Dear Exiles,

A year ago today our Early Access adventure began. We want to thank our community for joining us on this journey, for all your feedback, bug reports, suggestions and words of encouragement along the way. Stay tuned to the end of the video for a special announcement.

https://youtu.be/do5hd_hCTt0

Dear Exiles,

A year ago today our Early Access adventure began. We want to thank our community for joining us on this journey, for all your feedback, bug reports, suggestions and words of encouragement along the way. Stay tuned to the end of the video for a special announcement.

https://youtu.be/do5hd_hCTt0

Good afternoon, you galloping love fruit-bats. Here we are again, back with another newsletter!

We've finalized our roadmap and development milestones for the final stretch of the Early Access process, meaning we're now barreling towards the endgame. On said roadmap are things like the combat revamp, additional items, content revamp and a host of other goodies we'll share on stream and in these newsletter in the coming months.

The volcano and jungle will become available at launch, whereas the new combat paradigm will definitely roll out on PC before May 8th. Project Content Rebalance will hopefully make it to PC players pre-launch, but may be moved back depending on when the work is finished.

Following up on what we mentioned last week, we have now moved into a crunch period to get everything ready and finalized for physical discs, aka "The Gold Build". This is the build what will be on the discs you buy in a store. It's a fully functional game that players can pick up and play without the need for an Internet connection. We can't assume that people will patch, since not everyone has Internet access 24/7, so this build needs to be stable and contain everything players expect. From a bug-fixing perspective it means prioritizing serious bugs that block player progress

The submission and certification process runs through January and February and the Gold Build needs to be locked in and ready for print about 6-8 weeks before full launch. The reason for this is that printing physical discs happens in one location, while packaging the physical editions takes place in a different location. Only certain printing houses are authorized to print console discs, so we have to work around their capacity and lead time requirements. On PC things are more relaxed. There's more flexibility in terms of where the discs are printed.

Once the Gold Build is approved the devteam will switch focus to the day 1 patch for PC and consoles. The day 1 patch will include less critical fixes as well as some content changes which did not make it into the Gold Build. If you're interested in reading more about Day 1 Patches there's a great blog post from Rami Ismail on the topic over on Kotaku.

Early Access players on PC will continue to see some patches and updates, albeit somewhat less frequently. For Xbox players it means there won't be an Update 32 Parity Patch until March at the earliest. Once the submission and certification process begins Microsoft doesn't allow us to add anything to the current Game Preview version of the game. We apologize for not being able to release this patch sooner, and thank you for your patience.

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. To not make this newsletter overly long we're only sticking to the highlights. Even if something isn't explicitly mentioned things are still being worked on "behind the scenes", and we'll mention these when they're relevant.



Hey, would you look at that! Two-handed swords! These are scheduled to come out at launch, and players can craft them out of Stone, Iron, Steel, Hardened Steel and Starmetal. Much like the hammers, they're big and heavy, taking a long time to swing, but also deal a lot of damage once they connect to an opponent.



Secondly, sprinting with weapons and tools is back! This was removed a while back, partly in order to deal with lag jousting, where players would use server latency to win combat encounters. The other reason was to highlight the difference between being in and out of combat. Sprinting away from an encounter is the defining factor that differentiates being in, or out, of combat. However, after both taking your feedback into account and seeing that lag jousting is essentially eliminated with the new combat paradigm, we're making it so you can sprint with weapons and tools again.

We fired off a second combat playtest on Friday, with a ton of changes and updates from the previous test (like sprinting with weapons!). There's still experimentation going on in terms of stamina management, health regeneration and damage numbers, but we're steadily moving towards a version that we think will be balanced and fun, and once we are at that stage we will deploy to Testlive servers to hear your feedback and suggestions!

Vanguard's main task at the moment is getting builds ready for certification, making sure they meet all the necessary requirements set by Microsoft and Sony. Pretty much everything from stability, branding, GUI consistency and responsiveness have certain requirements that we need to hit. This is to ensure that the experience on Xbox and PlayStation is more consistent across all games than on PC, where it's more up to each individual developer.

