Right, then. Since our esteemed administrator deemed fit to call me out on my lack of Sonja the Red updates, I figure I’d shed a little light on Sonja’s extended absence. There won’t be any witty third person accounts from Sonja’s perspective this time, just a little bit of insight into some of the wonky shit this game can pull from time to time.
First off, I’ll start by saying I done fucked up. Things were going peachy-keen for Sonja for quite a while. She was building up her settlement, and I was making regular trips back and forth from home to the mine, and then back home again. It was getting to be a downright chore, simply because the mine is full of spiders, and they never really seem to stop spawning. So it was a matter of hacking away with my pick at the ore, then stopping and hopping around fighting spiders. I’d kill them easy enough if there was just one or two of them, but they’d still get their licks in, so after a while it was back to the homestead to kill and cook more meat, and start refining that iron. Everything I’d tried to make so far requires a shit ton of iron, including the skinning knife.
So, out of sheer boredom, and looking to try and cheese my way through it a bit, I started looking up different locations of iron deposits, and if there were any that weren’t such a pain in the ass to harvest. I found a website that showed a very lucrative spot near the jungle and not too far from the homestead. So I set out in search for it.
I reached as far as the Windswept Ruins, and met Sonja’s first encounter with the sand… beasts. I don’t really remember what they’re called but they basically look like black panthers. I had fought some of these a bit when I was playing co-op with someone, and I killed one or two of them, so I approached with optimism. I was met with one fucking claw swipe to the face, and Sonja was dead. Awesome.
Not really knowing why the online co-op game I hosted with a friend had these creatures appear so much weaker, I was a little miffed. But I respawned with my naked Sonja back at the homestead and began my sprint back to her body. While I knew the sand beast was still there, I was pretty confident that I could sneak by it and raid my old body of all my shit.
There was one tiny little problem, though. When I got to the place of my death, Sonja’s old body was gone. Completely. I know where I died, and I was standing right there, and there was nothing but sand. Sonja’s body, for whatever reason, was nowhere to be found. That meant all of her light armor, all of her weapons, everything, were gone. That’s a LOT of work to just have up and vanish.
It’s enough to make an old man rage. And it’s enough to make him put down the controller and say “FUCK THIS GAME” and walk away for a bit.
So I did, and then I put it back in tonight to re-think my strategy yet again and maybe perhaps not entirely screw the pooch this time. Then I realized there was a pretty big patch, apparently, and that all my skills and feats had been reset. Now, Elder Scrolls Online does this sometimes too, and it pisses me off to no end. Why in the blue frozen hell can’t they warn a person that they’re going to do this, before they do it? It would be really nice to take a quick inventory of the shit I had invested in before they wipe the fucking slate clean.
It’s always nice to look at your skill tree and see you have 50 unspent skill points, and have no earthly bloody clue how you had them dispersed. It’s one of those things that makes me want to kick a developer in the balls, just because.
So by this point I’ve re-allocated Sonja’s skill points, God only knows if it was how I had it before, and I’ve changed the settings to prevent Sonja from losing her belongings when she dies. I do this begrudgingly, because I know it will change the way I play the game. That was the danger and consequence for venturing out. It was the risk I was taking every time I set foot outside of my home. That is what makes Conan Exiles the game it is. Without that consequence, there’s no risk, but at the same time, losing all my shit because the game fucked up is a monumental headache. This armor requires too much time and resources for the game to just screw you out of them.
I’d really like to start making some actual progress in the game. Hopefully I can get over this slump that I’m in, because I really would like to see Sonja start turning into the badass I know she can be.
