Good evening little dogs of the intertube. We're back with another community newsletter, recapping the last week of development on Conan Exiles.

On Friday we released a blog post with a list of what you can expect from Conan Exiles at launch. We've been following the community's reactions and while we might not be able to respond to everything we are reading your feedback. We have a vision of what Conan Exiles should be, which might differ from your vision of what Conan Exiles should be, and our job as a developer is to merge the two into a coherent whole. Game development is normally a closed process, but because we opted for Early Access we also had to make sure that the community had a voice. The new combat system is a direct consequence of this interaction that fits in with the Conan vision.

Coming up in the beginning of March we'll be running compatibility tests to check the game against several different types of hardware configurations to see how the game performs. The purpose of the test is to identify performance bottlenecks and compatibility issues, e.g. problems running the game with a specific type of CPU, GPU or OS version.

As part of optimizing for console we have introduced several tweaks and fixes that improve performance on PS4 and Xbox One. The good news is that several of these optimizations also apply to PC, and are especially useful on lower-end PC configurations.We will be testing these fixes on a wider range of PC hardware configurations than we have access to internally as part of these tests.

We're still ironing out the kinks in the new combat system. Our goal is still to have it out on Testlive very soon for testing. The current plan is to keep the new combat system on Testlive for a few weeks to get extensive testing and feedback before rolling it out to Live. That way we can also get large scale testing and stress testing of the combat system before launch.

 
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.

 
It's been a while since we've heard from the guys over on the technical side of Conan Exiles, so we figured it would be good to check in and see what they've been up to. While the Vanguard works directly on game features, Tech and Tools work on backend features. The Tools subteam are the guys in charge of making sure everything we use to make the game works as intended. They build and maintain our internal tools for source control, build system and version making, crash report gathering and handling and smoke tests. Sometimes they also help create systems that are implemented into the game, like the voice chat system.

The engine subteam focuses on a wide array of things needed for the game to run properly, such as dedicated server support, client and server optimizations, engine level bug and crash fixes, and a host of other technical stuff going on under the hood. The game's sand tech, where you'll leave trails in the desert sand as you walk, comes from the engine subteam. The optimization tests we mentioned earlier are also within the realm of the tech team.

This past week the Tech team has been battling it out with engine optimizations and various certification issues that have popped up when we're submitting builds to Sony and Microsoft. Definitely valuable work now that we're moving ever close to leaving Early Access.

The Monster Hunters team was introduced last week as the team in charge of revamping monster and creature NPCs for the new combat system. They've been prototyping monster attacks, primarily testing new setups for Shalebacks, crocodiles and hyenas for now, in addition to experimenting with hyper armor. Hyper armor means the creature can't be staggered when it performs certain attacks, putting an aggressive player in greater danger when engaging a monster.

Our end goal with the creature revamp is making them feel smarter and more dangerous to players. The old combat system was more like an MMORPG than an action game, where a creature would stand in front of you and attack. Under the new paradigm we plan to make creature attacks more varied, with better anticipation time and "tells" so you'll know what comes next. 

In addition to being the combat team The Berserkers are also the guys in charge of movement and animation for the human characters in the game. Since we want to support using tools in the first-person viewpoint we have been revamping the first-person perspective animations to make it all look better.

Based on community feedback from the combat stream the Berserkers have been making some improvements to camera behavior when locked onto a target. We had a lot of players ask us not to have your character in center frame when locking on, as this would obscure your target. We've listened to your feedback and moved the camera up higher and slightly to the side. This way your target will always be visible to you when fighting. The camera will also move dynamically depending on where you are in relation to your enemy.

Finally, there's been some changes to the way stun-locking works in the game. All heavy attacks will give you hyper armor, preventing you from being stun-locked. This will not only help when facing a crowd of enemies, but also means you can more reliably land hits. Then again, that goes for your opponent as well.

Over in the art department we've had a character art workshop for our 3D modellers. This is so we'll have more people to help us with our character assets and art pipeline in the future. Currently there's three people creating every piece of clothing, every human model and every monster and creature you see in the game. Thanks to this workshop we've been able to diversify and have more people available if need be. 

In terms of new clothing and outfits the Derkheto priest(ess) outfit is coming together nicely in the concepting stage. Derkheto is a death/sex goddess, but designing her followers' clothes is proving trickier than you might think. You'll get to see it soon and we think you're going to like it.

The Vanguard team is working on translation and UI fixes, making sure the game manages to display all the 11 languages it's being translated into. Some languages have been breaking the user interface in various exciting ways. This obviously can't happen in a finished game, which is why we're fixing it.

One of our coders has been doing some fixes to the temperature system, digging through it to work out some of the kinks. Bugs frequently encountered by the community have been fixed and the system should be more reliable than before.

If you caught up with our blog on Friday, you'd see that we're adding a fast travel/teleportation feature. We always talked about doing teleportation as part of the sorcery system, and since mounts aren't making it into the game for launch, we wanted to create a way for players to cut down on on-foot travel time. The Map Room, which is a placeable you can build, is our solution. By building a Map Room in your base you can travel to special obelisks you've discovered in the Exiled Lands. To build it you'll need to find the recipe out in the Exiled Lands and when you teleport or get close to the obelisks you will gain corruption, cutting down on your max health and stamina.



Finally, we've been conducting some memory tests on our Testlive servers with the help of diligent members of our community. They answered the call we put out on Twitter, jumping into the servers to play, build, fight and give us some very valuable data. Thanks everyone, we really couldn't have done it without you! 

The testing was to check out some recent memory leaks, seeing what triggers them. We've run three tests on Testlive and gotten some leads on how to proceed with taking care of the issue. We are aware of the way our live-servers are performing and have collected databases to examine them for data on how our players are playing the game. It gives us a lot of important and useful information in terms of bottlenecks and fixes we need to do. We'll also do spot checks on official servers, so you may have been playing with a Funcom developer without even knowing it! This way we'll be able to improve performance on both PC and console.

Community Manager Jens Erik will be at the Norwegian Game Awards in Trondheim on Friday. We're sponsoring the event and giving away a Best Game Concept award, so if you're at the event feel free to come around to have a chat.

There won't be a Conan Exiles stream this week, but mark your calendars for March 2nd when we'll be streaming again.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Good evening little dogs of the intertube. We're back with another community newsletter, recapping the last week of development on Conan Exiles.

On Friday we released a blog post with a list of what you can expect from Conan Exiles at launch. We've been following the community's reactions and while we might not be able to respond to everything we are reading your feedback. We have a vision of what Conan Exiles should be, which might differ from your vision of what Conan Exiles should be, and our job as a developer is to merge the two into a coherent whole. Game development is normally a closed process, but because we opted for Early Access we also had to make sure that the community had a voice. The new combat system is a direct consequence of this interaction that fits in with the Conan vision.

