I purchased Conan Exiles when it recently hit v1.0, and have played the game co-op with one friend on a private dedicated server. We had a lot of fun playing the game. Exploring the varied landscape of the world is very nice, the character customization and barbarian-themed armor and weapons are cool, building and decorating is interesting and satisfying, the climbing mechanics are really enjoyable, and it's a beautiful game to look at, too.

Ultimately though, I can't recommend it in its current state. Here's why:

The combat system, described by some reviewers as feeling nice and fluid, is afflicted by some serious issues, the most serious being shields. A player or NPC can keep his or her shield raised indefinitely, and the shield will totally negate the damage of almost any attack, high or low, with no loss of stamina. This is most obvious (and hilarious) when fighting frost giants. Their gigantic heavy axe attacks with huge windup animations simply stop dead upon contact with a player's shield, as if there's no weight or momentum behind them; you can stand around blocking all of their attacks until the shield eventually breaks, if so desired.

There is no hard counter to shields, whether being used by players or NPCs. You can perform a kick to unbalance your opponent, but they can recover and get the shield back up before you even escape the kick animation lock. You can't force them to drop their shield with heavy combos, since weapons rebound off shields, interrupting combos. You can't outflank them, because they can easily turn to face you, with lock-on in the case of player vs. player. All you can really do is move erratically and flail around like crazy hoping to get lucky hits in: essentially button-mashing.

In contrast to invincible shields with no counter, bows and ranged weapons come pre-nerfed, do terrible damage, and feature very low projectile velocity and exaggerated ballistic firing arcs, presumably because FunCom couldn't figure out how to balance ranged weapons properly. Fortunately, mods exist to at least un-nerf ranged weapon damage for solo play and on private servers, but unfortunately you'll be stuck with the silly flight physics that resemble throwing a tennis ball more so than firing an arrow.

Other issues with combat include huge quadrupedal bosses and enemies that turn on a dime, very poor telegraphing of some enemy attacks especially if your ping is higher than the single digits, and several other miscellaneous issues. It's also worth noting that boss hit points are massively inflated to be balanced around groups of 10+ players, so for solo and small-scale co-op you'll definitely need a mod.

Finally, you can avoid all combat, even PvP, simply by running away. Just keep on running and you'll be fine. Leopards can't catch you, for example, nor can a pack of wolves. Is an entire 10-man clan after you in PvP? Just run away, you'll be fine. If you think I'm kidding, Google it up, folks. The meta is real.

Conan Exiles has a serious problem with mob placement. For starters, enemies always spawn in the exact same spots, just like in an MMO (and also like an MMO, they're mostly there to guard resource nodes). Some wander a bit, but you will always know pretty much exactly where they'll be after you've visited an area one time. This applies to every creature and humanoid in the game. Compare to ARK: You may have a general idea of which dinosaurs are where, but they range over a huge area, and you never really know when or where a carnotaur or pack of allosaurs might appear. Compare to The Forest: Cannibals scout intelligently and patrol large areas unpredictably.

Creatures in Conan Exiles, for the most part, have no real ecosystem simulation (one exception: nest-guarding aggro), and their AI is very simplistic. They just stand around in their always-the-same spawn locations; the aggressive ones charge you headlong to attack when you enter their aggro radius, no matter what. None of them engage in threat displays to warn you off first, for example, as real-life gorillas might do.

Crocodiles are a special case. They stand around on land, charge headlong at their targets instead of laying in ambush, can't swim properly when they do go into the water, and can't even attack you if they're in the water with you. Yes, that's right: The crocodiles in Conan Exiles cannot swim properly or attack you in the water. Think about that for a second, folks.

Along the same lines, gorillas can't climb anything; big cats also can't climb (yes, a cat that can't climb) and as mentioned earlier, can't even manage to catch/deal damage to a running human. Spiders can't climb, either. Essentially, all NPCs/mobs can only move along the ground, and of the very few that can enter water, there isn't much meaningful they can do there. The big cats do sit around on Pride Rock lookalikes in some areas, though, which is a nice touch.

