When comparing Conan Exiles vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best open world games for PS4?” NieR: Automata is ranked 15th while Conan Exiles is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro A great deal of fun to play with your friends
In Conan Exiles, you're able to team up with people and build cities, or even empires if your group is large enough to make it happen. You're also able to do things that simply couldn't happen as a solo player, like waging war on enemy cities, pooling resources to expand your territory quickly, or making group expeditions to find rare resources. As much fun as the game is by yourself, it really shines when you've got a few friends to team up with to take on the world.
Pro The combat is fast-paced and brutal
In Conan Exiles you play as an exiled warrior, so it's no wonder that you know how to fight. You play in first-person and wield a large array of weapons in order to destroy your enemies. Combat often ends quickly, with decapitations, limbs flying everywhere, and blood spattered on the ground. You can even sacrifice your enemies to the gods in order to gain power if you want to. If you like brutality, Conan Exiles has it in spades.
Pro Exploring the world is fun
There are several different biomes in Conan Exiles. Barren wastelands, harsh deserts, sparkling rivers, and haunted forests are just a few of the ones you'll encounter, but you'll want to get out there and really explore the environment. Every biome holds different secrets to discover and, more importantly, different materials so you can craft new stuff, which is always satisfying.
Exploring also lets you scout out enemies that you plan to attack, find new areas you want to settle, or even make new friends to cohabit the area with. You'll have to explore whether you want to or not, but Conan Exiles makes it very enjoyable by making sure it's a rewarding experience.
Pro Extensive crafting system that encourages player interaction
Crafting in Conan Exiles is essentially the name of the game. There are hundreds of items available to craft, and even though it may seem a little daunting at first, the process is very intuitive. You're able to do most things right from your inventory screen with no added help, and other things are deliberately pointed out as needing other amenities to be able to craft them.
As you level up, you acquire "knowledge points," allowing you to learn how to craft new things. However, one person can't possibly know how to craft everything in the game. This system is perfect for making players either raid others for the goods they need, or team up and work with people to get further in their quest for survival.
Pro The developers are very interactive with the community
The developers of Conan Exiles do their best to maintain regular and transparent communication with the players, actively seeking feedback, requests, and ideas in order to make the game better.
Pro Awesome game! Search for "Server 3001" and join the best PvE-C private server out threre! Currently paid for until March 2020!
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Not suitable for younger players
Conan Exiles contains nudity and a lot of gore.
Con Incredibly little of the story is conveyed well to players, essentially requiring looking up goals online in order to progress in anything but crafting and combat
Con Joining a server for online play can be problematic
If the multiplayer servers are full, then you're out of luck. So far, there's no user-friendly functions like queues or notifications to help you out. You're stuck with spamming attempts to join a server or rejoin if you get kicked out for whatever reason. It would have been nice to have some helpful features to ease this process along.
Con The game feels unfinished and unpolished
Even though Conan Exiles is no longer in early access, there are a lot of flaws here and there that add up over time. You have plenty of freedom to roam around, but there's no real sense of progression or a focused storyline. Some areas in the open world just have a bunch of enemies to kill for the sake of killing them. You may also lag a lot, with your character warping around as you try to move. On their own, these things wouldn't be such a big deal, but they really do become a pain as the problems start to stack up.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.