Dear exiles,

Happy November everyone! Hope you all had a great Halloween and that you didn't overstuff yourselves on sugary sweets. We celebrated the only way we could think of: Smashing pumpkins. Literally. Many thanks to our American community managers Nicole Vayo and Andy Benditt for taking time out of their work schedules to partake in what we hope will become a great new pastime.

We've had some new people joining us this week: a new coder, Marcine, a new 3D artist, Gunnar, and a new project manager, Ramona. Welcome to the team, guys!

And now, for your favorite pastime: reading the rest of the weekly newsletter.


The patch we mentioned sending to Microsoft late last week passed certification, but we needed to wait for a store upgrade from Microsoft before we could push it to live. It's now been released into the wild, so hopefully players can summon avatars again. We also hope the dancers no longer crash your servers.


We're currently in the process of building a new live candidate from the version of the game currently up on Testlive. There are bugs and exploits that we're currently working on fixing that will be included in this live candidate. Chief among them are duplication exploits and a speed increase bug. They're both fixed in Testlive, along with a host of other bugs. There are some additional bugs in the Testlive version that need to be fixed (another duping bug, for example), but once those have been sorted out, we will move this version from Testlive to live.

However, we should have hotfixed these bugs much, much sooner. We should also have been more communicative with you, the community, about what was going on. For this we apologize. Please understand that we haven't been ignoring you or keeping you in the dark. It was just a case of human error.

We're currently planning for the patch to go live on Thursday. We'll also be doing some cleanup on the official servers.


Every Friday, the development team meets up to highlight and talk about what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. So as not to make this newsletter overly long we're only sticking to the highlights from the teams. Things are still being worked on "behind the scenes", and we'll mention these when they're relevant.


The Vanguard has grown since last week! The Featureama team has been integrated into The Vanguard to help out with bug fixing, now that we're in our polish phase. More people means more bugs fixed! They've fixed the speed exploit and the duplication exploit previously, and one of the coders are working on a different, final duplication bug on Testlive.


The art team is still pumping out new outfits, creatures and weapons. You can see the brand new Kambujan Shaman outfit in the image below, and we'll be bringing you renders of other cultural styles in the coming weeks. On the creature side of things, they're experimenting with creating more fantastical beings to further fill out the creature pool. Maybe you'll see some of them on this blog?



"We've been working on making things wet. Very wet," was the single-sentence summary out of the Terraformers team on Friday. In addition to some cool secret projects (to be revealed later) they've been helping out with the new dynamic weather system to make thing look nice and wet when it rains. Now we feel like we need a shower.


We had a round of combat testing on Friday afternoon to see how the newest additions to the combat prototypes behave "in the wild". There's even a nifty arena set up for our testing. Because obviously you need a proper fighting pit when you're doing combat prototyping. Again, keep in mind that this is just prototyping and testing. There's no set date for when any of this will make it into the game.


Thank you once again for reading. We hope you enjoy reading these newsletters. We do read and appreciate your feedback, even if we're not always there to immediately respond to it. Please do not mistake silence for apathy. We really care about this game and we are doing our very best to make it as good as we can.

As mentioned previously we are currently in a polishing phase in the development of Conan Exiles. This means we're working on improving the current features we already have in the game before we start working on adding additional features. This is why we haven't mentioned things like pets, city management, The Purge or the sorcery system in this blog. Once we're satisfied with the game's level of polish we'll continue working on new features.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Dear exiles,

Happy November everyone! Hope you all had a great Halloween and that you didn't overstuff yourselves on sugary sweets. We celebrated the only way we could think of: Smashing pumpkins. Literally. Many thanks to our American community managers Nicole Vayo and Andy Benditt for taking time out of their work schedules to partake in what we hope will become a great new pastime.

We've had some new people joining us this week: a new coder, Marcine, a new 3D artist, Gunnar, and a new project manager, Ramona. Welcome to the team, guys!

