Bow Changes, Weapon and Armor Tiers, Creature Combat and Farming!

Jens Erik, a Community Manager, and Oscar Lopez Lacalle, the lead designer on Conan Exiles go into details of changes made to combat and all kinds of other informaton.
YouTube link here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5vk9qs70gQ

Bow Changes, Weapon and Armor Tiers, Creature Combat and Farming!

Jens Erik, a Community Manager, and Oscar Lopez Lacalle, the lead designer on Conan Exiles go into details of changes made to combat and all kinds of other informaton.
YouTube link here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5vk9qs70gQ

Good morning, cheeky balloon animals!

We hope everyone's been enjoying the new combat system, which we rolled out on PC Testlive last week. The feedback we have gotten so far has been incredibly helpful with helping us find issues to fix and things to tweak. Please keep the feedback and comments coming. New builds will be rolled out to Testlive with additional fixes.

In the future we'll also talk about some of the bugs and issues you've reported to us from the Testlive build and how we're fixing them. A lot of it has been improved already. From the current Testlive build to the latest internal development build there are around 300 changes.

There were some freezes on the Testlive servers over the weekend, due a recursive item reference which has now been found and fixed and will be patched to Testlive later today. We also noticed players having trouble finding the servers in the browser. This was fixed and rolled out to Testlive on Tuesday.

Finally, we want to speak to the Xbox audience. We wanted to let you know that we haven't forgotten you and that we will patch the Xbox version of Conan Exiles. As soon as certification ends, which should be soon, we will be able to roll out the Update 32 parity patch on Xbox One.


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.


The mighty Vanguard are our forward troops in the fight against the bugs and exploits. They also help smooth out gameplay systems and mechanics in need of some extra love and attention. This past week there's been a big update to the Feats interface, grouping a lot of blueprints together and organizing them based on theme and content. We think this will make navigating the Feats window much easier for players, letting you understand everything at a glance.



We're hooking up a post-character creation in-game cinematic to replace the temporary one that's currently in the game. This will offer up more details in the game's story, you'll get to see more of Conan, and we've even made a facial rig to give your player character facial expressions in the in-game cinematic.

Finally, the moaning sound that would sometimes play when drinking water has been removed. No more sexy sounds, but we're leaving the door open for our Audio team to create and add some cool buff sounds.


The Terraformers are working on creating new content while also rebalancing existing content. Following up on the armor and weapons revamps we talked about two weeks ago we had some questions from players asking how this will affect NPC drops. Weapons and armors will still drop as loot from NPCs, and we've now also added cultural armors as drops from NPCs belonging to that culture. Meaning you might get Stygian armor from Stygians, Nordheimer armor from Nordheimers, etc.

Speaking of NPCs, populations across the entire game are still being tweaked as part of the content revamp. You'll be able to experience this very soon on Testlive. If you've been playing around with the Testlive build you have already seen some of the effects this has had on NPC and resource placements. You might also have run into the world bosses: bigger, more dangerous versions of regular enemies that stick to certain areas in the map. There are more of them coming, but what they are remains to be seen.



In terms of thralls we've also begun working on a new type of thralls that will work as item carriers for players. You'll find them in camps, just like regular thralls. Once broken they'll have a much greater inventory space than other thralls, based on their tier level, letting you take a lot of extra stuff with you for when you go out on expeditions! This was another reason to have mounts and we have found an alternative by implementing carrier thralls.

Thralls is a natural part of the game already, so we wanted to expand the system further. We felt that carrier thralls made sense as a way of increasing players' carrying capacity.


Ostrich Run

The Monster Hunters have been doing a lot of quality of life work on creatures and monsters. Forward movement's been improved, attack boxes have been adjusted and animations have been polished to look better.

We've also re-implemented additive animations on creatures. That's what you see in the video above. They were removed when the new AI came in a while back and needed to be re-implemented alongside animations for when animals would turn in place. It resulted in creature animations being a bit stuttery, but now that we have the Monster Hunters team we're able to re-implement it and smooth it out, so things look better. All animals have additive animations now except the very small ones (rabbits, baby animals, cobras, etc). The new system is improved from before. It allows us to have different additive turning based on the creature's movement speed.


It is a streaming week again and so we'll be running another developer stream on Friday. Joel won't be joining us, so lead designer Oscar will be taking his place. We'll talk about farming, show some new combat improvements, and bring in someone from the Monster Hunters team to talk about the creature revamp they've been doing.

The time and place, as always, are www.twitch.tv/funcom at 5pm CET. We hope you'll join us!

Sincerely,

Funcom

Good morning, cheeky balloon animals!

We hope everyone's been enjoying the new combat system, which we rolled out on PC Testlive last week. The feedback we have gotten so far has been incredibly helpful with helping us find issues to fix and things to tweak. Please keep the feedback and comments coming. New builds will be rolled out to Testlive with additional fixes.

