So, I had about 15 hours with the game now and I think it deserves a fundamental "meh"/fine as a multiplayer game and a thumbs down as a single player game.
There is potential here. As I already said, graphics, audio, all very good.
The art style is well done.
The world invites you to explore.
But the meat of the game is held back either by bugs (yes, still) or horrible design.
While I liked the combat at the beginning, I started loathing it after a while. Enemy attacks cannot be interrupted (well, they can, but it seems random at best, so as a strategy it is worthless) - not even reliably with a friggin' two handed hammer which should excel at that.
Human enemies aren't bad, but they are cheating as they don't seem to be bound by any stamina as you are. Have fun attacking every now and then, conserving your stamina for dodging while enemies unleash a relentless fury of blows on you.
Beast behavior is just weird. They walk as in a 90s/early 2000s game, stepping in place while rotating around. Their attack ranges are all over the place - some don't hit you when they should, others knock you around with meters between you.
And don't you ever try to fight a large enemy. You won't be able to dodge half of the time as you simply get stuck INSIDE them. Which makes two-handed weapons absolutely shitty, you will want to use 1H + shield, at least that doesn't bug out like that.
Or you use bows. The least damage dealing bows in gaming history.
The worst must be knocking out thralls to try and drag them to your base - you can't just almost kill them and then deliver the final blow with a knockout weapon. No, there are two health bars and you must take the knockout bar down entirely with a knockout weapon - oh, and those suck, of course.
But when you have finally managed to do so, the real odyssey begins. You have to tie them up and drag them around using a rope.
You cannot climb while holding that rope (you just drop it when you do). You cannot swim while holding the rope (they'll drown). The ragdoll effect while you drag them through the mud is hilariously comical (look for some videos).
So you have to take long, safe, slow roads to drag them. Of course, the rope has a durability that lasts a few minutes, maybe.*
Oh, and since you will walk a long way, you will encounter enemies on your way back. So you need to drop your rope, obviously, and fight.
Good luck not hitting the tied up thrall by accident, killing him with one blow - same with enemy attacks.
And even if you manage all of that, somehow... sometimes the thralls just disappear into the ground.
I tried four times to get a thrall to my camp, all attempts failed due to bugs or "accidental" monster attacks where either I or the monster killed the thrall in one hit.
Why you can't just carry knocked out thralls on your shoulders and make them invulnerable to accidental attacks is completely beyond me. That would solve almost all problems with the current system.
* Everything in this game has an absurdly bad durability. A few hits with an 2H Iron Hammer and it breaks. An iron pickaxe? Done after 10-20 minutes of mining.
Couple that with the ridiculous amount of shit required to craft anything.
Just imagine this one: To craft a skinning knife, you need 20 (TWENTY!!!!) bars of iron.
Or this one: You need twenty skins/pelts to craft a bed that visually has one or two of them lying on top.
Also nice: 100 iron bars to craft a blacksmith table.
All of this leads to constant grinding that just isn't all that fun, in no game.
To further annoy players a bit, there is no automatic crafting of sub-steps. If crafting A requires materials B and C, but C has to be crafted, then you have to craft C manually before you can craft A. This is just unnecessary.
Also, I can't get over respawning rocks. If they would reappear differently, i.e. they break loose from a mountain and then you can mine them. But no, they respawn exactly the same way they were placed every time.
Building is okay, but also plagued by some bad design: For example, instead of crafting one basic block that you can transform into everything (foundation/wall/stairy, column, doorway, etc.) all of these are single items blowing up the list of craftables like crazy.
It is also impossible to place a ceiling over a doorway with a door in it. You gotta remove the door, place the ceiling, then you can add the door back in...
There are multiple variants of beds and bedsheets - all of which have exactly the same function, but differ A LOT in materials consumed. What's the point of that?
And of course, everything costs shitloads of materials. You basically need to move a mountain or clear a forest to build a single house.
I can tell that some of these problems are alleviated by playing in a team - but I don't give a fuck, I'm a single player guy playing an offline game. This shouldn't feel like playing the offline demo of a game that would require more players.
Also, some of these can be adjusted in server settings - but as I said before, a game should be judged on what devs think should be the default for everyone, at least in single player.
So, if you like to play on public servers and have some people to play with, I think it wouldn't be as bad as my experience was, maybe even worth it.
But to me? Naaah.
And I don't think the required changes to make it better will be done, as they would be rather fundamental. Unfulfilled potential is rarely achieved post release.
Maybe the bugs will gone at some point.
Conclusion:
In all but graphics, performance and audio, Conan Exiles is simply inferior to Empyrion - and that one is in alpha.
Sure, Empyrion can be clunky as fuck, but at least it doesn't annoy you with any of the things mentioned above. And what other game lets you start on a planet, looking at the moon, and eventually you will build a capital ship, fly through space, land on that moon, build a base there and start warping to other systems to explore those, using motor cycles and hover crafts for drilling through all the terrain? You could say that comes with the setting, but by far not all scifi games allow that kind of freedom. And don't tell me there couldn't be portals in a fantasy game leading to new worlds.
And despite being procedurally generated, I found exploring the world, finding and delving into dungeons and other special locations simply more rewarding (not in visuals, but in gameplay and, well, actual rewards).
Empyrion is also the first game since Morrowind that gave me the feeling of truly exploring a new world (or well, multiple ones, and moons).