Coming up in the beginning of March we'll be running compatibility tests to check the game against several different types of hardware configurations to see how the game performs. The purpose of the test is to identify performance bottlenecks and compatibility issues, e.g. problems running the game with a specific type of CPU, GPU or OS version.

As part of optimizing for console we have introduced several tweaks and fixes that improve performance on PS4 and Xbox One. The good news is that several of these optimizations also apply to PC, and are especially useful on lower-end PC configurations.We will be testing these fixes on a wider range of PC hardware configurations than we have access to internally as part of these tests.

We're still ironing out the kinks in the new combat system. Our goal is still to have it out on Testlive very soon for testing. The current plan is to keep the new combat system on Testlive for a few weeks to get extensive testing and feedback before rolling it out to Live. That way we can also get large scale testing and stress testing of the combat system before launch.

 
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.

 
It's been a while since we've heard from the guys over on the technical side of Conan Exiles, so we figured it would be good to check in and see what they've been up to. While the Vanguard works directly on game features, Tech and Tools work on backend features. The Tools subteam are the guys in charge of making sure everything we use to make the game works as intended. They build and maintain our internal tools for source control, build system and version making, crash report gathering and handling and smoke tests. Sometimes they also help create systems that are implemented into the game, like the voice chat system.

The engine subteam focuses on a wide array of things needed for the game to run properly, such as dedicated server support, client and server optimizations, engine level bug and crash fixes, and a host of other technical stuff going on under the hood. The game's sand tech, where you'll leave trails in the desert sand as you walk, comes from the engine subteam. The optimization tests we mentioned earlier are also within the realm of the tech team.

This past week the Tech team has been battling it out with engine optimizations and various certification issues that have popped up when we're submitting builds to Sony and Microsoft. Definitely valuable work now that we're moving ever close to leaving Early Access.

The Monster Hunters team was introduced last week as the team in charge of revamping monster and creature NPCs for the new combat system. They've been prototyping monster attacks, primarily testing new setups for Shalebacks, crocodiles and hyenas for now, in addition to experimenting with hyper armor. Hyper armor means the creature can't be staggered when it performs certain attacks, putting an aggressive player in greater danger when engaging a monster.

Our end goal with the creature revamp is making them feel smarter and more dangerous to players. The old combat system was more like an MMORPG than an action game, where a creature would stand in front of you and attack. Under the new paradigm we plan to make creature attacks more varied, with better anticipation time and "tells" so you'll know what comes next. 

In addition to being the combat team The Berserkers are also the guys in charge of movement and animation for the human characters in the game. Since we want to support using tools in the first-person viewpoint we have been revamping the first-person perspective animations to make it all look better.

Based on community feedback from the combat stream the Berserkers have been making some improvements to camera behavior when locked onto a target. We had a lot of players ask us not to have your character in center frame when locking on, as this would obscure your target. We've listened to your feedback and moved the camera up higher and slightly to the side. This way your target will always be visible to you when fighting. The camera will also move dynamically depending on where you are in relation to your enemy.

Finally, there's been some changes to the way stun-locking works in the game. All heavy attacks will give you hyper armor, preventing you from being stun-locked. This will not only help when facing a crowd of enemies, but also means you can more reliably land hits. Then again, that goes for your opponent as well.

Over in the art department we've had a character art workshop for our 3D modellers. This is so we'll have more people to help us with our character assets and art pipeline in the future. Currently there's three people creating every piece of clothing, every human model and every monster and creature you see in the game. Thanks to this workshop we've been able to diversify and have more people available if need be. 

In terms of new clothing and outfits the Derkheto priest(ess) outfit is coming together nicely in the concepting stage. Derkheto is a death/sex goddess, but designing her followers' clothes is proving trickier than you might think. You'll get to see it soon and we think you're going to like it.

The Vanguard team is working on translation and UI fixes, making sure the game manages to display all the 11 languages it's being translated into. Some languages have been breaking the user interface in various exciting ways. This obviously can't happen in a finished game, which is why we're fixing it.

One of our coders has been doing some fixes to the temperature system, digging through it to work out some of the kinks. Bugs frequently encountered by the community have been fixed and the system should be more reliable than before.

If you caught up with our blog on Friday, you'd see that we're adding a fast travel/teleportation feature. We always talked about doing teleportation as part of the sorcery system, and since mounts aren't making it into the game for launch, we wanted to create a way for players to cut down on on-foot travel time. The Map Room, which is a placeable you can build, is our solution. By building a Map Room in your base you can travel to special obelisks you've discovered in the Exiled Lands. To build it you'll need to find the recipe out in the Exiled Lands and when you teleport or get close to the obelisks you will gain corruption, cutting down on your max health and stamina.



Finally, we've been conducting some memory tests on our Testlive servers with the help of diligent members of our community. They answered the call we put out on Twitter, jumping into the servers to play, build, fight and give us some very valuable data. Thanks everyone, we really couldn't have done it without you! 

The testing was to check out some recent memory leaks, seeing what triggers them. We've run three tests on Testlive and gotten some leads on how to proceed with taking care of the issue. We are aware of the way our live-servers are performing and have collected databases to examine them for data on how our players are playing the game. It gives us a lot of important and useful information in terms of bottlenecks and fixes we need to do. We'll also do spot checks on official servers, so you may have been playing with a Funcom developer without even knowing it! This way we'll be able to improve performance on both PC and console.

Community Manager Jens Erik will be at the Norwegian Game Awards in Trondheim on Friday. We're sponsoring the event and giving away a Best Game Concept award, so if you're at the event feel free to come around to have a chat.

There won't be a Conan Exiles stream this week, but mark your calendars for March 2nd when we'll be streaming again.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Hey all! Today's stream began the first 25 minutes with Joel answering questions and clarifying some details about the launch features.

The rest is Nicole and Jens hanging out with the amazing people behind the Pippi mod, being shown around and seeing the incredible things they've made. This includes a portal room to mazes and puzzles as well as a dance party with hundreds of guests as well as music.
Here's a link to the mod:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=880454836

And here is the stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVhahfSGrsQ

Hey all! Today's stream began the first 25 minutes with Joel answering questions and clarifying some details about the launch features.

The rest is Nicole and Jens hanging out with the amazing people behind the Pippi mod, being shown around and seeing the incredible things they've made. This includes a portal room to mazes and puzzles as well as a dance party with hundreds of guests as well as music.
Here's a link to the mod:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=880454836

And here is the stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVhahfSGrsQ

Dear Exiles,

As we’re getting closer and closer to launch we’re stocking up on the midnight oil and we’re burning it with reckless abandon. These are busy times, hectic times, but also very exciting times. The studio is buzzing with activity and we’re working hard to make sure the game is ready for the grand premiere on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on May 8th.

