At the time, I enjoyed my time with Conan Exiles (playing like 10-20 hours and not really accomplishing anything) but now that Valheim exists I can't think back on CE favourably.

CE's roots as an MMO poison a lot of the experience, and with most of the stuff you can build locked behind DLC it is fundamentally compromised. The game feels dreary and sluggish and is constantly telling players "NO!", with only the most spartan interactions between the player and the world. Although it's not buggy at all, mechanically it feels like an alpha.

Meanwhile, Valheim delivers an immense world and actually blends its survival, RPG, and crafting elements together into a cohesive loop, all while feeling more polished and complete than Conan Exiles. Valheim a joy to play on its own merits and never feels compromised by being single- or multi-player.

This is harsh, but honestly I think Conan Exiles is obsolete; the time investment isn't worth it, no matter the price.

@noblenerf:

The game definitely did not feel good at all. That sounds awful about crafting being locked behind DLC.

I actually almost bought Conan Exiles, I'm glad I saw that it was coming to Game Pass. I just rewatched the Conan movies for the first time in years and started reading the original Howard stories along with some of the comics and have been enjoying it. It's a shame there isn't a good, modern Conan game.

I hadn't heard of Valheim...interesting. I don't think these survival games are quite my cup of tea, but maybe I'll check Valheim out.

I actually enjoyed it and it seems to be better than most of the games in that genre especially compared to stuff like Stranded Deep. That being said it is rough and suffers from the same issues in that genre. Really not fun to grind getting material to build one thing. Plus the gameplay is meh and so are the graphics. I definitely wouldn’t pay for it ,I got it on Plus. It does benefit from playing with a friend but the issue with that is there’s a max distance you have from the other player and if you go beyond it warps your back to them. Very lame. Really wish there was a good alternative for Conan lore.

@masterbrief: Max distance for co-op, wow.

I didn't hate my time with it. I played a few more rounds than I thought I would because I made it further. It just wasn't fun enough for me to sink a lot more hours in.

I have a copy of the 360 Conan coming my way to try, but it looks like a pretty bad God of War rip off.

@gla55jaw: Mercenaries 2 had the same distance tether for its coop. No joke it was like 100-200ish feet. Couldn’t really use the helicopters at all. That made sense with the tech at the time. Now days I dont buy that excuse especially online coop. If I remember right Ark Coop had the same thing for offline and the ps4 can barely run that lol. I think that Conan action game is decent but nothing special. Definitely in that era of trying to mimic GoW like Dantes Inferno.

bought it around when it came to ps4 and played it with my fiancee in our own save , it has that shitty teether mechanic alot of these games seem to have that made it not too fun. fast forward a month or so and we played it with some work buddies and that was admittedly alot more fun but playing on a server has its own issues like if you don't log in for a week al your shit gets wiped ( we moved) i haven't touched it since. it was pretty buggy at the time but not in a deal breaker sort of way but having seen/fought some of those bosses i can't imagine playing it solo. i'm glad you were able to give it a gamepass go tho , better than spending money on something you don't like n all

I can't really speak to the console versions of the game but I have sunk plenty hours in to it on PC.

Set up a dedicated server to play with friends and doing so gets rid of the annoying tethering system you guys are talking about. Looks a good bit better on PC most likely too.

But if you're only option is playing it on console then yeah probably a pass

@deadeyes: @styx971:

I'm glad I tried it out, but yeah, definitely not a solo game. I wish there was a better Conan game to play. I tried out that 360 Conan game, which is just a really old feeling God of War clone.

@gla55jaw: yeah i get what you mean . i think the only other conan game i can think of that 'new' is that RTS game i think it was dan that did a quicklook of it a few years back. n thats definitely not the same as playing an action game.