My only follow-up question is whether you used to play Conan Exiles with your son.
Contrasted to your method, I took my own walkabout – only with one foot in Early Access, and the other one on a banana peel. I delved into SCUM, to bring me back around to how much a dev goes through in Early Access. The results were very unfavorable. I was no longer nostalgic, having come through Conan Exiles in EA.
So I bought a game I’d loved on the PS4. It’s written in stone, and although it supports mods, I played it vanilla. And then pretty much after I solved it I stopped playing it. A glorious Finished Game, but forgettable.
I can sense I’m losing you. The quick solution to “play through and forget it” is Software As A Service. It’s a Developer’s soft option. This is where I believe things started to go wrong.
Thank you @CodeMage for sharing your take. There are many parts I disagree with, but I value your input, and I think frankly you’re just terrific.
If they balanced stamina so you don’t have infinite rolls, they wouldn’t need to massacre spear in such a way, which would make for a more enjoyable gameplay. At the present moment, pvp is just ppl spamming greataxe sprint attacks or the bugged katana dash. It’s braindead imo and no one likes it save for a couple weirdos.
And then after the second “big combat update” we’ll need 3rd combat update but Age of War will be over and Funcom will simply ignore the issues cuz there’s a new shinny age of something.
Let’s agree to disagree. The one most guilty of this particular flavor of douchebaggery is definitely doing it to shut down discussion.
Obviously I’ve been playing too much Cyberpunk 2077 lately, because I read that and my first thought was “wtf, she’s not going anywhere”
Anyway, I’ll still be lurking around here as long as I’m maintaining BUGLE
Nah, I can respond, I just won’t argue
And BUGLE is not going anywhere. I’m making progress on the 1.3.0 release. I’m just slower than I used to be, because I have less free time
For a very short while. He wanted to try it with me, and I was all too happy to oblige. That was back when the NPCs had no leash and an elite hyena could wreck a lowbie in a matter of seconds. I remember that detail because guess what we ran into on our way to get some iron?
Anyway, we had a bit of fun, but that was it. It’s just not his kind of game. In fact, our tastes in games don’t overlap much. You won’t see him playing The Talos Principle or Spiritfarer or even Dead Cells, just like you won’t see me playing Rocket League, Fortnite, or Escape From Tarkov
Hell, even when we play the same game, we often play it in drastically different ways. I used to love playing Minecraft in survival mode. He likes to play it on those servers where you have PVP matches on floating islands and whatnot. Different tastes, like I said
Yeah, that’s another example of different tastes. There are certain games I can – and do – replay from time to time, even though some of them weren’t made to be replayable at all. Some of them are ancient by today’s standards, like “The Longest Journey” or “Crusader: No Remorse”. Some are merely old, like “inFamous” (1 and 2).
I also re-read some of my favorite books when I can’t find nothing to read that will pique my interest (or when I find something and it turns out to be bad enough to DNF).
And then there are games that I enjoyed playing and just haven’t aged that well for some reason. I tried replaying Assassin’s Creed 2 – my favorite installment of the franchise – and I just couldn’t enjoy it the way I used to. Something about the controls irritated the shіt out of me, I don’t even remember what exactly.
“Live service games” or “games as a service” or whatever the fuсk we’re supposed to call them aren’t a bad thing per se. I will still occasionally play No Man’s Sky. Cyberpunk 2077 had some drastic changes, some of them for the better, others meh. Dead Cells is another example of a game that keeps getting updates. And shіt, I almost forgot Terraria!
All of those are games I thoroughly enjoyed, sometimes because of the changes and sometimes despite them.
Things “started to go wrong” a long time before the “game as a service” was a twinkle in some slimy executive’s eye. In fact, things started out wrong, because greed has been humanity’s thorn in the side for much longer than we’ve been playing these silly games on these wonderful machines
Maybe some day the human society will evolve beyond people like Musk and companies like Tencent, but that day is not today.
I’m glad I read @erjoh’s post before I read yours, otherwise I might’ve taken the “I value your input” part amiss
All joking aside, thank you for your kind words. I would love to know more about what you disagree with and why, not because I want to change your mind, but because I’m curious and because I’ve always valued your opinions even when I strongly disagreed with them. Doesn’t have to be a public post if you don’t want it to be
At this point I’m just hoping they revert the changes to Age of Sorcery’s 3rd chapter combat. That was by far a lot more enjoyable. They really dropped the ball on this update.
