Conan Exiles' performance, gameplay, and mechanics - A write up

[FiftyTifty]

Prompted by a user comment on my review of the game, I have gone in-depth over the issues of the game, possible solutions, as well as comparing to specific mechanics implemented by a select few games. It's pretty long, but it's not exactly a simple issue.

Without further ado:

The overarching problem with the game, is several-fold, which can be summarized with the following: Building, combat (split into PvE and PvP), and performance. I'll discuss them in that order.



Building

It takes quite a lot of time to build, especially when you're constructing aesthetically pleasing houses, rather than infantile lego boxes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it prevents players from creating large expanses of trash castles, that amount to little more than ridiculously long fences.

And the building mechanics themselves are brilliant, albeit mostly ignored by the player-base. This isn't so much an issue in and of itself, but the reason why people choose to make layered square cages?

It's much easier to destroy what other players have built, as well as taking their accumulated resources. To iterate how much easier, it only takes a half hour at most, to gather all the materials necessary to create explosives as a solo player. Create one or two of them, find some shmuchs tier 2 base (or tier 3, if it's not a bizarre mutation of a jenga tower), and you've looted the player's hard work in under three minutes.

Dragonfire, the main ingredient for explosive jars, requires the following: Daemon's blood, brimstone, crystal, and steelfire.

Daemon's blood is supposed to be an extremely rare resource, requiring well coordinated groups of 10 people to obtain meagre amounts of. At least, that's what the wiki says. The reality? The devs added what are known as "Baby Dragons". These are enemies that drop as much of the resource as their big-bad-boss tier equivalents, whilst being killable with a few hits from an iron broadsword.

Crystal? Steelfire? Brimstone? Extremely easy to obtain, and if you have a tier 2 thrall, steelfire becomes as easy to obtain as crystal (obtained in caves, gathered the same way as bushes and stray stones). Brimstone? Just go to the north-west of the map, and mine the gigantic brimstone quarry. You will be able to carry eight stacks of it on most characters.

So you can create a fabulous looking base, that you spent days on, be ruined by a solo player's half hour of planning, and couple minutes of execution. If you decided to go out and mine some iron, with said bombardier keeping a watch on you? By the time you're back, you've nothing.

And that's assuming you're online whilst you are being raided. If you're offline? Wellp.

Nor does it end there. You don't even require explosives to take most players' efforts. And we all know the exploit: drop a loot bag around each wall, equip your trident, and attack the walls. Judging by the sound, you can tell if you're hitting a player's chest, workbench, and such. When you find where they are, keep attacking until they're destroyed. The items will then be dropped into the loot bags from earlier.

Congratulations, even if the player built with tier 2 or tier 3, you just stole all his resources.



Combat

The combat in the game is rather poor. Yes, it is active combat. No, it's not implemented well at all. I'll be drawing comparisons from three games: Dark Souls, Mount And Blade: Warband, and For Honor.

The first issue, is the act of attacking itself. In the three aforementioned games, every attack has "weight". To explain what I mean by that:

1. If you attack, and hit your opponent, he will be stunned. He will not be able to glide through the attack, whilst exchanging blows at the exact same time. In Dark Souls, the damaged player will have to make the effort to press a button to roll away, in order to put distance between the two of them. It's very much a constant effort of feinting, timing, and positioning. None of which are applicable to Conan Exiles.

In Warband and For Honor, once you've been successfully hit, you will be stunned, unable to spam your left mouse button in response. You have to block, in order to interrupt the next attack, and give yourself a chance to respond. Again, you can't just keep spamming and hope you win.

In Conan Exiles, that doesn't happen. And if you block, the other player just has to get close to your character and continue spamming; the attacks will pass through the shield and damage you, whilst you do nothing to him.

2. If you attack, and miss your opponent, you leave a small window to be taken advantage of. This is universal for all three games, but for Conan Exiles? If you miss, no biggie, just keep smashing your mouse so your khopesh is always moving.