In addition to this one of our Vanguard designers has finished up work on the new perk system, which will add improvements and modifiers to your character based on how you've levelled up your Attributes. Examples include things like a double jump skill, better stamina consumption, quicker healing, and now, a ricochet shot, for all you Hanzo mains out there.

They've also shown the system for dying and respawning some needed love in order to improve the experience for players. Player corpses should now reload better after a server crash, which had some inconsistencies in the past. Death Markers should also be less prone to breaking. NPC and player corpses now have different expiry times, and they've added a neat little glowing green light that emanates from your character's bracelet when they die.

Last, but certainly not least, is a quick loot GUI to help you take things from players and NPCs much quicker than before.

The Terraformers have been wrapping up the final bits of content they need to get wrapped up for the Gold Build. We've talked extensively about the volcano and jungle already, so we'll leave those out for a bit this time and talk about some other stuff!

Project Content Rebalance has been going well so far and we got to experience a sample of the changes during the Friday combat playtest. This rebalance involves tweaking the NPC population and resource nodes in order to provide a more diverse and challenging experience to players. Being used to the previous "shotgun approach" to NPCs and resources the game definitely felt different, but in a positive way. Creatures and NPCs were sparser, which made meeting other humans feel more special, like the Exiled Lands really were a place only the strongest can survive.

In terms of new content there's a lot in the pipeline that's coming in for launch. We've mentioned skinning daggers before, and there are 5-6 of them of different materials, planned for the Gold Build. New bows, swords, axes, maces, spears, armors, arrows, resources, crafting materials, deities, trophies, and some secret things are all scheduled to come out in the final, launch build of the game.

We're back on the bi-weekly stream train over on our Twitch channel. If you missed it on Friday, you can find the VOD of our latest stream on YouTube. Friday's stream was very silly, and a little chaotic at times, but we definitely had fun with it. We plan to do more community focused streams in the future, spotlighting mods, doing a cool building project, Q&A's and more.

And that should be it for this week! Thank you so very much for reading, for continuing to support Conan Exiles and being a part of this amazing community.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Good afternoon, you galloping love fruit-bats. Here we are again, back with another newsletter!

We've finalized our roadmap and development milestones for the final stretch of the Early Access process, meaning we're now barreling towards the endgame. On said roadmap are things like the combat revamp, additional items, content revamp and a host of other goodies we'll share on stream and in these newsletter in the coming months.

The volcano and jungle will become available at launch, whereas the new combat paradigm will definitely roll out on PC before May 8th. Project Content Rebalance will hopefully make it to PC players pre-launch, but may be moved back depending on when the work is finished.

Following up on what we mentioned last week, we have now moved into a crunch period to get everything ready and finalized for physical discs, aka "The Gold Build". This is the build what will be on the discs you buy in a store. It's a fully functional game that players can pick up and play without the need for an Internet connection. We can't assume that people will patch, since not everyone has Internet access 24/7, so this build needs to be stable and contain everything players expect. From a bug-fixing perspective it means prioritizing serious bugs that block player progress

The submission and certification process runs through January and February and the Gold Build needs to be locked in and ready for print about 6-8 weeks before full launch. The reason for this is that printing physical discs happens in one location, while packaging the physical editions takes place in a different location. Only certain printing houses are authorized to print console discs, so we have to work around their capacity and lead time requirements. On PC things are more relaxed. There's more flexibility in terms of where the discs are printed.

Once the Gold Build is approved the devteam will switch focus to the day 1 patch for PC and consoles. The day 1 patch will include less critical fixes as well as some content changes which did not make it into the Gold Build. If you're interested in reading more about Day 1 Patches there's a great blog post from Rami Ismail on the topic over on Kotaku.

Early Access players on PC will continue to see some patches and updates, albeit somewhat less frequently. For Xbox players it means there won't be an Update 32 Parity Patch until March at the earliest. Once the submission and certification process begins Microsoft doesn't allow us to add anything to the current Game Preview version of the game. We apologize for not being able to release this patch sooner, and thank you for your patience.