And now, for your favorite pastime: reading the rest of the weekly newsletter.


The patch we mentioned sending to Microsoft late last week passed certification, but we needed to wait for a store upgrade from Microsoft before we could push it to live. It's now been released into the wild, so hopefully players can summon avatars again. We also hope the dancers no longer crash your servers.


We're currently in the process of building a new live candidate from the version of the game currently up on Testlive. There are bugs and exploits that we're currently working on fixing that will be included in this live candidate. Chief among them are duplication exploits and a speed increase bug. They're both fixed in Testlive, along with a host of other bugs. There are some additional bugs in the Testlive version that need to be fixed (another duping bug, for example), but once those have been sorted out, we will move this version from Testlive to live.

However, we should have hotfixed these bugs much, much sooner. We should also have been more communicative with you, the community, about what was going on. For this we apologize. Please understand that we haven't been ignoring you or keeping you in the dark. It was just a case of human error.

We're currently planning for the patch to go live on Thursday. We'll also be doing some cleanup on the official servers.


Every Friday, the development team meets up to highlight and talk about what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. So as not to make this newsletter overly long we're only sticking to the highlights from the teams. Things are still being worked on "behind the scenes", and we'll mention these when they're relevant.


The Vanguard has grown since last week! The Featureama team has been integrated into The Vanguard to help out with bug fixing, now that we're in our polish phase. More people means more bugs fixed! They've fixed the speed exploit and the duplication exploit previously, and one of the coders are working on a different, final duplication bug on Testlive.


The art team is still pumping out new outfits, creatures and weapons. You can see the brand new Kambujan Shaman outfit in the image below, and we'll be bringing you renders of other cultural styles in the coming weeks. On the creature side of things, they're experimenting with creating more fantastical beings to further fill out the creature pool. Maybe you'll see some of them on this blog?



"We've been working on making things wet. Very wet," was the single-sentence summary out of the Terraformers team on Friday. In addition to some cool secret projects (to be revealed later) they've been helping out with the new dynamic weather system to make thing look nice and wet when it rains. Now we feel like we need a shower.


We had a round of combat testing on Friday afternoon to see how the newest additions to the combat prototypes behave "in the wild". There's even a nifty arena set up for our testing. Because obviously you need a proper fighting pit when you're doing combat prototyping. Again, keep in mind that this is just prototyping and testing. There's no set date for when any of this will make it into the game.


Thank you once again for reading. We hope you enjoy reading these newsletters. We do read and appreciate your feedback, even if we're not always there to immediately respond to it. Please do not mistake silence for apathy. We really care about this game and we are doing our very best to make it as good as we can.

As mentioned previously we are currently in a polishing phase in the development of Conan Exiles. This means we're working on improving the current features we already have in the game before we start working on adding additional features. This is why we haven't mentioned things like pets, city management, The Purge or the sorcery system in this blog. Once we're satisfied with the game's level of polish we'll continue working on new features.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Photo: Robin Baumgarten

Dear exiles,

We have returned! There was no newsletter last week as Joel and I attended SplashJam the week before that (meaning we weren't at the weekly dev meeting). SplashJam is a game jam on a cruise ship travelling from Tromsø to Trondheim in Norway. Funcom was one of the sponsors of the event with Amazon, D-Pad Studios and Unity, among others, with Joel and I acting as mentors for the attendees. You can find a bunch of pictures and videos from the event on the Funcom Twitter feed. The header image (Photo: Robin Baumgarten) is from the second night of the jam.

Now onto the newsletter itself!


Last week we released another patch to the Testlive branch on Steam. We're hoping to publish this version as our next content update. Included in this update are thrall inventories, new building pieces and repair kits. We'll publish an extensive blog post on this update once it's been released.


We sent off a patch to Microsoft for certification on Sunday. Since this patch contains a fix for the broken entertainment thralls we really want it to pass certification so we can push it to live. This patch should also allow you to summon god avatars again. A fix for the single-player stamina bug (and resource respawning) is in the works.


