Dear Conan Exiles devs,
as part of staff on a roleplay server with plenty years of gameplay, mod experience, roleplay time, and server administration under my belt, I observe the news of the Age of Heroes with growing concern, whereas I started with curiosity and relief.
First, let me underline the things I am excited for: An inspirational theme like heroes has grand potential and fits very well into a community that consists of casual players, official PvPer, and roleplayers alike, so kudos for that. I also appreciate that we’ll be getting more time between new chapters and ages, mainly because that gives the dear modding community more time to come up with fixes and workarounds for the newest Conan Exiles bugs and issues.
You don’t want to tackle a new Engine for Conan and I get that, it would mean having to remake the entire thing, and it’s cheaper at the moment to overlap patches and come up with workarounds for your own workarounds that you had to come up with for issues of the previous team, and as long as there’s still ideas to milk money from the community, your point stands. However, I beg that you remind yourself more that the game is anything but optimized or stable, and adding more stress on top will not lead to enjoyment for anyone. If you really MUST implement more moving thralls with HP bars, like bench thralls who will now wander around the base, or companions that will be glued to each player, then please also implement the option to turn that off, sever-wide. Your idea to create immersion is sweet but if the new shiny toy makes the entire game lag even more it defeats the point. Your game is like an old workhorse with decaying bone structure, it will not help anyone if you slap a golden saddle onto it and the horse breaks down.
I am not telling you to not implement new features at all, but I am very well asking that, for features that will create more lag and issues server-wide, you offer alternate options/settings to turn those features off. Please.
I would also recommend that you turn off that your “companion” talks to you, since that could be very disruptive for roleplay, and you know that players are going to want to walk their new companion over their standard follower, and they should be allowed to without being irritated by it.
If you actually cared to read through all of this, I thank you for your time.