State of the Game (Returning Player - WTF, Y tho ?)

So I´m a returning player, got around 1000h Playtime, last played dec last year - always private servers cus official is riddled with cheaters, tryhards and gold/land sellers.

first of all this will be concived as whining and I don´t care.

so they removed the healing with food system, what does the 100+ diffrent food items in this game have for impact now? To me it seems like I can go collect a handful of insects and have the same outcome as searching and collecting the food books and ingredients, wich takes hours. Is there any balance issue that counters this argument ? Now I´m either stuck with the bandage stuff with extremly long animations or with the healing pots wich are kinda heavy for thier actual size when in your hand.

Next thing is armor, is wearing armor make any diffrence now ? I get killed with 5 hits from a exile at the newb river if I am naked and if I wear an armor it´s 5 to 6 hits wich kinda defeats the whole purpose of armor, am I missing smt here ?

the pvp tactics are also heavy influenced by horses and a “meta” evolving around tigers if you don´t follow it your doomed. this also makes around 98% of items/weapons useless. I suggested to my admins to restrict pvp or just deactivate it since it also defeats any group expirence bc ppl are more danger to thier groupmates than most of the mobs. well no big deal for me cus I prefer pve anyway, but it kinda kills any “skill based” pvp imo.

I recently started playing again with two friends, one a beginner and one kinda vet player with ~ 500h of playtime, but he never played with the horses. they both are absolutly devastated about the still existing many bugs in this game - corpses dissapearing for no reason, including your own. laggy/desynced fights in an action based game where mobs just kill you bc u kept hitting the model on your screen while the server counts the mobs somewhere else, mobs with shields blocking 100% of the time -even when they are in an attack animation - “oh you did not bring a mace or axe, well you`re done”. armors not showing real insulation stats, and with the recent db rework also sources on the web not giving you correct values, practially removing the ability to expirence the late game parts in the snow or the volcano.

srsly this was one of the best survival games and it´s been turned into a frustrating mess in less then a year. still early access but with tons of dlc to buy. my friend asked me yesterday if he should get them and I told him not to cus it´s just sooo buggy.

I personally get anarchy online, age of conan flashbacks where games just got overloaded with more content but on the same way never got rid of day one bugs so my final qestion would be:

Why invest time/money into it ?

I would like to hear from other players what they think about the current state of this game.

P.S. English not my native langruage if you find typos feel free to keep `em.
P.P.S. Don´t come in here talking about realism in a fantasy setting - I´m not questioning your love for this game or your personal Git gud attitude - I would just like to hear you honest opinons about the current state of this game, have a nice day!

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You could have uninstalled the game went on to play something else that did not anger you.

The fact is we dont need another one of these threads everyone knows how buggy the game is we have been playing it for years. For us veteran players that have not taken a break got rewarded with instead of fixing the exiles you currently play in here is a brand new land Isle of Siptah that we been focusing on instead of improvements. O yeah and you have to pay for it.

Im not over conan exiles but I have excepted it for what it is and have adapted to the buggy game. I dont buy DLC anymore to support the team. Being on PS4 or console, in general, has its own problems we are the stepchildren to the master PC race and get no real support. Unfortunately voicing your opinions and concerns doesn’t get to the powers to be at FC.

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I am a returning player as well. I stop just before it came out officially. Yes there are some bugs no question there but since I have return I am enjoying myself a lot. I have my own server . Yes official servers are crap right now and I don’t see it getting better and it’s unfortunate that they let it go that way. If I had to play on official servers I would not play at all for the same reason you stated.

As for the healing certain food do give back your health faster then the bugs for an example you gave.

But yes they should work more on the bugs but what I do instead of coming here and talk about my frustration I may have I report those bugs and hope they pay attention to it which they are. Hopefully it continues.

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The thing is, he was talking about bugs that exist since the launch of the game in 2019. Those surely got reported. You want to hope for another 3 years in order to see them fixed?

I’ve recently watched 2 new players play this game. The last thing they did before quitting the game was the warmaker dungeon, where they got frustrated by the design of it. You need a key to get to the inner sanctum and in there is the Arena Champion, basically a noob killer. Ofc his friend died to her and he was the one holding the key. Also PvE was enabled so he couldn’t loot his friend’s body, forcing him to get stuck inside the dungeon, eventually losing everything (you need the key to get out again).
I could totally understand their point of view as new players, because this dungeon design is simply flawed.

Here is the video I was talking about:

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Pretty frustrating to see sing and black playing. I’m also watching it and every time they go through one of the bugs that we all know that exist, since they are classic ones, i feel ashamed.

