This is how the game gets the richest lighting. If it follows the normal light path (sun angle 0 in ultradynamic sky), the sun passes directly overhead and shadows the character heavily in the face, not to mention sweep across the sky, throwing shadows into the ravines in the desert for most of the day (and conversely why photography when the sun is overhead sucks).
To quote my favorite TV show theme song:
If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes
And other science facts,
Just repeat to yourself “It’s just a show,
I should really just relax”
As an aside, the moon used to go the wrong way… that was fixed. Note, the moon isnt used as a lightsource but rather a night brightness setting in the UDS.
At least the drunk giant is a primary source, not just looking at a google images png and trying to overlay the map onto it like a toddler solving a puzzle. Because that’s the entire scientific method in that video. It’s insulting every time someone brings it up.
At least he’s in the game, not some hastily cobbled together unofficial map with less than 30 seconds of fact checking behind it, like that “video” that keeps popping up and I have to keep ridiculing…
It is easier to accept it the way it is.
Refer to an explanation by the Outcast if you’re so inclined to dig a little deeper.
After more than enough complaining about it, some idiot finally decided to move the orbit of the moon. It’s still wrong, but what’s worse is that the reflection of the “old” moon still shows up crossing the water where it was originally before they moved the moon.
Be careful what you wish for because if they do it,
they will sure as hell screw something up.
There was once more realistic clouds, but that got changed into a Linden Labs Clone.
The stars once traversed the sky, but hey… that was changed too, now we have twinkling stars thanks to a cheap trick. Still people complain they don’t recognize any constellations.
Why should they recognize anything. The Exiled Lands only seems to be a part of the planet, but it is not. I’m sure there must be some lore explanation of it’s creation and existence.
People are not satisfied. They never will be.
You give them an inch and they will take a mile.
That’s why this game got turned into “just another game”.
I think you’re misconstruing the point. It is more complicated than that. I simplified the concept in my message to illicit a response from him and it worked. For the longest time, your stance against the snowglobe theory is that it is needless and absurd. Joel saying it’s more complicated than being a pocket dimension doesn’t mean it’s confirmed to not be one. It means it’s more complicated than that, not less.
and by saying a car is more complicated than a hamster wheel is not saying it isn’t a hamster wheel… I’m not misconstruing it. You’re reading too much into it.
As I’ve said many times; snowglobe, dreamland, alternate dimension, that’s all lazy story telling. That’s what a movie does when it gets to the end and it hasn’t made any sense, so it just throws that in at the end so that literally anything makes sense. That is the height of less complicated. It’s anything goes cuz “it’s like, not real bruh.” I give Joel and the team enough credit that the game backstory is not based on “anything goes”. For the most part, the story is clear. Human’s are held in by the bracelets to be slaves for the godkings cuz they rebelled in the past. Conan is wandering thru the area (cough no bracelet) looking for the serpent ring. Some godkings got mad, made a sandstorm and it made a desert in what would otherwise be lush land. A giant gets drunk and has a weird dream and some people eat other people. The rest is “more complication” but that’s basically the nut of it. The obsession with making the game really about Cthulhu instead of being a Conan centric world is kind of nauseating (which I might add… we haven’t seen any overdoses of since Siptah). Godkings extraplanar? Sure… whatever. They have funky powers. That doesn’t make it a snowglobe/dreamland/other dimension/hamster wheel.
Oh and I forgot; Neebs gets eaten by a tiger and stung by bees…
Nope. Compare the positions of the Northern Aqueduct and the Southern Aqueduct.
@Taemien’s explanation about lighting is most likely to be correct. It’s also unlikely to be answered by Funcom, and if they do, they’ll give some sort of half-mysterious answer that points you to the Snow Globe theory, because the Snow Globe theory is the cheap and easy way to explain away anything that doesn’t make sense.
Well, yeah. It’s convenient.
Personally, I think that they simply didn’t think through all of these things with the same level of attention to detail that the fans expect and exhibit. The Outcast’s dialogue, for example, looks to me like a typical nudge-nudge-wink-wink-break-the-4th-wall gag. But then people started taking it a lot more seriously than it deserves, and making all sorts of connections between that and the Lovecraftian stuff. Put yourself in the devs’ shoes: the fans handed you an explanation on a silver plate, why not take it and run with it?