3. If you attack at the same time as your opponent, the two of you will be stunned and damaged. This means you cannot just spam to victory, unless you explicitly want whoever has the best health:damage formula to win. Naturally, nobody wants that except for one-trick pony characters, so once the stun wears off, the players reposition themselves.

Not in Conan Exiles. Keep going around in circles, and spamming your left mouse button. Whoever spams most, wins. The combat in Conan Exiles is nothing like that present in For Honor, Dark Souls, nor Warband; games praised for their excellent active combat system.

No, it's not at all like them. In fact, it's almost exactly like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but even worse. In Oblivion, you still had to position your character, and weapons did not lend themselves to spam. The dagger, perhaps, but that is due to it being an exceptionally weak weapon.

In Conan Exiles, the strongest weapons, are the ones you can spam the fastest. Conan Exiles has worse combat than Oblivion, a game that was lambasted for it's poor combat mechanics and janky animations back in 2006.

This isn't unique to PvP, either. PvE is in a worse state, as it's only exacerbated through the terrible AI. The AI rarely attacks, and spends most of it's time going the exact opposite of it's target. When it does attack, the aim is an absolute joke. A prime example would be thralls; they're good for nothing except for looking good.

A mechanic that was intended to make player buildings exceptionally dangerous to attack, ended up being nothing more than an annoying gimmick, rectified by a couple seconds of mouse button spamming.

But no, it doesn't end there.

Unlike Warband, the combat in the game is client side. Not only that, it's implemented in a somehow-worse fashion than the first Dark Souls game. With Warband, the combat logic is done entirely server side. This removes all desyncs and phantom range, at the cost of increased latency. Increased latency, however, is averted by playing on a server located on the same continent. Which should be the case, but Conan Exiles has awful server software. This will be covered later.

At least in Dark Souls, there is the dodge mechanic, which allows you to avoid incoming attacks entirely. If a player attacks you, and they have a laggy connection, if you rolled through their attack, you won't be damaged.

And in For Honor, there is a significant effort made in syncing the combat between players, minimizing desync as much as possible.

Conan Exiles has the worst netcode I've experienced in a multiplayer game. To give an example, I was being repeatedly followed by a naked player with a stone warhammer. Tier 1 weapon, and no armour. I had tier 2 equipment, and should have been able to win perfectly.

The problem was, this naked player had a horrible connection, being able to hit players that were a long distance away. Say, 30 meters or so. Since the game has a knockdown mechanic, that is uninterruptible and extremely easy to spam, as soon as this player attacked, it was over. I spent a good twenty minutes in total, being forced to watch my character being endlessly smacked into the ground.



Performance

There are two types of performance to talk about. One is client performance, the other, server performance. To save you the effort of reading, tl;dr: client side is horrible, extremely heavy on the GPU due to overly detailed LOD and poorly implemented graphics settings. Server side is horrible due to being single threaded.

As an example of the poor settings, the shadow distance AND shadow quality are tied to the same setting. This is bad; if you want to see your village actually cast shadows, you need to bump it up to high or ultra. Increasing shadow distance increases the number of draw calls (CPU), which isn't fine due to d3d 11, but acceptable for those of us with Skylake/Kabylake CPUs due to their superior draw call performance.

But increasing shadow quality hammers the GPU. More edge blurring, and higher resolution shadow maps. Quality and distance should be separate settings, but for some odd reason, they're not.

Client side CPU performance is also terrible, due to this being an open world game with extreme amounts of customization, running on a Direct3D 11 renderer. Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4.5 are designed around issuing under a couple thousand draw calls (i.e, simple scenes), and having the graphics driver run on a single thread. For open world games, especially ones that have customization and multiple players, the renderer should absolutely not use Direct3D or OpenGL, but Vulkan. The new APIs (Mantle, Direct3D 12, Vulkan) are designed around issuing tens of thousands of draw calls per core, whilst scaling almost linearly in performance across multiple cores.