With only three months to go before the big day, we wanted to take the opportunity to talk to you about how the launch version of Conan Exiles will look.

In the past couple of months, we’ve had to make some serious decisions as to what will be in for launch. We’ve been going through every aspect of the game (including things still in development) and we have evaluated everything based on a range of criteria. Some features or content simply ended up not being good enough, some things have ended up not making sense for the game, some things have been replaced with other features and content, while some things just turned out to be out of reach from a technical or development capacity standpoint. When you’re closing in on launch you must make some difficult choices and we’ve been doing a lot of that during the past few months.

We’re now at a point where we are able to commit to what’s going to be in for launch and what’s not, and we want to take this opportunity to offer full transparency on what and why.

This coming Friday we will be doing another live stream where we will set aside some time to talk about this update. If you have any questions or comments please let us know during the stream and we will try and answer as many questions and address as many comments we can. The stream will go live at 5pm CET on Friday February 16th at http://www.twitch.com/funcom.

Major new features and content coming for launch

Swamp and Volcano Biomes



When we launch Conan Exiles, the world will be twice as big than it was when we first launched Early Access. Starting May 8th players will have full access to a vast new swamp biome, full of new monsters, new crafting recipes, weapons and armor, new locations, building materials, and more. The swamp will be an integrated part of the main map and can be found on the eastern side just above the southern desert.

A new volcano biome will also be added to the Frozen North area.

New combat system

When we did our Easter community survey last year, improved combat was the single-most requested feature. In fact, the overwhelming majority told us this should be the number one priority of the development team. Being a game based on Conan the Barbarian and his savage world, melee combat was always something we wanted to make sure was a step above other games in the genre and your feedback confirmed that should be our focus, so we set out to work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwc9oKMnZyE

The new combat system is a complete and total overhaul. It changes everything. It feels a lot more visceral, it relies on thought and tactics, and most importantly it makes combat a lot more fun. To get an impression of how it all look and plays, check out the recorded livestream above.

The new combat system also introduces a brand new HUD and several significant improvements to several of the user interface elements in the game. We will continue to improve and iterate on the HUD towards launch based on the feedback we receive.

The Purge

The purge was one of the features we talked about early on and it’s been important to us to make sure we get it ready simply because it’s a key ingredient to closing the gameplay loop.

The purge was initially conceived as NPC armies coming from outside the Exiled Lands to attack players. As we decided that the team working on this should spend more time polishing and optimizing the general AI on all creatures and NPCs in the game, we had to go back and rescope this feature in order to make sure we could launch with a solid implementation.

The important thing to close the gameplay loop is to have a purge mechanic that sees creatures or NPCs present a danger to your base. In PvP you already have the danger of players coming in to attack your city, and you need to build smart and you need to set up defenses to keep attackers at bay. In PvE and single-player we haven’t had such a threat, which means there has been a certain lack of meaning to building a fortified base.

The purge mechanic at launch will see creatures and NPCs attack your base, even when you’re not logged in, so you need to consider traps, walls, thralls, and other defenses. It can be a lone hyena trying to knock down your door, or it could be a group of bandits coming in to break down your walls. The purge mechanic will be active on all official servers, and private server admins can choose to turn it on or off on their hosted servers.

We look forward to showing you more of this as we get closer to launch.

Farming

If you ever need a respite from the skull-crushing savagery of the barbarian lifestyle, you will be able to enjoy the laidback life of an exiled farmer. At least until the shalebacks come tearing through your crops.



In order to farm crops, you’ll need to be able to obtain seeds from the crop you want to farm. Seeds are gained from plants when you use the Sickle. Seeds can then be placed into a Planter to, over time, grow a crop. Each seed results in a total of 10 crops, except for certain specialized crops. You’ll need to power the planters using Fertilizer. Fertilizer is made in a Compost Heap, which is craftable via the inventory. Certain plants require special Potent Fertilizer, also made in the Compost Heap using special ingredients.

All non-aquatic plants can be farmed, as well as the Orange Phykos.

A new religion

We are adding an entirely new religion to the game with a brand new avatar: Derketo! She is a dual-natured goddess who is worshipped in Stygia as the queen of lust and fertility, while feared in the Black Kingdoms as the goddess of death. She is both terrible and beautiful.

This addition represents an entirely new religious path, with three tiers of altars and special crafting ingredients and items you can only create when following Derketo. We look forward to showing you more of this as we get closer to launch.

War Paint

War paint is confirmed for launch. You learn about war paint through the Feats window, like most other crafting recipes. You craft war paint using Papyrus, which creates a special pattern that you then apply to your character.



There are two kinds of war paint. One is purely visual, with 7 different kinds of cultural styles and patterns you can apply. The other gives you a +3 bonus to one of your attributes. When we revamp the attributes system to include perks, war paint can be used to give you those extra stat points you'll need to unlock a particular perk. You can only have one pattern on at a time, so remember to choose wisely.

Cultural style war paint will last about a week in real time, but stat boosting war paint will fade after about an hour. So, it could be a good idea to pack extra patterns.

Fast Travel

We know a lot of you really want a way to quickly get around the world, so we’ve gone ahead and added fast travel!



Scattered around the world you will discover obelisks and once you have interacted with them you will be able to fast travel to them from your base. In order to do that you need to build a map room (pictured above), and as you discover more obelisks you will unlock new areas that you can fast travel to.

Perk system

The new perks give you meaningful choices about how to play (and roleplay) the game. As you spend points in abilities, you unlock these powerful perks.



Does your character lean towards cannibalism? Invest in the Survival tree and gain the "Raw and Bloody" perk - which gives you the ability to consume raw flesh without penalty.

Are you playing a nimble warrior? Invest in the Agility tree to learn "Extended Leap" and perform amazing feats of acrobatics.

A pack rat? Invest in Encumbrance  and learn "Balance and Counterbalance" to convert that extra weight into combat damage.

There are 35 perks spread across 7 attributes and you’re going to want them all!

Other content and features coming in

There are many other goodies not in the game right now that will be coming in for launch (or even before launch) not listed above.



You’ll see stuff like an improved journey interface (allowing you to track your outstanding milestones),  new furniture and other placeables, new building pieces, throwable lures to attract monsters you’re hunting, new potions, and much more.

We aim to give you a more exhaustive list closer to launch, but in the interest of keeping the “wall of text” factor to a minimum for this update, we’ll leave it at that for now.