For the most obvious idea that it should follow PRESENT Earth settings:
Some facts about pre history, in which the hyborian age is set to represent might also influence where the perceived Sun path through the day is seen.
A whole lot of structures reminiscent of ancient history are dated (not only by ancient aliens) based on the fact that they are supposed to align with the Sun, but in modern day it does not.
That with the fact one CANNOT know if the map represents north like we do, as even IRL old maps also did not.
Old Chinese maps, along with some SEA and Polinesian maps, for one reason or another, put the south up. Some disc maps of old put what we consider north “all around it”. That is even one of the most probable explanations as to why maps do not in fact show Antarctica in “medieval times”, instead, they are part of a circular map the in doing so deforms the coastal profile of continents.
So there is no reason to claim the sun “must” be a certain way, and even if it did, there is no reason to claim that in the game world corresponds with the map points for our IRL customs.
I have yet to see anything solid to contradict the theory besides “it dum and i no like it”. I’d love to hear a proper counter argument made in good faith.
FWIW, I did make my counterargument entirely in good faith. If it’s not clear what my theory is, here’s the short version: when the devs crafted the lore, they didn’t see the need to go to the same lengths you did.
Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t actually care. I mean, if Funcom devs wrote a post or made a video tomorrow where they explicitly said “Jimbo is right, Exiled Lands are a snow globe”, I would be mildly disappointed that the extent of their imagination didn’t go beyond “dur hur it’s not real”, but it wouldn’t really change my opinion about the game in general.
So yeah, it’s lazy, it’s unimaginative, it’s a cop-out, and those are the qualities I don’t like in writing, but I don’t care enough to put an effort into “disproving” it for you.
That’s not a reason why it can’t be true. That’s a personal bias, an opinion.
Yes, and I’ve never once disputed that. There isn’t some magic big doorway that’s the only way in and out. Extradimensional travel is entirely doable through physical traversal. The bracelets aren’t necessarily a requirement to enter the Exiled Lands, they’re a means to keep people inside.
To add to this: the Lemurians arrived by physically arriving at this place. Thoth-Amon would have as well. The giant-kings even talk of how barges would come in by river.
Imagine a staircase, but to your perception you think you’re walking on a flat surface. However, you end up on another floor that you weren’t on before. You didn’t take some magical portal to get here.
Again, you’re projecting your own bias on it. Just because you don’t like the Cthulhu Mythos doesn’t make it any less part of the lore. Even Robert E Howard himself wrote his works to be connected. While your opinion may not like that, that does not change that fact. The game doubly so includes that. The keystone is forged using an item lifted directly from a lovecraft story, the force behind the maelstrom is directly named to be a lovecraft diety, and most of all:
You seem to have forgotten all about Age of Sorcery, which features Nyarlathotep as Kurak’s master
The burden of proof isn’t on me to prove the Exiled Lands is not a pocket. The concept of the game takes place between two novels where Conan is traversing an area on foot between. Its stated by the developers that the story of Conan Exiles in the Exiled Lands takes place in that timeframe.
It is reasonable to believe that it is a physical location in that space, unknown to most because of the low population (or non-existent) density of that area and its remote location. To say otherwise needs a bit more evidence than a theory.
If someone said the sun wasn’t going to rise tomorrow. I don’t need to prove that it will.
You’re selling them too short to diminish the merit of the theory. There’s been bread crumbs towards this all the way since launch. They didn’t retroactively rename the map “dreamworld” in the devkit, it always was. They didn’t retroactively add the unnamed city as an after the fact homage to the nameless city; and they certainly didn’t think of adding one of the necessary components of the game’s main story afterwards. They’ve added more to it over the years to strengthen the clues, not to build on them afterwards.
You’re once again letting bias cloud your perspective. Disappointing that this is all it comes down to, some knee-jerk response that no, it can’t be true becaus I personally don’t like it