We already know they wont be rolling anything back. They will be giving us an option to check to give us something “similar” to what we had before, but leave it as is for those that like it.
Which would be who?
Similar like soy burgers are similar to real beef burgers
funcom does not fix, they placate. I’ve seen this same thing with ring of Elysium. I got in on the alpha using a proxy. Bought it the minute it dropped EA on steam. The first update was great. Then it got dimed out. We got the season pass, daily challenges that build by tier, and a new event every season. The devs were so busy working on pass content and the next event they never managed to back track and fix anything but the absolute worst bugs. Events that didn’t work right or had to have very specifics to work; place, time, person doing it, never got fixed. Holes in maps you could hide in. Weapon reloads that dupped ammo, and so on.
It’s now another half assed tencent zombie game with all the old passes recirculating and the events gone.
I see funcom marching Conan down this same road.
So the new version still works, and while it doesn’t taste the same, nothing had to die in order to complete said working process?
Callbacks are tight!
Today I plan to review a buncha video from before this Combat change, during the Beta and after. Truly I can’t believe these words are coming from this old cynic’s fingers, but I think these changes are good for PvE and PvP. Edit: after that, I reckon I’ll have something to add to your excellent posts.
Please nobody take this as being a jerk and maligning Funcom, but again I’ll say a lot of my pure combat friends have derided Conan Exiles for not being serious. In Early Access when it was messy and gritty, hot times summer in the city, we could hack and slash all day. It was super-fun and clearly a placeholder. After that (in their words), life became disorganized, inchoate, janky and unserious.
This new set of rules shows there’s not just a kernel of hope, but substantive proof that a more mature system is in the works. I’ve seen it before, and all my cynicism is beginning to wash away the more I play with it. Some of these other weapons have an actual shot now of breaking the meta. And archers are finally getting their badass due.
I agree. The more I get into combat, the more I like the changes. Even with the NPCs cheating it up. But having the option to switch back on something like combat flow, creates a variable so far upstream in the evaluations that the ability to mitigate METAs would be hamstrung.
I say leave it alone, fix the NPCs and let everyone learn the new system.
How can you think a combat system rework that is so clunky and not fluid in the slightest was better than what we had? The fact that all the NPC are now doing Moonwalking and attacking 360. Im pretty sure there is some funcom devs or employees making unofficial comments on this forum with responses like this. Revert the combat changes and get rid of the autolock which you changed last year so anyone and his dog can hit ppl. Bring back the little skilll you had in your game!
I’m pretty sure with responses like yours, that there are shills from Studio Wildcard trying to dissuade people from CE and look toward their game. See how easy that was to just make up sheet without a shred of evidence to try to reduce your opponent’s argument point? It’s called ad hominem.
Towelie. Randy. Burger King. Cannabis. You’re playing all my favorite tunes, and I don’t want you to stop! You know, my first real job was at Burger King, and it was an excellent place to work. I loved it. Later, I became a print journalist, and during my internship was given access to the main distributor in that region of the US. Their representative disclosed to me that in every commercial-grade hamburger, you might be eating the corpses of up to 100 different cows and bulls and calves. Of course, now with DNA testing, we know it’s not uncommon for even major ground beef patties to incorporate the distinct DNA of 1,000 or more animals. It’s really fascinating!
A bit distasteful too, much like the ammonia flavor of those lab-grown Impossible Burgers. We gave up meat and never want to taste meat again, why manufacture such a ridiculous thing?!!
I am still working up a response to your great post, yet as you can probably see I’ve been playing a bit of GTA lately, since they made some important changes. It’s kind of interesting (in a decade-old game), and informs a lot of what I was already trying to say to you. My plan, as long as @Croms_Faithful is OK with it, is to collect my thoughts and write a non-treatise that pertains to these Combat Changes, and does not ever once include the words “hope” or “wish.”
