don’t log in consecutive days and replace it with another manual way of decreasing the purge. Maybe some form of sacrifice you can perform at a religion station, or item you can craft and consume at a firebowl cauldron. That way, if you really are worried about a Purge, there is a mechanism to reduce your Purge meter, but it isn’t a forced mechanism that you cannot stop if you are actually trying to trigger a Purge. Secondly, make all Purges at least have one wave of human thralls no matter where the base to be attacked is. I understand the difficulty scaling for different areas, but just make the human thralls have lower tier gear (like how there are Exile thrall and Volcano thrall stat and gear differences naturally). Thirdly, change the Purge increases to count for each individual action that occurs instead of singling them to one every 15 minutes (if that’s even how it works). Make those actions count for very little, or you could increase the total Purge meter if you’re worried that it will increase the Purge bar really quickly compared to the current system. Fourth, update us on how exactly the Purge will count things that cause it to go up. Currently, all our assumptions on how the Purge works are just that; assumptions. I don’t know why this system seems to be shrouded in mystery, especially when it should be treated like a late-game goal instead of just some annoying occurrence that may happen to you for some reason you don’t even understand.
Without fixes for the above 2 issues, I find it very hard to see myself and many others continuing to play the game even with all the other new updates coming down the pipeline. It’s hard to make a case for playing a game where all of your progress that takes so long to accrue could disappear in an instant just due to a single stupid glitch. So for the sake of continued longevity, please please please Funcom, address those 2 issues soon! Below are all the other issues I have found while playing the game for a year that still, in my opinion, need to be fixed. Adding all of these issues together makes for a very frustrating time with a game that has SO many great qualities.
------------------------------------------------------General Issues------------------------------------------------------
Building Materials are Not Created Equal
When upgrading your house to higher tiers (especially T3), the costs are way higher than the basic sandstone structures. The logic is understandable, but I feel like the actual practice is unbalanced and unfeasible mainly due to Hardened Brick/Brick costs. It’s not that big a deal to convert Brick into Hardened Brick with Stone Consolidant, but the stone cost for brick and/or the building brick requirements are too high. A T3 foundation costs 15 Hardened Brick, which ignoring the stone consolidant cost requires 150 stone to make. This means you have to harvest about 3 stones with a fully upgraded star metal pick just to have enough resources for one foundation. Conversely, it takes less that one stone for a 1 sandstone foundation. This equates to a T3 foundation cost of about 4.3x the cost for a Sandstone Foundation, which in my opinion is too high. I think the ideal ratio would be, at most, 2.5-3x more than a Sandstone Foundation. Otherwise it takes weeks to gather enough resources to upgrade your base, and it seems like players should be encouraged, not discouraged to upgrade their base. It shouldn’t be super easy, but nor should it be so hard that it isn’t worth doing. Because then we are just left with boring Sandstone structures everywhere because nobody wants to waste the time or resources to make cooler creations outside of single-player mode.
The availability of Black Ice Structures compound this issue because it replaces that Hardened Brick cost with Black Ice, which is WAY easier to gather. Each node allows way more hits to harvest, and it’s already in its final form (no need to stick in a furnace to turn it into brick which reduces the total by a factor of 10). Also, Black Ice requires insulated wood instead of shaped wood which again is easier to produce.
Shaped Wood requires 10 Wood (or 5 Wood with a T4 Carpenter) to produce. Insulated Wood requires 1 dry wood and 2 resin (or just 1 dry wood and 1 resin with a T4 Carpenter). Drying wood produces 2 shaped wood and 1 resin per 1 wood (requires a bunch of bark for fuel as well, but still). This means that Insulated Wood requires only 1 (with T4 carpenter) or 2 wood to produce purely using a dryer and carpenter’s bench. This also gives you an excess supply of dry wood which happens to be the best fuel source providing a nice little bonus.
This makes Black Ice way more cost-effective than any other T3 building structure type, which unbalances the building mechanics when it really should be somewhat equal. This results in people primarily using Black Ice when upgrading their buildings as the resource farming time is drastically less than with other T3 building types (again, based on my experience).