Every Friday, the development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete.


Bug fixes! The biggest is a fix for bedrolls to stop them from killing you when you spawn on them.


As revealed last week, there's a new weather system on the way. This reworked system will create more dynamic weather types and remove bugs from the older system.


The Art team has given Conan a facelift so he'll look better during cinematics. With some digital botoxing, tucking and lifting, the hardened barbarian looks at least ten years younger. On the VFX side of things there's some new occlusion tech in the works to further improve the look of the weather system.

Our character artists are creating new Hyrkanian and Kambujan Shaman Outfit clothes, moving us even further towards having clothing options for every culture represented in the game. Finally, our incredible creature artist is making something we simply call "The Ooze". You'll get to see more of this in the future.


The Xbox One X console is out next week and Conan Exiles will be one of the supported games. We're using the increased power of the console to increase the graphics resolution, improve shadow quality, increase effective resolution textures, increase view distance. Technically it should also shorten down loading times as well. We felt this was the best way to utilize the new hardware.

Our tool for gathering and reporting crash statistics is coming along, giving us a better way to visualize and understand the issues in the different versions of the game.

Last, but not least, we have a mostly working PlayStation 4 version of Conan Exiles that's been sent off to QA. We've partnered with a company called Testronics to test our games and they'll put the game through the proverbial wringer for us. Full launch across all platforms is scheduled for Q2, 2018.


Thanks for reading! See you in the next one!

Sincerely,

Funcom

Photo: Robin Baumgarten

Dear exiles,

We have returned! There was no newsletter last week as Joel and I attended SplashJam the week before that (meaning we weren't at the weekly dev meeting). SplashJam is a game jam on a cruise ship travelling from Tromsø to Trondheim in Norway. Funcom was one of the sponsors of the event with Amazon, D-Pad Studios and Unity, among others, with Joel and I acting as mentors for the attendees. You can find a bunch of pictures and videos from the event on the Funcom Twitter feed. The header image (Photo: Robin Baumgarten) is from the second night of the jam.

Now onto the newsletter itself!


Last week we released another patch to the Testlive branch on Steam. We're hoping to publish this version as our next content update. Included in this update are thrall inventories, new building pieces and repair kits. We'll publish an extensive blog post on this update once it's been released.


We sent off a patch to Microsoft for certification on Sunday. Since this patch contains a fix for the broken entertainment thralls we really want it to pass certification so we can push it to live. This patch should also allow you to summon god avatars again. A fix for the single-player stamina bug (and resource respawning) is in the works.


Every Friday, the development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete.


Bug fixes! The biggest is a fix for bedrolls to stop them from killing you when you spawn on them.


As revealed last week, there's a new weather system on the way. This reworked system will create more dynamic weather types and remove bugs from the older system.


The Art team has given Conan a facelift so he'll look better during cinematics. With some digital botoxing, tucking and lifting, the hardened barbarian looks at least ten years younger. On the VFX side of things there's some new occlusion tech in the works to further improve the look of the weather system.

Our character artists are creating new Hyrkanian and Kambujan Shaman Outfit clothes, moving us even further towards having clothing options for every culture represented in the game. Finally, our incredible creature artist is making something we simply call "The Ooze". You'll get to see more of this in the future.


The Xbox One X console is out next week and Conan Exiles will be one of the supported games. We're using the increased power of the console to increase the graphics resolution, improve shadow quality, increase effective resolution textures, increase view distance. Technically it should also shorten down loading times as well. We felt this was the best way to utilize the new hardware.

Our tool for gathering and reporting crash statistics is coming along, giving us a better way to visualize and understand the issues in the different versions of the game.

Last, but not least, we have a mostly working PlayStation 4 version of Conan Exiles that's been sent off to QA. We've partnered with a company called Testronics to test our games and they'll put the game through the proverbial wringer for us. Full launch across all platforms is scheduled for Q2, 2018.


