Even late in the game when tending to the hunger

• Posted by axue tao 3 December 2023 - Filed in Entertainment - #POE Currency  - 18 views

  That world map, a huge swathe of the mythical prehistoric Hyborian age from Howard’s books, is Conan Exiles’ strongest asset, even surpassing the genital physics. It’s the dangling carrot (the world map, I mean) that keeps you mining rock after rock for ironstone, because you want the iron armour to explore the Unnamed City and vanquish its clicking skeletal horrors POE currency trade .

  What it isn’t very good at is coming across like a finished product

  Even late in the game when tending to the hunger and thirst bars are a formality, there are still far-flung map regions hosting weather phenomena and enemies you’ve yet to see. Journeying beyond the deserts of the default spawn region and into meadows and snowdrifts with their own native clans and beasties is its own sense of accomplishment, crafting tree be damned.

  About that, actually: Conan Exiles has a hell of a crafting tree. You could be forgiven for thinking you’ve accidentally loaded up The Sims and its every expansion, such is its devotion to interior decor items and unique armour sets later in the game. It takes an incredible grind to get to those upper echelons, inevitably, but the transitions between discernible phases are snappy enough. You can work your way up from wood tools through stone to iron and steel in one determined evening, as long as the server isn’t heavily populated or full of dicks.

  
  A quiet place
  Which, of course, it will be. For those entirely averse to human contact, it almost functions as a solo survival RPG thanks to a series of boss fights that lend a sense of structure, but it makes for a particularly opaque and lonely one in the absence of formal quests and a scarcity of NPCs.

  As is so often the case, the apex of Conan Exiles is found on a private server with a few particularly devoted friends who won’t destroy your every accomplishment. In public server land, offline raids are generally forbidden so you can (usually) disconnect with the knowledge that your joke of a wooden hut will still stand when you return, but I encountered several servers where the dominant clan was so big that it could operate how it pleased with impunity—it’s join or survive out there. I’ve also seen solo players grind away until they could summon an avatar, however, a god made flesh in XL scale, and run amok across a large clan’s base. Conan Exiles is good like that.

  
  What it isn’t very good at is coming across like a finished product. Despite 15 months gestating in Early Access, there are rough edges all over Conan Exiles, including audio sync issues, enemy AI that sometimes flatly ignores players, woolly melee fights and incredibly suspect slope traversal. Fighting anybody on a 10% gradient or above, for example, involves a lot of floating and swinging impotently at the air under an enemy’s feet POE currency .