Guess what Conan Exiles uses? You guessed it, Direct3D 11. Now, Unreal Engine 4 did implement rudimentary Vulkan support back in 2016. Funcom should take advantage of this, and implement a full Vulkan renderer, otherwise we'll have a survival-building game that doesn't run well on any CPU out today, nor any CPU that will be released in the next ten years.


Server side isn't any better. Funcom decided to use the SQLite database software. The problem? It's designed for small sites and projects, and to only run on a single core. In other words, it performs poorly, and is programmed around consumer hardware present during early 2000. Conan Exiles creates huge databases due to all the building pieces placed by players, all the NPCs, all the thralls, all the players, and all the data related to the above.

There is a reason server software has been designed, for the past decade, to eat all the cores you can throw at it; it performs far better, makes far better use of modern hardware, and most importantly, reduces latency and increases performance in every metric.


Client performance is terrible. Server performance is terrible.

The one redeemable feature of Conan Exiles is the building, which is superb. It blows Fallout 4's building mechanics out of the water, and I thoroughly loved Fallout 4's settlements. But Conan Exiles' one redeeming feature, a very good one at that, is made useless due to all the other problems that plague it.

[TwinCrows]

Originally posted by Kaziklu78:

The testament to Funcom on this one is that the game is working well enough that people are complaining about things like it is in a late beta stage rather than where it is. It feels really very good.

Yes they need to Optimize, yes they have features and mechanics to tweak. It is however actually really neat.

Well said. It's really a fantastic game for it to have held our interest so much before release.

[Kaziklu78]

It really is. The bugs are a issue, but when you think of the features not in the game yet... like sorcery, it is clear combat is not finished and there is a lot going on. I suspect the August "expansion" and the Xbox release will result in some major advancements if only in optimization.

[Barnes]

big tiger, open source guy here, I don't have a problem with the db architecture at this stage in the game. Contrary to popular opinion (or even its own help guide) Lite is a reasonable choice for a testing environment, for its comparative schizophrenia, sharding, old technology. No moving parts, nothing to break.

The video card stuff I really had to look into. I can totally agree with you on the one hand, but your way runs the risk of overspecialization. It makes access much less universal. IMO some classics are great because they just run, and it's through the benefit of years, open source, and grinders who kick the crap out of applications.

After my experience with Folding @ Home, a lot of clustered computing in the early oughts and a metric ton of bitcoin mining/farming, why couldn't this deployment work in a hybrid client/server peer-to-peer framework? It could totally blow out the constraints keeping this from being of MMO level. With modest blockchaining, the security elements would also be verified and tracked on a player basis by the minute.

[FiftyTifty]

Originally posted by kratos:

big tiger, open source guy here, I don't have a problem with the db architecture at this stage in the game. Contrary to popular opinion (or even its own help guide) Lite is a reasonable choice for a testing environment, for its comparative schizophrenia, sharding, old technology. No moving parts, nothing to break.

The video card stuff I really had to look into. I can totally agree with you on the one hand, but your way runs the risk of overspecialization. It makes access much less universal. IMO some classics are great because they just run, and it's through the benefit of years, open source, and grinders who kick the crap out of applications.

After extensive experience with Folding @ Home, a lot of clustered computing in the early oughts and a metric ton of bitcoin farming, why couldn't this deployment work in a hybrid client/server peer-to-peer framework? It could totally blow out the constraints keeping this from being of MMO level. With modest blockchaining, the security elements would also be verified and tracked on a player basis by the minute.

SQLite Is just far too awful for an open world game. Using SQLite instead of MySQL for large databases, is like using LUA instead of C++ for the core game code. It might very well have been good enough back at the proof of concept stage, when making a demonstration to the higher ups of what the game is trying to achieve. But with actual players, more than a handful of NPCs, and an intensive building system? It runs like dirt; that's why the server FPS is so low on every damn sever. Transferring data to/from the database is done on a single ruddy thread.

As for the renderer, this game kills my 7850, which is on par with AMD's 6970. If you're running a card that doesn't support Vulkan, you're also running a card that's too weak for the game.