The store page makes a big deal about The Purge, a mechanic in which a horde of enemy NPCs appears to attack your base, but its implementation is extremely disappointing. You don't get to test out defensive walls, traps, palisades, boiling oil, flame orbs, and so on against a horde of enemies outside your gate when The Purge occurs. No, they just spawn anywhere on the foundation blocks of your base and attack your stuff and your thralls. This is exploitable, too, and also can be buggy.

There are no mounts or vehicles of any kind in Conan Exiles. For the most part, you will run or walk everywhere, constantly using up your stamina. For a game clearly in the same genre as ARK et al., this is very silly. I've heard a rumor that the developers claim the game engine "can't handle" fast mounts, and if that rumor is true, that is also silly since Conan Exiles is built with Unreal 4, which can handle vehicles just fine.

There is a limited fast travel device available to discover and build in one of the mid- to high-tier areas of the game, but it is limited to traveling from a huge and expensive placeable teleportation item to one of ten fixed points around the game world, one-way (unless you build more of that huge and expensive item nearby every fixed point).

Bugs are to be expected in this type of sandbox survival game, but some of the bugs currently present in Conan Exiles are really obnoxious. I pity anyone playing on a server where they don't have access to admin tools to work around bugs and other issues.

I'm not going to make an exhaustive list, but here's a good example: Named thralls (humans you can capture and enslave who have non-generic names) have goofy, super-far-apart alien eyes. Here, I'd better show you:

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1392018529

Yep, every single one of them.

Another bug that particularly annoyed us was items (including plot-essential quest items) seeming to vanish from the game files so completely that you can't even spawn them in with admin commands, let alone obtain them normally. This is usually blamed on mods by the community, but also occurs when no mods that touch items in any way are installed, or even with no mods at all.

This is a fun game, but it's plagued by some serious issues, including some very questionable design decisions that I doubt will ever be overhauled. I don't regret buying it or playing it, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it to any of my Steam friends in its current state. I wouldn't recommend ARK either, mind you, with ARK being the elephant in the current survival sandbox room.