Features and content not coming in for launch

Mounts and pets

Unfortunately, we will not be launching with mounts or pets. Mounts were one of the most requested features, and we have spent a lot of time trying to make it work for Conan Exiles. Due to technical limitations with the way the game loads and streams the game world, we were unable to include a feature that allowed players to move over a certain speed. Our coders worked hard to find a solution for this, but in a recent “point of no return” type meeting, we decided that their time is better spent on polish, bug fixes, and other features that we know can make it for launch.

Pets is another animal-specific thing we also wanted to do. We have done a lot of the groundwork, and it’s certainly possible that we can add them at some point after launch, but we decided to prioritize polish and other features ahead of launch. There were also concerns about server performance, that too many players having too many animals and human thralls would have a massive impact on servers. To minimize risk for launch and to focus on other core features, we have decided to put this on hold.

Sorcery

We started sowing the seeds of sorcery with the release of glass orbs that worked as grenades. Brewing alchemical potions and poisons can also be said to be a kind of sorcery in Conan's world. We're expanding the types of potions you can create using alchemy and you'll also be able to craft special throwable lures to attract specific monsters and creatures.

Sorcery, as initially pitched, will not make it into the game, but some elements will. The fast travel system is teleportation magic, but it doesn't require corruption to fuel it. We have also added explosive and poisonous gas orbs that delivers some of what was planned for the sorcery system.

Ultimately, we were in a situation where we could either focus our development capacity on improving the combat system or splitting up the team to work on combat and a fully realized sorcery system. We chose to focus on combat, as we felt that was a more integral aspect of the Conan experience. It was a very difficult decision to make, but now that the new combat system is almost ready, we feel that it was indeed the right decision and that a more fun, tactical, and visceral combat system is something the game really needed.

Settlement system

The settlement system was an idea we had early on to add more NPC life to bases, especially on PvE servers. It was never clearly defined, but we had some high-level ideas.

Many of the ideas we talked about early on will not be in the game. Some of the ideas were abandoned because we had to prioritize other key areas, the primary example being enemy AI. A lot of the same coders that would have worked on doing AI for city life had to focus on improving the general and combat AI for enemies (which was far from good enough at launch). Thankfully we have made significant strides in that area due to this reprioritization. Keep in mind the version that is live for PC now over two months old and a lot of progress on NPC pathfinding and general AI behavior has been made since then.

Some ideas were abandoned because they didn’t work well enough within the framework of the game and some ideas matured into other features that have since been implemented.

For instance, a large part of the settlement system was making thralls more interesting and useful, and some of those features we have added during Early Access. You can now for instance dress them up and equip them with weapons you want them to use, and we have added the ability for thralls to follow you around and help you out in sticky situations. At launch you will also see monsters behaving in more interesting ways, such as foraging for food, resting up, and so on.

Looking beyond launch

They say ideas are cheap and that execution is the hard part. That’s doubly true for game development. We have had a lot of great ideas both before and during Early Access, and we’re very happy that we have been able to execute on a lot of them. Unfortunately, there have also been ideas that we in our excitement communicated early on that just weren’t possible for us to execute on.

So far during our 12 months of Early Access we’ve put out 32 major updates that have introduced new features, new content, and a whole lot of polish and bug fixes (visit http://www.conanexiles.com/updates for a full overview). Some of that content represent parts of the greater designs we envisioned. For instance, we have added the trebuchet and siege defense mechanisms, but we have not added things like corpse lockers or siege towers like we wanted to. It’s fully possible that in the time after launch we can return to some of this content and these features and flesh them out further.

A great thing about Early Access is that you have the opportunity to organically discover what your game needs while you’re actually making it. New ideas come up and player behavior and feedback tells us what the game is missing (as mentioned earlier, improved combat was the most requested feature in our survey, so naturally a lot of our attention was turned in that direction).

There is a lot of content and several features we have added during Early Access that we weren’t originally planning to do, but saw during Early Access that we should be prioritizing. Some of those features and content include climbing, orbs, and the avatar defense domes to name a few.



What we do want to make very clear is that we will never lock features we have talked about for Early Access behind paid content updates. If at some point after launch we can implement mounts, sorcery, or any of these features that we wanted to introduce in Early Access, we will make sure these are available freely to everyone.

Our focus now is launch and making sure that’s rock solid on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and that we make sure as much of the content and features we envisioned make it into the game. Once we’ve launched we can start making plans for what we can add to the game in the future.

Our hope is that Conan Exiles can live on for a long, long time.

Kind regards,
The Conan Exiles Development Team

Dear Exiles,

As we’re getting closer and closer to launch we’re stocking up on the midnight oil and we’re burning it with reckless abandon. These are busy times, hectic times, but also very exciting times. The studio is buzzing with activity and we’re working hard to make sure the game is ready for the grand premiere on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on May 8th.

With only three months to go before the big day, we wanted to take the opportunity to talk to you about how the launch version of Conan Exiles will look.

In the past couple of months, we’ve had to make some serious decisions as to what will be in for launch. We’ve been going through every aspect of the game (including things still in development) and we have evaluated everything based on a range of criteria. Some features or content simply ended up not being good enough, some things have ended up not making sense for the game, some things have been replaced with other features and content, while some things just turned out to be out of reach from a technical or development capacity standpoint. When you’re closing in on launch you must make some difficult choices and we’ve been doing a lot of that during the past few months.

We’re now at a point where we are able to commit to what’s going to be in for launch and what’s not, and we want to take this opportunity to offer full transparency on what and why.

This coming Friday we will be doing another live stream where we will set aside some time to talk about this update. If you have any questions or comments please let us know during the stream and we will try and answer as many questions and address as many comments we can. The stream will go live at 5pm CET on Friday February 16th at http://www.twitch.com/funcom.

Major new features and content coming for launch

Swamp and Volcano Biomes



When we launch Conan Exiles, the world will be twice as big than it was when we first launched Early Access. Starting May 8th players will have full access to a vast new swamp biome, full of new monsters, new crafting recipes, weapons and armor, new locations, building materials, and more. The swamp will be an integrated part of the main map and can be found on the eastern side just above the southern desert.

A new volcano biome will also be added to the Frozen North area.

New combat system

When we did our Easter community survey last year, improved combat was the single-most requested feature. In fact, the overwhelming majority told us this should be the number one priority of the development team. Being a game based on Conan the Barbarian and his savage world, melee combat was always something we wanted to make sure was a step above other games in the genre and your feedback confirmed that should be our focus, so we set out to work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwc9oKMnZyE

The new combat system is a complete and total overhaul. It changes everything. It feels a lot more visceral, it relies on thought and tactics, and most importantly it makes combat a lot more fun. To get an impression of how it all look and plays, check out the recorded livestream above.

The new combat system also introduces a brand new HUD and several significant improvements to several of the user interface elements in the game. We will continue to improve and iterate on the HUD towards launch based on the feedback we receive.

