What happened to survival?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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I haven’t played in weeks, my builds are gone. Been playing 7D2D so keeping up with them. They are about to get a big weather update, and make the environment more critical in/to{?} your survival.

When I first started playing Conan your environment/climate/weather played a more critical part in your survival, but now…

I mean the volcano will kill you if not prepped, same with the far north, but other then that funcom pulled natures teeth at some time. Love to see funcom put the bite back in the environment.

What if you could actually die of thirst if you don’t get to noob river fast enough? Really need a better name for that, maybe the Nu’ Bie, the Nobie?

But once there how safe is the water?
Crocodiles need to be the water ambush predators they are.
Ever heard of water born parasites?
Just set your water skin next to the fire for a bit.
Ya, do not throw away that empty water orb :grin:

Camp fires are hot, do not walk through them.

If there are sand storms in the desert why not sleet in the north, typhoons in the east, and white out blizzards in the far north?

And even though a wrap may stop bleeding, is it effective against infection?
Might ought to put some aloe on that.

Ya, it’s the little things that make a survival game a survival game. The environment it’s self should be some level of that threat all the time.
I’m mean you are relatively safe in your own keep.

Phobia warning spider GIF on GIFER

What do you think?
Is Conan too tame?

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We regret to inform you… survival… didn’t survive.

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A little more survival wouldn’t hurt , it doesn’t have to be Green Hell (where it’s a small miracle in ccop if someone doesn’t get hurt or eaten right after we leave the base) , more like Forrest / Sons of the Forrest style.

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A partial answer to your question is money. Games that exceed a certain level of difficulty do not sell well. Especially so later in their life cycle.

From what I remember CE was intended to be survival “lite” right from the start, to attract a bigger audience, then it turned out that they had to tone it down even more because the time and resources they had were not sufficient to implement everything they wanted to.

At least CE and 7 Days allow you to change the difficulty. Some official CE servers with more peril would be nice but given how unpopulated hardcore private servers are it would probably not be worth it to Funcom.

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The fact that you can drink from any water source without consequences is funny.
Would love to see snow storms added.

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7 days to die water and food poisoning/sickness is a thing player count 41K.
ARK, where the easiest thing to do is die to nature, climate/temp is a worry player count SE: 41K SA 20K

Son of the forest which does not have a real multiplayer mode or public servers 18K

Conan exiles 10K, These are all last 30 day peak counts. I don’t think cranking the environmental factors down to diaper boy levels helps the game at all. If anything it just makes the game more boring. They use Conan’s toxic masculinity as an excuse to be all alpha male, then want KOA levels of environmental challenge {google it, yes I’m that old}.

Awww did conans kach a coed poor boy, please :face_with_rolling_eyes:

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I agree with DeaconElie on this , he is right. The survival aspect must be more understandable at least in the beginning. The sandstorm can be healed with wraps, the water can be consumed from every water source, even salt water and sewer water. It’s correct that now we don’t need to change armors with thralls to stay alive in certain areas, but give less effect to the consumables and more significance to armors it’s silly that naked or with something linen you can walk on frost areas. Give severe crippling from great fall with a good amount of timer if not instant death. Give severe crippling from frostbite or heatstroke.
There are plenty to do to create logical survival difficulties than rising the needs of water and food that most of the survival games do and it becomes ball breaking.
I do understand that these changes won’t effect a lot the veterans, since the map won’t change and i am pretty certain that you can see the volcano downstream on visits, but it’s not because it’s difficulty rise up, but because there’s absolutely no vital reason to go there anymore.
These biomes must get their old glory, people should go there for vital reasons, not game breaking, but vital.
Why should i bother to have a black blood tool anymore?
Why should i bother for raw ash, gold or obsidian?
Why should i bother for black ice recipes or giant bodyguards?
What these will give me that others can’t?
It’s good that legendary weapons are better from crafted, but this doesn’t happen on armor pieces too.
But still, give me the ability to fix my own legendary, the ones i want to use, bottom line, let me delve legendary weapons and get the recipes.
And though these don’t seem to be “survival” suggestions, they are.
If these abilities are hidden in places with extreme temperature effects…
If the crafters that can create late game are mostly there…
And above all, if i need late game to proceed in the game…
That’s survival!