There are several different options to fix this. The stone --> brick cost could be reduced to something below 10, but this has very wide-reaching consequences as many things require brick. Therefore while potentially the easiest method, it is not ideal. Additionally, you could make it so smelter thralls reduce the resource cost the same way carpenters do so with wood. Aka a T4 smelter thrall would cause bricks to only require 5 stone to make as opposed to 10. I think this mechanic should be in the game either way because it seems silly to be able to reduce cost for wood but not stone. Alternatively, you could reduce T3 structure hardened brick cost by 40% (which would bring the T3 foundation hardened brick cost down to 9 achieving the desired 2.5-3x ratio discussed above). This solution would be more targeted than the previous two, but a fourth and better options also exists… You could switch out the hardened brick cost altogether for a different high tier resource such as…Obsidian (read the next section for details on how)!
Obsidian Is Worthless
Right now, it can ONLY be used to produce composite obsidian, which is a huge pain in the butt to do. You have to go all the way to the Volcanic Forge, hoping your thrall doesn’t randomly fall in lava and die, then use up precious steel bars to sit there waiting for it to craft, while having to kill the annoying thralls that respawn right around the forge every 15 min or so (all solo because your thrall probably died on the way there). Not to mention it takes forever to craft each bar (10 sec each – so 6 per minute). This whole process is made even more pointless when you realize an easier way to do this is to kill or capture volcano thralls to obtain their obsidian weapons, then just put them in dismantling benches to scavenge composite obsidian bars that way. No steel bars, large amounts of obsidian, or time wasted. Doing this option then fully makes raw obsidian worthless.
There is one awesome way this could all be fixed. Make raw obsidian the “hot” counterpart to black ice. If an insulating black ice foundation requires 15 black ice, make a cooling T3 foundation require 15 obsidian. Boom! Two birds one stone! You fix the obsidian worthlessness issue and the unbalanced building structure resource cost issue in one fell swoop. It also makes sense thematically as black ice structures keep you warm from resources gathered from the cold, and thus obsidian structures keep you cool from resources gathered in the heat.
Alternatively, you could turn obsidian into basically a high tier form of stone/iron ore which can just be placed in any furnace to produce composite obsidian bars at a high obsidian cost (maybe 10 raw per one bar). Maybe add a second element where steelfire or black ice+brimstone is required like how you convert iron --> steel --> hardened steel. With this second alternative fix to composite obsidian, you could still substitute composite obsidian bars for hardened brick and still fix the building material balance issue. Or as a somewhat crappy but easy fix, you could drastically lower the time it takes to craft each composite obsidian bar to like 3 seconds or something. Still, please use obsidian for T3 building components because it’s a mainly unused yet high tier resource that fits perfectly into what should be required for a high tier building.
Thrall Spawn Rates
Referencing back to late-game activities like the Purge, another late-game activity is acquiring all the different T4 thralls. The problem is that doing so is incredibly tedious for no real reason. As a good example of what I’m talking about, I’ve been trying to get Grrr Legbiter for 2 weeks now, playing every day and doing about 4 runs a day going through all the potential spawn points to find him (if he’s not there, I kill the thrall that is, and wait for it to respawn to see if it is him the next time around). I STILL haven’t found him. This isn’t fun. It’s just tedious. According to the wiki, most T4 thralls have a less than 1% chance to spawn. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad if there were more than one T4 armorer that could craft flawless versions of certain armors. All T4 armorers can craft flawless versions of the DLC armor, so why is it so much harder to find armorers for the base game armor? At least have all armorers be able to craft more than just one flawless armor type so that, for example, there isn’t only one armorer that can craft flawless Hyperborean Slaver armor. Alternatively and preferably, maybe just increase the spawn rate for some of these T4 thralls so that players don’t have to go through 50+ runs of refreshing spawn points just to find one.
Follower Thralls are the Real Main Character
Maybe I just don’t know the right character build, but this game has always made me feel like I’m actually the follower, and my thrall is the main character of the game. This is due to the fact that thralls are super strong AND our characters are super weak. Trying to do a boss battle solo is nearly impossible, but throw in a T4 fighter thrall with some good armor and weapons, and all you need to do is sit back and watch as your thrall kicks the boss’s ■■■ singlehandedly. You want to contribute to the fight? There’s no point, because the damage you do is negligible compared to your thrall’s, and now you just risk the chance of getting cornered and one-shotted. This makes combat a whole lot less fun.
