May is over!, oh and Conan Exiles...

Damn!  It's like May 31st and I haven't posted all month.  Sorry about that!  I've been a bit busier than I would have envisioned, building a desk, some fencing, odd jobs around the house and gaming of course.  I'll have to try harder to maintain this thing.

May has been filled with a couple of games occupying my time, mostly between State of Decay 2 and Conan Exiles.  I had received a copy of Exiles through my Humble Bundle subscription which I highly recommend if you are a gamer with a wide range of tastes.  The bundle is $12.99 CDN per month and you always get far more value than the monthly fee, plus you help out various charities. 

Anyway, Conan Exiles... Well, ok,  I have to admit that when teh game came out I was totally not interested since I don't typically enjoy wide open PVP, (Player Vs Player), games that do not have a logical purpose.  For example, Dark Age of Camelot had real vs realm PVP, so there was a purpose, Conan Exiles was every man/woman for themselves for no other reason that to slay other players, which is a premise I just don't buy.  Wide open gank-fests, for no other reason that you can, is to me: A) illogical, B) beyond distopian, and C) Just frigging lazy development.  Mostly A and C though.  here's my reasoning.

Illogical:
The game starts with your character nailed to a cross in the desert, left to die.  Suddenly, Conan himself cuts you down, gives you some water and walks off into a sand storm.  The land is harsh and EVERYTHING is hostile.  Now I may be some kind of idiot, but when you run into other exiles wouldn't it make more sense to band together, pool resources and not just to survive but thrive?  In the game everything you run into, with few exceptions, will try to kill you.  They don't even take your stuff when they do, rather they just hang around where you died.  I can understand animals doing that, but the humans should at least rob your corpse, and for that matter the carnivorous animals should at least take a bite or two from your succulent flesh.  Alas, they do not.  mostly though, it's the unrealistic brutality I have issue with.  When it comes to other players on the official servers they, largely, behave the same way and that seems very counter productive to me.

Beyond Distopian:
Everyone in the game is either a thrall, read slave, or a murderer.  I mean come on!  No friendly NPC's, (Non Player Characters), except one guy who shows you how to clap and then drones on about nothing in particular.  Such a society couldn't survive for long or we'd all be living this kind of life in the real world.  Even in the conan movies this was not the norm.

Lazy Development:
Yeah I said it.  I think that the devs simply built an arena shooter game with swords and bows when it could have been so much more.  I should take a moment here to qualify what I find lazy.

The art work is fantastic, the programming seems to be really solid and the networking is similarly great, but these things, while important, do not a complete game make.  Games need some sort of direction other that a Rinse and Repeat cycle, which I call simply an RnR game.  RnR type games are very lazy to me as there is no story to uncover, no compelling reason to engage in the game systems, or no systems in place beyond fighting and farming.  Conan Exiles is an RnR game to me unless someone can point out some compelling reason it isn't to change my mind.  According to the Steam service I have almost 100 hrs played in the game and I haven't found anything yet to convince me otherwise.

If you are a real Conan fanatic you might find that the game suits your tastes, but for me it's a solid "meh".  I do like the building mechanic in it and that's pretty much all I play it for these days and that is only because I have the gear to run my own private server to keep the riff-raff out.  If I had to score it on a scale of ten, I'd give it a 6/10.