You can see their disappointment while being stuck in rhinos or seeing how thralls break the balance, while also being absolutely necessary for most people.

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Oh, sometimes Funcom fixes “day one bug”. If it was an advantage for players of course :wink:
Like taking KOed thralls through a maproom. Thats patched out now…

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They are reworking the food mechanic so you have to wait and see how that changes.

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For me it was enough with the messy fights… mobs teleporting and sliding here and there,… the game is not polished enough to be considered an action game.

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yes it’s still like this and like you said “useless” but not only the items or weapons, PVP as a whole. and to play on a PVE server, well the content is not challenging/smart enough to play for long so,… I only write and “complain” because the game is so cooooooool and so damn broken (mainly balance) at the same time that it makes me so sad

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How long is long enough? A typical AAA title gets boring in about 8-15 hrs whereas CE typically keeps people busy for 100s - 1000s of hours.

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People tend to stay on these type of games longer not because Triple A or small independent but because they spend hours building. The buildings become virtual propriety they never want to let go.

Conan doesn’t keep people busy with 1000s of hours of content there is 0 replay value in dungeons.

We just build and build and build until we get bored then we hop on once a week to refresh.

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The dungeons have immense replay value because of the materials you farm. You cant build godbreaker or champions without many runs thru warmaker to get the scraps, and now you have to run vaults many times for eldarium that gets consumed at the delving bench and the leyshrines. Its not about clearing the dungeon; its about what items you can make/access as a result.

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I think he meant replay value because of the story and the challenge.
In this respect, conan dungeons have no value at all …
All mobs are weak and easy to defeat.
Me and my clan do all the dungeons while naked, only using good weapons when we start on a new server to gather resources.
If you have a thrall then you don’t even have to fight, you just need to heal your thrall.
There are no attack patterns for you to escape, puzzles, real traps, real challenges and engaging story.
But on the other hand, Conan Exiles world has a very good history that few players know in depth.
The way they tell the story is not linear, reminiscent of the Dark souls style in which you collect fragments of the story by the items and objects on the map.

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Exiled Lands dungeons have limited replay value, but it’s there. As DarthPhysicist pointed out, you farm them for loot or materials. Personally, I detest the former reason and I prefer the latter. I don’t like playing Conan Exiles like a slot machine.

On Siptah, dungeons have much more replay value, because they’re a part of your regular farming process. That’s where you get eldarium, but it’s not only that. I think they designed the loot tables really, really well, because you get a lot of useful mats from the vaults that you would normally have to farm for. So when you go through a Siptah vault, you don’t feel like you’re “falling behind on your chores”. Yeah, you’ll get your eldarium, but you’ll also get several supply packs that’ll make up for some of the stone/wood/iron you didn’t farm while you were in the vault, and you’ll pick up small quantities of other useful stuff, like alchemical base, steelfire, or silk. Not enough to completely replace farming for them when you need them, but these small quantities add up anyways.

That’s oversimplifying it. I’ve got more than 3000 hours – “honestly” gained, not by leaving my toon logged in overnight to fill the Purge meter :stuck_out_tongue: – and for me it has been a mix of many factors.

Building is part of it, yeah. Many of those hours were spent farming for a new build I designed and then building it. But refreshing the builds I’ve already finished doesn’t add hours to my playtime. It’s at most 1 hour a week – 2 sessions of up to 30 minutes each.

The rest of the time is spent engaging with the content in different ways: leveling up thralls and pets, grinding for dungeon drops, grinding for UC boss drops, and – most importantly – exploring new content.

Despite all the criticism I have about Funcom’s QA practices, they do one thing regularly enough to keep me engaged: they release new stuff. Sometimes it’s a new dungeon. Sometimes it’s new mechanics, like follower leveling, or mounts. Sometimes it’s a change to existing mechanics, like dodge roll and momentum-based movement.

Sometimes it’s just a DLC. New materials and decorations are always fun to play with, see how I can use them to improve my existing builds, or maybe re-create those builds the next time I start a new character on a new server.

Speaking of which, that’s another source of engagement for me: sometimes I’ll get bored and start on a new server. Other times, I’ll start on a new server not out of boredom, but because a group of trolls and griefers overran the old one, and “ain’t nobody got time for that”.

Even so, you get bored eventually. I was playing on a nice private server, with a great admin and a wonderful community, but I was slowly getting bored even of that, because even though Pippi allows you to set up merchants, there’s no real trading economy when the currency – gold and silver – is ridiculously easy to find in the world. So yeah, I could build my castle, I could make it look alive with thespians, I could add wonderful decorations to it, I could set up merchant shops, but in the end, I knew nobody would have a good reason to come visit it, because there’s no good reason to.

