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.

[VARIANVS]

Nice post here!

[Meltdown]

So question, do you have the same complaint of Ark, or 7DtD, or DnL because the issues you list are the same issues all pvp survival games have.

[FiftyTifty]

Meltdown님이 먼저 게시:

So question, do you have the same complaint of Ark, or 7DtD, or DnL because the issues you list are the same issues all pvp survival games have.

Never played them. If they also have:

♥♥♥♥ combat
Unfinished, bugged AI
Extremely unbalanced in favour of raiding
God awful client & server performance
Linear progression
No modern renderer
Poorly threaded
Bugged sound attenuation and positioning

Then yes; those aren't games, they're glorified alpha builds.

[Ancid]

lol

[devilkingx2]

is the game good yet?

[cattibria]

devilkingx2님이 먼저 게시:

is the game good yet?

A lot has changed since this was written in July.

[timmercado1975]

As much as I love this game and appreciate what the devs have done up to this time (I'll probably be flamed for that lol), I am TOTALLY appreciative of this post. Thank you, innofender, your post has helped me to understand some of the things that are probably giving me worse performance out of this game than my machine should be providing.

I would really love to see some developer response to this. Maybe I'll try and friend Nicole or Jens and ask them too if they have the time.

BTW, one of my favorite things about your posts as I read them, inoffender, is that you appear to just being discussionary and civil while presenting your points instead of debasing, rude, or raging like so many other complaining posts seem to be unfortunately. Thank you for being an adult, as well as wonderfuly informative, during this review and your subsequent posts. Cheers!

[devilkingx2]

steitsch님이 먼저 게시:

devilkingx2님이 먼저 게시:

is the game good yet?

A lot has changed since this was written in July.

I figured, i wasn't expecting such glaring issues to be prevalent forever

[FiftyTifty]

Honestly, not much has changed.

Raiding is still far easier than building, gear disparity is even worse than before due to the Frozen North's content, Bat Demons (new mob from Frozen North) are the new Baby Dragons for getting daemon blood, animal AI is still as bad as it was when I wrote the review, and combat is still centered on spamming.

The only thing that stands out as a significant change to the game is the dodge mechanic, but that's about it. The AI is still exceedingly dumb, server performance is still terrible, and client performance hasn't improved either.

[cattibria]

@OP, How long have you had the game? I have it since the begaining of March and a lot has changed since then. Just based on the size of the patches and hot fixes, most, if not all, of the code has been replaced since you wrote this post. The have also added a lot of content that was not there. Presently they are working on added polish and optimizations to the game. I stand by what I said previously.

[FiftyTifty]

I've had it since July. I've played it intermittently, as well as the previous week with a couple friends. Nothing fundamental has changed; refer back to my previous post.

[ﮱﮔutex]

+1 ... EA gaming , has reached its Zenith. Cant see myself ever paying for another EA game.

I think most of us who have brought into EA games are slowly waking up, the daliy frustration of tying to 'play' an EA game, is not worth the effort.

Just have to wait until a game is 'full release' ...like Elite Dangerous (no content) and ARK ..lol
Gaming development has become like "bitcoin' full of speculators, no substance.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/440900/discussions/0/1488866813752489022/

[devilkingx2]

Sexual Inoffender님이 먼저 게시:

Honestly, not much has changed.

Raiding is still far easier than building, gear disparity is even worse than before due to the Frozen North's content, Bat Demons (new mob from Frozen North) are the new Baby Dragons for getting daemon blood

I don't think it's inherently bad if raiding is easier than defending, this game needs PVP and if it's possible to build ridiculous impenetrable fortresses all that's going to end up with is an alpha tribe problem (see: ark survival evolved)

the problem depends entirely on how hard it is to get stuff and how hard it is to build a base and acquire your loot versus destroying it, ark has stuff that takes 10 hours to get so it makes sense that you'll be able to build impenetrable fortresses in that game, whereas Rust is a game where if you know what you're doing you can get rocket launchers in under an hour

the two sides of the coin are ark and rust actually, if raiding is to be hard to do then it should be extremely effective (being wiped on ark can destroy months or weeks of hard work while conversely rewarding the raiding tribe with amazing prizes they may have never seen before)

whereas on the flip side raiding in rust at times looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ncw8WVXKhc.

but if you know what you're doing it usually doesn't take very long to get back on your feet

those are the paths that conan could take, it's pick you poison between "don't get attached to any of your stuff" and "that tribe has 20 active members so we worship them as our pantheon of gods and you can see their base from any corner of the map"

Sexual Inoffender님이 먼저 게시:

Meltdown님이 먼저 게시:

So question, do you have the same complaint of Ark, or 7DtD, or DnL because the issues you list are the same issues all pvp survival games have.

Never played them. If they also have:

♥♥♥♥ combat
Unfinished, bugged AI
Extremely unbalanced in favour of raiding
God awful client & server performance
Linear progression
No modern renderer
Poorly threaded
Bugged sound attenuation and positioning

Then yes; those aren't games, they're glorified alpha builds.

those games had most of those issues at the beginning but they were eventually fixed, ideally conan should be making progress towards fixing those as well