I finally bit the bullet and watched the recording. Or at least, as much of it as I could stomach, because I ended up skipping certain parts.
For starters, I really like Andy and I respect Dennis, so it really pains me to say this: the nicest way to describe this stream is to say that it was fumbled. There seems to have been no preparation involved in this process, judging from the results. It was really frustrating to watch.
There’s a silver lining to that, though. I believe this might make some people here change their minds about how Funcent is handling Conan Exiles. It also shows quite clearly that the people in charge of the major decisions don’t play the game enough to understand what players actually need, or what mechanics they rely on.
Take the stack-splitting revamp, for example. I’m sure it was done with the best intentions, but it really shows that no one involved has played the game enough to understand that players really won’t appreciate having to: 1) take a bunch of crap from one or more chests, 2) go to the crafting station, 3) transfer the materials into the crafting station, 4) wait for the crafting to finish, 5) take the leftover materials from the crafting station, 6) go back to the chest(s) and put the leftovers back in. Not when they were previously able to take the materials they needed, plop them into the crafting station(s), and leave the crafting process unsupervised without worrying about leftovers.
You might think it’s an exaggeration, that we’re talking about especially fussy players, and ask why the game should cater to them. And that might be a fair point if it weren’t for certain crafting stations like the campfire or the grinder, where the crafting is automatic and you have to put in the right amount of (potentially perishable) raw materials to get the right amount of crafted products.
And this is just one example. It’s illustrative, but not a solitary nitpick. Requiring the dyer’s bench to dye your armor is another fine example. Adding even more destructive effects to the purge without solving the purge-pulling abuse on PVE(-C) servers is another. I could go on, but I hope this drives home the problems with the direction of this game.
Speaking of that…
If you don’t have a clue about what’s important for your players, you’ll make decisions that make the game worse instead of improving it.
I’m not saying I expect them to play the game obsessively, but they do need a certain level of familiarity with how the game is actually being played. It doesn’t matter whether they get that familiarity by playing the game or by talking to their playerbase or by some combination of those two activities. What matters is that they don’t make decisions that make the game worse for their players.
Even if they were receptive enough to community feedback – which they’ve proven they aren’t – they would still end up with wasted development effort. That’s simply not what you can call “improving the game”.
In the interest of fairness, I want to make it clear that I don’t think that everything they showed in the stream is bad and that the new update will suck completely. Yeah, the ballista seems interesting and the Sacred Hunt could be fun. I can’t talk about the combat changes from a personal perspective, but it looks like they might be positive. The revamp of the follower AI commands is a great thing if it ends up working correctly – we’ll have to see if it has any big bugs once it gets into live and people start relying on it.
But the bottom line, at least for me, is that the way they’re handling the game hasn’t really changed and the problems that drove me away will persist.