The Purge

The purge was one of the features we talked about early on and it’s been important to us to make sure we get it ready simply because it’s a key ingredient to closing the gameplay loop.

The purge was initially conceived as NPC armies coming from outside the Exiled Lands to attack players. As we decided that the team working on this should spend more time polishing and optimizing the general AI on all creatures and NPCs in the game, we had to go back and rescope this feature in order to make sure we could launch with a solid implementation.

The important thing to close the gameplay loop is to have a purge mechanic that sees creatures or NPCs present a danger to your base. In PvP you already have the danger of players coming in to attack your city, and you need to build smart and you need to set up defenses to keep attackers at bay. In PvE and single-player we haven’t had such a threat, which means there has been a certain lack of meaning to building a fortified base.

The purge mechanic at launch will see creatures and NPCs attack your base, even when you’re not logged in, so you need to consider traps, walls, thralls, and other defenses. It can be a lone hyena trying to knock down your door, or it could be a group of bandits coming in to break down your walls. The purge mechanic will be active on all official servers, and private server admins can choose to turn it on or off on their hosted servers.

We look forward to showing you more of this as we get closer to launch.

Farming

If you ever need a respite from the skull-crushing savagery of the barbarian lifestyle, you will be able to enjoy the laidback life of an exiled farmer. At least until the shalebacks come tearing through your crops.



In order to farm crops, you’ll need to be able to obtain seeds from the crop you want to farm. Seeds are gained from plants when you use the Sickle. Seeds can then be placed into a Planter to, over time, grow a crop. Each seed results in a total of 10 crops, except for certain specialized crops. You’ll need to power the planters using Fertilizer. Fertilizer is made in a Compost Heap, which is craftable via the inventory. Certain plants require special Potent Fertilizer, also made in the Compost Heap using special ingredients.

All non-aquatic plants can be farmed, as well as the Orange Phykos.

A new religion

We are adding an entirely new religion to the game with a brand new avatar: Derketo! She is a dual-natured goddess who is worshipped in Stygia as the queen of lust and fertility, while feared in the Black Kingdoms as the goddess of death. She is both terrible and beautiful.

This addition represents an entirely new religious path, with three tiers of altars and special crafting ingredients and items you can only create when following Derketo. We look forward to showing you more of this as we get closer to launch.

War Paint

War paint is confirmed for launch. You learn about war paint through the Feats window, like most other crafting recipes. You craft war paint using Papyrus, which creates a special pattern that you then apply to your character.



There are two kinds of war paint. One is purely visual, with 7 different kinds of cultural styles and patterns you can apply. The other gives you a +3 bonus to one of your attributes. When we revamp the attributes system to include perks, war paint can be used to give you those extra stat points you'll need to unlock a particular perk. You can only have one pattern on at a time, so remember to choose wisely.

Cultural style war paint will last about a week in real time, but stat boosting war paint will fade after about an hour. So, it could be a good idea to pack extra patterns.

Fast Travel

We know a lot of you really want a way to quickly get around the world, so we’ve gone ahead and added fast travel!



Scattered around the world you will discover obelisks and once you have interacted with them you will be able to fast travel to them from your base. In order to do that you need to build a map room (pictured above), and as you discover more obelisks you will unlock new areas that you can fast travel to.

Perk system

The new perks give you meaningful choices about how to play (and roleplay) the game. As you spend points in abilities, you unlock these powerful perks.



Does your character lean towards cannibalism? Invest in the Survival tree and gain the "Raw and Bloody" perk - which gives you the ability to consume raw flesh without penalty.

Are you playing a nimble warrior? Invest in the Agility tree to learn "Extended Leap" and perform amazing feats of acrobatics.

A pack rat? Invest in Encumbrance  and learn "Balance and Counterbalance" to convert that extra weight into combat damage.

There are 35 perks spread across 7 attributes and you’re going to want them all!

Other content and features coming in

There are many other goodies not in the game right now that will be coming in for launch (or even before launch) not listed above.



You’ll see stuff like an improved journey interface (allowing you to track your outstanding milestones),  new furniture and other placeables, new building pieces, throwable lures to attract monsters you’re hunting, new potions, and much more.

We aim to give you a more exhaustive list closer to launch, but in the interest of keeping the “wall of text” factor to a minimum for this update, we’ll leave it at that for now.

Features and content not coming in for launch

Mounts and pets

Unfortunately, we will not be launching with mounts or pets. Mounts were one of the most requested features, and we have spent a lot of time trying to make it work for Conan Exiles. Due to technical limitations with the way the game loads and streams the game world, we were unable to include a feature that allowed players to move over a certain speed. Our coders worked hard to find a solution for this, but in a recent “point of no return” type meeting, we decided that their time is better spent on polish, bug fixes, and other features that we know can make it for launch.

Pets is another animal-specific thing we also wanted to do. We have done a lot of the groundwork, and it’s certainly possible that we can add them at some point after launch, but we decided to prioritize polish and other features ahead of launch. There were also concerns about server performance, that too many players having too many animals and human thralls would have a massive impact on servers. To minimize risk for launch and to focus on other core features, we have decided to put this on hold.

Sorcery

We started sowing the seeds of sorcery with the release of glass orbs that worked as grenades. Brewing alchemical potions and poisons can also be said to be a kind of sorcery in Conan's world. We're expanding the types of potions you can create using alchemy and you'll also be able to craft special throwable lures to attract specific monsters and creatures.

Sorcery, as initially pitched, will not make it into the game, but some elements will. The fast travel system is teleportation magic, but it doesn't require corruption to fuel it. We have also added explosive and poisonous gas orbs that delivers some of what was planned for the sorcery system.

Ultimately, we were in a situation where we could either focus our development capacity on improving the combat system or splitting up the team to work on combat and a fully realized sorcery system. We chose to focus on combat, as we felt that was a more integral aspect of the Conan experience. It was a very difficult decision to make, but now that the new combat system is almost ready, we feel that it was indeed the right decision and that a more fun, tactical, and visceral combat system is something the game really needed.

Settlement system

The settlement system was an idea we had early on to add more NPC life to bases, especially on PvE servers. It was never clearly defined, but we had some high-level ideas.

Many of the ideas we talked about early on will not be in the game. Some of the ideas were abandoned because we had to prioritize other key areas, the primary example being enemy AI. A lot of the same coders that would have worked on doing AI for city life had to focus on improving the general and combat AI for enemies (which was far from good enough at launch). Thankfully we have made significant strides in that area due to this reprioritization. Keep in mind the version that is live for PC now over two months old and a lot of progress on NPC pathfinding and general AI behavior has been made since then.

Some ideas were abandoned because they didn’t work well enough within the framework of the game and some ideas matured into other features that have since been implemented.