Thanks for reading! See you in the next one!

Sincerely,

Funcom

Hey everyone,

Here's a quick update about the release window of the game:

We've been looking at our development roadmap for Conan Exiles, and considering the level of quality and polish we would like to meet before full release.

Making sure that Conan Exiles is of a high technical and gameplay quality is our number one priority right now. As such, we have decided to take a little more time than we had originally planned, to make sure we get as much polish in as we can before it moves out of Early Access.

So we're pushing the release date from Q1 2018 to early Q2 2018. It's not a major shift in release, but it will make a significant difference on the quality of the game.

Hey everyone,

Here's a quick update about the release window of the game:

We've been looking at our development roadmap for Conan Exiles, and considering the level of quality and polish we would like to meet before full release.

Making sure that Conan Exiles is of a high technical and gameplay quality is our number one priority right now. As such, we have decided to take a little more time than we had originally planned, to make sure we get as much polish in as we can before it moves out of Early Access.

So we're pushing the release date from Q1 2018 to early Q2 2018. It's not a major shift in release, but it will make a significant difference on the quality of the game.

Dear exiles,

We hope everyone's had a good weekend and that the fall weather is treating you well. I'll keep the introduction short this week so we can get to the good stuff!


Last week we pushed a new build to Testlive with some exciting changes. You can now interact with archer, fighter and dancer thralls and open their inventories. This means you can equip better armors and weapons and thereby increase their survivability and damage potential!

New thralls will only be clothed in the most basic, coarse tunic after you remove them from the Wheel of Pain. They'll still retain their weapons, so they can fight, but without armor they might not survive for long.

One side effect of introducing the thrall inventories was that you could no longer pickup these thralls once they have been deployed [due to inventory item restrictions]. This makes it more cumbersome to move thralls over long distances. We are therefore adding support for archer, fighter and dancer thralls to follow you around instead. This should make it easier to rearrange your defenses. The follow mechanics also opens up the doorway for rescuing thralls in the future.

We have also introduced repair kits and patch kits to complement the new and reworked repair system. These allow you to do partial repairs on weapons and armor sets, respectively. They become available at level 12 and you can unlock higher tier ones which are more efficient for repairs at higher levels. Finally, we added some more roofing pieces (bringing the total number of new building pieces up to 195) so you'll have more variety when building. We will update TestLive this week with bugfixes as well as the ability to tell thralls to follow you around, and we aim for the patch to go to Live during next week.


Xbox was patched last week with a hotfix to take care of some memory and texture loading issues. We found an error where the game was using up too much memory, causing the client to crash. The version we rolled out last week seems to have helped a lot with client stability. Work continues on server stability with G-portal, our official server partner.


Every Friday, the entire development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete. You can find their names and descriptions in the first community letter.


The Vanguard has been on the crash and bug fixing train this past week, resolving both inventory crashes and server crashes. Hopefully they make it into the game really soon. They've also been helping out team Berserkers by adding improved ragdolls for humanoids. As mentioned last week: knocking someone down with a giant hammer isn't the same if he doesn't go flying in a heap of limbs.

Other than that, there's been some changes to temperature and how building pieces will affect your character. Basically, we made them temperature resistant. Sandstone, for instance, is supposed to make you colder, but only past a certain threshold. If your character is warm, taking shelter in a Sandstone building will start to cool you down towards Temperate, the neutral state. It won't make you colder beyond 0. If you're already cold it won't push your temperature down further. If the area you're in is cold something like Insulated Wood can't make you any warmer, but it will try to bring you up to a neutral temperature. Which is how it should work.


As revealed last week, the new dungeon is located inside the large Volcano in the north. Inside the volcano you will meet a new faction, who holds a mysterious attachment to the old ruins that rest at the center of the caldera, nestled atop a deadly lake of lava.

The Volcano will bring a new mechanic to the game that will challenge your skill and agility to even reach the dungeon at its heart.


