A discussion in another thread made me wonder: are there any (hopefully good) persistent-world multiplayer survival games? By “persistent world” I mean that the game is running 24/7 even if you’re not online.
Here’s why I’m asking and how it pertains to Conan Exiles.
I’ve played some harsh survival games, but they were either single-player, or they were the kind of multiplayer game that you spin up and play awhile and then shut down. It’s not too hard to make the game brutally challenging when you can just stop at any time and continue at your leisure.
There have been recurrent calls to make Conan Exiles a more brutally challenging survival game. The latest of those calls floated the idea of incorporating base damage into that challenge. To me, that sounds like it would require me to schedule my life around this game, which I’m not prepared to do, no matter how much I like Conan Exiles. If I can control the schedule of the base damage challenge, then I can avoid it. If I can’t, then I have to make my life revolve around it.
That’s why I’m asking more knowledgeable survival game players to hopefully give me some references to other games, so I can study what they did.
I’ve been looking… its abit hit or miss. Alot of games are old titles too, which I havn’t wanted to pull trigger on.
Dayz. Has bad rep… there spending 2022 working on Bugs. Its hard to find people who play it, and arent holding onto old hates, like they do Cyberpunk 2077. Some people are just willing spend there last days on Earth down talking it. XD
Few games with more “Survival focus” Like Green Hell, My Country, You got games like Ark… (Ai on Dinos feels so old…) Handful of things I’d like to see in CE… mostly the Dino’s)
FO76… but Surv stuff is like CE, its a Threat at start of game, but becomes a useless threat later.
I love Camp System. And wish it had a Function in CE, so you could Server Hop base and all. Workshops would be great fun. (if tuned abit)
I keep eye out for Surv Games… but 90% of time they don’t quite fit what I want.
Another is Medieval Dynasty, Build a base/town/city with full surv mechiancs and town management.
But Devs refuse (like all others who make Medieval games) to Allow Females as playable Characters.
Soon get Co-op mode…
Was one… it was taken down do to Law Suit, Which had Base building and everything like CE Did. I forget name…
Valhiem was another, never played it… looks didn’t really interest me.
The Forest, I love idea of having chop tree down, and drag it back. Or Cart stuff back and being bale repel Ropes. Just friendly Fie, so no pvp.
few others who names escape me, that were more hardcore with Surv stuff by were PC only with pvp always on.
If you’d like Hard Survival with guns, full metabolism including waste operations, full wounding, infection and wetness Effects, Inventory Rot, extremely challenging Out Of The Box Experience (highly recommend going in cold, no YouTube), plus airplanes, vehicles and the never-ending quest for Fame, choose SCUM.
I think the building damage may not have been thought thru as it pertained to being offline rather it was a suggestion to up the survival aspect of the game, since it does carry the survival tag on steam. I actually have a survival based modded server as there are several mods that when combined, make the game very challenging in a way that augments Conan without “ruining” the Conan side of it.
The Bodyworks mod adds diseases and fatigue, which means that when you are injured and run around without healing up, you risk infection. If you dehydrate or dont eat often, you tire faster. Running all the time (as people often do in CE) also makes you fatigued. A fatigued character becomes slow and susceptable to disease. Once you hit one of these states the only solution is to hole up in your base and rest by doing the lying down or sitting emote while drinking copious amounts of water or crafting medicines. Very cold or very hot can give fever and sickness if prolonged.
Then I add drachenfeles’s weather mods. The lighting adds its own challenge but cranking them up makes weather extremes a threat and you have to pay attention to the time of day (my days last 4 hrs and nights a real time 30 min). Night gets extremely cold.
Lastly sandstormex/snowstormex or drachenfeles’s lore friendly sandstorm to really up the threat.
All server settings barbaric.
Those mods together give a very good and lightweight survival element to the game that my casual friends were not put off by and in fact, played heavily. It makes long journeys in the EL difficult because you cant be caught in the weather and you have to plan for night.
So I found these to really amp up the survival elements while preserving the lore and core gameplay. It can be done.
