I’m going to make a video tonight, if I don’t board game, that has some starter advice.
From what I can tell, it’s clearly supposed to work offline. I just tried it out in order to answer this question for you (I know how frustrating it is when you can’t find the specific answer you need).
When I set Steam to offline mode and disabled my internet connection, Conan popped up a window saying that for the first time you run the game, Steam needs to be online (I had just patched the game, so I think the “first time” thing had reset). I set Steam to online, loaded the game to the main menu, then exited and set everything back offline.
Next time I ran the game, it loaded fine without that message. I was able to go into the Single Player, where it asked me if I wanted to continue my existing save/world, or recreate the world. I choose recreate, and it warned me that all local server files would be wiped. I said yes, and clicked Start.
From there the game hung on a black screen, but given all the text and instructions I think this is a bug as opposed to intended behavior. It appears to me that it is designed to run offline, but there might currently be an issue (at least on my machine with this new patch that just came out today) with Offline mode in Steam.
If there’s anything else you’d like me to try, let me know!
Hmm. Thanks!
I guess I’ll be waiting to see if they work this out.
I just tried one other thing. I set steam to Online, started up Conan, and launched my single player game. I then disconnected my internet. I was still able to play, gain exp, harvest stuff, etc. So it does appear that the server is all local and it’s not being run on a single player instance in the cloud or anything like that.
When I get stuck on that black screen, the game isn’t hard locked or anything. Music is still playing and when I hit ESC, I can hear a dialog window come up in the game, it’s just that nothing is rendering on my screen.
I’m pretty positive it doesn’t broadcast or anything and I doubt it needs a “keepalive” or something from the server. I’m sure this was designed to play over LANs and is why its lumped in with “co-op”
I emailed them to find out. I’ll let you know.
Yeah, I have a feeling the offline mode just has a bug where one part of it is still trying to ping a remote service for something (could be something as simple as trying to populate a Steam friends list in-game). Since this never answers back, things kind of get stuck and the screen doesn’t render. It makes sense if their typical use case (and thus test case) is on a server. They’ve clearly done work to make sure this runs locally, it’s probably just a bug that slipped through in the SP implementation. Totally understandable, given it’s just hitting EA.
In any case, this is what you would expect from a brand new EA survival game release. In a lot of ways it feels more… ugh, I don’t know if “polished” can be accurately used here, as it’s littered with rough edges and the combat is basically placeholder at the moment. Someone upthread mentioned “professional” I think, and that fits. It feels more “professional” than Ark in some ways. I also appreciated that unlike Ark, not everything sends me flying backwards 30 feet when it strikes my hitbox, which apparently is 10 feet in diameter. I appreciate that bumping a spiky plant doesn’t send my camera careening everywhere while screaming SUIT BREACH like Osiris does.
Jumped on a few servers last night and in every encounter with hostile creatures, the creatures would teleport around. I guess this is the rubberbanding players are talking about? Even happened on servers with low pings and concurrent player populations.
Also disappointed that apparently you can’t harvest wood by punching a tree.
I haven’t seen much rubber banding, but it makes me wonder why. I have a pretty fast internet connection, so it could be packet size maybe.
I don’t think it’s ping, I think it is pathing errors from my observations. It seems like if the mob cannot find a way to you, or you get too far ahead of them, they will pop to your location. I’ve seen this on several occasions when I jumped into the river to get away from something, and it popped up on the opposite shoreline once I got there. Before hand, it was scrambling back and forth on the beach.
I got onto the server and was not asked for a password even though the server shows as locked. My guess is that is a bug. The game ran fairly smooth. Over lunch I was able to get to about level 5 and get to the life giving river that seems to be the core of low level game play. This river really needs a name.
Some things I am seeing are missing completion and polish. Like NPCs will float until they get within a certain range of you, then they animate just fine. Sound seems to be wonky too, with some sounds kicking in, or not at random. Also a few UI visual queues are missing that you would normally expect. Wildlife AI is bare bones at this point. Things beeline for you, and attack. Or they pseudo run away and then stop. Many adversaries just stand there for a few seconds at a time doing nothing. None of that was earth shattering and you can still see where the game is going.
They released a patch to address rubberbanding. A temporary fix was put in to reduce the max concurrent players on Public servers from 70 to 40, so I imagine part of it something to do with the server CPUs getting overwhelmed. I’ve also seen some mention that the anti-cheat stuff can cause issues.
Hyena/Spider combo is blocking my access to iron. Brutal to deal with
We may have to come up with some new strategies to deal with strong creatures in this as compared to something like ARK.
Once you got on your feet and had a few strong tamed dinosaurs in ARK, you were pretty safe for combat for almost anything short of a Giga or alpha, which were really rare. It will be interesting to see if there are tactics we can use to deal with the more powerful creatures now that we have to do it on foot and without pets.
Okay, I think I have the server locked back down again. At least for now, I think it is beneficial for us to not have it open to the public.
Had some good fun last night near base Harkonis.
More fun tonight hopefully.
I think we should stock up for a small base and build as close to the iron as possible. Put out some spikes and lead the mobs back and arrow them from inside the walls.
I couldn’t play last night but I hope to tonight. Though I might be broadcasting some board games.
Had some fun as well last night, also at Base Harkonis. Still noobing it up big time as I get my bearings. Not sure yet how much I “like” the game or even how I’ll measure that, but so far I’m having fun.
Are bows eventually going to not suck?
That looks a lot like Reign of Kings, but with a way bigger budget and better engine… better everything. I’m not interested in this kind of games though, too violent for my taste.
Did we get reset or something? my character is gone…
I’ve watched a couple of streams because of the Funcom association. I know it’s in EA, but if this is considered more AAA than the other survival/crafting games (with which I’ve zero experience with, beyond minecraft) they must be in dire states indeed.