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. To not make this newsletter overly long we're only sticking to the highlights. Even if something isn't explicitly mentioned things are still being worked on "behind the scenes", and we'll mention these when they're relevant.



Hey, would you look at that! Two-handed swords! These are scheduled to come out at launch, and players can craft them out of Stone, Iron, Steel, Hardened Steel and Starmetal. Much like the hammers, they're big and heavy, taking a long time to swing, but also deal a lot of damage once they connect to an opponent.



Secondly, sprinting with weapons and tools is back! This was removed a while back, partly in order to deal with lag jousting, where players would use server latency to win combat encounters. The other reason was to highlight the difference between being in and out of combat. Sprinting away from an encounter is the defining factor that differentiates being in, or out, of combat. However, after both taking your feedback into account and seeing that lag jousting is essentially eliminated with the new combat paradigm, we're making it so you can sprint with weapons and tools again.

We fired off a second combat playtest on Friday, with a ton of changes and updates from the previous test (like sprinting with weapons!). There's still experimentation going on in terms of stamina management, health regeneration and damage numbers, but we're steadily moving towards a version that we think will be balanced and fun, and once we are at that stage we will deploy to Testlive servers to hear your feedback and suggestions!

Vanguard's main task at the moment is getting builds ready for certification, making sure they meet all the necessary requirements set by Microsoft and Sony. Pretty much everything from stability, branding, GUI consistency and responsiveness have certain requirements that we need to hit. This is to ensure that the experience on Xbox and PlayStation is more consistent across all games than on PC, where it's more up to each individual developer.

In addition to this one of our Vanguard designers has finished up work on the new perk system, which will add improvements and modifiers to your character based on how you've levelled up your Attributes. Examples include things like a double jump skill, better stamina consumption, quicker healing, and now, a ricochet shot, for all you Hanzo mains out there.

They've also shown the system for dying and respawning some needed love in order to improve the experience for players. Player corpses should now reload better after a server crash, which had some inconsistencies in the past. Death Markers should also be less prone to breaking. NPC and player corpses now have different expiry times, and they've added a neat little glowing green light that emanates from your character's bracelet when they die.

Last, but certainly not least, is a quick loot GUI to help you take things from players and NPCs much quicker than before.

The Terraformers have been wrapping up the final bits of content they need to get wrapped up for the Gold Build. We've talked extensively about the volcano and jungle already, so we'll leave those out for a bit this time and talk about some other stuff!

Project Content Rebalance has been going well so far and we got to experience a sample of the changes during the Friday combat playtest. This rebalance involves tweaking the NPC population and resource nodes in order to provide a more diverse and challenging experience to players. Being used to the previous "shotgun approach" to NPCs and resources the game definitely felt different, but in a positive way. Creatures and NPCs were sparser, which made meeting other humans feel more special, like the Exiled Lands really were a place only the strongest can survive.

In terms of new content there's a lot in the pipeline that's coming in for launch. We've mentioned skinning daggers before, and there are 5-6 of them of different materials, planned for the Gold Build. New bows, swords, axes, maces, spears, armors, arrows, resources, crafting materials, deities, trophies, and some secret things are all scheduled to come out in the final, launch build of the game.

We're back on the bi-weekly stream train over on our Twitch channel. If you missed it on Friday, you can find the VOD of our latest stream on YouTube. Friday's stream was very silly, and a little chaotic at times, but we definitely had fun with it. We plan to do more community focused streams in the future, spotlighting mods, doing a cool building project, Q&A's and more.

And that should be it for this week! Thank you so very much for reading, for continuing to support Conan Exiles and being a part of this amazing community.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Welcome back you chthonian fleshpools! Hope your weekend was delightful and that the new year has been treating you well so far. It's time for another community newsletter and this week we have some stuff that we think you might like!

As you may already know, we're launching Conan Exiles for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on May 8th. This means we're now at the point where we need to start working on the build that will be put on the discs you can buy at your local video game store. The build needs to be ready at the end of January so the testing and certification process can begin. In practice, that won't have a massive impact on players, but for us it might mean some extra overtime and work. Nothing we can't handle, though.