The art team is still filling in the different gaps in the crafting system. There are a bunch of new weapons in the works, two of which you got to see last week. This week, two more! Expect to see more in the weeks to come. Beyond the traditional weapons, design work has begun on special weapons to capture thralls. Personally, I'm hoping for a net you can fire with a crossbow.





On the animation side the facial rig we finalized a few weeks back is being integrated into our motion capture system for future use. Finally, there's a new creature coming to The Frozen North, one we won't reveal just yet, but it's currently being animated. It's big, hairy, and will pose a significant threat.





Those weren't the new monster, by the way. They're just adorable baby animals


The Featurama team has been busy with optimization work, making sure everything in the game is working at a certain threshold of polish. They've been tackling FPS drops when destroying buildings and how to properly handle thrall equipment (thralls are very protective of their equipment).

Finally, they've started working on an upgrade to the weather system. This reworking will create more dynamic weather types and remove bugs from the older system.

[/h1]The Berserkers (Combat and movement)[/h1]

Combat prototyping is far from over and The Berserkers is moving into gameplay design to further iterate on the combat system in the game. They're looking at stacks, buffs, combo attacks and different weapon properties, and brainstorming how it all can fit together in Conan Exiles.

Something that's being considered is a more free-flow movement and combat system, where your character won't end up facing the camera during combat. It's still on the experimental stage, and might not make it into the game at all, but it's a possibility.


On the back-end side of things the tools team have been wrestling with the Unreal Editor, fixing whatever problems and crashes the developers might be having. They've also been working on extracting better crash data for future crash fixes.

The rest of the tech team have been working on improving stability and performance on the Xbox One, specifically by improving how the client loads and streams in game data. Previously you'd load in everything when jumping into a server or single-player game. This doesn't just take a while, but streaming in all that data can also cause the client to crash. We're now looking into a way to load in data in chunks and stream those to the player, hopefully improving stability and performance. There's no firm ETA yet, as it still needs more testing and polish. Don't expect it to come out immediately.


This year, Funcom is sponsoring Splash Jam, a traveling game jam on a cruise ship travelling from Tromsø to Trondheim on the 18th to the 21st of October. Joel and myself, Jens Erik, will be attending and tweeting about the event on the official Funcom Twitter account.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Dear exiles,

We hope everyone's had a good weekend and that the fall weather is treating you well. I'll keep the introduction short this week so we can get to the good stuff!


Last week we pushed a new build to Testlive with some exciting changes. You can now interact with archer, fighter and dancer thralls and open their inventories. This means you can equip better armors and weapons and thereby increase their survivability and damage potential!

New thralls will only be clothed in the most basic, coarse tunic after you remove them from the Wheel of Pain. They'll still retain their weapons, so they can fight, but without armor they might not survive for long.

One side effect of introducing the thrall inventories was that you could no longer pickup these thralls once they have been deployed [due to inventory item restrictions]. This makes it more cumbersome to move thralls over long distances. We are therefore adding support for archer, fighter and dancer thralls to follow you around instead. This should make it easier to rearrange your defenses. The follow mechanics also opens up the doorway for rescuing thralls in the future.

We have also introduced repair kits and patch kits to complement the new and reworked repair system. These allow you to do partial repairs on weapons and armor sets, respectively. They become available at level 12 and you can unlock higher tier ones which are more efficient for repairs at higher levels. Finally, we added some more roofing pieces (bringing the total number of new building pieces up to 195) so you'll have more variety when building. We will update TestLive this week with bugfixes as well as the ability to tell thralls to follow you around, and we aim for the patch to go to Live during next week.


Xbox was patched last week with a hotfix to take care of some memory and texture loading issues. We found an error where the game was using up too much memory, causing the client to crash. The version we rolled out last week seems to have helped a lot with client stability. Work continues on server stability with G-portal, our official server partner.


Every Friday, the entire development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete. You can find their names and descriptions in the first community letter.


