"Don’t talk like a fool," he grunted. "Come, girl, don’t be such a spitfire. I’m not like that Stygian you knifed, and you know it."
“A penniless vagabond,” she taunted.
He laughed at her.
“What do you call yourself? You haven’t enough money to buy a new seat for your breeches. Your disdain doesn’t deceive me. You know I’ve commanded bigger ships and more men than you ever did in your life. As for being penniless—what rover isn’t, most of the time? I’ve squandered enough gold in the sea-ports of the world to fill a galleon. You know that, too.”
“Where are the fine ships and the bold lads you commanded, now?” she sneered.
“At the bottom of the sea, mostly,” he replied cheerfully. “The Zingarans sank my last ship off the Shemite shore—that’s why I joined Zarallo’s Free Companions. But I saw I’d been stung when we marched to the Darfar border….”
- Dialogue between Conan and Valeria in ‘Red Nails’, 1936, by Robert E. Howard
Conan routinely lost everything as a character. Many times, he never even recovered the treasures, or completed the objectives, he set out to when he was a thief, adventurer, pirate, and king. So as a fan of the source material the game is based on, and as a player that doesn’t over value their time put in a game to amass virtual items and assets, I’m rather surprised by how some feel a need to be compensated for their, uhm, ‘losses’ because of the time they chose to put in.
Its a video game. You were not cheated out of things you have ‘earned’, you lost things due to technical issues… in a video game. I can’t overstate how non an issue this is. Furthermore, it is a survival video game. Survival is an awful business, if you lack a willingness to deal with unexpected, and significantly bad setbacks. Build a shelter, watch is get taken down by wind and rain. Set a deadfall, find that the would be dinner has been taken away by a raptor of some sort. Survival is about persistence in face of lack, not accumulation of, security.
Some might propose the ‘its no fun to play a game where you keep losing everything’ point. And if by losing things, that means accomplishment milestones, and progression, that is somewhat understandable to me. However, what plot is their in Conan Exiles? There is a very loose story, much like other sandbox and survival games. I’ve lost progress, and I’ve also willfully restarted quite a few times, I never felt as if all my past play time was taken, or wasted. And at the end of all this, why are you investing so much time into a game, that isn’t meant to be some continually linear progression like a typical MMORPG to greater godlike levels and power, to begin with if the security of progression matters so much to you?
I do hope, and will appreciate, when Funcom has more of these issues and bugs worked out. They are not a huge game development studio, so I actually do feel they deserve much more patience with addressing technical issues in a modern multi platform game, with as ambitious a design, like this one has. I am just grateful that they have now made another game, that makes real effort, to fit one of the greatest intellectual properties with Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories.
Continually though taking to the forum and Twitter, to post negative rants, targeted at the people and company behind the game however is not appreciated. Sorry you are so unhappy with a video game not being perfect. Sorry that you might need to start over, or use other tools, to get back to a certain point in Conan Exiles. But what do you expect? No one promised a perfect, or fully moderated even, game to you. I feel Funcom has delivered on all the things I saw promised to be within the game, when I was taking my time researching it, before I bought it.
If you genuinely feel your time has been ‘stolen’ somehow, then maybe it has, by yourself for not better considering if the game, or its current state, was right for you and your expectations.