We rolled out a PC patch today to take care of some bugs and crashes. This fixes the loot bag freeze and corrects some additional issues that have been requested by the community. The temperature system has been made more stable with this patch, and fall damage has been reduced.
We rolled out a bug and crash fixing update for Xbox on Monday. It gave us a tiny scare when it looked like none of the servers were working, but thanks to some quick work by G-Portal we were able to speedily take care of everything.

This was not the parity patch that would bring Update 32 to Xbox One. It will be released at a later date.

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. To not make this newsletter overly long we're only sticking to the highlights. Even if something isn't explicitly mentioned things are still being worked on "behind the scenes", and we'll mention these when they're relevant.

We did a studio wide playtest of the new combat system on Friday. Everyone on the Conan Exiles team were pitted against each other underneath the scorching sun of the Exiled Lands. The goal of the playtest was to, obviously, test how the new paradigm behaves and how we, as players, respond to it. Overall the test went really well. The Berserkers team gathered a lot of feedback on how it all felt to play and lingering bugs that need to be fixed. We're doing another playtest this week as well. Come mid-February we hope to have a version ready for Testlive, so all of you can dig in.

What we can tell you are a few details on how it all works. Much like before, combat is divided into light and heavy attacks that can be freely strung together into combos. Attacks consume stamina, forcing you to not just rush in and blindly start hitting the attack buttons when encountering an enemy. You can also block oncoming attacks to stagger enemies, setting them up for a counter attack. So far so similar to the old system.

The new combat system adds in status effects, an improved system for staggering, more animations and more varied attacks. Status effects include things like bleeding, crippling, sundering, knockdown launchers, shield smashing and staggers. How these come into play will be revealed at a later date.

There's also been done more work to differentiate the weapons and make them feel unique when you attack. Instead of just swinging or stabbing, each weapon type has specific attacks and animations that make them feel distinct. Daggers are quick, best used to strike and then dodge away. Hammers are heavy and take time to swing, but you can sometimes gain stagger immunity during attacks. Hammers can also launch people up into the air if you hit them right. Which is just awesome!

This week, we're giving you both a peek at the entrance to the new Volcano dungeon and a look at a part of the jungle biome. You'll have to wait a little while longer before you'll be able to explore these place to your heart's content, but we can promise you it will be worth the wait.



As you reach the volcano you'll need to make your way into the center of the crater, where you'll find the entrance to the dungeon. It looks like an ancient temple, a remnant from a bygone age, where an unknown people would conduct rituals of a strange and dark nature. This is what will greet you when you enter the temple. Now the temple is not the dungeon proper, it merely houses the entryway to the dungeon. How you enter it is up for you to discover.



The jungle also contains the ruins of an ancient civilization, a people who were destroyed in a great Cataclysm long ago. You'll find their remains scattered throughout this area. This giant stone face depicts the Witch Queen, a woman of great magical power who ruled with an iron fist. Now these ruins are all that remain of her reign.

This particular place connects the jungle to the icy north through an underground travel, allowing quick passage between the two areas for travelers.

As always, Vanguard is all about the bug and exploit fixing. Since this would be the place for it, we figured it'd be interesting to give a quick explanation of our bug fixing process. As the developers or the community discover bugs, glitches and possible exploits we'll write up a report with a step-by-step guide on how to replicate the case in question. If our QA guys are able to consistently replicate the bug it's assigned a severity and given to a coder or designer for fixing. Usually we need to rejigger a blueprint in the Unreal Editor, or we might dig into the game code in order to fix the bug. The fix is then tested by QA to make sure the bug has actually been fixed. 

In addition to fixing bugs we're working on a new HUD (Heads Up Display) to better convey information to players. We want to tweak the HUD to make it work better with the more action-packed combat system so you can see your health, stamina and other stats at a glance. Once we have something to show you, we'll let you sneak a peek at what it looks like. 

Over on the Art team our character artists have been hard at work with re-making King Conan's Royal Armor from Age of Conan, which you will get to see very soon. This is an in-game item that will be given to everyone who buys the Early Access or Game Preview version of Conan Exiles. There will be a variant for female characters as well, naturally.