Moreover, the cost of not having Vulkan because the devs want to support ancient GPUs (the 7000 series came out in 2011!), is that even the biggest, best, and most expensive CPU from 2025 won't be able to run the game smoothly. So you end up with players being lost due to the CPU requirement.

You can also easily switch out a GPU. Bought a newer, faster one? Uninstall the drivers for your old one, take it out the motherboard, slot in the new one, ta-dah.

A meaningfully faster CPU? Look forward to replacing your motherboard, CPU, and RAM (e.g, moving from AM3+ to LGA 11510.

So the argument of having a far superior renderer would exclude users, is poppycock. Even if the game were to stick with Direct3D 11, and even if people played with amazing GPUs, the bastardized CPU performance requirement would exclude far more users.

[Solomon Hawk]

I agree with you on at least one thing Big Tiger ...
This game needs a seriously robust database management system. SqLite just won't cut it.

[Barnes]

Originally posted by big tiger:

SQLite Is just far too awful for an open world game. Using SQLite instead of MySQL for large databases, is like using LUA instead of C++ for the core game code. It might very well have been good enough back at the proof of concept stage, when making a demonstration to the higher ups of what the game is trying to achieve. But with actual players, more than a handful of NPCs, and an intensive building system? It runs like dirt; that's why the server FPS is so low on every damn sever. Transferring data to/from the database is done on a single ruddy thread.

As for the renderer, this game kills my 7850, which is on par with AMD's 6970. If you're running a card that doesn't support Vulkan, you're also running a card that's too weak for the game.

Moreover, the cost of not having Vulkan because the devs want to support ancient GPUs (the 7000 series came out in 2011!), is that even the biggest, best, and most expensive CPU from 2025 won't be able to run the game smoothly. So you end up with players being lost due to the CPU requirement.

You can also easily switch out a GPU. Bought a newer, faster one? Uninstall the drivers for your old one, take it out the motherboard, slot in the new one, ta-dah.

A meaningfully faster CPU? Look forward to replacing your motherboard, CPU, and RAM (e.g, moving from AM3+ to LGA 11510.

So the argument of having a far superior renderer would exclude users, is poppycock. Even if the game were to stick with Direct3D 11, and even if people played with amazing GPUs, the bastardized CPU performance requirement would exclude far more users.

You know, I think you might just be looking at the PC as the uber-console. Start with the visuals and work your way backward, it seems. Very interesting approach.

[FiftyTifty]

Oh, that's not what I'm saying at all. The game already eats up the GPU, as it's gone balls-in on the detail. As an example, in most cases in games, walls would consist of a box with a normal map and perhaps a parallax map. In Conan Exiles, the artists directly modeled in a bunch of bricks for the buildable walls.

The game is extremely hi-poly, and has huge numbers of objects being rendered at any given time. These two performance drains are made even worse when factoring in player bases.

Consoles, since their inception, have had APIs on par with Vulkan. Case in point, let's take an old console. Let's say, the Gamecube. The rendering API issued draw calls so fast, that there was no point in doing depth culling; the CPU cost of deciding whether or not to cull an object was far more costly than just issuing the draw call to render it. This is a console from 2001, the days of DirectX 7/8. The PS2 and Xbox had similarly performing rendering APIs.

Or let's take the Xbox 360. Each core in it's CPU is on par with a Pentium 4 @ 3.0Ghz. Yet, if there's one thing that decade old system was good at, it was issuing many draw calls across it's cores. The PS3? Wii? They too had blazing fast rendering APIs.

The Xbox One, Wii U, and PS4? You guessed it, blazing fast rendering APIs.

With Direct3D 11, the draw call performance is still nowhere near to the Gamecube's rendering API. Faster than Direct3D 9, sure, but the cost of calculating whether an object should be depth-culled is the same as just issuing the draw call.

That's the renderer Conan Exiles is using, an open world game with extreme object density. A rendering API that is not as fast as the ones used in consoles from early 2000.

