Dropping into Conan Exiles

What I really need right now is another game to play, right?  Potshot and I are already waist deep in Valheim, the group is sizing up Elder Scrolls Online, there is a possible war brewing in null sec over in EVE Online, and I have been running around EverQuest on yet another nostalgia tour.  Do I have any gaming time left?

Of course I don’t, but when did that ever stop me when the mood struck?

Rewinding a bit, back during the the Steam Winter Sale I picked up a few co-op survival-ish titles looking for something that might be of interest to our group.  I solicited for other possible titles, and Conan Exiles was suggested in the comments.  When I went to the AI for suggestions, Conan Exiles was on their lists as well.

Conan Exiles

But by the time it really got on my radar the Winter Sale was over and I wasn’t ready to spend $40 on a whim.  So we ended up playing Valheim to get our Valheim fix.

Enter the Steam Spring Sale, which I derided a bit on Friday for starting too early and being somewhat brief relative to the solstice sales.  But there, on sale, was Conan Exiles, marked down 70%.  For $12 I could see myself testing it out.

Steam Spring Sale Prices

I wasn’t going to go all in on the DLC or anything, but the base game seemed possible.

Then Potshot messaged me on Discord about it being on sale, which pushed me just enough to click the button and install it.

I went and played it for about an hour on Friday night, and my wife had to poke me to go start the barbecue because I had said I would make dinner because I was into the game.  So later that evening I did the usual “bad decisions made after 8pm” thing and quit my local game, went over to G-Portal.com and rented a server for 30 days and setup a new channel on our Discord dedicated to the game with the IP address and password.  We now had a server.

I hadn’t even done that much, but it felt like there was something there with Conan Exiles that we could explore.

My initial impressions are that it has a lot in common with Valheim, so much so that I am sure the Valheim developers must have at least some familiarity with Conan Exiles.

Then again, there are some ways you’re just going to do thing with a first person survival crafting building title in today’s gaming environment.  A lot of the titles I looked at felt akin in some very mechanical ways.

But it also feels different from Valheim.  To start with, the game has a fixed, set map.  You can find detailed versions of the default game map that will point out every camp and harvest node spawn location.  Conan is a lot more MMO-like in that regard.  Also mobs and resource nodes respawn.  You do not have to keep going further and further afield to find iron or some NPCs to fight with.  When you clear a camp one day the same party will be there the next, at least with the default settings.  The list of server setting is a mile long, so it seems fairly customizable.

So we have jumped into that for the moment.  I managed to stumble upon Potshot and his first camp, where he had already setup some crafting and had a hat for me.

We meet up in game

The world is gritty and dry and your relationship with food and drink is a lot more survival driven than with Valheim.  In Valheim food is a booster, something that gives you more health or stamina, but which wears off over time.  In Conan you need to eat and drink just to stay alive and maintain your current levels of health and stamina regen.

That said, but titles lean heavily on stamina as a combat limiting mechanic.

The world, more hand crafted than the randomly generated Valheim worlds, also has some different dynamics… like climbing.  I ran around for quite a while, going past mesas and hills, not sure what to think of stuff often up on top of them.  There was no path up that I could see.  Then I accidentally jumped at a cliff face and found I could scale it.  You can just climb up things.

Climbing up to visit the neighbors

The game also feels rooted a bit in its predecessor from Funcom, Age of Conan, the 2008 MMORPG.  That was viewed as pushing boundaries because it allowed nakedness and had an “endowment” slider so you could set your penis size.  That is always worth a headline and some attention from the media.  I did peek at my full naked self, but opted for modesty as who in the hell needs to see that waving around when you’re running back to your corpse.

Death is a thing.  You die and respawn at your bed or bedroll… another Valheim thing, though also a Minecraft thing if you want to go back a ways… and by default have to run back to get your stuff, which can be challenging if that bastard sword wielding NPC woman is still camping your corpse.

And, also true to the Age of Conan legacy… at least as I understand it, I never got around to actually playing Age of Conan fifteen years back… is somewhat graphical levels of mayhem in combat, with the loser falling to pieces like that Patsy Cline song.

Did I really just cut off this guy’s feet?

At times it is almost absurd.

That’s you all over

And it happens to you when you die as well.  I went back for one corpse recovery and could only find my legs.  However, all of your stuff is there in a nice little grave marker that glows in the dark.  You just have to hit one key to loot it and re-equip everything, which is handy if whatever killed you is still there.

So we are diverting into Conan Exiles for a bit.  Expect a travelogue of our journey there I suppose.  We will see what goes to the back burner if we end up focused on this.