Improvements are being made on character models across the board. Everything from skin and facial textures to eyebrows and hair are being updated to optimize them further and take care of whatever issues and bugs might still linger. There's also work being done to expand the make-up options during character creation.

Finally, intrepid players might have noticed that we still have two more gods left in the religion selector. Our creature artist is working on two more god avatars, which we'll reveal in a future community update, so you can start speculating now on who it will be.

We're returning to our biweekly dev streams on Twitch (that's the every two weeks definition of biweekly) on Friday, January 19th. It's going to be a similar thing to the stream we did before the holiday break, where we play the game to have fun and chill out. Nicole and Jens Erik will be teaching Andy, who's community manager for Secret World Legends, to play Conan Exiles.

Hope you'll be able to join us for some laughs and good times on our Twitch channel. twitch.tv/funcom.

We'll see you next week for another newsletter!

Sincerely,

Funcom

Welcome back you chthonian fleshpools! Hope your weekend was delightful and that the new year has been treating you well so far. It's time for another community newsletter and this week we have some stuff that we think you might like!

As you may already know, we're launching Conan Exiles for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on May 8th. This means we're now at the point where we need to start working on the build that will be put on the discs you can buy at your local video game store. The build needs to be ready at the end of January so the testing and certification process can begin. In practice, that won't have a massive impact on players, but for us it might mean some extra overtime and work. Nothing we can't handle, though.

We rolled out a PC patch today to take care of some bugs and crashes. This fixes the loot bag freeze and corrects some additional issues that have been requested by the community. The temperature system has been made more stable with this patch, and fall damage has been reduced.
We rolled out a bug and crash fixing update for Xbox on Monday. It gave us a tiny scare when it looked like none of the servers were working, but thanks to some quick work by G-Portal we were able to speedily take care of everything.

This was not the parity patch that would bring Update 32 to Xbox One. It will be released at a later date.

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. To not make this newsletter overly long we're only sticking to the highlights. Even if something isn't explicitly mentioned things are still being worked on "behind the scenes", and we'll mention these when they're relevant.

We did a studio wide playtest of the new combat system on Friday. Everyone on the Conan Exiles team were pitted against each other underneath the scorching sun of the Exiled Lands. The goal of the playtest was to, obviously, test how the new paradigm behaves and how we, as players, respond to it. Overall the test went really well. The Berserkers team gathered a lot of feedback on how it all felt to play and lingering bugs that need to be fixed. We're doing another playtest this week as well. Come mid-February we hope to have a version ready for Testlive, so all of you can dig in.

What we can tell you are a few details on how it all works. Much like before, combat is divided into light and heavy attacks that can be freely strung together into combos. Attacks consume stamina, forcing you to not just rush in and blindly start hitting the attack buttons when encountering an enemy. You can also block oncoming attacks to stagger enemies, setting them up for a counter attack. So far so similar to the old system.

The new combat system adds in status effects, an improved system for staggering, more animations and more varied attacks. Status effects include things like bleeding, crippling, sundering, knockdown launchers, shield smashing and staggers. How these come into play will be revealed at a later date.

There's also been done more work to differentiate the weapons and make them feel unique when you attack. Instead of just swinging or stabbing, each weapon type has specific attacks and animations that make them feel distinct. Daggers are quick, best used to strike and then dodge away. Hammers are heavy and take time to swing, but you can sometimes gain stagger immunity during attacks. Hammers can also launch people up into the air if you hit them right. Which is just awesome!

This week, we're giving you both a peek at the entrance to the new Volcano dungeon and a look at a part of the jungle biome. You'll have to wait a little while longer before you'll be able to explore these place to your heart's content, but we can promise you it will be worth the wait.



As you reach the volcano you'll need to make your way into the center of the crater, where you'll find the entrance to the dungeon. It looks like an ancient temple, a remnant from a bygone age, where an unknown people would conduct rituals of a strange and dark nature. This is what will greet you when you enter the temple. Now the temple is not the dungeon proper, it merely houses the entryway to the dungeon. How you enter it is up for you to discover.



