Always need an online connection, Even to play single player well that was a few years ago but i decided to give it another try and i can't even get the game to run as i get a Fatal Error on the intro screen and then crashes.

It seems many people for years have been having these problems, If you go look on their forums you have people posting about the same issue and they never get resolved as the threads automatically close after a few days with no replies. Don't waste your time or money on this.

Conan Exiles is a game like no other. Superior building control and options within the two maps, a very large amount of gear to acquire and make, and interesting lore very close to REH's world. On Steam, Epic, Microsoft Games, XBox and Playstion, with offline, multiplayer either through Official or private servers in 3 modes: PVP, PVE-C and PVE.

This game is 7 years old. Funcom was going into bankruptcy and Conan Exiles took them out of it thanks to the pre-orders and success of the game at launch. Then fully acquired by Tencent as of 2020. While Funcom is no stranger to mistakes, once Tencent started showing interest and prior to the full acquisition there was partial stake, there have been noticeable shifts. Heavy monetisation, very poor QA, lack of communication, no vision, new content effectively overlapping old to invalidate those pre-existing systems, tone deaf systemic changes in QoL, moves of key staff to Dune and what appears to be a lack of manpower to support the game.

While some players that might enjoy it for a few hours here or there could get passed most of the bugs or not even see them, the enormity of the bugs and how it impacts the various playstyles, hardware and modes runs deeper than the greater player community may realise. As little as data table typos going ignored for months to enormous stability issues spanning near to a year of players on multiplayer falling into their own buildings and having to use the in game feature to die to be set free. No clear refund policy. Ignoring reports. Poor SOP and direction to new staff on how to handle the forums. Poorly communicated and even contradictory instructions for submitting bug reports, contests, events.

On multiplayer, of course not a CE only problem of late, the prevalence of hacking has been a 7 year long staple for Official PVP with some sprinkling here and there on private servers, now making its way only PVE and PVE-C.

This game is a beautiful, bug-ridden, abused and all but discarded mess. If you decide to purchase the game and/or play, do NOT buy anything. Regret is the most common feeling afterwards. Since most of the newly released monetised content is also always broken in some way.

This is slowly becoming a zombified, enshittified version of itself.

As someone with multiple accounts and close to 7500 hrs, heed my words and be wary.

A game with this many significant bugs and this many cosmetic dlc packages tells you this: the studio thinks they can get away with a broken product if they put enough drapes and lipstick on it.

You can still have fun with this game but its a c teir survival crafter with ubiquitous sometimes game breaking bugs, some reported shortly after release nearly a decade ago on the funcom boards.

Bugs off the top of my head in late 2024 with 40ish hours of gameplay:
-Your stamina bar can deplete and not replenish. This means you cannot attack or build. *Logging does not fix this.* This is a showstopping bug that was reported in in 2018 and *still happens.* I had to reset the g portal server before I could play the game again.
-NPCs constantly, constantly spawn 60 ft in the air and cannot be reached.
-Knocked out enemies can fall through the bottom of the map.
-Defeated enemy corpses can despawn instantly. no looting no harvesting.
-Dismounting near walls puts you inside the horse, a death sentence in combat, otherwise just a pita.
-Your horse will occasionally appear at random points on the map when you log in, not next to you where you left them. Think of it as a boring quest you didn't want to do!
-All sorts of other mount-related issues, minor but constant headaches and occasionally enough to get you killed.
-You occasionally appear in random parts of the map when logging in, despite where you logged out.
-Mouse direction does not equal attack direction and there's a bug where you can get stuck facing one direction for 10+ seconds unable to attack people hitting you as you run backwards into them. It happened enough I could get video of this.
-Put a bed too close to a wall? When you respawn at it, you now live in the wall unless you have a construction hammer on you or a friend can demolish the wall.
-Your items can disappear in your inventory. They're still there, but you have to change the sort options to see them.

I know I'm missing soo many more bugs, but that's not all. The builder ui is janky, the combat is janky, and the general ui is un-intuitive. Example: How do you make ballista ammo? Well you have to interact with the *front* of the ballista, not the other 270 degrees of it which gives you a different window..... *obviously.* How do you apply tinkerer mods to equipment? You drag and drop (oh except this just swaps the item's locations unless the item has 100% of its *max* durability. Couldn't find this detail in any articles or reddit posts, just trial and errored it.) You figure most of this stuff out with some googling and watching youtube guides with 7 views, but who wants to waste 15 minutes just trying to do the most basic crap?

I could understand this if it was alpha release abadonware. But it's not. I mean, it kinda *is*... but the fact that they have so many overpriced dlc's and updates and *this* many issues is just insulting to the consumer.