For instance, a large part of the settlement system was making thralls more interesting and useful, and some of those features we have added during Early Access. You can now for instance dress them up and equip them with weapons you want them to use, and we have added the ability for thralls to follow you around and help you out in sticky situations. At launch you will also see monsters behaving in more interesting ways, such as foraging for food, resting up, and so on.

Looking beyond launch

They say ideas are cheap and that execution is the hard part. That’s doubly true for game development. We have had a lot of great ideas both before and during Early Access, and we’re very happy that we have been able to execute on a lot of them. Unfortunately, there have also been ideas that we in our excitement communicated early on that just weren’t possible for us to execute on.

So far during our 12 months of Early Access we’ve put out 32 major updates that have introduced new features, new content, and a whole lot of polish and bug fixes (visit http://www.conanexiles.com/updates for a full overview). Some of that content represent parts of the greater designs we envisioned. For instance, we have added the trebuchet and siege defense mechanisms, but we have not added things like corpse lockers or siege towers like we wanted to. It’s fully possible that in the time after launch we can return to some of this content and these features and flesh them out further.

A great thing about Early Access is that you have the opportunity to organically discover what your game needs while you’re actually making it. New ideas come up and player behavior and feedback tells us what the game is missing (as mentioned earlier, improved combat was the most requested feature in our survey, so naturally a lot of our attention was turned in that direction).

There is a lot of content and several features we have added during Early Access that we weren’t originally planning to do, but saw during Early Access that we should be prioritizing. Some of those features and content include climbing, orbs, and the avatar defense domes to name a few.



What we do want to make very clear is that we will never lock features we have talked about for Early Access behind paid content updates. If at some point after launch we can implement mounts, sorcery, or any of these features that we wanted to introduce in Early Access, we will make sure these are available freely to everyone.

Our focus now is launch and making sure that’s rock solid on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and that we make sure as much of the content and features we envisioned make it into the game. Once we’ve launched we can start making plans for what we can add to the game in the future.

Our hope is that Conan Exiles can live on for a long, long time.

Kind regards,
The Conan Exiles Development Team

As announced in this week's community newsletter, we're doing another dev stream this Friday at 5pm CET on twitch.tv/funcom.

Tune in as Jens Erik and Nicole get a tour of the Pippi Mod Advanced Server, showcasing everything you can do with the Pippi server tools mod. We'll also be discussing launch features with Joel Bylos.

As announced in this week's community newsletter, we're doing another dev stream this Friday at 5pm CET on twitch.tv/funcom.

Tune in as Jens Erik and Nicole get a tour of the Pippi Mod Advanced Server, showcasing everything you can do with the Pippi server tools mod. We'll also be discussing launch features with Joel Bylos.

Good morning swarthy soul pods!

Please note: This is not the blog post with a list of launch features. That's to come later this week.

We have finished up the Gold Build! It has been sent off to Microsoft and Sony for the first leg of the submission process. This is essentially the same as the certification process we had to go through when patching Xbox: Microsoft and Sony will check our submitted build to make sure it follows their set requirements and standards. Stability, branding, GUI consistency and responsiveness (among others) have certain requirements that we need to hit. This is to ensure that the experience is consistent.

The build might get rejected, but if it does we'll get a list of everything we need to fix and resubmit as quickly as we can.  To reduce risks and ensure we find all critical bugs, our external QA partner, Testronic, has switched to double shifts and doubled the number of testers, giving us QA coverage 16 hours per day, 7 days a week.

Over in combat land we did another playtest on Friday. The American Funcom office in Durham, North Carolina, got to check out the combat and content revamp, providing us with some great feedback. A lot of issues were reported for GUI and control, especially related to gamepad support. As a direct consequence we're assembling an internal strike team to remedy as many of these issues as possible for launch.

We're doing another round of playtesting very soon. This time around we'll be bringing in an external focus group to give the game a spin. It will consist of both experienced and inexperienced Conan Exiles players, so we can see how they respond to the game. After this we'll do whatever changes we need to do based on their feedback.

Once all that's over with we'll move the whole thing to Testlive to get critical feedback from the community. We expect this to happen before March. Due to the Gold submission taking time and priority we know we are sliding a bit from our previously stated deadline (mid-February), but we think it will be worth the wait. This will only make the game better.

In the version coming to Testlive you'll be getting all the new combat changes and the content revamp, which changes the placement of NPCs, creatures and resources on the map to improve progression. You will also get the new Perks system. The Jungle/Swamp biome or the Volcano is not included in this build. If you travel to these areas, you'll only see a flat texture. We're keeping them back so we can do additional rebalancing and updates before rolling them out for launch.


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 have a new team, Monster Hunters, made up of a designer and three creature animators. They're the guys in charge of the creature revamp we mentioned last week. Monsters and animals need to be updated to fit in with the new combat system, so we're giving them new attack animations with a greater focus on telegraphs and anticipation time in order to make creature combat more tactical. PvE is just as important as PvP in Exiles and we want the new combat system to feel good when fighting both creatures and humans.

Their work has already started. They've been laying the ground work for what needs to be done the coming weeks. Maybe you'll see some gifs in the next couple of newsletters?


The big thing coming out of the Terraformers team this week are changes to how you unlock weapons and armor in the game. Essentially, we're redoing everything to put the different kinds of armors and weapons on more of an equal footing.

In the old system you'd unlock new types of weapons, armor and clothing as you leveled up. You started with very low-end stone weapons and light armor, incrementally moving onto slightly better and better stuff as you leveled up. We'd condition you to think that the final weapon and armor unlocked would usually be the best. This is what all players would use when reaching the level cap. A lot of it had to be unlocked separately too!

Unlocking weapons and armors still happens when leveling up, but we're trying to create a better balance between the different things you unlock. We'll break it down to armors first, then weapons.



When you reach level 10 you can unlock the "Armorer" Feat. This gives you the recipes for basic Light, Medium and Heavy Armor. The only thing stopping you from making these armors immediately is your access to resources. If you want to just use those three sets you can spend your Feat Points on other things and never look at another armor set again.

After unlocking Armorer, you also have the option to unlock additional armor archetypes every 10 levels. They give you access to new sets or armors, from light to heavy. These are based on the different Hyborean cultures and are just as viable as the basic armors. We're balancing the different armor types by giving you buffs to different things based on which armor you're wearing.

But wait, there's more! Once you reach level 60 you can unlock Epic Armors. The Epic Armors feat lets you craft Perfected Lining and improved versions of the basic armors. If you have additional Feat Points left you can unlock Epic versions of any culture armors (without needing to unlock the original), to craft a more powerful set. Keep in mind that you won't be able to unlock all armors, so spend your points wisely. Certain faction and special armors will be locked behind a thrall or a recipe found out in the world. Armorer thralls will also be able to make Exceptional and Flawless versions of their cultural armors.