One way to fix it is by making player characters stronger. Only after that you should then nerf followers. How do you specifically make characters stronger in the right way? Every time the character levels up, they should get a much larger base increase in health, attack, and defense that has nothing to do with attributes. That way low-level characters aren’t able to completely destroy all low-level enemies, but being level 60 actually gives you the ability to still have a decent shot of fighting a boss even if you spend all your points in encumbrance or something. This mechanic may somewhat be in the game currently, but if it is, it’s needs to be beefed up way more.
Thrall Weapon Switching Needs to Be a Thing
Now this issue looks to potentially be getting fixed with the most recent update, but it’s still very worth discussing. One of the biggest pains in the butt when exploring the Exiled Lands is when you finally fall upon a T4 thrall you want to take back to your base (see above issues as to why finding one is such a rare and desired occurrence), but sadly your thrall has a Flawless Star Metal Greatsword equipped and you have no chance to swap it out with a truncheon before he smashes the blade down on the T4’s head killing him/her instantly. Or maybe you just want your thrall to be able to quickly switch to another weapon in their inventory for whatever reason. Having some form of quick command to do this would be ideal. Also, I have seen issues in the past where thralls cannot figure out what to do when you switch them between 1H and 2H weapons. So that issue would also need to be fixed. Currently, I don’t know if that is still an issue because to avoid the issue altogether, I just stick with giving all my thralls 1H weapons so I don’t need to worry about it when I give them a truncheon. Also, it would be nice to have an option for animal thralls to be able to switch to attacks that just knock enemies out so they also would not be subject to the same issue of killing potential thralls you want to capture.
Fast Travel/Obelisks Needs to Be More Available
Conan Exiles has a massive map, which is a good and bad thing. It’s mainly good, but when you need to get to different places, running takes FOREVER. The addition of mounts helps a little bit with that, but if you want to be able to capture thralls, horses potentially attacking them makes that very hard to do. Also, the previous issues with a 7-day decay timer makes it all the more a pain in the butt to build a base not close to an obelisk. If you want to explore the game, it’s hard to do that knowing you will have to take a few hours just to get all the way back to your base every time you want to venture out. Obelisks and map rooms make it much easier to move around in the game, but still only limit you to those places closest to those obelisks and where you know players have accessible map rooms set up. [I personally try to make an accessible map room near every obelisk so all players can move around easily and I can refresh them easily]. What would be nice is some sort of item similar to a map room where you could manually place where you transport to and from. Almost like your own mini-obelisk. Being that we wouldn’t want a million of these all over the place, the resource cost to make these should understandably be incredibly high (much more than a map room), maybe something that only drops from a boss battle. Or even make a cap on the number of transport nodes each clan could have. Adding these would open up the map way more and would also help with the short 7-day decay rate I discuss above.
Current Proposed Follower Caps are Too Low
I understand the purpose of trying to reduce lag, but I really don’t agree with the 50+5 rule. 50 followers for one player is reasonable, but to only get an additional 5 for each clanmate is not. Most clans have multiple bases, and only upping the cap by 5 for each person heavily disincentivizes players from joining clans because now they have to short staff each additional base they have. And maybe that would make sense if this game was not extremely geared towards being in a clan, but it is. The low growth on the cap per player in a clan punishes players for joining a clan which is counterproductive. Just make it 50 per player. Or maybe a less restrictive progressive “tax” on the follower limit like 50 for one person, 90 for 2 people, 120 for 3 people, etc. (50 + 40 + 30 + 20 +….). I’ve also seen the reasoning that in PVP, clans can surround their bases with unlimited followers to make it tough for opponents to get past them due to enemy difficulty and forced lag. But this is only really an issue in PVP. In that case, just institute the cap for PVP and PVE-C servers and not PVE. There should be differences between the game modes, and this can definitely be one of them.