I agree in the most @Sera67. @CodeMage the other survival games I played are…
(from worst to best)
Green hell… Finish it because I pay it, it wasn’t running 24/7, maybe my mistake, I don’t know, I didn’t check the parameters. However I played multi-player with friends… Disaster, full of bugs, glitches, crusings… Forget the green keep the hell only!
Ark. 24/7 beautiful game, beautiful maps, nice multi-player, yet… Your toon is good only to fix traps and tame, you are not a fighter, just a breeder. Waiting rng to work and give you mutations so you’ll have stronger dinos… Full of bugs, glitches, the building is mission impossible and constantly crushing on server transfer keep loosing gear.
The forest. Not 24/7 a bit creepy on the beginning, but after 2 weeks the map is clear and you are finishing story on hard in a few hours. Multi-player decent, I don’t have to repeat, bugs glitches and crush, yet the crushing in this game was way less than the above. Building was difficult to understand at the beginning, from 1 to 10, my score is 4 on building.
Stranded deep…
Not 24/7 even in the online version.
Beautiful game, simply beautiful.
Some simple games, no matter the bugs, glitches or the low content are little masterpieces and stranded deep is one of them. In this game I revive the agony of survival I had the first days on Conan exiles and more.
The landscape, tho it’s “repeating” it is beautiful and relaxing. The underwater fishing is magnificent and the building funny. Very fast game however with zero reasons to keep you playing it, absolutely zero. The multi-player online experience sucks a million and it is overrunned from 6 year old children that begging you to kill a shark, this is all they care, the game content for them is useless… The online experience in this game is horrible.
So no. Maybe my Playlist in survival is low but enough to understand that all the other games are way buggier and laggier than Conan exiles and they don’t even have the half of what Conan provides. The worst part is that you are not even a fighter, you have no fighting skills, just aiming skills even with melee weapons .
Ps, “fall out” I removed the disk in the first 3 hours and toss it to the garbage, no chemistry at all.
Yes it is, and I think CE is the best game I ever played, but will agree with those that say the survival aspect gets less and less with every update. Maybe that’s not bad, maybe minimizing survival makes it a better game in the end for longevity, who knows? But in the world of “survival” games, CE on vanilla rates is not very “survival” focused.
Correct. Conan Exiles is not a straight survival game. It is an open world sandbox game with survival elements.
And I also agree with this. Like Marcospt I am also all for additional challenge and have openly advocated for it myself, even suggesting a ‘Harcore’ admin setting which I am happy to expand upon. But many of us forget that the ‘Dominate’ aspect is also part of the progression pipeline. Transforming the game into a diehard survival experience may be a disincentive for newer players.
And I would also add an important consideration members. That being that we ALL currently have the means to make the game more challenging. There are numerous ways. For example, play on a dedicated server with harvest and damage multipliers customised, activate Barbaric difficulty if you have admin access, play solo, use mods if you have access to them, do not use buffs or put Attribute points into Vitality, only use weak aloe exract, leave your followers at home, and here is a big one which I have noted on numerous times to other members. Only equip gear barely qualified for the job. For example, going to the summoning place? Just take ‘standard’ non-epic armor and an iron weapon, and leave legendary weapons and godbreaker armors for the Volcano or Unnamed City. If you feel you need them. Players have more agency over their own level of challenge than they realise.
Agree again. But sadly many people tend to get bogged down in this one component of a rich and fulfilling playing experience.
A lot in there, which is why I wish I was pulled into pvp, because i think if all elements are presented together, the king becomes the beggar at some point again and would have to find his next meal… grub anyone?
Everquest Landmark (the precursor to the canceled third Everquest game) was probably the best open world survival-ish game I have ever played. It was effectively like Terraria but 3D and extremely high detail voxel deformation (allowing for curves and minute details, nearly down to the pixel at 1080p). It was also unique in that it was a MMO. Meaning instead of playing on a server with a few dozen people, you played with thousands. They did make instances of the maps so everyone could have a spot to build in, but you could visit freely outside your home map. The only downside was PVP was restricted to claims that had it enabled. So you could only duel or engage in arena style fights. No game has had a building system that was better.
Sadly it was canceled in beta. A truly damn shame.