But now, we have Mantle, Direct3D 12, and Vulkan. We have APIs available, that are supported by 5-6 year old consumer hardware, that have magnitudes better draw call performance, THAT ALSO scales up in performance almost linearly across cores.

There is no magic bullet for making Direct3D 11 faster. Instancing? Only of use when there are many copies of the exact same object present. Batching? The CPU has to combine entire models, and it's completely unfeasible for hi poly objects during real time.

An open world game with high object density is the exact opposite of what pre-Direct3D 12 APIs are designed, and intended, for.

[Barnes]

I really appreciate that summary. I guess you kind of saw where I was going with my era references. I don't have any love for the XBox, but you can definitely call me a PlayStation fan. So I can completely follow that thread you put out there.

Sorry to go back to a frequent example of mine. GTA. GTA IV on the PS3 was an achievement. GTA V on the PS3 was a relatively ugly suckfest. GTA V on the PS4 made such fundamental changes that with the new draw distances my driving was suddenly phenomenal. Can you unpack that "bunny-hop" progression?

[FiftyTifty]

Originally posted by kratos:

I really appreciate that summary. I guess you kind of saw where I was going with my era references. I don't have any love for the XBox, but you can definitely call me a PlayStation fan. So I can completely follow that thread you put out there.

Sorry to go back to a frequent example of mine. GTA. GTA IV on the PS3 was an achievement. GTA V on the PS3 was a relatively ugly suckfest. GTA V on the PS4 made such fundamental changes that with the new draw distances my driving was suddenly phenomenal. Can you unpack that "bunny-hop" progression?

The PS3's gimmick was that it had a bunch of cut down cores, that had high performance. The problem? They are a nightmare to use. The result? Devs just didn't use them, and if they did, they were very underutilized. The PS4 uses plain x86 like the PC, and has 7 or 8 cores available to be used.

But the biggest problem is that it had the equivalent of an Nvidia 7800GTX. It has an awful (by 2008 standards) GPU. The PS4, however, has a heavily optimized 7870.

And that's not even factoring in the huge boost in RAM & storage the PS4 and XB1 have over their previous generation.

[IncubusDragon]

I can't disagree with anything the OP said

[Anzark]

It's painfull to see [not see???] that CM's don't even bother replying to this thread. I sometimes wonder ... What they even pay them for ? The CM's in Funcom are almost non-existing. The community is small enough for one CM to be able work perfectly fine... I seen bigger communites being moderated by [ONE] CM with much more activity...

[cattibria]

Originally posted by Pigeon:

It's painfull to see [not see???] that CM's don't even bother replying to this thread. I sometimes wonder ... What they even pay them for ? The CM's in Funcom are almost non-existing. The community is small enough for one CM to be able work perfectly fine... I seen bigger communites being moderated by [ONE] CM with much more activity...

They read it and most likely have pushed higher up the food chain. That's the way it was when I was in the software industry and we ran across something we had questions on answering. Once the higher ups responded, we responded.

[Anzark]

Originally posted by steitsch:

Originally posted by Pigeon:

It's painfull to see [not see???] that CM's don't even bother replying to this thread. I sometimes wonder ... What they even pay them for ? The CM's in Funcom are almost non-existing. The community is small enough for one CM to be able work perfectly fine... I seen bigger communites being moderated by [ONE] CM with much more activity...

They read it and most likely have pushed higher up the food chain. That's the way it was when I was in the software industry and we ran across something we had questions on answering. Once the higher ups responded, we responded.

So basically what you say ... They don't get answers, thus they are not active at all :D Well, then what's the point of having CM's if they don't do the most basic stuff which CM's do 'Communication' with playerbase ;p

[FiftyTifty]

To be fair, it's only been a couple days since it was posted, with only one working day for someone on-the-job to read it and punt it through the usual channels.

[Barnes]

Originally posted by big tiger:

To be fair, it's only been a couple days since it was posted, with only one working day for someone on-the-job to read it and punt it through the usual channels.

So which public server you going to call home? You know, testing environment and all that.