We're doing similar Feat groupings for weapons and removing a lot of the prerequisites needed to unlock things. Melee weapons are grouped into three basic categories: Warrior, Bruiser and Skirmisher. Warrior unlocks the Stone Sword and Club, and is required if you want to make swords, axes, clubs and maces. The Bruiser Feat is for heavy weapons, unlocking the Stone Maul, Stone Pike and Two-Handed Stone Sword. If you have your eyes on a Steel Hammer you'll need this first. Skirmisher is the basis for making daggers, javelins and throwing axes, letting you unlock the Stone Daggers and Stone Throwing Axe.

Once any of these Feats are unlocked you can get the recipe for any weapon in their specific subcategory. You just need to meet the level and Feat requirements.

Here's an example: At level 16 you can unlock the Stygian Khopesh if you have the Warrior, Blacksmith and Journeyman Craftsman Feats. There's no need to unlock any swords. If you then want to craft an Iron War Axe at level 28 you just unlock the recipe, without needing to have unlocked any axes previously.



Then, there are the Legendary Weapons. These can be found in specific chests hidden away around the map. Bosses will drop keys that you then use to unlock the chests. Legendary Weapons are broken when you find them, requiring you to use a Repair Kit. Once it's been repaired you can use it to your heart's content.

Finally, we're making it easier to unlock recipes by giving players more Knowledge Points and combining several Feats into one. You still won't be able to unlock everything (unless you cheat), but you should be able to unlock about 50% of all recipes.


More combat updates coming in from the Berserkers team! This is also a perfect time to clear up some stuff after last week's newsletter. As mentioned last week, we're forcing a third person perspective whenever you climb or equip a weapon in Conan Exiles. This includes bows. You'll be allowed to harvest, build and craft.

The weapon trails you saw in the stream can be turned off, if you choose, but we advise keeping them on just to be safe. It's our main source of communicating attack information to players. They're getting a visual pass, meaning we're re-examining how they look in order to change them. Our art director is working on concepting trail styles that look different for the various status effects. It won't just be a color change. With these visual changes we can tone down the saturation and presence of the trails without losing the ability to communicate the difference between attacks.

We're also looking at how the camera moves and behaves during combat, both when locking on and aiming freely. This was also something we got feedback on from the community.

Speaking of bows, they've gotten some changes this past week. The Berserkers team have taken steps to make them feel more responsive when playing. Shots have a higher apex than previously, resulting in somewhat greater shot distance than before.

Arrows are shot in the same direction every time, regardless of distance to target. This is to force players into becoming more skillful with the bow. The intention is for arrows shot while using target lock to hit the torso, not heads or legs. If you want to do headshots or crippling shots you would need to aim manually. We've also been working on improving client/server stability to make sure bows fire properly and hit their targets.

Another piece of feedback we saw after the combat stream was on the Attributes system. Some players feeling that bows weren't being prioritized to the same level as melee weapons and we want to take a moment to address this. The main focus of the game has always been melee combat. Bows were always intended to be included, but we knew that players would need to go in for a melee attack sooner or later. Enemies will always come at you. However, with a decent bow at your side and a high Accuracy stat you can do a significant amount of damage before something reaches melee range. You can pull enemies and kite them from far away, but you should always carry a melee weapon with you.


Keep in mind that a lot of the changes and updates we're mentioning in these newsletters still haven't made their way to game just yet. So far, they're only in our internal builds. We've also done changes to things like client/server stability, how we collect crash reports and updated the game code.

To put it visually, this is how our builds are laid out:

• Live (2.5 month old code)
  
  
  • Testlive (Newer code)
    
    
    • Internal dev (Internal Stable)
      
      
      • Internal dev (Internal Unstable)

On top is the Live build, which is what the community is playing. Underneath that is Testlive, where we roll out updates and patches for additional testing before moving them to Live. Then there are the Internal Dev Stable and Unstable branches. The further down you go the newer the code.

Unstable is what we're currently developing in and we move builds from Unstable to Stable when content has been locked in. Then we start optimizing and stabilizing that build to then move it to live.  This isn't a 100% correct representation, but we wanted to give a brief peek behind the curtain to see our process.

Lots to take a bite out of in this week's newsletter, so we hope you enjoyed it. The blog post with all the launch features is still set to come out this week, separate from this newsletter!

We're streaming again on Friday and we will be taking some time out of the stream to talk about our launch features. The main part of the stream is a mod creator highlight, where we'll be talking to Joshtech, the man behind the very popular Pippi Mod. We hope you'll join us on Twitch.tv/funcom at 5pm CET on Friday.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Good morning swarthy soul pods!

Please note: This is not the blog post with a list of launch features. That's to come later this week.

We have finished up the Gold Build! It has been sent off to Microsoft and Sony for the first leg of the submission process. This is essentially the same as the certification process we had to go through when patching Xbox: Microsoft and Sony will check our submitted build to make sure it follows their set requirements and standards. Stability, branding, GUI consistency and responsiveness (among others) have certain requirements that we need to hit. This is to ensure that the experience is consistent.

The build might get rejected, but if it does we'll get a list of everything we need to fix and resubmit as quickly as we can.  To reduce risks and ensure we find all critical bugs, our external QA partner, Testronic, has switched to double shifts and doubled the number of testers, giving us QA coverage 16 hours per day, 7 days a week.

Over in combat land we did another playtest on Friday. The American Funcom office in Durham, North Carolina, got to check out the combat and content revamp, providing us with some great feedback. A lot of issues were reported for GUI and control, especially related to gamepad support. As a direct consequence we're assembling an internal strike team to remedy as many of these issues as possible for launch.

We're doing another round of playtesting very soon. This time around we'll be bringing in an external focus group to give the game a spin. It will consist of both experienced and inexperienced Conan Exiles players, so we can see how they respond to the game. After this we'll do whatever changes we need to do based on their feedback.

Once all that's over with we'll move the whole thing to Testlive to get critical feedback from the community. We expect this to happen before March. Due to the Gold submission taking time and priority we know we are sliding a bit from our previously stated deadline (mid-February), but we think it will be worth the wait. This will only make the game better.

In the version coming to Testlive you'll be getting all the new combat changes and the content revamp, which changes the placement of NPCs, creatures and resources on the map to improve progression. You will also get the new Perks system. The Jungle/Swamp biome or the Volcano is not included in this build. If you travel to these areas, you'll only see a flat texture. We're keeping them back so we can do additional rebalancing and updates before rolling them out for launch.


