Conan Exiles - Combat Changes during the Age of War

Dennis Douthett - the lead designer of Conan Exiles talks about the combat changes during the Age of War: 

Developer Letter - Combat changes during the Age of War

Hello everyone!

My name is Dennis Douthett, and I’m the Lead Designer for Conan Exiles.

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. I hope you find this insight interesting, and not too long winded!

The topic today is combat changes coming during the Age of War.

Good Stress

To begin it's important to establish one of the many reasons we find games to be fun. It's the contrast between stress and relief.

When designing games, we look to introduce stress to you by placing challenges in your way. 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. The closer we can stress you to a tipping point only for you to just barely overcome a challenge, the better the victory feels!

As you continue to read this article, keep the relationship between stress and relief in mind!

Combat and Stamina
Why did we change it?

I have seen responses to the stamina updates in the patch notes asking why we made these changes. 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. I will do my best to explain how we got from point to point that made these changes necessary.

These changes sometimes have effects on more than one community as well. 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. 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 Problem

A unique mechanic was implemented in recent years after our team decided the game was too easy in our playtests. 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. 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."

I do agree this was an issue, but I think that solution introduced a new problem. Between the system providing immunity and the stun protection we give during attacks it was difficult to understand when an enemy would be stunnable.

Increasing Consistency and Dynamics

Even if you are a seasoned player, you likely have no idea why enemies are sometimes stunned and sometimes, they are not. 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. 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.

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Thanks Luethar!