Conan Exiles - Balancing Survival Gameplay

How to balance a survival/crafting game? Here's the answer for Conan Exiles on Gamasutra:

Balancing survival gameplay and RPG progression in Conan Exiles

Building a game in the survival/crafting genre right now is a tough ask. It’s a very crowded market, particularly on Steam, and particularly in Early Access, and there are a large number of high quality titles in that crowd jockeying for players’ attention and dollars.

One tack a number of games have taken recently to distinguish themselves is by expanding their survival game with player progression, loot, or other RPG systems.

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“In general, we wanted specific crafts to feel like mini-projects, and tried to always have something waiting for the player right around the corner,” says Lacalle. “We wanted this dynamic to not only encompass the basic survival genre elements of hunger, thirst and access to resources and technology, but also to include combat, equipment and the ability to build anything from a tiny shack to a fortress to a grand castle that will stand against the assault of other players.”

While the system is designed to allow for multiple builds and playstyles, it becomes clear early on that it’s impossible to master all of them. While a jack-of-all-trades character is viable in Conan Exiles, that character will trade basic competence in everything for never excelling in any one area.

The higher an attribute in Conan Exile, the more points it costs to increase it further. "It's a design that allows for specialization but presents the player with hard choices that steer them into a bare minimum set of attributes that make their characters functional all-around," says Lacalle.

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More information.

Bleh.

I'm gonna skip the dick/boob stretching and move onto this beta:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/513710/

I might translate a certain interview if I get enough time to explain why - let's just say it's not supposed to milk the audience with pay2win rubbish.

Grind?

If you can play it single-player I will give it a try once it was in the Humble Monthly.

Darkheart said:

If you can play it single-player I will give it a try once it was in the Humble Monthly.

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In theory you can, you launch your own server (quite simple) and you block others to connect to it.
Now, it is a very limited experience: Fight is a no brainer, just button bash and you will be fine. Map is always the same with the same mobs under the same trees and once you have built yourself a place and walk a bit, well ..
I love Conan and its particular setting depicting a period between Atlantis and Bronze Age but being a single player myself it was a clear refund for me.

Do they actually do refunds?

Yes, they accepted the Steam way, no real question asked. Very convenient to test games.

It uses the same engine, prefab building, and character leveling (raise atts and spend points to unlock crafting) as ARK except it's more glitchy and "alpha" feeling than ARK ever was early (leave it to funcom to fail at ripping off someone else's game), combat is pretty weak, capturing and enslaving NPCs is far less interesting than ARK's dinos.

You get boobs, a boob slider during character creation, and some conan flavored gods and architecture. Otherwise it's a total conversion or mod for ARK that's very inferior to that which it copies.

You can play solo (I play duo with me hosting my own server instance and at least THAT is smooth with only a few survivable glitches for the connecting client). But, there's zero content scaling and there are parts of the map so overloaded with mobs that I don't think you'd ever get to do that content without a small army.

ARK can be grindy but it feels rewarding and the progression in ARK is better than the progression in some MMORPGs. Hell, ARK feels like a good MMORPG to me at times, but since we play duo/trio it's more enjoyable since we don't have to deal with idiots or idiotic chat.

Conan feels like a bad korean grinder where you grind and grind some more; except in Conan, after days of killing the same static camps of mobs over and over and over again, and you unlock that new sword, and craft it, you find out that it has less dmg/dps than the sword you've been using for 10 levels. Then it happens again with the next sword. And again. And you're like, sweet, I've killed 2000 bandits to unlock new crafting recipes that are completely useless. That's some sexy grindage.

Now, I'm a big reminder of the fact that games in alpha or early access will have issues, imbalance, etc. The game is in development. BUT, this game is a DIRECT STEAL of ARK (I've also written that I hope the ARK guys are getting royalties or are suing because it's that much of a lift). You shouldn't have so many issues in a game when you're doing a near direct lift from another game.

Only Funcom could be so utterly inept that they can't even steal someone else's game and re-release it without adding more bugs and glitches than the original ever had.

Sounds like there's no reason to play this and not ARK, unless you're a die-hard Hyborea fan.