For many reasons I just can’t commit to playing multiplayer anymore and it’s been like that for a while. Having played the survival experience extensively, the magic is long gone. Building stuff is my sole motivation to play. I’ll typically play for two weeks, get bored and leave the game aside for months. New material form DLCs is not sufficient to make me want to play/build and spend $ for it. It’s just more of the same. No matter what I build it still looks like a ghost town.
It’s obvious that Funcom constantly works very hard to fix and improve the game. There has surely been a lot of work and brainstorm behind the new map and dungeons for instance. However, it seems to me that the post-launch development of the game has been mainly focused on the multiplayer experience. Easy to understand but there’s still a market share to grasp or at least to limit its attrition (and potentially increase DLC revenues).
Whether it is to cater the motivation of lonely builders or the “dungeon masters” who prepare custom experience for players, I believe that the relation between Admins and Thralls is key to bring life into the sandbox.
The previous works on the thralls such as new animations, new NPC, new specializations, new work benches and the behaviour controls definitely improved the game. It’s headed in the right direction but certainly not at destination yet.
Here are some ideas:
In the admin menu, scrolling the thralls would display a preview.
Cloth slots for working thralls, just like other thralls but no weapon slots.
More random animations for working thralls.
Ability to set social behaviours to thralls, such as walking freely in a set radius and interact (very basic) with other thralls. A simple faction system within a clan could enable reactions toward others that the admin would set (a b c d) for each thrall (or leave to default) to dictate their interactions, such as “indifferent”; “chat”: “walk along”; “sit down together”; “chase”; “flee”; “share invisible items”; “dance”; “random” in a chain reaction of emotes.
Thrall creation editor. Rather than Funcom working constantly to expand the too-long-to-browse list of thralls, a real game changer would be to allow admins to create their own thralls. This cannot be overstated: whether players asked for it or not, this feature would take the game to another level.
Add more possibilities to the character editor to allow more realistic body shapes.
More civil clothing options.
Players to enable interaction between certain objects (set from the object) and thralls like sitting or drinking.
Enable player’s content for dialogue thralls.
Retain the features of the in-game thralls like shapes and accessories.
Thralls reactions to elements and environment (animations).
Enable junior characters. It’s perhaps too controversial, maybe they couldn’t be butchered.
Fix the annoying bug that would fill thralls’ empty cloth slots at every restart.
Players to set the interaction of thralls with players (greet; look away; bow; indifferent; wink; etc.).
Allow the players to set the stance of thralls, including the dance type for entertainers.
New thrall classes, not combat oriented. Musicians, field workers, janitors; healers, etc.
Enable more followers but perhaps limit the combat ability to one of them, or set by the admin.
Anyway, you got the gist.
For players in my position, and there must be others, new DLC and dungeons only offer more of the same so I’m not likely to throw in more money. I probably would if some of the features above would be introduced.
Finally, I don’t think players who quit playing the game are likely to be active in offering feedback.
It makes Funcom miss on the reasons why players quit for the most part. Therefore the feedback system based on the popularity of the suggestions is weak and misleading. Providing feedback must be plain simple too.
95% of what you are asking for is covered by a single mod:
There’s various other mods that will cover the gaps. Immersive Armors, Improved Quality of Life, Fashionist, Thrall Wars, Age of Calamitous, and many others.
Assuming you are on PC. And if you are, you have access to ALL of what you have said. Except one point, minors… that will be a hard No across the board. They do wish to sell the game around the world and with the most popular retailers.
If you’re not on PC. Well much of what you ask is beyond the limits of the consoles. So even having access to mods wouldn’t help much. Game is already pushing limits of hardware there.
I understand that even with an efficient architecture in Unreal 4, the game limitations are set by the processing power of the least capable machine for which you sell the game, let aside PC.
In that light, I don’t know if the game is already at capacity in terms of processing and what the actual burden is to enable the features I mentioned in my post. Just saying, not literally asking.
For instance, I thought that a thrall creation editor was just a matter of developing the UI because the character class and all the related blueprints and components already exist. You just dial an instance. Would it really add to the processing workload to introduce a player-created character (NPC) compared to using one that is preset?