I need to counter people like you who are bad at the game don’t play pvp and just come onto the forums to have arguments, you have made no points about how the combat changes are good. just another shill for funcom. I bet you even love the autolock being so good it has removed any skill in landing hits. You are like the people amazon hired to endorse ‘Rings of power’ just fake people that have no idea what you are talking about, you just like being on the forums.
I have also not played since chapter 3 released. But I have tested the combat changes on testlive. And I was not happy about it. Those changes were basically the final nail in the coffin for me.
Apparently they seem to have enforced controller style movement onto everybody. People who were used to attack towards the camera were now forced to manually rotate their character with WASD, because the attacks now go by default towards where the character is facing. This is nothing I bothered about on testlive, because I play since 2019 with controller style movement.
What drove me off is the clunky new rotation during attacks. You can’t do a 180 attack anymore, your character will try to rotate first and then attack again when you are halfway there. You can just wait for your character to rotate first, but this adds unnecassary delay and slows down the fighting AGAIN.
The spear nerf might be a bit too harsh, but a slow down of the animation was the right move. But what was the reason why Funcom finally ripped the spear?
The reason was basically this: Age of Rolling introduced cripple on hit. A HUGE buff to spears, because some other weapons did not receive this. Now you could easily cripple everyone with a spear so they were forced to roll away. The spear was still pretty good to hit the opponent during rolls. Also it got a buff (Mordlun) because of the legendary weapon revamp.
Age of Rolling chapter 2 introduced rotation during attacks. You could slightly adjust the spear attack direction. This made the spear more accessible to bad players, because of error (bad aim,/bad prediction) correction. This paired with the already existing target lock and auto facing mechanics made this kind of combat basically auto aim. Spear players never missed on officials. Since it was so easy to execute, more and more successful spear PvP players appeared. There was an outcry about spear being OP then (and it was).
Poke’n roll was already despised since 2019 so it got more hate than ever. Funcom had to act and reducing the speed of the heavy attack was the outcome. I also believe this stupid rotation during fighting may also be a change intended to fight “poke’n roll”.
All Funcom had to do, was to NOT embrace the rolling with the stamina changes even more and to remove target lock + auto facing in Age of War Chapter 1. Reduce the dmg of daggers, but not as much as they did (because they are basically also overnerfed). What they could do now for the daggers is to make them even faster by a tiny bit to compensate the lack of damage. Also find a solution for bows so they are usable on console and PC in PvE and not OP in PvP.
Also make Javelins useful for once (the last time they were useful was when water PvP was only possible with Javelins).
The Katana is a BEAST now. Again. Musashis Black Blade 2 shotting people with it’s dash. No more comments here…
So you basically mentioned most of my other reasons why I left the game as well.
Unfinshed features (sorcery, corrupted builds, golems, perk rebalance etc.)
Tencent’s influence and greed
Rushed patches (huge desync patch with Age of War Chapter 1 or 2, crom coin disaster with Age of War Chapter 3) next to all the small bugs and “features”
Absense of any balance feeling for the game’s PvP from @den (yes, you need to play PvP more intensively in order to understand what is wrong with the game; cough bomb PvP cough)
No intention to fight cheaters on officials from Funcom
And just the general lack of “love” for the game. Put more resources on it Funcom! It is probably your most successful game ever.
This one can never see baking additional jank into a game as being good for the game.
If the only way that challenge can be added is by making movement and combat less fluid, then the chassis as a whole is fundamentally flawed and should be scrapped or those who feel the need to sneak such messes in at the last moment are should not be developing on that chassis.
Having forced this one’s self to play this atrocious new system in both PvE and PvP, and this one uses a controller mind you, this one is done.
This game is now blocks and dolls and that is the only amusement this one derives any longer.
The combat is no longer fun, it is a burdensome jank fest that is a chore. Every encounter is an exercise in how much of this over boiled brussel sprout can this one force feed themselves. Even PvP kills, when this one gets the opportunity, given the sparse prey available, are unsatisfying, this one sees where the jank tripped the enemy, not this one’s skill. Might as well sit back and let Admin wipe them, as unfulfilling as it is.
To those who enjoy this, Prost!
Have all the fun.
This one takes no joy in it and refuses to squander recreational time on such odious tasks.
