To address this, our first order of business for the Age of War was to remove the system that made combat feel inconsistent and buggy. If enemies have a large health pool, and you can attack for long stretches of time before your stamina is depleted, where does the stress come in? If the enemy you are attacking has a chance to randomly defy the expected game mechanics to cause stress, how can you counter their actions skillfully? With “stress and relief” in mind, consider the combat system as it exists in Exiles today.
So instead of using brute force to create a gap for enemies to act in battle, we would create it by starving the player of the ability to attack as frequently. There are no audio or visual cues that let you know an enemy is immune to being stunned – and if there was, they would feel very “gamey” in their presentation. Increasing Consistency and DynamicsĮven if you are a seasoned player, you likely have no idea why enemies are sometimes stunned and sometimes, they are not. Between the system providing immunity and the stun protection we give during attacks it was difficult to understand when an enemy would be stunnable. I do agree this was an issue, but I think that solution introduced a new problem. For example’s sake, the timing was something close to, “For every 3 seconds of being stunned, you get 1 second to act with impunity.” Enemies attacked by multiple players would never get a chance to act, causing them to be stunlocked to death! This led us to create a system that would give enemy AI brief immunity to stun after they had been unable to act for some time. So, while nobody directly asked for that specific change, I can still say who the changes are for: These changes were aimed at making combat feel more consistent, less buggy, and more dynamic for everyone! The ProblemĪ unique mechanic was implemented in recent years after our team decided the game was too easy in our playtests. We have many different types of players in Conan Exiles, but without a doubt nearly every type of player will be participating in combat at some point. These changes sometimes have effects on more than one community as well. I will do my best to explain how we got from point to point that made these changes necessary. It is true that nobody outright asked us to increase the stamina cost of attacks, but sometimes fixing problems we identify can affect multiple systems.
CONAN EXILES BEST ARMOR PATCH
I have seen responses to the stamina updates in the patch notes asking why we made these changes. The closer we can stress you to a tipping point only for you to just barely overcome a challenge, the better the victory feels!Īs you continue to read this article, keep the relationship between stress and relief in mind! Combat and Stamina Why did we change it? Challenges can be any type of gameplay that blocks your progress: a boss enemy with loot you want, a long wall climb with few resting points along the way, a puzzle that requires observation and timing to unlock a mechanical door. When designing games, we look to introduce stress to you by placing challenges in your way. It’s the contrast between stress and relief.
To begin it’s important to establish one of the many reasons we find games to be fun. The topic today is combat changes coming during the Age of War. I hope you find this insight interesting, and not too long winded!
I’ve spent a lot of my time as Lead Designer collaborating with the community on Discord, showing off new content on Twitch and YouTube, but this is the first time I’ve worked on a blog post to go with a release. My name is Dennis Douthett, and I’m the Lead Designer for Conan Exiles.
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