Yes and no. Probably could get away with adding those sliders (someone else can chime in on this as I’m sure they have more info on this). But it would likely be severely limited.
I’d love to see many of these ideas added to the base game (as a pc player, I use various mods to create similar effects, but that doesn’t solve anything for console players - and the last dev stream suggested that more than half the player base is on console). I have no idea how hard they would be to implement, or how high their performance impact might be, but as the features themselves, I think there are some great suggestions here.
Just any gaming PC (± $1000)? Are the PC requirements the same whether you are playing Conan with mods or if you actually take it into Unreal and make your own? Say that I wanna use VR, would that PC be a good fit as well?
I am well aware of the gap between console and PC, but I work in front of a computer all day long. When it’s playtime, the couch is calling me louder than my desk.
I’m not sure, since I never tried it, but doesn’t a controller work on PC, which gives the ability to couch surf and get the PC experience? Maybe it still requires some keyboard input, but a cordless keyboard might work.
I’m currently using a i7 8700K and a GTX1080ti, and while its a bit on the older side, its a bit overkill for Conan. So pretty much any medium range rig that isn’t older than 2-3 years will be good.
Works flawlessly from my experience. You pick up the controller, and start using it. CE will automatically change the UI to suit the controller. Works out of the box pretty much. This was a test with the Steam Contoller. Though I’m sure all the standard controllers pretty much work.
Like @Taemien said, this is a pc game, we console players get just the basic form of the game, pc has no limits unfortunately for us. In any case if you choose to go pc on Conan exiles I already envy you m8.
I actually run CE on an older, mid-range laptop, if you can believe that. Minus a few lag spikes when trying to run through really built up areas, it manages a rather good playing experience. I use a controller and it’s identical in button layout to the console version. I do occasionally have to use the keyboard for a few things, but that is mostly admin work. If you just want to play the game straight, most everything runs fine from the controller.
My laptop was beastly when it came out, but now it’s quite outdated so I play CE on my series X.
When I play games on my laptop I run it through my TV and play from the couch. I actually use a mouse and keyboard, I have a small lap board that I put them on.
If I recall both Xbox and PS controllers should work with a pc, you might need to get some type of update for the controller
It sounds complex, but it’s pretty easy to play many games on PC as though you were playing on console
We should be demanding more. On the cusp of the PS4 several major games released, still on the PS3. Although the difference between the two versions in real time was quite dramatic, on the PS3 you could play the game very well. The graphics were limited, as were the controls.
All we want is something that looks and plays cleanly on the 4.
I’m not saying this in defense of the state of the game on console, just to point out how odd this “generation” swap has been compared to all the ones in the past.
When the Xbox one/PS4 came out companies were creating cross generation games, but they were completely different builds. Shadow of Mordor was a great example because it was missing the nemesis system completely on old gen consoles.
Now we have the same game running across multiple generations, and able to play together. This is really cool, but presents the obvious problem of bottlenecks.
Just on Xbox alone you have the XB1, XB1x, XBSX and XBSS. That’s a crazy wide margin of power, and the high end is going to be held back by the low end, while the low end is going to constantly have problems trying to keep up.
Considering this wasn’t actually cross generation when it launched however makes me agree that FC really should be doing as much as possible to make the old generation as smooth as possible, seeing as those are the consoles that most players purchased the game on.
This is exasperated a bit more by the continuing availability problems of the new console, but even if everyone who wanted to upgrade could, the game should work well on the system it was sold for.
I’d like for my Lancer to tow 2 tons too. But short of an engine/transmission/frame rehaul it ain’t happening. Your best bet is a PS5. I think the only thing stopping them for making preparations to cease PS4 support is the chip shortage.
Don’t expect this to be normal anymore. FFXIV ceased support of the PS3 a few years ago. Not to mention there are several games that I own (and still periodically play) who’ve updated far far past the specs of the original PC I bought them for.
One game used to run on 256MB of RAM, now takes nearly 4GB. Its storage space requirement far exceeds the original harddrive I installed it on (13GB vs 12GB HDD).
