You get that calling CE a 'beta' makes no sense, right?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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Will be blunt,

Game will never be ‘finished’, as will a lot of games with similar design aspirations such as No Man’s Sky.

Yes, there are bugs, yes some long standing, yes some very detrimental on some play style or modes.

The reality is, we’ve come to a new age in game design and life cycles, where the more open world and non narrative a game is, giving players more ability to act on their own objectives through their own methods, we’ll have bugs, exploits, things we don’t like implemented as mechanics. And I’ll take that, I’ll take it any day of the week over a return to railroad narrative, largely closed world, maybe 200 hours or so of play time interest games (With crap NEET dominated PvP tossed in).

Open world sandbox design, especially in the survival genre, is very new, experimental, and immature. Developers are continually striving to develop new technologies and approaches that deliver on the promise of it.

When you call it a ‘Beta’ and imply the development team is not involved in one of many commercial and technology experiments in game design and evolution, and that players have a role in that which requires some patience (Yes, that may mean dealing with a bug for a year), you can’t be taken seriously.

I’ve bought this game twice, on PS4 and PC, along with DLC and also hosted servers on G-Portal. Been playing it since alpha, and launch. Have seen the last year plus bring wonderful content, bug fixes, and new players. And yes also a few setbacks at times. But I’ve never felt lied to, never felt I wasn’t delivered the best product Funcom could put out the door. And I for sure never felt I was sold a lemon.

Basically, no, calling it a Beta and demanding it be made to appeal to your want to make it Fortnite with sword and sandals, or some PvP focused already a hundred plus in the market clones for clan bros, is ridiculous levels of entitlement. There is this thing, called YouTube with plenty of video reviews that have shown CE warts and all. Steam has a two hour return policy. So when you take to the forums here to mud toss ‘I was sold a beta’, you’re really saying ‘I couldn’t bother to take 20 minutes to research the game, and even with two hours of play time I couldn’t decide if I like it.’

INB4, ‘But these things are much deeper into the game than 2 hours.’ No, stop, just stop. This game is built on a brilliantly basic gameplay premise, and has a lot of content to take in, i.e., you still are acting entitled. If you played this game for two hours, critically, you’d come away with a clear idea of is it for you. You’d see there is always more than one way to get around a bug issue also.

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Yeah, nothing but love for this game.

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Yeah, I could list a number of games from various genres where potentially game-breaking bugs were never fixed; in a minority of cases the developers have even replied that they had no intention to, because all their programmers had moved on to future projects (guess if I ever bought those “future projects”?).

As I’ve said before: Conan Exiles is a massive undertaking for such a small company as Funcom, and it’s pretty impressive that they got it even as far as the game is today. It’s not perfect, I’m sure we can all agree on that - and I understand there are still issues that prevent some players from playing the game at all - but it’s still pretty damn good.

Yes, Funcom may have bitten more thay can chew with such a massive game; perhaps a little smaller game with a little more effort in refining what they had would’ve produced an even better game. But at least they were smart and decided not to start adding some fan-favorite features that would’ve been clearly too much work to ever make function properly, such as riding, as well as postponing other features until they’re confident enough they can make it work.

I understand why some people feel it’s taking Funcom too long to fix their game, and why they feel like asking for a refund and going to play something else. But I’m constantly amazed by the persistence with which these people continue making angry noises on the Internet regarding the game with which they claim to have lost all hope long ago.

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Well said.
Back in January of 2017 when my boyfriend and his friends were laughingly talking about a new game with totally naked avatars, I decided to buy it for him as a joke gift. Who knew it would pull ME down the rabbit hole.
When he went on deployment, out of boredom I started playing it and even back in early EA, was pretty amazed. I still stand outside at night in the frozen north and just stare as the snow glistens and twinkles with the reflection of the stars.
To me β is just the second letter in the Greek alphabet. If anything, Funcom has created an Omega game, where they do not try to be the Alpha game of the week, and have gone off in a new direction that will be a precursor to gaming in the future.

