Conan Exiles, Part Three

14 February, 2017. 851 words.

You might be wondering why I’m still talking about Conan Exiles after trashing it for two posts in a row. Welllllll, see, it’s still kind of fun. :)

Some random shrine of some random priest.

It has that same sort of addictive crafting progression treadmill that ARK has: I want to see everything you can craft, so I have to keep leveling up and unlocking new recipes and finding more and more resources. And every time you craft something new, it helps speed up the leveling and searching for more resources. And there’s always something cool to craft just out of reach. So it’s kind of a vicious cycle that will continue until I either run out of things to craft and/or can safely walk anywhere on the map. (I quit playing ARK after I could craft winter-weather protection and a rifle which could kill any dinosaur I encountered.)

By the way, they fixed the connection issue I was having to my private server. I’ve worked out how to circumvent or deal with most of the other issues I’ve encountered, so they don’t really seem like bugs anymore. No doubt that’s what Early Access developers count on.

Most of my combat issues were solved in one of two ways: First, make an iron pike. It’s the best weapon in the game so far, miles ahead of everything else (even better than the Stygian spear, a later weapon). Unfortunately it also has the worst animations. Second, build a one-story platform with stairs near enemy spawn points and use a bow. Due to the limited functionality of the AI, no enemy will ever follow you up a set of stairs so you can safely stand on top of your platform and plunk enemies to death forever. (Once a rhinoceros broke my platform so I guess you need to repair it occasionally too.)

Platforms from which you can shoot monsters with complete immunity.

About that crafting: Exiles and ARK have the exact style of crafting progression that I like, which is so rarely found in MMORPGs. You start out making small things, then later you combine those small things to make bigger things, then later you combine the bigger things to make really, really big things. Each new tier requires ingredients crafted in the previous tier. Each tier builds on the last tier, in other words.

MMORPGs typically do crafting with no dependencies between the tiers. You craft the new tier of stuff with a new tier of ingredients that you gather in a new area of the game. It’s the same crafting just with different names on the ingredients. You don’t usually need ingredients from the old tier after you’ve graduated to the new tier.

Crafting and combat and bugs aside, if nothing else, it’s a great game for screenshots. I mean, if you like desert terrain. There’s a lot of interesting scenery to look at. In some ways, playing survival games is sort of like camping “but without all that awful nature,” as Linda Belcher would say.

Sacrificial altar where something bad might happen, according to a talking stone tablet.

I’ve made some adjustments to my server settings. Two major game design issues that have consistently annoyed me in the game: The amount of damage that enemy mobs do is ridiculous, so I set the “player damage taken” setting to 0.5. The damage wouldn’t have bothered me, but I’ve crafted three tiers of armor now and none of them had any noticable effect on damage taken, so I’m just assuming that armor calculations are completely broken and/or armor is mainly for decoration.

The other issue is that experience gain is really slow. You get to a point where you’ve crafted everything you need or want from the most recent recipes, then look up and find you still have most of the way to go until the next level and more recipes. You can either craft things like crazy or kill things like crazy to make up that experience, and both of those things are pretty tedious and grindy. So I changed the XP multiplier to 5.0. I started with 2.0, then went to 4.0, and finally settled on 5.0. It still takes like an hour to gain a level.

One other thing I wish I could tweak is the drop rate for Bark. It’s a big bottleneck in the production process.

An outstretched hand structure extending out over the river.

It occurred to me one day that playing a good survival game is almost like playing an RTS, except zoomed way in to one individual unit that you control manually. Base-building, resource collection, and manufacturing are all components in a good survival game.

Exiles is a good start to a fun game. It’s really a shame they released it too early. By the time it’s feature complete I’m sure I’ll be bored with it. Survival games with fixed maps don’t have much replay value. It’s not like I’ll get a different result if I start a new character. Maybe Funcom will release new maps someday.