The Journey system and some improvements

The journey system is a great way to provide a basic guidance of objectives to aim for in a open world while teaching you about the world(and some lore), game play, and though it’s descriptions of each journey step your “story” so to speak. If you have not actually bothered to read them then I would at least encourage a glance at them.

However it needs updates, I’ll start with nice touches it could use, while not absolutely needed would be a nice added feature and followed with suggestions to its order and placement.

I’d also like to add that there are far more pressing concerns the dev’s should be worrying over at the moment, these suggestions are for a more calming time when the offices are not currently on fire haha.

  1. I do believe all of the steps have a short worded tutorial under each “story” element of the journey step on how to achieve the step, for example “obtain an iron bar” shows a short “story” element on why you character believes he needs better tools and below that a short tutorial element on how iron ore smelted in a furnace will create Iron Bars. however some of these tutorial elements needs a better description or in some cases an actual longer more in depth one. Farming and potion making being great examples where the tutorial doesn’t provide enough information to get started. While most of us have a couple hundred hours in Conan Exiles from beta and potentially thousands of hours from other such games to draw on to fill in the gaps, many players do not. Ill bravely admit I did not know the compost heap was a peaceable item during the beta, but rather a crafted ingredient to the farming building. I figured it out quickly but confusion could of been avoided with a better description. I do fully believe there needs to be some mystery in the game that we have to blindly figure out but not the fountains of game play

  2. You can easily complete journey steps without ever having gotten to read the journey step in the first place. while not critical and probably not even thought of, the pre step description can be just as important as the completed step description in understanding the “story” your character goes through in the journey. Thus the suggestion is to show both the pre description and the post description on the journey…after all you can easily complete steps in later chapters just by following the very first steps in chapter 1 thus denying you the ability to even get to read what the pre description even was.

  3. While i’m still fairly new to Conan Exiles having put about 250 hours into the beta and about 20-30 hours since live, I see no end to basic questions that gets answered just by following the journey. The Journey needs more emphasis that its a tutorial so to speak and a vast majority of game play mechanics get answered just by following it.

  4. Do to changes make during the time span of the beta the placement of a large number of steps makes little sense and causes more confusion. The number of times I’ve seen new players ask where is the stone skinning knife listed in the wiki for example to complete one of the earliest steps you get to begin skinning is well, rather sad. As such at the bottom of this post ill list the steps that should get rearranged to have the journey make more sense. if you don’t understand what i mean by this, the first skinning knife you can craft is now iron. earlier in the beta there WAS a stone knife. While the knife was removed the journey step was never altered thus the step to skin an animal is a couple chapters BEFORE it asks you to mine an iron node or even craft an iron tool. and I highly doubt the early exile npcs by the river even drop a knife, though I know the camp by the Dreggs can have chests that MIGHT drop one

  5. Kinda bumming of of the 2nd and 4rd points, certain steps should be in a more “general category” rather then a chapter. These steps would include finding camps, bleeding, cripple, finding a head, heavy finisher, go to x city, you get the idea of what I mean? Some of these like cripple and bleeding are located all the way in chapter 6! and these are things that with some small amount of luck you’ll complete with your first few fights in the game if not the first fight you get into. This mostly addresses the fact that your only allowed to read journey steps of the chapter your actually on. so craft some daggers as your starting weapons and get some bleeding ticks? then that bleeding step in chapter 6 triggers 5 whole chapters before you could of ever read the step description (which some of them are well worth the read)

** This is a collection of steps that should be altered or moved to make it a more seamless and understandable journey, there are many more that could use an updated tutorial portion that each step provides to figuring out how to do many of the steps.

Spend knowledge Points - this should be moved to chapter 1, perhaps after eating as you’ll have gained a level by then

Block an attack - this should be next to crafting a weapon and shield

Use skinning knife to skin an animal - this is currently painfully out of place with the removal of stone skinning knives

scout a Darfari camp - 3 or 4 of the starter roads lead you to right in front of one and this step is in chapter 3 (some exile camps seem to count as Darfari camps)

Obtain an Iron bar - while the placement is ok for right about when you should think about iron, half way through the next chapter is mining iron ore

Mine all the iron in a node - this should be before obtain an Iron bar…I mean it should at least be in the same chapter and not the next one

Obtain a potion - this could use a better description on how to make a potion, I see this get asked a-lot on how to make the basic healing ones, perhaps even making it an earlier step as the means to make one is available early on

Recruit a unique thrall - this should be a more “general category” step as it’s not hard to snag one early on, but this step is listed very late in the journey

Drink a yellow lotus potion - 1st this damn thing NEEDS a timer, like 12 hours or something, next it needs to be listed much much much sooner in the journey

Earn a perk - this is oddly listed in chapter 4 and most people prob earn this one in the first 10 minutes of game play.

I’m probably missing 1-2 steps that should get looked at in either placement or description to make them more clear.

Anyway this is my suggestion in an otherwise mountain of suggestions that are being thrown out there atm. once again ill state that I understand there are FAR MORE pressing concerns in the game atm then this, but I at least would like to get it out there.

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Yes,I agree with this ,the journey should be further developed ,seeing as this is based on a world with more lore and stories to tell than most franchises ,there is no reason this can’t be a survival game and a deep RPG in terms of story.

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I second this, all good suggestions. I couldn’t fathom why journey items from future chapters were completing so early in the game, especially as each one tells a story. You often only get half the story :joy: Even just showing what it said before being completed would be an improvement.

The Journey items could definitely use some re-arranging but there are always going to be some weird ones. For example the journey for combining orb effects and explosives line up well with the star metal journey because of how you crack open a star metal node. But you can make them a lot sooner than when you can use the star metal and players may want to raid bases before they get to max level which involve explosives and orbs.

I do like the suggestions above and this one definitely sounds better.
I can understand the part about the trebuchet being a journey step as at least it will get you to make and use one to experience it.

But yeah there are other things that could be added instead of these. There are better potions that could be used in the journey and some that not everyone will use so they seem more interesting to make for a journey step.

I would like a step to craft specific armour pieces or weapons just to get us to use and try different things we wouldn’t normally do.