Dhelio Conan Exiles Review

There are a few games that, whenever I'm not playing them, maybe because I'm watchinga video or a guide on this or that feature, always make me think "wow...why don't I play this more often?"; except that then I play them, and get reminded of why. Maybe the combat is boring, or the quests are bland, but more often than not it's the long quiet time between exciting content that I can't stand. Conan Exiles, on paper, is a great game. What's not to love? Huge map, plenty of building materials, tons of weapons and armor, NPC sieges (both in defense and in offense), dungeons, bosses, mod support. But all these events and features are so sparse in gameplay that a player may barely come across most of the content at the 200hr mark. This is probably due to my own stubborness in playing this game in SinglePlayer. While it's a supported mode, it's clear that this wasn't the intended way to play. In single player mode you'll come across a lot of negative space (that it's there for players to build fortresses), and most crafting is time based (which works if you have a server that constantly updates those timers even when you're not playing, less so when you're letting those timers run in realtime), resource gathering is mostly meaningless and unfun (but might be a point of friction between players for multiplayer), and so on and so forth. Sure, there are plenty of settings a player can choose to make this more bearable (more materials per node, faster crafting, faster thrall crafting, etc.) but even by heavily messing with modifiers I couldn't find a satisfying game pace. And honestly I shouldn't have to. The only time I really got into it was when I rented a server just for me to play. But that is a high price to ask players, when the game is so heavily monetized both in DLCs and ingame store. Maybe a simple solution would be to tie ingame timers to the PC's clock, skipping crafting timers ahead when the player enters. But I don't think it will be a feature anytime soon. All in all I feel like Conan Exiles should be a game that I like way more than I do, and that disheartens me. I can't recommend this game.