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| Yes, there it is. |
I hadn't installed it in 2021 when I broke down and bought my current PC, and I suppose that my old toon there is still hanging out wherever I'd left it way back when.
Still, Funcom continues to keep the Conan license alive with AoC, Conan Exiles, Conan Chop Chop, and Conan Unconquered. How do they do it? And while most people know of Conan from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies the original Robert E. Howard short stories are still around.* I can find at least one Conan book at my local bookstore, which is one more than from David Eddings (and until recently Michael Moorcock). What is the appeal of Conan?
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| Maybe it's because the Sun travels east to west and the Moon travels west to east. Yeah, I thought something was weird the first couple of days I played, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I realized that the Sun rose in the same area that the Moon set. |
The Sword and Sorcery subgenre has its adherents, particularly those in the RPG community who enjoy the "old school" style of 1e AD&D and modern interpretations such as Shadowdark. It's just that for some reason the brutal and brooding style of the Hyborean Age, created by a bookish Texan, has an enduring appeal to this Norwegian game company.
When I used to play Age of Conan I got the impression that it was far more popular over in Europe than in the US, and my tinkering around with Conan Exiles has only reinforced that perception.
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| Taking a rest in a bed I'd built with crude tools. |
Both Conan Exiles and Age of Conan have a casual attitude toward nudity that would shock certain sensibilities in the US. Yes, you can play Conan Exiles on a server --your own or created by others-- without turning nudity on, but I'm sure that was put in place to allow the game to be put on Steam. I'm not here to moralize about that, because nudity or near nudity is a staple of Sword and Sorcery along with magic and civilization itself being evil and corrupting, but it is worth noting that Funcom went all in on the aesthetic. Before you ask, no, they didn't add sex to the game, but apparently people created mods to "fix" that.
Why am I not surprised?
A more problematic part of Conan Exiles is that Funcom did not shy away from another aspect of Sword and Sorcery: slavery and thralldom. Here in the US, any discussion of slavery centers, first and foremost, on the slavery of Africans that culminated in the American Civil War. Slavery in Conan Exiles is more akin to that found in the Ancient World, where those defeated in war were enslaved by the victors.** In Conan Exiles, you "recruit" people to your side by knocking them out using a truncheon, putting them on the Wheel of Pain, and having them "work" the wheel until their spirit is broken.
And despite the "splitting hairs" aspect to the whole thing, holy crap is this something incredibly problematic.
Yes, it follows with the spirit of Conan's world, but I also think this is something that the devs could have read the room and said "You know, slavery isn't exactly a popular thing right now, maybe we ought to come up with another mechanic other than thralls." I mean, there's plenty of other things that were popular in the Ancient World (and Sword and Sorcery) that didn't make the cut in the game.
If you are thinking about Conan Exiles as a survival game to play and you find the thrall mechanic a hard line, that's on Funcom. They could have easily changed the game to something less problematic, but by sticking to their guns they limited their game's appeal.
*Not to mention stories written by other authors, such as L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Poul Anderson, and even Robert Jordan.
**For those familiar with Roman and Greek history may have heard of Epictetus, the Stoic Philosopher, who was born a slave. And there's Spartacus, who led a slave revolt.
I did a whole post during our dive into Conan Exiles about how this was a bit of a problematic bump. Funcom both tried to hide things with terminology at some points, but at other junctures was just all "you torture your slaves to subjugate them to your will."
ReplyDeletePass the gruel.
And that is before we get into the optics of rolling up as a white race and then subjugating your dark skinned neighbors. I mean, sure, they were practicing human sacrifice before you came along, but still.
On the one hand, it is just a video game and after all those virtual people I have slain over the years, usually via murder for hire schemes, what's a bit of virtual slavery on the side?
On the other... that was a bit too much for our group and we ended up moving on despite some of the relatively well done bits of the game.
The strange thing is that --from a pure gameplay and polish standpoint-- Conan Exiles is much better than the old Age of Conan MMO. It's so much better that if the people playing Exiles dwarfs Age of Conan, I'd believe it.
DeleteBut still, how could Funcom possibly miss the boat on the whole slavery thing this badly? Why wasn't there anybody saying "You know, this really doesn't look good from a modern perspective; maybe we ought to rework the whole thrall thing so it's less of an issue." And if it was brought up and the dev leadership decided to go with "authenticity" or some other bullshit excuse, that's a reflection on their attitudes and beliefs.