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One of this issues is the odd inconsistencies from inception.

We cannot eat fresh, raw, red meat…
But we can drink sewage and sea water?

Clothing can cause you to freeze to death in otherwise comfortable and temperate to warm biomes?

How much food and water does it take to stay healthy and how often?

Furthermore, how in the cluck does a feast weigh less than a glass orb filled with water?

Then let’s talk about how safe it is to eat bread you baked in the furnace you use to fire bricks and smelt iron and especially silver ore…

The point is, unless they make some sense and have consistency, survival mechanics are just annoyances.
The more counter intuitive or lacking in verisimilitude, the worse.
Conan Exiles has some survival elements, but it shows it’s age, a legacy of a time when survival games were often deliberately obtuse.

While this one would like to see stronger survival elements and themes, and a revamp of hunger/thirst/shelter… This one isn’t certain that is realistic. Also, this one recalls when the elements were stronger. But not better. When one could die of frostbite on noob river because one was wearing high quality Aquilonian clothing.

If they ever get around to an Age of Savagery or Age of the Wilds or some sort of survival Age…
This one hopes it is approached with significantly more care and diligence than the most recent Ages.

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I’d say pretty much everything in CE is too easy at this point. Certainly for someone who’s familiar with the game/map. There’s that line devs have to walk between too easy and too difficult while not substituting tedium for difficulty.

Switching into devil’s advocate mode cause sadly I got nothing better to do atm.

The unrepairable legendaries are a double edged sword, no pun intended. It has at times made me use weapons that I normally don’t which makes me learn how to do things in a new way thus adding new aspects to the game. On the other hand farming legendaries for multiples of the one I do want is just tedious.

There are mods that add things like blinding snowstorms with extreme temperature drops and absolutely deadly sandstorms that do spawn sand beasts inside it, etc and so forth. Not that it does anything for console players. Also if you manage to find such a server it will usually have 0 to 2 players and will shut down shortly thereafter.

As an aside one thing that kills me is people who create a “hardcore” server with long nights but then use the pippi vote function to make it dawn every damn time.

7 Days is the only other survival game I’ve actually played. It’s systems are much deeper than CE and while not as pretty that gap is closing. Random gen maps are pure win also. Right now it has no environmental effects at all though it will after the next big patch. There are people who complain that water ceases to be an issue very quickly and that having to boil it is a tedious and boring chore along with slowly limping around for up to two real life hours after a leg injury and harvesting every stump in the biome for honey to treat an infection. Not to mention that dying cures everything anyway.

CE does have food poisoning though it’s laughable and corruption which could be an issue at lower levels that death doesn’t cure.

From what I read Ark is about taming/riding dinos and sci-fi guns and technology which all in all seems to have a huge fan base regardless of survival aspects.

7 Days has it’s exploits but has always been very stable and bug free relatively speaking for me. No clue how Ark compares to CE there. I have to wonder how many players CE has lost due to bugs, like the ongoing crafter thrallicide, cheats and poorly explained, if at all, bans. I tend to doubt minor survival aspect changes would bring them back but maybe we’ll get to see.

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You can always see things like this from a different perspective , realism should stay to the obvious and " whats intuitive" without impeding on the fun of a video game , and having frostbite or heatstroke while wearing endgame gear in a noob area could be considered game design to force high level character to not rein havoc on the starting area without having some sort of debuff that would level the playingfield a little ( I’m not saying that this was funcom intention for sure , but it would be a defendable position if it was ) , having to take ice or spiced food to counter the effect to make them spend resources ect …

I’m for the comeback of more survival aspects too , indeed with more care let’s not forget the armors that would give insane cold protection while looking like it was made for temperate weather showing a lot of bear skin on metal :see_no_evil: :hear_no_evil: :speak_no_evil:

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In Ark the survival aspect is much harder , you can’t outrun the dinos like you can avoid everything in conan. The temperatures of the various maps makes a lot more sense than in conan and are not tied to just small areas ( like the bridge between the highlands and the black keep , or the frost giant dungeon ) but the hole snowy parts with the days and nights accentuating the effects ( so it can get really cold at night in snowy partsbut you can also get a torch out / build a campfire or wear appropriate armor and it gets really hot in the day near volcanos ) but you can still drink water from any source without having to boil it like in conan. And you can spend a very long time ( as conan a long time ago ) before reaching end game dino/tames and gear ( especially if you start the game without looking any information ) , since you can find blueprints of various tiers ( 5 tiers with some rng since it’s in boxes that reset and can spawn any tier of any object ( but with higher chance of good ones in the hardest parts ) inside the various caves filled with insects and deadly dinos for the various gear that leveling unlock in the basic tier.