Temperature Damage Is Inconsistent
In a server where one of my bases actually did disappear, I could not quickly transport back. Unfortunately it was in the volcano. Luckily I had gear good enough to get my temperature to only “Hot”, so I felt that it would be okay to log out and run back later. I made sure my temperature wasn’t changing, then logged off because it was late and I would just come back the next morning to make the long trek back to my main base across the map. But for some reason, in the morning, my character had died while I was offline. Yet for some reason there was no record of it in the event log. This really sucks because I had a full set of Godbreaker armor and a legendary weapon in my inventory which all disappeared after I died, which should not have happened because I was only “Hot” which does not do health damage (Or so I thought). This may have been a singular incident, but issues with the temperature mechanics make me think not.
For example, I’ve been confused by the “Extremely Hot/Cold” states. When looking in the Stats tab, it says these states causes 0HP/sec damage, which makes no sense. So apparently, I am taking damage, but it’s 0 damage, which technically means I’m not taking damage. When looking at my health, if I stay in that temperature range, I lose no health for about a minute, then I can see minor chunks of health disappearing (as well as no ability to regenerate health from anything due to the “Stopped Healing” effect). Yet, all the while in my stats page, it still says I am experiencing 0HP/sec damage. This makes me skeptical that maybe the entire temperature system is bugged making it very hard to anticipate if you character will randomly die when you are offline. I’m not sure exactly what the issue is, but I think it needs to be looked into.
Upgrading Structures Should Give You The Breakdown Cost Back
When you place an upgraded piece over an old piece, it breaks the old piece down and puts in the new piece. Yet for some reason you don’t get the breakdown resource cost from the old piece by doing this. Why? There’s no reason not to. Especially because you could just destroy the piece first, THEN place the upgraded piece in the same place. But that’s just adding an extra step when presumably the developers added the upgrade option for the sole reason of removing that step. Maybe it wouldn’t be as much of a big deal to not get those resources back if the upgraded building pieces didn’t require so much stone/brick to produce (see above issues with building resource costs). Hopefully this was just something that was overlooked, otherwise I really don’t understand the logic behind not having it as the default.
Using Map Rooms While Dragging an Unconscious Thrall Sorta Works
It IS possible to travel through a map room with a knocked-out thrall, but there is one weird caveat to it; the thrall’s body doesn’t come with you, but the rope extends infinitely from their previous destination. This basically means you can still run with them attached to your rope until you place them on a wheel of pain, but if your rope breaks or you accidentally unequip it, then you lose the thrall. This must be a pain in the butt to fix in the code, otherwise it seems like they would have had it fixed by now, but hopefully they can get the knocked-out thralls to travel with you the same way your follower thralls can. That way you don’t have to worry about potentially unequipping/breaking your rope before getting to a wheel of pain (another reason why I like to set up bases close to obelisks).
Religion Materials With Different Spoil and Stack Rates
Each religion has its own tool to harvest human bodies for unique materials. Yet some of them don’t expire (Derketo and Ymir), some have different expiration times than the others, and they have different max stack rates. Why? Why should Ymir’s Ice Shards never expire while Mitra’s Lingering Essence expire in an hour (as opposed to 2hrs for Yog, 30 min for Set, and 100 min for Jhebbal Sag)? Also, what’s the point of having different max stack numbers? They are essentially all the same material, just for different religions, yet these two factors vary significantly for no apparent reason. Just make them all uniform.
Elevators Have Default Starting Locations
Vertical elevators always default to being at the top which is super annoying. Most vertical elevators are used so that you can get up to high places, which means you have to wait forever for the elevator cabin to come all the way down before you can get on and go all the way back up. This should honestly be the opposite if there is a default position as going down is way easier (just fall and catch yourself on a wall). The best way to fix this is to just have the last used position be the default (I thought that is what it used to be, but I may be wrong). That way you can send an elevator down for next use while having another next to it stay at the top. Also, they are extremely slow. It would be nice if they could move a little bit faster because it takes almost longer than climbing to move anywhere.
------------------------------------------------------Annoying Bugs------------------------------------------------------
Next are some general bugs I have encountered that aren’t necessarily game-breaking, but are pretty annoying that the devs might not be aware of.