The jungle also contains the ruins of an ancient civilization, a people who were destroyed in a great Cataclysm long ago. You'll find their remains scattered throughout this area. This giant stone face depicts the Witch Queen, a woman of great magical power who ruled with an iron fist. Now these ruins are all that remain of her reign.

This particular place connects the jungle to the icy north through an underground travel, allowing quick passage between the two areas for travelers.

As always, Vanguard is all about the bug and exploit fixing. Since this would be the place for it, we figured it'd be interesting to give a quick explanation of our bug fixing process. As the developers or the community discover bugs, glitches and possible exploits we'll write up a report with a step-by-step guide on how to replicate the case in question. If our QA guys are able to consistently replicate the bug it's assigned a severity and given to a coder or designer for fixing. Usually we need to rejigger a blueprint in the Unreal Editor, or we might dig into the game code in order to fix the bug. The fix is then tested by QA to make sure the bug has actually been fixed. 

In addition to fixing bugs we're working on a new HUD (Heads Up Display) to better convey information to players. We want to tweak the HUD to make it work better with the more action-packed combat system so you can see your health, stamina and other stats at a glance. Once we have something to show you, we'll let you sneak a peek at what it looks like. 

Over on the Art team our character artists have been hard at work with re-making King Conan's Royal Armor from Age of Conan, which you will get to see very soon. This is an in-game item that will be given to everyone who buys the Early Access or Game Preview version of Conan Exiles. There will be a variant for female characters as well, naturally.

Improvements are being made on character models across the board. Everything from skin and facial textures to eyebrows and hair are being updated to optimize them further and take care of whatever issues and bugs might still linger. There's also work being done to expand the make-up options during character creation.

Finally, intrepid players might have noticed that we still have two more gods left in the religion selector. Our creature artist is working on two more god avatars, which we'll reveal in a future community update, so you can start speculating now on who it will be.

We're returning to our biweekly dev streams on Twitch (that's the every two weeks definition of biweekly) on Friday, January 19th. It's going to be a similar thing to the stream we did before the holiday break, where we play the game to have fun and chill out. Nicole and Jens Erik will be teaching Andy, who's community manager for Secret World Legends, to play Conan Exiles.

Hope you'll be able to join us for some laughs and good times on our Twitch channel. twitch.tv/funcom.

We'll see you next week for another newsletter!

Sincerely,

Funcom

Hey all! A quick hotfix to fix and adjust some things. The community letter will be out later today so keep an eye on that for info on what's to come. :) Have a good Wednesday!

• NPC bodies will despawn faster.
  
• Fixed an issue where using the torch would make the area around you too bright to other players.
  
• Fall damage has been reduced.
  
• Removed winter loading screen and changed it back to the default
  
• Temperature system improvement: Fixed a bug where character temperature changes would be permanently modified when weather changes occur in game. This could lead to heatstroke in cold areas or frostbite in warm areas when trying to counteract the temperature system
  
• Fixed a bug where changing the filter on a loot bag/container, and removing items would freeze the game at the last item.

Hey all! A quick hotfix to fix and adjust some things. The community letter will be out later today so keep an eye on that for info on what's to come. :) Have a good Wednesday!

• NPC bodies will despawn faster.
  
• Fixed an issue where using the torch would make the area around you too bright to other players.
  
• Fall damage has been reduced.
  
• Removed winter loading screen and changed it back to the default
  
• Temperature system improvement: Fixed a bug where character temperature changes would be permanently modified when weather changes occur in game. This could lead to heatstroke in cold areas or frostbite in warm areas when trying to counteract the temperature system
  
• Fixed a bug where changing the filter on a loot bag/container, and removing items would freeze the game at the last item.

Hey everyone!

Just a quick announcement that the community newsletter is being pushed to tomorrow. In case you were wondering :)

Hope you have a wonderful Tuesday.

Hey everyone!

Just a quick announcement that the community newsletter is being pushed to tomorrow. In case you were wondering :)

Hope you have a wonderful Tuesday.