I purchased Conan Exiles when it recently hit v1.0, and have played the game co-op with one friend on a private dedicated server. We had a lot of fun playing the game. Exploring the varied landscape of the world is very nice, the character customization and barbarian-themed armor and weapons are cool, building and decorating is interesting and satisfying, the climbing mechanics are really enjoyable, and it's a beautiful game to look at, too. Ultimately though, I can't recommend it in its current state. Here's why: [h1]Combat[/h1] The combat system, described by some reviewers as feeling nice and fluid, is afflicted by some serious issues, the most serious being shields. A player or NPC can keep his or her shield raised indefinitely, and the shield will totally negate the damage of almost any attack, high or low, with no loss of stamina. This is most obvious (and hilarious) when fighting frost giants. Their gigantic heavy axe attacks with huge windup animations simply stop dead upon contact with a player's shield, as if there's no weight or momentum behind them; you can stand around blocking all of their attacks until the shield eventually breaks, if so desired. There is no hard counter to shields, whether being used by players or NPCs. You can perform a kick to unbalance your opponent, but they can recover and get the shield back up before you even escape the kick animation lock. You can't force them to drop their shield with heavy combos, since weapons rebound off shields, interrupting combos. You can't outflank them, because they can easily turn to face you, with lock-on in the case of player vs. player. All you can really do is move erratically and flail around like crazy hoping to get lucky hits in: essentially button-mashing. In contrast to invincible shields with no counter, bows and ranged weapons come pre-nerfed, do terrible damage, and feature very low projectile velocity and exaggerated ballistic firing arcs, presumably because FunCom couldn't figure out how to balance ranged weapons properly. Fortunately, mods exist to at least un-nerf ranged weapon damage for solo play and on private servers, but unfortunately you'll be stuck with the silly flight physics that resemble throwing a tennis ball more so than firing an arrow. Other issues with combat include huge quadrupedal bosses and enemies that turn on a dime, very poor telegraphing of some enemy attacks especially if your ping is higher than the single digits, and several other miscellaneous issues. It's also worth noting that boss hit points are massively inflated to be balanced around groups of 10+ players, so for solo and small-scale co-op you'll definitely need a mod. Finally, you can avoid all combat, even PvP, simply by running away. Just keep on running and you'll be fine. Leopards can't catch you, for example, nor can a pack of wolves. Is an entire 10-man clan after you in PvP? Just run away, you'll be fine. If you think I'm kidding, Google it up, folks. The meta is real. [h1]Enemy Placement, Creatures, and AI[/h1] Conan Exiles has a serious problem with mob placement. For starters, enemies always spawn in the exact same spots, just like in an MMO (and also like an MMO, they're mostly there to guard resource nodes). Some wander a bit, but you will always know pretty much exactly where they'll be after you've visited an area one time. This applies to every creature and humanoid in the game. Compare to ARK: You may have a general idea of which dinosaurs are where, but they range over a huge area, and you never really know when or where a carnotaur or pack of allosaurs might appear. Compare to The Forest: Cannibals scout intelligently and patrol large areas unpredictably. Creatures in Conan Exiles, for the most part, have no real ecosystem simulation (one exception: nest-guarding aggro), and their AI is very simplistic. They just stand around in their always-the-same spawn locations; the aggressive ones charge you headlong to attack when you enter their aggro radius, no matter what. None of them engage in threat displays to warn you off first, for example, as real-life gorillas might do. Crocodiles are a special case. They stand around on land, charge headlong at their targets instead of laying in ambush, can't swim properly when they do go into the water, and can't even attack you if they're in the water with you. Yes, that's right: [b]The crocodiles in Conan Exiles cannot swim properly or attack you in the water.[/b] Think about that for a second, folks. Along the same lines, gorillas can't climb anything; big cats also can't climb (yes, a cat that can't climb) and as mentioned earlier, can't even manage to catch/deal damage to a running human. Spiders can't climb, either. Essentially, all NPCs/mobs can only move along the ground, and of the very few that can enter water, there isn't much meaningful they can do there. The big cats do sit around on Pride Rock lookalikes in some areas, though, which is a nice touch. [h1]Questionable Design Decisions[/h1] The store page makes a big deal about The Purge, a mechanic in which a horde of enemy NPCs appears to attack your base, but its implementation is extremely disappointing. You don't get to test out defensive walls, traps, palisades, boiling oil, flame orbs, and so on against a horde of enemies outside your gate when The Purge occurs. No, they just spawn anywhere on the foundation blocks of your base and attack your stuff and your thralls. This is exploitable, too, and also can be buggy. There are no mounts or vehicles of any kind in Conan Exiles. For the most part, you will run or walk everywhere, constantly using up your stamina. For a game clearly in the same genre as ARK et al., this is very silly. I've heard a rumor that the developers claim the game engine "can't handle" fast mounts, and if that rumor is true, that is also silly since Conan Exiles is built with Unreal 4, which can handle vehicles just fine. There is a limited fast travel device available to discover and build in one of the mid- to high-tier areas of the game, but it is limited to traveling from a huge and expensive placeable teleportation item to one of ten fixed points around the game world, one-way (unless you build more of that huge and expensive item nearby every fixed point). [h1]General Bugginess[/h1] Bugs are to be expected in this type of sandbox survival game, but some of the bugs currently present in Conan Exiles are really obnoxious. I pity anyone playing on a server where they don't have access to admin tools to work around bugs and other issues. I'm not going to make an exhaustive list, but here's a good example: Named thralls (humans you can capture and enslave who have non-generic names) have goofy, super-far-apart alien eyes. Here, I'd better show you: https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1392018529 Yep, every single one of them. Another bug that particularly annoyed us was items (including plot-essential quest items) seeming to vanish from the game files so completely that you can't even spawn them in with admin commands, let alone obtain them normally. This is usually blamed on mods by the community, but also occurs when no mods that touch items in any way are installed, or even with no mods at all. [h1]In Conclusion[/h1] This is a fun game, but it's plagued by some serious issues, including some very questionable design decisions that I doubt will ever be overhauled. I don't regret buying it or playing it, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it to any of my Steam friends in its current state. I wouldn't recommend ARK either, mind you, with ARK being the elephant in the current survival sandbox room.