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We do understand where the notion is coming from and that “beta” gets thrown around as a derogatory term. Sometimes, it’s used for lack of better words as players want something to be improved.

We are also very aware that Conan Exiles is not perfect. It’s a complex game with pretty complex game mechanics. It might not be obvious or feel that way but even the simplest of games is more complicated than what people generally assume it is.

Sandbox survival games are even more extreme in that regard and different beasts. They give the players a lot of freedom, which means the developer has much less influence over what the players are going to do in the game. It’s one of the defining aspects of sandbox games that give you a lot of freedom to make the game what YOU want it to be. It also means it’s a different experience for everyone. For some it’s a good one and for some it’s not. It also means we are learning almost daily about things we weren’t even aware of to be possible. The complexity of Sandbox games means there is a lot of room for “outside of the box thinking” when it comes to gameplay. It can be both a curse and a blessing. A blessing in the way that we see buildings and creations being made in the game that are mind boggling and floor us and a curse when new exploits get discovered which are really hard to fix due to interconnected game mechanics.

If you feel the game is not for you then there are tons of other amazing games out there and it’s your right to choose something else. If you feel the game is what you want it to be, that makes us certainly super happy. If you enjoy it but you feel there are some things that you would like to be different, we are certainly ALWAYS willing to listen. As long as that input is presented in a respectful and constructive manner.

The community team reads through thousands of messages each day and we take back the feedback that we know we can act upon or we can have discussions around internally. We also try to be as open as we can. For some that is not enough for some it is.

As painful as it is to admit, we simply cannot make everyone happy but we certainly do try our best to improve Conan Exiles in every way possible. You, the community, is a big part of that and for that we are very grateful :slight_smile:

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A good MMO is a working , breathing project that is in constant flux.

If its not, then its just a stand a lone, and no one wants to play by themselves.

Ive been playing MMOs since the 90s. Since Star War Galaxies, there has not been a real fun adventure. Sure there are problems, that’s life. At least they are not in the tower counting coin. I see vast improvements monthly.

WoW was a ship storm for 2 years, some said not playable. Now look at it.
Not my cup of tea, by they seem to have hit a winning game.

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Well, I’m gonna put in my two cents. I freakin’ love this game, and I love the fact that you guys communicate.

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Yes but some people would say, “thanks for communicating about your broken game.” I think the expectation is that when you buy a game you expect it to “just work,” and I don’t think that will ever change. As unforgiving as the game itself is, even if there were absolutely no bugs it would be extremely hard to ask a consumer who has paid $50 at that point to “stop acting entitled.” They are absolutely entitled, they paid money for a product - what would happen if you bought fintech software that was riddled with bugs? Would the publisher be able to get away with saying “we know you’re struggling but bear with us?” What happens when you pay for a plumber to come over and fix your kitchen plumbing, and he/she does but leaves without putting the sink back?

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Everytime a person has bought a PC pre loaded with latest Windows (or Linux, or Chromium, ad nauseum), they’ve paid a lot more for something loaded with bugs in the OS alone. And yet, they’d realize how ridiculous it be to take that into the store and make it seem as if the thing were so non functional as to be considered some beta or such. Games are as complex as an OS is now in a lot of ways, especially games that are trying to give players as much freedom as possible. The consumer expectations here have not kept pace with the reality of the product. It is like having the mindset of a person who thinks they are just asking for a hot air balloon, and pissed their warp drive sometimes doesn’t also auto dock their ship, flawlessly.

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We play the same game, and there are bugs in it, you with me? If you’re still with me on that, then what I think you’re saying is that you’re willing to look past the bugs and enjoy the game. Good. For the most part I have too, but when the faults of the game cause the small pool of players I play with to move on I get the sense that my example isn’t unique, and it’s insulting to the players who expected so much and got so little to say something like “get over it.”

