All in on Conan Exiles

If you were expecting me to end up narrating a tour of Tamriel and our group’s experiences in The Elder Scrolls Online, I fear you I have some bad news for you.  After a couple of weeks of poking our toes into ESO, the arrival of Conan Exiles has grabbed out attention and left Tamriel in the rear view mirror for now.

Conan Exiles

Valheim too for a bit, judging from our play time in Conan Exiles, though there are some other factors in play that is a topic for another post.

Why has Conan Exiles grabbed us?

It certainly hasn’t been for any epic fights.  In fact, we seem to die quite a bit in CE.

Named with a skull… this will end badly

Being done in by some random wandering named NPC was a regular occurrence early on.

There is a nice blood splatter effect around the screen as you take damage

Death has a reasonable sting.  All your stuff remains with your corpse, so there is a corpse run to be done, but otherwise it is mostly an inconvenience.  Still, enough deaths and such will make you a bit cautious… though we have gotten a bit better.  I beat another mob with a skull icon on his name.

The big 2H sword swing for the win… murderer gets murdered

And, just to round things out, I did eventually get even with Tessa.

Bent over panting from the effort, but I still won

And we certainly aren’t in it for the PvP, which is a popular option on a lot of open servers.  I accidentally left that option on for our server until we started killing each other in our ham-fisted early attempt to group up to fight mobs.  Things were much better once I turned that off.

Instead, the game right now seems to appeal to the explorer.  And I do mean that, at least partially, in the “exploring the world” way.  The world is well crafted and interesting.

Looking out over some of the terrain

Of course, this is the world of Conan… you actually meet him at the start of the game… so not everything is sweetness and light and pretty desert vistas.

Good lord, what is happening in there?

Yeah, the neighbors are a bit strange.  But they don’t come around looking to convert you or anything, so that is nice.

The world is very static in an MMORPG sort of way.  If you go wipe out a camp of hostiles, you can go back the next day and find that they have respawned, an MMORPG mechanic as old as time at this point.

That was an old, established thing when these guys were a brand new thing

That can make farming for specific mobs easier, as there is some randomness as to who respawns, even if the locations are pretty fixed.  Likewise, things you harvest, like iron or coal, always respawn in exactly the same location.  So to see the world is to know the world.

But when I say that the game appeals to the explorer, I mean the classic Bartle-type explorer who doesn’t just walk the landscape but seeks out all the ways the game can be played, all the options made available to them… and Conan Exiles is loaded up with that.

We have mostly been playing with crafting, though we have also been out “obtaining” followers, which is something I will get to in another post.  But even followers relate to crafting!

The game sets up a series of journeys you can follow to learn about some small aspect of the game.  They are usually just 4-6 steps and guide you through some of the simplest aspects of the game mechanics.  They aren’t always well explained or as helpful as you might want… go mine brimstone would have been easier with a hint about brimstone being found in caves… but the are there to guide you.  And in doing one you often get another made available to you.

There is also a whole range of knowledge to be unlocked.  As you level up… there are levels which are obtained through experience which you earn through both combat and resource harvesting… you gain knowledge points which you can use to unlock various abilities, mostly crafting and building related, but there are other paths.

And there are a lot of aspects to crafting.  Our base now has a sprawl of crafting stations within it.

Some of the crafting stations… also trees…

(Side note:  There is often mention of bugs in many of the reviews on Steam, and we’ve run into a few, including random deaths, losing corpses, and the above where there were trees inside our base when I logged into the game, though Potshot didn’t see them.  When I left and came back they were gone.  But they haven’t had any real big impact on our time so far.)

You also don’t just make something and are done.  Everything wears out and, unlike Valheim, need resources in order to repair.  There are repair kits you can make that will fix an item partially, but the durability will be less.  But if you have unlocked the knowledge needed to craft an item you can then repair it fully.

Next to all of that is food, which needs to be prepared unless you want to eat bugs all your life, and there is a whole crafting journey related to that.  Food also has a limited shelf life.  In fact, the default is so short than one of the only settings I have tinkered with so far… and there are over 100 server settings you can tweak, not all of which are well described… is the rate at which food decays because we kept ending up with piles of rotten food.  Sure, you can put that in the composter… another crafting station… but it would be nice for it to last a bit longer.

So there is a lot to explore just in that.  And then there is our base.  I think the building mechanics are also pulling us in… or at least Potshot.  Our first setting was less of a base and more of a single wide mobile home in layout.

We got a BBQ and some crafting here in the car port

After scouting around a bit a new location was chosen for our ever growing base.

Our base viewed from above

It had to keep growing to contain all the crafting stations that needed to be housed… that and to keep them out of the weather.  There isn’t any rain that I have seen, but sandstorms rise up now and then and do more than just make it tough to see very far.

I was on a corpse run when one kicked up and out and exposed it literally began to peel away my health.  I survived by hiding in a niche in cliff that reduced the effect while applying a stream of bandages to myself to keep from dying right there.

So we’ve mostly been about gathering resources and crafting so far… and leveling up in order to unlock more crafting… which has been enough to keep us busy.