And then came Isle of Siptah. It made me feel like that line from “Godfather III”: just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in! I can already tell it will add thousands of hours to my playtime, because even though I already designed my castle in single-player mode, I haven’t yet started to build it. I want to explore the content first, and it’s been two weeks of spending most of my free time on playing, and I still haven’t gotten bored of the content itself enough to go farming for my build.

TL;DR: I don’t think you can reduce thousands of hours of engagement with the game to just building. It’s a big part of it, but different people stay for different reasons.

Thats not exactly a good/engaging/fun thing, lol

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And yet, you dont dislike this Slot machine 2.0, which you have to use for basically most things, as they are non-existent somewhere else on Siptah.

Its currently fun for you, as its NEW… Give it some months, you will be annoyed like with CE slot machine, because its the same.
Also that most things you get in Siptah are not even new, but are just from CE… :smiley:

Only big difference: You get mats which have a usage, without farming it. Killing UC normaly dont give you great mats. But then again, the newest dungeons in CE also give you certain mats (if you farm then in the dungeon).

Which was at December 2019 - the horses - which I dont even use… Thats also the reason, many stopped playing. You have basically >8 months without any new content. Horse is for PvP content (which most PvPers hate anyway).

Sounds like the same with CE at the beginning :wink:

I wouldnt even playing EA. Because, when the game is finally out, you have already seen everything, where on every part of the map, etc. And that during a game-state, where many mechanics will/can change.

I played like a maniac Warcraft 3 Beta. When the game came out, many things where changed, which I didnt like and I never played the normal game :wink: But people are different anyway :smiley:

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I must say one of the thing really ticks me off is how the clothing is keeping me warm and cooled at the same time. It’s not possible to get more warm protection or cold protection by using different sets. Now they are all the same now.
If it’s a bug or if it’s intended I don’t care it’s stupid and show the state of the game. I hope that it’s a bug and that they haven’t “streamlined” the temperatures like that to make it easier to manage the content.
I have a couple of servers and in order to keep them interested I have to add a fair share of mods. I would wish Funcom would give us admins more control of the game. So I’m glad we have our modding community to help us out here.

I’ve spend days in a row in the game for builds and pvp. It was fun. But the last year of updates and bugs had it hard. And that temp issue is just a thorn in my eye!

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Eye of the beholder. If it keeps you coming back, you’re clearly getting something out of the experience.

@Mahejo does the armor currently have even amounts of hot and cold protection or does it have say 2 ticks cold and one hot?

Where, in that whole paragraph or anywhere else in the post, did you see me imply that? Just because I like the vaults for the reasons I wrote there, doesn’t mean they’re perfect and there’s nothing to dislike.

I hate slot machine mechanics in general and I always will, but they’re very limited in the vaults. The only things that are non-existent on Siptah – and rely on RNG for a chance to drop – are the Exiled Lands recipes. Everything else can either be found elsewhere on the map, or always spawns in the vault.

If we’re still talking about the dungeons, i.e. the vaults, then I disagree. It’s not the same at all, for all the reasons that I pointed out.

If we’re talking about Siptah experience in general, then yeah, there’s still too much RNG for my taste. What’s currently driving me crazy is the insane amount of eldarium I have to farm in order to play the delving bench slot machine. One vault is usually no more than 80 decaying eldarium, which turns into 40 bars, which is just two “slot machine tokens”.

So I’ve been spending days trying to get Gravebane, which is one of the two recipes for weapons that apply the “undead bane” effect that you would normally get with specter coating (which can’t be obtained on Siptah, hurray). By now, I have 7 duplicate eldarium mace recipes, and still no Gravebane. I really, really hate that, and I wish they would do something to make delving benches nicer to use.

Yeah. And if it hadn’t been for that private server, with the mods to explore, I probably would’ve stopped too. That was way too long without new content. But I love what they did with those 8+ months.

Hell no, it’s not just PVP content. There are currently no dungeons that require horses, true, but that’s a very narrow way of defining “PVE content”.

I mean, that’s part of the fun for me. Yes, it will keep changing. And that will keep it interesting for me. And when it gets release, there might even be a server wipe – I don’t know, but it could happen – and that means starting from scratch, but with all the knowledge I’ve accumulated. That’s actually fun for me.

To be fair, I’m not trying to tell people how they should feel about Conan Exiles. I’m just explaining that when you see PVE(-C) players with thousands of hours, it’s not just “buildilng and Stockholm syndrome”, there’s more to it :wink:

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