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 have a new team, Monster Hunters, made up of a designer and three creature animators. They're the guys in charge of the creature revamp we mentioned last week. Monsters and animals need to be updated to fit in with the new combat system, so we're giving them new attack animations with a greater focus on telegraphs and anticipation time in order to make creature combat more tactical. PvE is just as important as PvP in Exiles and we want the new combat system to feel good when fighting both creatures and humans.

Their work has already started. They've been laying the ground work for what needs to be done the coming weeks. Maybe you'll see some gifs in the next couple of newsletters?


The big thing coming out of the Terraformers team this week are changes to how you unlock weapons and armor in the game. Essentially, we're redoing everything to put the different kinds of armors and weapons on more of an equal footing.

In the old system you'd unlock new types of weapons, armor and clothing as you leveled up. You started with very low-end stone weapons and light armor, incrementally moving onto slightly better and better stuff as you leveled up. We'd condition you to think that the final weapon and armor unlocked would usually be the best. This is what all players would use when reaching the level cap. A lot of it had to be unlocked separately too!

Unlocking weapons and armors still happens when leveling up, but we're trying to create a better balance between the different things you unlock. We'll break it down to armors first, then weapons.



When you reach level 10 you can unlock the "Armorer" Feat. This gives you the recipes for basic Light, Medium and Heavy Armor. The only thing stopping you from making these armors immediately is your access to resources. If you want to just use those three sets you can spend your Feat Points on other things and never look at another armor set again.

After unlocking Armorer, you also have the option to unlock additional armor archetypes every 10 levels. They give you access to new sets or armors, from light to heavy. These are based on the different Hyborean cultures and are just as viable as the basic armors. We're balancing the different armor types by giving you buffs to different things based on which armor you're wearing.

But wait, there's more! Once you reach level 60 you can unlock Epic Armors. The Epic Armors feat lets you craft Perfected Lining and improved versions of the basic armors. If you have additional Feat Points left you can unlock Epic versions of any culture armors (without needing to unlock the original), to craft a more powerful set. Keep in mind that you won't be able to unlock all armors, so spend your points wisely. Certain faction and special armors will be locked behind a thrall or a recipe found out in the world. Armorer thralls will also be able to make Exceptional and Flawless versions of their cultural armors.



We're doing similar Feat groupings for weapons and removing a lot of the prerequisites needed to unlock things. Melee weapons are grouped into three basic categories: Warrior, Bruiser and Skirmisher. Warrior unlocks the Stone Sword and Club, and is required if you want to make swords, axes, clubs and maces. The Bruiser Feat is for heavy weapons, unlocking the Stone Maul, Stone Pike and Two-Handed Stone Sword. If you have your eyes on a Steel Hammer you'll need this first. Skirmisher is the basis for making daggers, javelins and throwing axes, letting you unlock the Stone Daggers and Stone Throwing Axe.

Once any of these Feats are unlocked you can get the recipe for any weapon in their specific subcategory. You just need to meet the level and Feat requirements.

Here's an example: At level 16 you can unlock the Stygian Khopesh if you have the Warrior, Blacksmith and Journeyman Craftsman Feats. There's no need to unlock any swords. If you then want to craft an Iron War Axe at level 28 you just unlock the recipe, without needing to have unlocked any axes previously.



Then, there are the Legendary Weapons. These can be found in specific chests hidden away around the map. Bosses will drop keys that you then use to unlock the chests. Legendary Weapons are broken when you find them, requiring you to use a Repair Kit. Once it's been repaired you can use it to your heart's content.

Finally, we're making it easier to unlock recipes by giving players more Knowledge Points and combining several Feats into one. You still won't be able to unlock everything (unless you cheat), but you should be able to unlock about 50% of all recipes.


More combat updates coming in from the Berserkers team! This is also a perfect time to clear up some stuff after last week's newsletter. As mentioned last week, we're forcing a third person perspective whenever you climb or equip a weapon in Conan Exiles. This includes bows. You'll be allowed to harvest, build and craft.

The weapon trails you saw in the stream can be turned off, if you choose, but we advise keeping them on just to be safe. It's our main source of communicating attack information to players. They're getting a visual pass, meaning we're re-examining how they look in order to change them. Our art director is working on concepting trail styles that look different for the various status effects. It won't just be a color change. With these visual changes we can tone down the saturation and presence of the trails without losing the ability to communicate the difference between attacks.

We're also looking at how the camera moves and behaves during combat, both when locking on and aiming freely. This was also something we got feedback on from the community.

Speaking of bows, they've gotten some changes this past week. The Berserkers team have taken steps to make them feel more responsive when playing. Shots have a higher apex than previously, resulting in somewhat greater shot distance than before.

Arrows are shot in the same direction every time, regardless of distance to target. This is to force players into becoming more skillful with the bow. The intention is for arrows shot while using target lock to hit the torso, not heads or legs. If you want to do headshots or crippling shots you would need to aim manually. We've also been working on improving client/server stability to make sure bows fire properly and hit their targets.

Another piece of feedback we saw after the combat stream was on the Attributes system. Some players feeling that bows weren't being prioritized to the same level as melee weapons and we want to take a moment to address this. The main focus of the game has always been melee combat. Bows were always intended to be included, but we knew that players would need to go in for a melee attack sooner or later. Enemies will always come at you. However, with a decent bow at your side and a high Accuracy stat you can do a significant amount of damage before something reaches melee range. You can pull enemies and kite them from far away, but you should always carry a melee weapon with you.


Keep in mind that a lot of the changes and updates we're mentioning in these newsletters still haven't made their way to game just yet. So far, they're only in our internal builds. We've also done changes to things like client/server stability, how we collect crash reports and updated the game code.

To put it visually, this is how our builds are laid out:

• Live (2.5 month old code)
  
  
  • Testlive (Newer code)
    
    
    • Internal dev (Internal Stable)
      
      
      • Internal dev (Internal Unstable)

On top is the Live build, which is what the community is playing. Underneath that is Testlive, where we roll out updates and patches for additional testing before moving them to Live. Then there are the Internal Dev Stable and Unstable branches. The further down you go the newer the code.

Unstable is what we're currently developing in and we move builds from Unstable to Stable when content has been locked in. Then we start optimizing and stabilizing that build to then move it to live.  This isn't a 100% correct representation, but we wanted to give a brief peek behind the curtain to see our process.

Lots to take a bite out of in this week's newsletter, so we hope you enjoyed it. The blog post with all the launch features is still set to come out this week, separate from this newsletter!

We're streaming again on Friday and we will be taking some time out of the stream to talk about our launch features. The main part of the stream is a mod creator highlight, where we'll be talking to Joshtech, the man behind the very popular Pippi Mod. We hope you'll join us on Twitch.tv/funcom at 5pm CET on Friday.

Sincerely,

Funcom