The Vanguard has been on the crash and bug fixing train this past week, resolving both inventory crashes and server crashes. Hopefully they make it into the game really soon. They've also been helping out team Berserkers by adding improved ragdolls for humanoids. As mentioned last week: knocking someone down with a giant hammer isn't the same if he doesn't go flying in a heap of limbs.

Other than that, there's been some changes to temperature and how building pieces will affect your character. Basically, we made them temperature resistant. Sandstone, for instance, is supposed to make you colder, but only past a certain threshold. If your character is warm, taking shelter in a Sandstone building will start to cool you down towards Temperate, the neutral state. It won't make you colder beyond 0. If you're already cold it won't push your temperature down further. If the area you're in is cold something like Insulated Wood can't make you any warmer, but it will try to bring you up to a neutral temperature. Which is how it should work.


As revealed last week, the new dungeon is located inside the large Volcano in the north. Inside the volcano you will meet a new faction, who holds a mysterious attachment to the old ruins that rest at the center of the caldera, nestled atop a deadly lake of lava.

The Volcano will bring a new mechanic to the game that will challenge your skill and agility to even reach the dungeon at its heart.


The art team is still filling in the different gaps in the crafting system. There are a bunch of new weapons in the works, two of which you got to see last week. This week, two more! Expect to see more in the weeks to come. Beyond the traditional weapons, design work has begun on special weapons to capture thralls. Personally, I'm hoping for a net you can fire with a crossbow.





On the animation side the facial rig we finalized a few weeks back is being integrated into our motion capture system for future use. Finally, there's a new creature coming to The Frozen North, one we won't reveal just yet, but it's currently being animated. It's big, hairy, and will pose a significant threat.





Those weren't the new monster, by the way. They're just adorable baby animals


The Featurama team has been busy with optimization work, making sure everything in the game is working at a certain threshold of polish. They've been tackling FPS drops when destroying buildings and how to properly handle thrall equipment (thralls are very protective of their equipment).

Finally, they've started working on an upgrade to the weather system. This reworking will create more dynamic weather types and remove bugs from the older system.

[/h1]The Berserkers (Combat and movement)[/h1]

Combat prototyping is far from over and The Berserkers is moving into gameplay design to further iterate on the combat system in the game. They're looking at stacks, buffs, combo attacks and different weapon properties, and brainstorming how it all can fit together in Conan Exiles.

Something that's being considered is a more free-flow movement and combat system, where your character won't end up facing the camera during combat. It's still on the experimental stage, and might not make it into the game at all, but it's a possibility.


On the back-end side of things the tools team have been wrestling with the Unreal Editor, fixing whatever problems and crashes the developers might be having. They've also been working on extracting better crash data for future crash fixes.

The rest of the tech team have been working on improving stability and performance on the Xbox One, specifically by improving how the client loads and streams in game data. Previously you'd load in everything when jumping into a server or single-player game. This doesn't just take a while, but streaming in all that data can also cause the client to crash. We're now looking into a way to load in data in chunks and stream those to the player, hopefully improving stability and performance. There's no firm ETA yet, as it still needs more testing and polish. Don't expect it to come out immediately.


This year, Funcom is sponsoring Splash Jam, a traveling game jam on a cruise ship travelling from Tromsø to Trondheim on the 18th to the 21st of October. Joel and myself, Jens Erik, will be attending and tweeting about the event on the official Funcom Twitter account.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Hey all! We have a new update in TestLive and would appreciate any feedback from it. This includes the addition of thrall inventory. Make sure to do it in this thread here, which includes the patch notes:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/440900/discussions/7/1488861734124414314/

TestLive feedback only in that thread please! :)

Hey all! We have a new update in TestLive and would appreciate any feedback from it. This includes the addition of thrall inventory. Make sure to do it in this thread here, which includes the patch notes:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/440900/discussions/7/1488861734124414314/

TestLive feedback only in that thread please! :)