Conan Exiles - Funcom, open-world survival

You got it already Gal. We seem up to date.

Which I will never understand. I mean, I guess it’s conceptually no different to the MMO mini-boom in the wake of WoW, but with lower risks for developers/publishers, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still don’t understand why so many people hop from one heavy time (and sometimes money) investment game to another near-identical game again and again.

I think a fair number of people enjoy the exploration and discovery phase of these games more than the rest. Once they discover what needs to be done and have seen the world they are done

You’re forgetting the wang measuring contests.

Seriously though, the PvP team aspects get a lot of play in similar survival/crafting MP games. People just love to tear down what others have built.

I am hoping this boom is just starting. I hope were in the “UO” or even “Merridian 59” level of open world survival game play design, while a well thought out polished design might even be a decade away.

Id love to have an MMO where you can live in, and it is not just all about bashing monsters. I have read sci-fi books that talk about games like this, where people can play in a very realistic world with real economies, real industries, etc… I guess, in short, I am looking for the MMO co-op game.

Dear God I hope not. I mean, I’d like to see a really polished WoW equivalent too, but given how these games already dominate the non-AAA sales landscape, I’d hate to see the genre achieve even greater hegemony for a further 10 years.

Why not? If it offers fun gameplay and millions of people are enjoying themselves, I can’t see why on earth refining the experience to be even more fun is a bad thing. They only dominate the market because people want to play them…

Because I’d like other genres to also sell enough for it to be worthwhile for developers to make them. More diversity is a good thing. I don’t know what it’s like now, but around the time ARK “came out” something like 7 of the top 20 games on Steam were survival crafters.

I realise it’s not a zero sum game, but at the same time I look at all the developer resources that were thrown at MMOs in the mid 2000s instead of, say, space sims, and despair.

There’s your MMO title for the successor to EVE, Space, Sims and Despair. Combine The Sims and Eve

Man, a co-op survival crafter with Blizzard level polish is probably my dream game. I really like the look of Conan so far, but watching on Twitch and seeing the number of bugs and server wipes they’ve had to endure is making me wait till it’s further along in development.

We have only had a single server wipe on the Qt3 server, and that was the first day only. Can’t guarantee there won’t be more to come, but I think the server wipes are specific to issues Funcom has had with their official server hosting, and not the status of the game itself.

I’d be very surprised if Funcom somehow managed to figure out some secret server sauce that every other early access survival crafting game hasn’t. I would expect a server wipe every time there’s a major update.

I never had wipes in Ark!

The wipes were very infrequent back when I was regularly playing ARK. Players also used the word “wipe” on reddit and the Steam forums to refer to many inconveniences in addition to actual server wipes.

I think there was one official required full wipe in Ark early on. After that, they’ve been optional. (For example, I don’t think the official Ark regular servers have ever been wiped after that first one.) But Ark is also using base Unreal and they branched off the most major update as a DLC, while Conan Exiles is using Unreal combined with their in-house DreamWorld code.

Like I said, if Funcom is able to run through Conan’s EA development without more wipes, I’ll be mighty impressed.

So has basically the whole Ark contingent here moved to this game now? Come on, fair go … Ark isn’t near v1.0 so I haven’t even played that yet, let alone buying in for this. ;)

Is there a roadmap for a proper bug-free release? It does look promising.

These Early Access survival titles are more like SaaS, in my opinion. It’s not really about hitting 1.0 and then wrapping up and going on to the next project (for better or worse, and there’s definitely plenty of both).

Ark may not be 1.0, but there was plenty of game there for me to have a lot of fun with it a year ago. Fortresscraft Evolved is not considered in Early Access but is also under continual development thanks to Patreon funding. People have been playing Rust since 2013, but it is still considered Early Access.

I guess my point is, I think these games need to be viewed from a different perspective… The question isn’t “Is it 1.0 yet?”, it’s “Can I have fun with the game right now?”.

I’m more interested in “is it mostly feature complete” and “is it mostly bug free with solid technical performance”. A state where you can report a problem with the game and not be met with howls of “it’s early access, what do you expect!?”

I don’t think Ark is anywhere near that yet which is why it languishes in my back catalog. But I do get the sense that once one of these games reaches my arbitrary criteria, most people have already moved on to enjoy the next bug-ridden mess. ;)

Sadly we lost our tier 2 Shrine of Set due to a bug. Don’t upgrade any shrines for now, server restarts nuke them

Logged onto the Qt3 server last night for a bit, but it seemed to be empty of other people. It was late, so not a surprise. Built a tiny place on the far eastern border and am working my way up in levels until strong enough to venture inland more with at least a decent chance of success.