21

I was giggling the entire time juicing the population of Asgard…I’m not sure what that says about me. c;

The animation definitely does stick you in place doing nothing for the last 3 - 5 seconds. And why not have an improved sacrifce table. It would look neat, a round stone platform 3 sacrificial tables angled on it, a few torches to set off that dark sacrificial ritual visual at night. Even neater with a thrall at each, sacrificing those poor poor souls as you drag them in.

~ Cinna

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23

I would argue that it’s the player having to do the deed, and doing so in such a visceral and in-your-face fashion, that provides the grittiness and really brings home what you’re doing. Abstracting that away by having a thrall do it or letting you leave after dumping the body on the altar devalues that a lot in my book. You’re of course welcome to disagree :grin:

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24

Also - sorcerers performing those rites need to perform them exactly and to the finest detail. Not something that they’d let their slave thralls do in many cases lest they get sucked off to the old ones realm to be the playthings of cthulu and friends.

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25

Talking to people I’m leaning more toward the mass sacrifice idea. Like be able to do 5 at once but you need a sorcerer thrall OR Player for each extra slot.

26

I’m not against the idea of having a failure chance based on thrall level.

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27

Lore wise (which is what this game follows very strictly) - failure is not just whoops the sacrifice died, it would be “whoops my base got sucked into hell” though (at least in some cases).

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28

More tentacles from the sky eating your base!!! and spawning a MiGo army in your kitchen! :smiley:

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29

That would be cool. If you fail on your thrall harvest the blood roll, the tentacles in the sky open above your base and the storm drops in (which can damage your base).

I’d be for that.

30

Just have the thrall die and lightning storm is summoned

31

That is perfect!
Chance of failure when performed by the heavily concussed thrall.
That failure spawns hostile monsters like the Blood Moon Beast, a swarm of MiGo, creates a hostile lightning storm or one time Yog effluence shower, or something else that both can kill thralls and players, and also damages like a purge.

It’s important to note, the thralls are literally beaten into unconsciousness and then tortured into a pliant state.
If they could perform dark sorcery still… Why not use it on their enslaver?

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32

mass sacrifices weekend

image

my boy

33

Yeah really…I tried to ignore the “final solution” approach to sacrifices but you had to focus on it…ugh.

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image

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35

It’s dark and gritty and unpleasant, for the first 5 times or so. Then it turns into “welp, it’s Alt+Tab time again, I wonder if there’s been anything funny on Imgur since the last time I checked”. No matter how hard you try to make something have an emotional impact, repetition will leach it away eventually. That’s human nature for you.

The only way I can think of keeping that emotional impact relatively intact is to make the ceremony infrequent enough that the shock effect from the previous one has had some time to wear off by the time you need to do it again. And that’s very hard to achieve.

What comes to mind immediately is to make the sacrifice give more blood so you don’t have to perform it as often, but that wouldn’t work out like that. Instead, considering the way people play Conan Exiles, players would most likely perform the sacrifice several times in a row to stockpile on blood and/or soul essence, just the way we do it now.

In the end, there’s no way to make the sacrifice impactful and infrequent without seriously complicating the system, e.g. by tying some kind of uncleansable corruption to the amount of sacrificial blood and soul essence that you haven’t spent yet. (That’s just an idea for how to achieve that particular outcome, I’m not proposing it as a good idea.)

I happen to agree with @Anglinex that the status quo becomes pointlessly repetitive after a while, but I don’t feel about it strongly enough to argue a lot. If Funcom thinks that having the equivalent of a TV commercial – perfect time to go for a quick pee during the movie night – in their game is good game design, that’s fine with me. :man_shrugging:

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36

Isn’t the whole game that way at some level?

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To paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk, on a long enough timeline, every game becomes pointlessly repetitive after a while :wink:

Thing is, we’re talking about 25-30 seconds of total loss of control over your character. Per unit of sacrificial blood. Which you need for a whole bunch of stuff.

Like I said, no big deal. That’s what Alt+Tab is for :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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38

I quite agree, which why I wrote

But it’s hardly something I feel strongly about either.

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39

Frequency would be an issue with that. Not against your idea but getting attacked 5 times a day would be just as annoying as the problem I’m seeking to resolve.

40

This one offers extreme (and hopefully extremely amusing) suggestions in the hope that some with less permanent San damage will refine them into something workable

41

An obligatory 25-second interruption of gameplay is too much.

The stone should have a thrall slot to do the rite. Player should only have to perform the rite if there’s no sorcerer thrall at the stone.

1 Like