In the future we'll also talk about some of the bugs and issues you've reported to us from the Testlive build and how we're fixing them. A lot of it has been improved already. From the current Testlive build to the latest internal development build there are around 300 changes.

There were some freezes on the Testlive servers over the weekend, due a recursive item reference which has now been found and fixed and will be patched to Testlive later today. We also noticed players having trouble finding the servers in the browser. This was fixed and rolled out to Testlive on Tuesday.

Finally, we want to speak to the Xbox audience. We wanted to let you know that we haven't forgotten you and that we will patch the Xbox version of Conan Exiles. As soon as certification ends, which should be soon, we will be able to roll out the Update 32 parity patch on Xbox One.


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.


The mighty Vanguard are our forward troops in the fight against the bugs and exploits. They also help smooth out gameplay systems and mechanics in need of some extra love and attention. This past week there's been a big update to the Feats interface, grouping a lot of blueprints together and organizing them based on theme and content. We think this will make navigating the Feats window much easier for players, letting you understand everything at a glance.



We're hooking up a post-character creation in-game cinematic to replace the temporary one that's currently in the game. This will offer up more details in the game's story, you'll get to see more of Conan, and we've even made a facial rig to give your player character facial expressions in the in-game cinematic.

Finally, the moaning sound that would sometimes play when drinking water has been removed. No more sexy sounds, but we're leaving the door open for our Audio team to create and add some cool buff sounds.


The Terraformers are working on creating new content while also rebalancing existing content. Following up on the armor and weapons revamps we talked about two weeks ago we had some questions from players asking how this will affect NPC drops. Weapons and armors will still drop as loot from NPCs, and we've now also added cultural armors as drops from NPCs belonging to that culture. Meaning you might get Stygian armor from Stygians, Nordheimer armor from Nordheimers, etc.

Speaking of NPCs, populations across the entire game are still being tweaked as part of the content revamp. You'll be able to experience this very soon on Testlive. If you've been playing around with the Testlive build you have already seen some of the effects this has had on NPC and resource placements. You might also have run into the world bosses: bigger, more dangerous versions of regular enemies that stick to certain areas in the map. There are more of them coming, but what they are remains to be seen.



In terms of thralls we've also begun working on a new type of thralls that will work as item carriers for players. You'll find them in camps, just like regular thralls. Once broken they'll have a much greater inventory space than other thralls, based on their tier level, letting you take a lot of extra stuff with you for when you go out on expeditions! This was another reason to have mounts and we have found an alternative by implementing carrier thralls.

Thralls is a natural part of the game already, so we wanted to expand the system further. We felt that carrier thralls made sense as a way of increasing players' carrying capacity.


Ostrich Run

The Monster Hunters have been doing a lot of quality of life work on creatures and monsters. Forward movement's been improved, attack boxes have been adjusted and animations have been polished to look better.

We've also re-implemented additive animations on creatures. That's what you see in the video above. They were removed when the new AI came in a while back and needed to be re-implemented alongside animations for when animals would turn in place. It resulted in creature animations being a bit stuttery, but now that we have the Monster Hunters team we're able to re-implement it and smooth it out, so things look better. All animals have additive animations now except the very small ones (rabbits, baby animals, cobras, etc). The new system is improved from before. It allows us to have different additive turning based on the creature's movement speed.


It is a streaming week again and so we'll be running another developer stream on Friday. Joel won't be joining us, so lead designer Oscar will be taking his place. We'll talk about farming, show some new combat improvements, and bring in someone from the Monster Hunters team to talk about the creature revamp they've been doing.

The time and place, as always, are www.twitch.tv/funcom at 5pm CET. We hope you'll join us!

Sincerely,

Funcom

Hey all!

We've released the newest combat on our TestLive Servers. If you'd like to check it out and leave us feedback, please go here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/440900/discussions/7/1692662484243639100/

EDIT: New smaller patch has been released. Leave feedback here now:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/440900/discussions/7/1692662484259480006/

We read all feedback posted there so please be sure to comment on that thread. Please refrain from posting bugs currently on live. If you're unsure how to switch to TestLive, you can read the instructions here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/440900/discussions/7/133257324787028868/

Thanks and have fun!

Hey all!

We've released the newest combat on our TestLive Servers. If you'd like to check it out and leave us feedback, please go here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/440900/discussions/7/1692662484243639100/

EDIT: New smaller patch has been released. Leave feedback here now:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/440900/discussions/7/1692662484259480006/

We read all feedback posted there so please be sure to comment on that thread. Please refrain from posting bugs currently on live. If you're unsure how to switch to TestLive, you can read the instructions here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/440900/discussions/7/133257324787028868/

Thanks and have fun!

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