I think I must approach games heavy on building like a model train enthusiast. I’ve only known a couple of people with a model railroad set up in their garages or basements, but they were way into it. In part, it was about running the train around the track and enjoying what they’d made, but it was also the joy in finding just the right car to add to the train, or the right trees for the slope above the tunnel.

Finding someone who thinks what you did is cool and worth spending time looking at is another story. Like model building itself, model railroad enthusiasts are content to trudge on unappreciated by friends and family.

I’ve always been that way with building games, or games heavy on building like Conan Exiles. As you might imagine, I was a big fan of early versions of SimCity, and have been a Sims player since there has been a Sims. Conan Exiles is an entirely different feel, of course. You get to be a part of your model railroad rather than just observe it like an invisible man on a cloud, or a kid peering through the smudged plastic of an ant farm.

Plus, you get to run around with a big sword whacking at all sorts of monsters when you just can’t look at another foundation block. I’d call that a win/win.

To be honest, another thing this particular Conan Exiles builder has in common with model railroad enthusiasts is an almost completely unearned sense of achievement. In both cases, all we did was buy stuff at a store (real or virtual doesn’t matter), then arrange them in a functional and aesthetically pleasing manner (we hope).

I love running around my build (Aresburg) and just enjoying the results of hours of work. Just like it’s fun to fill those buildings with souvenirs earned from questing; there’s an attached sense of accomplishment. But I didn’t make any of those building blocks, or script the battle mechanics. Largely, all credit for my build where any is due belongs to the unsung heroes hard at work in Funcom’s art department.

It’s really easy to make a Conan Exiles build look good, provided you’ve purchased DLCs and unlocked the corresponding building styles, or added to your inventory through the Conan Exiles Bazaar.

Ah… the Bazaar. Known unlovingly to CE players as The FOMO Bazaar, it is a smattering of items and add-ons made available on a rotating basis. Of the hundreds of possible items available for purchase, Funcom has chosen to make seven available at any one time. Of those seven, two rotate every day, some rotate every three days, and others might rotate every three weeks.

Additionally, things sold as sets will also appear as individual items (other than building sets sold strictly in kits and add-on kits). If you buy something that is part of a set, the next time that set is in the bazaar, it will appear to have a severely deep discount, but that’s only because the price of the already purchased items have been removed from the set’s total.

It’s a confusing and unpleasant shopping experience for those of us still willing to deal with it at all. A DLC costs around $20 (USD) or so. There are building sets alone that cost more than that, and the individual items are typically around 200-600 Crom Coins (the bazaar currency one can only buy in set quantities), so about $2.50-$7.50. Funcom is now charging the same price for a market stall and a stylized cooking set as it did for an entire DLC. And using extremely throttled availability in the hopes that someone will shell out $20 impulse dollars because they’re afraid this product they really, really want won’t be available again until the year 2173.

Hence, FOMO Bazaar. Did I mention how awesome Funcom’s art department is? Well, the marketing department is pure Herb Tarlek.

For instance, I’ve held my nose and purchased a few over-priced items. The building kits are worth having. But I almost fell for the FOMO the last time the market stall was up for grabs. As I mentioned above, filling in the details and getting the build just right is a large part of the enjoyment. What’s a thriving pre-industrial age (well, kind of) city without an open air market? Nothing is the correct answer. It’s nothing.

And there it was. The market stall. I can’t remember if it was 400 Crom Coins or closer to 600, but there it was and I was going to build my market….

Wait a minute. The market stall? Unless I’m designing outdoor shopping on Camazotz, what the heck am I going to do with one market stall? And I checked the game’s inventory in the admin panel. There is indeed one.

You can’t see it, but right now I’m making a very stern and disapproving face.

All the chairs with fabric in them have the exact same color of fabric: burgundy. Almost all the wood in furniture is the same shade of dark. The art is beautiful, but there is such a lack of variation and an almost entire lack of functionality. The Aquilonian bath set? Can’t use the bath like the Onsen. The prisoner shackles can only be used to lock up … yourself, so entirely useless as a prison prop if you wanted to, you know, SHACKLE someone.

When the Yamatai tavern set was released, the bazaar photos clearly made it look like you could fashion a functioning tavern using the pieces included. However, until a subsequent update, the floor cushions on which one hoped an NPC might settle on to be available to employ were just cosmetic props. It took a horde of exiles crying foul for Funcom to make the cushions functional as seating after they were clearly marketed as such.

You just can’t ever tell with Funcom whether an item in the bazaar adds any functionality to the game, or if you’re paying good money for a retextured cosmetic that disappointed you the first time around because the bazaar listing implied more.

It’s strange that Funcom has chosen the FOMO business model when players are constantly flooding forums with a clear willingness to go hog-wild in a functional store that featured all their offerings. As KiahOnFire mentions in her excellent video about the slow attrition of Conan Exiles, there needs to be some newness. From my own perspective, as many excellent aspects as there are to CE there’s a lack of vibrancy in the color variations of textured items (which have no dye channels and are therefore unchangeable) and in the behavior of NPCs that makes it heard to feel immersed in a larger build.

Unless you’re building a Necropolis for some reason. Because it’s all vacant stares, eating empty bowls of gruel on dark furniture.

It takes more work than it really should to bring a Conan Exiles build to life, and that is largely because Funcom refuses to unlock the warehouses and release the grain. It’s very frustrating to know there are about 50 bazaar items that would totally rock your build, but you couldn’t even purchase them if you wanted to. So you have to fashion a market out of dining tables and inventory clutter instead. Or use Fashionist mod items as armor stands.

There are mods, of course. And kudos to the great CE modding community. Between Nexxus Mods and the Steam workshop (assuming you purchased CE through Steam, of course), there’s great variety in quality of life improvements as well as cosmetic items. Of course, if you’re playing on a server then you can only use those mods if the server uses them (I believe). And if you’re administering a server, demanding too many mods will scare away players who don’t want to have to reconfigure their game every time they launch just to see your pretty hair.

Finally, the FOMO bazaar is something of an insult to Funcom’s art department because that market stall really rocks. I didn’t buy it, but I would if there were a pack of five different stalls rather than just one. I’d spend a little money on chairs if I could change the color of the fabric and wood. I’d worry about adding all those little touches to the bars and private homes inhabited by my city of NPCs if the experience of the FOMO bazaar didn’t leave me feeling as dead inside as a thrall sitting alone in a tavern waiting for a job offer that will never come.