Too long, didn’t read all that is up there right now.
Personally, whether it’s an RPG or not, there is no reason Conan has to be a big empty world with nothing to do but slaughter, build, and enslave.
It is entirely reasonable to include quests and stories for your character to do something beyond those three objectives.
With that I definitely agree.
We definitely need something more to do and quests would be one way to accomplish that.
And that’s entirely fine. However, there’s a difference between games that you don’t like, and games that are bad. There are many games that don’t interest me, personally, at all, such as the majority of FPS and sports games. That doesn’t mean they’re bad games, just that they’re not for me.
A first person shooter without choices and consequences isn’t a bad first-person shooter. It’s just not a game that’s designed for you. An RTS with a linear plotline isn’t a bad RTS. It’s just not a game for you.
Each game is designed according to the vision of its developer. Sometimes that vision matches our preferences, sometimes it doesn’t. Luckily there’s plenty of games out there for everyone’s tastes.
I think the issue is not about the games themselves per se, but how they are marketed.
Games themselves are technically innocent to everything that’s wrong in them. There’s no such thing as a bad game; only bad marketing. This is why I advocate developers that no matter how simple their game is, they shouldn’t resolve to stretch them - bloating gameplay - and that they should instead keep believing in the product. This shows that there’s integrity in the group.
It’s better to drop out due disappointment of boredom than boredom of disappointments.
If their marketing team tells us how wonderful the endgame is gonna be and it ends up being just another bottleneck, guess what happens at the reception phase. 
I like the idea of random quests as well. Make them fit into Conan lore though.
Make the quest both RNG in what you have to do, where to do it, and then a RNG drop of something, based on the level of the quest. Nothing in the reward end would be unique. Could even be rng of all legendary weapons, purge thralls, armors etc. Just not building mats.
Example…One would check on any merchant the option during talking to accept quest.
Say the merchant Set City talks of being robbed by Cimmerians. In return for killing those thieving Cimmerians, he will reward you. To accomplish this, you must harvest with a quest tool (30 minute decay timer) that is tied to only harvesting a certain race id. In this case Cimmerians. You also will get a chest put into your inventory (that decays in 30 minutes as well, and can’t be put into a fridge btw) that requires these special harvest. Once crafted, it acts like a bearers random drop, but uses the legendary tables for its rewards.
So it is not necessary, but still randomizes on occasion.
Sure, why not, that’s really questing in pur old tradition.
I would love for my part a more lore related questline, more about the story of Hiboria, or the exiled lands, the why and who. There plenty unsolved mysteries in this world. Not that i would them all to be resolved, this wouldn’t feel fine. But give a glimps here and there, some infos more, maybe some artefact.
Quests like you said are more time-filler at my eyes. Go and get me… 50 crocs teeth, 100 elephants hides, and so on. Well, mostly still repetition, and slaughter all the long. And nothing that tell us more.
Maybe i’m focused on my damn mysteries, this may be, fine. But still, i imagine others like also this feeling, and have the wish to know more.
…10 loafs of bread, 500 pieces of dried berries, 2000 eggs, 50000 grilled steaks, 2 cups of honeyed wine and couple kilos of salt. Mix and stir all the ingredients in multiple cauldrons at the same time on an open fire, sing Can You Feel The Love Tonight in repeat and then go feed the whole continent excluding the Outlands coz they’re nasty there. Save some for yourself too, if you can, coz otherwise a pat on your back is all you get from all this when you’re ready. Oh and by the way your name is Pig, if anyone asks, and your favourite colour is raw ash… don’t ask. I’m new here too. 
Isn’t Age of Conan the game to play if you want rpg, quests and doing something else than slaughter, build and enslave ? I don’t remember seeing CE marketed as an mmo but as a survival game. In a survival game your only quest, as astonishing as it seems, is to survive.
I really like this Idea! and with each quest unlock cooking recipes
Perhaps in some survival games, yes. They would have to be explicitly simple and linear though. Coz each item you pick up has a hidden quest for us. Not all quests are visible or even tracked.
Edit:
Technically put, any game that allows the player character to die is a survival game if their purpose has anything to do with something we can only provide while the character is living. However, a survival game is more than just this level of survival.
Adding quests makes you think and learn more about the world you are surviving in.
Of course, from some of the replies in this topic, it seems like more want the mindless sort of survival game. Where you just run around hacking and slashing anything in sight.
That’s pity. A sandbox such as this one with a valued theme would benefit from lore takes.
We can be mindless in every game so a hint of intellectual material wouldn’t hurt those who want to seek instead. If someone wants to behead me on the way, I’ll embrace it as roleplay and let them have the chance. It’s not like I lose progress or anything in a game of neverending story. 
HA-HA. You believe most players actually play this way? Try log in to refresh, hoard, troll. that would be more appropriate.
Oh, I absolutely agree. I love finding lorestones and journal pieces on my way; the ghost people on their own journey (who apparently failed at their “quest for survival”) tell their own sad little tales of the Exiled Lands; the few NPCs who bother to actually talk to us, such as the Outcast and Archivist, further enhance the immersion. Funcom’s vision of what could exist in the Hyborian Age is an interesting one, and I’d love to see more of that.
However, the sort of “random quests” such as “The howling of wolves bothers me at night, go and kill 20 of them” and “my niece is ill, I need 42 desert berries to make medicine for her” don’t add to immersion, at least not for long. After a few sleepless nights and ill nieces they simply become tedious and actually break immersion after so many times.
But, game designers need to design their games for their target audience. If the target audience simply wants to crush their enemies, see them driven before them and hear the lamentations of their women, while drooling on cartoon boobs and communicating with each other with eloquence along the lines of “sftu n00b”, intellectual content would be appreciated by few, and thus developer hours might be better used to make more enemies to crush, more boobs to drool on, and more noobs to stfu.
Quests could also take an advantage of local biometrics to keep some sense in them, especially if they are absolutely random.
Yeah, those quests are not necessary here coz we already do the gathering albeit for different reasons. They would just serve to make our progression more tedious and leaves a bit less room for roleplay. They need to be carefully thought about, even if made random.
I don’t think the target audience is quite that primitive. Yes, we love simplicity like that though mere slaying comes off as boring in repetition too fast; it’s fun, but it needs flavour. Thus to keep it interesting, there needs to be some things that break the boredom, and allow us to return to the slaying part from time to time in a way that doesn’t feel like an inexperienced taxi driver stuttering the car. A fluent experience, that is. Part of this is the building aspect for example.
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