Valheim is a decent game only if you want to get your viking fix. Servers are much smaller than Conan’s. Rated for about 10 players max and from what I’ve gathered, it struggles with more than 5. Personally I’ve seen it struggle with 3 on Serverblend, a host that can do 40-80 man Conan Servers with mods just fine. Its building system is superior to Conan. Since building pieces will lock together not just on predefined sockets, but in any configuration. Snapping pieces together is optional.
Its downside in building is you have viking style wood and stone buildings. That’s it. Furniture is basically 2 bed styles, a few rug styles, a table or two, some chairs, a bench, a stool… very simple. But if you’re a heavy viking/norse lore fan. Its fine.
I’ve played quite a few others off and on. And I have to say. Conan Exiles is probably the best on the market. I have a few hundred hours played in various other games. But thousands in CE, and more than the others added together. In my experience, sometimes other games will do one or two things better than CE, but just fall short everywhere else. And of course its based on the Hyborian Age, the literal birthplace of the Sword and Sorcery genre. The inspiration behind just about every other fantasy that came after. Can’t really ask for much more than that.
I know its a bit off topic, but if you’re looking for a fun little game to play. I’d recommend Phasmophobia. That’s truly an addicting game, though it couldn’t be any more different than what you’re asking.
Though there a neat game ive played and that called V rising and its unique in that Gearscore determine how well you are prepared for each fights … i do love that system … while its not a good transmoggable but at the very least its does increase the difficulty since if you are not up to the GS of the mob you do so little damage but if your able to get and surpass the gearscore then your damage goes up with a percentage of increase damage. i love it tbh. It really does prevent rushing to end game as you need to start your way from bottom to up and the fact that recipes are locked behind bosses that just makes it even more inviting to overcome it.
Please don’t take this as my pointing you out, yours is simply a jumping off point. This could be a discussion of Player Expectations: a lot of us still expect survival to be an element. If you look at early gameplay, there was a significant play toward Survival. In fact, I remember wondering how long I was going to keep up with feeding a character and helping him drink, it was a pesky novelty to me.
At one point all this lifted and CE became pretty easy. Then they made it so that we can escape pert near anything, and even the Sandstorm from the beginning of the game is tepid.
There was one brief, glorious time where Conan was so Survival-oriented that it made people vocally angry. Some of my very old Aurelius videos (link above) are from that time, on my channel. My #1 Conan How-To video emphasizes Survival elements, and that’s from just prior to Launch, May 2018.
I remember one player hoarsely saying he was PTSD after arriving on a new server and finally making it to my base near The Galleon. It would be ideal if we could come closer to this again without making the game inaccessible. This is why I recommended SCUM due to its level of sheer complexity, and relative difficulty, because despite its Survival “bent” it still accommodates players in other ways.
On twitch channel the game has no reference of survival it says RPG Μάχης (battle). And yes survival is less and less, I don’t know if it is me (knowing how to survive) or the game anymore . This is what @drachenfeles was trying to say all this time I guess and I believe that “survival difficulty” was his mods if I am not mistaken.
That’s the set of “User Defined” tags I get at Steam with the standard PC Browser. Those appear at the top. Where I was looking was at the Developer-designated tags, which do not include Survival because it appears Steam doesn’t consider it a Genre.
When you go to the Store to shop for games, there is no Survival Genre, but there is a Theme. When you click the Survival Theme, Conan Exiles is there, but so is No Man’s Sky. lol
Its not Tagged, But one of Most Popular under “Survival” in main menus. To be fair, tag system sucks… games with no nudity, but with slight bit of panty shots or cleavage get mag dumped with Nudity tag none stop.
When Steam does a sale or “types”" of game, Conan is under Survival everytime and one of top 10 listed.
On sale right now for 19.99. I’ve been looking. XD
Agreed. But thay is where FC has an issue. They arent great at foing from accesibke early game to an engaging end game with some sort of challenge. Thibgs on Exiles are either too easy, and on rar occasions to hard.
My friends and i have a board game term for acceptable challenge…speed bumps. Acceptable minor setbacks that challenge me to engage in every game loop at least a little. No one wants the road blocks where you have tonturn around and go back to the beginning to get around, but a peed bump that knocks yoir bumper off is what we want.
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