The dino/tames of course helps a lot especially when you learn which ones to use/mount to mine resources or harvest wood ect…

you should give it a try if you like dinosaurs , but it’s very different of Conan in terms of exploration ( due to the fact that the character controls are a bit more unrealistic , and that you need special gear from aberration map to be able to climb cliffs ) as you can ride flying dinos. and also in combat since you mainly use riffles ( no combos with the swords ect… )

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Personally, this one would not find it defensible.
In general. Such artificial and heavy handed handicaps break the verisimilitude…
In general.

However, if we look at very high end armour (not just the epic version of regular armour), say, Silent Legion, with it’s reputation for being cursed…
That would be excellent.

Having armour with mystical origins or materials (such as black ice or dragon bones, or scraps from haunted ruins) that chills enough to both make the Volcano comfortable, but also freeze a person solid in less sweltering climates (or alternatively, makes permafrost feel cozy, but rapidly cooks one to death in the meadows) is an excellent mechanic. But it needs to be articulated.

Furthermore, if the armour is based on the designs of inhuman monsters (such as the Vault armour on Siptah) it could easily offer absolutely no temperature protection or stabilization. This gear is not conceived with human comfort in mind, and such beasts would not need environmental protection the way a soft skinned man thing would. While they may offer good defense and other benefits, their weight/encumbrance may be unpleasant, and the wearer might as well be skyclad for purposes of temperature regulation.

So, while for most basic cases (even epic tier ones) this one would not like such penalties as you noted and would find them too much of a stretch…
This one adores them for mystically sourced, legendary, or otherwise inhuman outfits.

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Ark was a real fun game, i gave a good amount of time in this game. I won’t speak about the malicious problems of this game, but the simplest that took the interest away from me was the fact that you were as good as the Dino you were riding. Plus the constant filthy skin :face_vomiting:.
But it was a great game, with many maps, amazing landscapes filled with any kind of danger and really difficult dungeons. I miss the flying dragons :laughing:.

I don’t know the new Ark, i haven’t tried it yet.

7d2d did a promising come back and seems to have good direction of development at the time. Now about the water complain all i can say is that people will always find a reason to complain. The game seem more correct in my eyes now than it was and the progression has meaning.
I love hoard every night one life sessions on 7d2d, every minute counts and the loot is extraordinary in your starting days. But one life is important, because then it becomes game breaking!

No matter the game, there are always gaps to be filled!

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I was playing Conan survival in 4D. Til the cyclone outside knocked out the power

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Dude, you made me actually have to look up a word. :+1: Kudos, that is quite the accomplishment.

Hmmm, set the base silent legion armor to slowly corrupt while wearing it, maybe give the fully corrupted a buff :thinking:

ARK live servers I always logged in naked on the beach. Went to a private server and played for a bit, but there is just so much wrong in the game I couldn’t really get in to it. #1 the mixed epoch dinos just made my head scream WRONG all the time. Old argument though.

THIS

IS

CONAN.

I really don’t think it should be this of soft a game.

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Right on the top funcom forum page.

"Conan Exiles is the open-world survival game set in the brutal world of Conan the Barbarian! Survive. Build. Dominate.

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they get less money for making the game easier. Wierd how that worked out for them.

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Should now say “Harvest, Build, Repeat”

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now serious take on this…
Instead of a negative adde, which deters the current casual gamers, add a biff for drinking clean water, maybe a 5 min stamina boost of 50. Add buffs for survival mechanics, not to big to make them meta, but enough to notice.

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Kind of sounds like a participation award.