Dragon Bosses Knock Thralls Underground
Every time I fight a dragon boss, after a few hits that knock the thralls back, they eventually glitch into the ground and thus cannot fight the enemy unless you runaway and force them to teleport to you again. This is pretty annoying when you have to do this multiple times in such a drawn out fight. [This has occurred on both Unnamed City Dragons, and the Green Dragon in the Temple of Frost].
Dead Bodies Seem to Become Invisible Often
When going through many of my runs to try and find Grrr Legbiter, after killing human enemies, it seems like about 30% of the time, the bodies will become invisible if my camera pans away from them at any time. Their body is still there and I can loot them if I put my cursor in the right spot, but their actual bodies seem to disappear. Sometimes they reappear when walking around, most times they don’t. This may just be on my end, but I still find it worthwhile mentioning.
Failed to Place Building When Previous Occupying That Space
If you stand in a place where a potential new building structure will go while having the build menu open and the structure is red because you are standing there, then you move out of the way and try to place that structure there, the game most times will say failed to place building. This then requires you to either destroy/build something attached to where that piece would have gone, or log out and log back in to get it to right itself again. This is mildly annoying especially when building massive structures.
Underwater Thralls Are Hard to Interact With
For some reason, if your thrall falls in water, it’s very hard to get an angle where you can actually interact with them. This includes if you kill or knock out an enemy who falls into water (e.g. the Cimmerian Berserker in the Mounds of the Dead).
Foundation Floors Seem to Sink Away Randomly
Oftentimes when I am running around my base which has the ground covered in foundations so that it’s flat, my character tends to sink to where the ground would have been like the foundations are not even there. It’s also inconsistent where that occurs because some of the foundations still seem like they are working while others don’t. This only seems to occur to foundations that are attached to the ground as everywhere above the ground does not seem to have this issue (or at least I haven’t encountered it thus far).
Inverted Wedge Building Pieces Do Not Snap Correctly
These building pieces just don’t work correctly. Their snap location possibilities are always inflexible and don’t cover the full range you are trying to do. Looking this up online shows a bevy of other people complaining about how these pieces have always been messed up and just don’t work correctly.
---------------------------------------------------New Content Ideas---------------------------------------------------
Below are a couple of suggestions I have for making the game better outside of fixing existing bugs. The additional game mechanics that Funcom has been adding more recently are definitely a step in the right direction, so my ideas are more in-line with more mechanic changes as opposed to just “Add more armors and dungeons”.
Make More Pets Mounts
Horses are great, but wouldn’t it be awesome to ride around on a bear or elephant? I think elephants and camels are shoe-ins for potential mounts, but almost every pet in the game could be rideable (riding a wolf, hyena, or any of the big cats might seem a little weird though). Even gorillas and yetis would be fun to ride similar to the Rancor rider in Star Wars Demolition (Malakili – look it up). It would make animals thralls much more versatile as currently human thralls are much more powerful and useful (when equipped with good gear and the ability to knock out thralls where animals can only kill). It looks like in the upcoming update we may be able to have mounts and another follower, and to prevent having 2 strong fighters by making one a mount, you could make it so if you have a mount that isn’t a horse, you can’t have another follower.
Make Journey Steps More Quest-Like
Journey steps are good for quickly leveling up your character and experiencing all the game has to offer, but the second you hit level 60, the incentive to complete them drastically decreases. I know this isn’t meant to be Skyrim, but adding an item reward for completing Journey Steps would be great. They can be small things such as a stack of resources or potentially gear. Maybe if a new dungeon is added to the game, completing a Journey Step of reaching that dungeon may provide you with an upgradeable piece of armor that can be much more useful when combined with the results of beating that dungeon (similar to the rusted armor --> Godbreaker armor mechanic).
That’s everything! Thank you for reading, and I want to stress that I didn’t spend a bunch of time typing this out just to whine and complain, but to provide a thoughtful analysis on things that should be addressed in the game to make it better and more fun for new and old players alike.
--------------------------------------------------------The End--------------------------------------------------------