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Nice sig, we need more Picts!

I’d contend with you, as a software engineer, that an operating system is far more complex than a game and requires a great deal more knowledge of the underlying hardware to be able to create one that the comparison you made isn’t valid, not by a long shot.
To the post: I think what goes on in a consumer’s head is something like this: “when I spent $50 for Diablo 3 (or Dragonball Fighterz, or whatever) that game worked.”

Yes the consumer expects to come across a minor bug once in a while, but never to the severity and frequency that they did in CE, and that is what pushed a majority of the players onto something else soon after release.

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No, no it isn’t insulting in the slightest if that same player goes to the game’s forum and takes their issue to hyperbolic claims of the game being unplayable, broken, a cash grab, and a multitude of other things in an attempt to murder the context of their issue entirely, and somehow strike out at the game devs and company at the same time as defrauding them.

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They’re mad. They spent money, maybe a lot by their standards, to buy fun and entertainment that would last. They felt they didn’t get that, and perception is everything. You can apologize for Funcom, and they can stay in contact with their player base more frequently than any other company in history but at the end of the day these consumers felt fleeced because what they got fell so far short from what they spent.

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As someone who has developed dedicated physical hardware in various flavors of assembly and their virtual equivalents, I’d say a modern OS is nowhere near the level of hardware as they once were for extremely good reasons of portability, and even inconsistency of hardware manufacture. And that the comparison stands very well in the terms of management of resources within the scopes of what they both are doing, and having to contend with in their modularity, and changes over life cycle. But that is a whole other thing to the topic at hand.

Such as? I have not on either my PS4 Pro or PC had game ending bugs. And have not had even very severe bugs in my playing experience of Conan Exiles.

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Yeah, the word Beta is being used way to often as an insult. But this game is beyond beta. Is it a work in progress, yes. But that is the very nature of delivering ongoing content over a long period of time. New content will bring with it new issues, as there is a lot of crossing scripts that don’t always pop their heads up even with stringent testing.
This is not God of War, where there was a linear path to the end, and the devs can check every scenario that they create with the game mechanics. As @Tascha said, being a sandbox game that tries to offer as much freedom as possible brings with it challenges that can never be foreseen, due to some very creative players.

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Yes the game was fun, best $18 I’ve ever spent, played over 3,000 hours. But, the endless exploits, piss poor UE4 engine and the same bugs fixed every other patch has me looking for something else.

JMO

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I can understand that, if you are more so playing rando PvP on officials exclusively, and not of the mind to go into private server side. But glad you got your money worth out of it, I mean 3k hours, Funcom should be sending you a degree.

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My take on perception - When I was going to college and working as a waitress, and people would complain that the dish didn’t look exactly like the picture on the menu. That’s the kind of self-entitled perception we have today. Some people are NEVER going to be satisfied and will always complain. Its the nature of the ME generation. Unfortunately the self-entitled have problems reading the agreement and disclaimers and demand their money back, always good for a chuckle.

38b33b72495bf5dd7d1f4da5d45f5634590db0345bcb855162708d2545194889

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This is a valid point. I have no doubt that the various game-breaking bugs some people are experiencing and reporting are real - but I’m not experiencing those bugs. On the other hand, I have experienced bugs that have not been, well, bugging everyone. And I’m reasonably certain I’m not crazy enough to have just imagined those bugs.

So, even though it’s the same game we all play, it doesn’t work the same way for every one of us. I don’t know much about consoles, but I’ve worked with PCs for many years and I’ve come to understand that every PC is a quirky individual, even if they’ve come from the factory line right after each other and had the OS installed into them at the same time, using the same specs. They all should work identically - but they don’t. For no logical reason.

That’s why Conan Exiles doesn’t work identically for everyone, either. For no logical reason. That’s why it’s so damn hard for Funcom to identify, reproduce and eliminate the bugs that don’t plague the whole game.

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I love that picture! :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl: