Hey everyone! It's mid-March already (time sure does fly) and we've been preparing for a trip to San Francisco and the Game Developer's Conference. Two people from Funcom will be on the show floor presenting Conan Exiles and Mutant Year Zero: The Road to Eden*, which was announced at the end of February. Community Manager Jens Erik will be at Epic Games' booth to demo Conan Exiles on consoles. If you're at the event and want to have a chat, feel free to reach out to us.

If you haven't tried it yet, the new combat system and content revamp is available for trial on Testlive. We once again want to thank everyone for participating and for giving us feedback As mentioned last week, there are additional builds coming that introduces some new changes and bug fixes. The next time we update the Testlive servers we will also review the number and configuration of all Testlive servers. 

Over on the console side of things we're still wrapping up certification. We know this has taken a while and that the wait has been frustrating for our Xbox community, but we still intend to roll out the next Xbox patch after certification is all wrapped up.

*Funcom is only publishing Mutant Year Zero. The Conan Exiles team is fully focused on Conan Exiles, to fully wrap up the game and prepare for launch. Only people from Funcom's management and marketing teams are going to GDC.


We recently did a big performance and compatibility test with our external QA partner, Testronic, and we've started going through the results of this test. It's given us a lot of really helpful data that we can use to improve the game.

There are many different types of QA (Quality Assurance). There's Functionality QA, which is making sure all of the game's features are working as intended while also rooting out bugs and glitches. There's Certification QA, to see if a game meets the requirements and standards set by the platform creators. We go through this when releasing patches for Conan Exiles. Localization QA checks how a game handles displaying different languages.

Compatibility QA means we're testing the game on several different types of hardware. This is usually done externally, since you need a lot of computer parts to do this kind of testing. It also takes a lot of time to assemble, configure and run tests. Big developers like EA and Activision have the capacity to do this in-house, but for us it means using an external partner.

For this test we set up different testing scenarios for both single-player games and dedicated servers. We defined hotspots around the map that affect CPU and GPU performance (based on internal testing and community feedback), places like the Black Hand Pirate ship and other highly populated areas with a lot of activity. Over 70 different configurations were tested, mixing up CPUs and GPUs from Intel, Nvidia and AMD, on all settings, from Laptop Mode to Ultra.

One of the things we found was that due to the optimizations we've done for the console versions the game uses a lot less system memory on PC now than at the start of Early Access a year ago.

The Unreal Engine doesn't use all processor cores efficiently, which is why Intel processors appear to be running the game better, even if an equivalent AMD processor would be more powerful if all cores were utilized. Consequently, we noticed that newer Intel I3 Dual Core CPUs managed to run the game quite well. There's a limit to how much we can change without incurring huge engineering refactoring costs. We might change our system requirements accordingly, though nothing's been decided just yet.

In the table below, we have summarized our findings from the compatibility tests. The results are relatively conservative and should allow you to have a good experience if you have similar configurations. Obviously, if you're playing in a stressful scenario with lots of players and buildings, performance will be different. If your game performance is severely different from our estimates in the table below, please get in touch with one of our community managers, as there may be some compatibility issues that we're not aware of.


(Right click on the image and select "Open in New Tab" for a better picture)


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.


Our intrepid monster hunters have been tweaking creature attacks and behaviors, working closely with the Berserkers team to prevent players from simply stunlocking creatures during fights. This week in particular the rhinos have gotten new melee and charge attacks, which will force players to be more active when fighting them. We'll have gifs of this very soon, after it's gotten some additional polish.

And now, some gifs of creature taunts:

Panther Taunt

Bat Demon Taunt


Last week we mentioned some changes to the decay system and now we can talk about what those changes mean for the game. Placeables are meant to decay the same as buildings, removing themselves from the overworld once their timer runs out. We're introducing a change that will make placeables attach to a building's decay score if it's inside the building's land claim bubble. Anything placed outside the land claim bubble will get its own decay score and become abandoned at its own pace. Lone placeables decay much faster than if they're in the proximity of a building.

The Vanguard has also been working on Testlive bugs, specifically an exploit that would allow players to run incredibly fast. This fix will be rolled out in the next Testlive build, along with over 300 other changes and bug fixes we've been working on internally.

RCON support will roll out with the next PC patch. We've already seen a lot of feedback from server moderators since the announcement, which has been incredibly helpful for sussing out what kind of functionality you expect from an RCON feature. Please continue to provide us with feedback.

Finally, our lead programmer has been testing out ways of improving building replication, making the game load in buildings much faster. This should also improve server performance and take care of some exploitative play along the way.


As always, it's all about combat balancing and changes for Team berserkers. Specifically, dodging. The new combat system was designed to be more tactical, forcing players to think a few moves ahead and choose when to go in for an attack and when to get out of the way. It's about looking for an opening and striking at an opportune moment.

What we noticed during combat test, and what our community has told us via Testlive feedback, is that there's a lot of dodging being done in all fights. If your Grit Attribute was high enough you could dodge roll circles around your opponents and never get hit. So, we've changed dodging to have a percentage-based cost. This restricts you to dodging 4-6 times before your stamina runs out, forcing you to be more selective with your evasions.


We're streaming again this Friday, at 5pm CET. This will be our first re-streamed dev stream, broadcasting to both Twitch and Mixer. We ran a quick test on Tuesday to see if everything was working properly and we might do some additional tests before we go live on Friday. Joel will be back to answer questions and talk a bit about new stuff making it into the game.

There might not be a traditional newsletter next week, since our community manager is in San Francisco at GDC, but maybe we'll be able to do a quick update.

Hey everyone! It's mid-March already (time sure does fly) and we've been preparing for a trip to San Francisco and the Game Developer's Conference. Two people from Funcom will be on the show floor presenting Conan Exiles and Mutant Year Zero: The Road to Eden*, which was announced at the end of February. Community Manager Jens Erik will be at Epic Games' booth to demo Conan Exiles on consoles. If you're at the event and want to have a chat, feel free to reach out to us.

If you haven't tried it yet, the new combat system and content revamp is available for trial on Testlive. We once again want to thank everyone for participating and for giving us feedback As mentioned last week, there are additional builds coming that introduces some new changes and bug fixes. The next time we update the Testlive servers we will also review the number and configuration of all Testlive servers. 

Over on the console side of things we're still wrapping up certification. We know this has taken a while and that the wait has been frustrating for our Xbox community, but we still intend to roll out the next Xbox patch after certification is all wrapped up.

*Funcom is only publishing Mutant Year Zero. The Conan Exiles team is fully focused on Conan Exiles, to fully wrap up the game and prepare for launch. Only people from Funcom's management and marketing teams are going to GDC.


We recently did a big performance and compatibility test with our external QA partner, Testronic, and we've started going through the results of this test. It's given us a lot of really helpful data that we can use to improve the game.

There are many different types of QA (Quality Assurance). There's Functionality QA, which is making sure all of the game's features are working as intended while also rooting out bugs and glitches. There's Certification QA, to see if a game meets the requirements and standards set by the platform creators. We go through this when releasing patches for Conan Exiles. Localization QA checks how a game handles displaying different languages.

Compatibility QA means we're testing the game on several different types of hardware. This is usually done externally, since you need a lot of computer parts to do this kind of testing. It also takes a lot of time to assemble, configure and run tests. Big developers like EA and Activision have the capacity to do this in-house, but for us it means using an external partner.

For this test we set up different testing scenarios for both single-player games and dedicated servers. We defined hotspots around the map that affect CPU and GPU performance (based on internal testing and community feedback), places like the Black Hand Pirate ship and other highly populated areas with a lot of activity. Over 70 different configurations were tested, mixing up CPUs and GPUs from Intel, Nvidia and AMD, on all settings, from Laptop Mode to Ultra.

One of the things we found was that due to the optimizations we've done for the console versions the game uses a lot less system memory on PC now than at the start of Early Access a year ago.

The Unreal Engine doesn't use all processor cores efficiently, which is why Intel processors appear to be running the game better, even if an equivalent AMD processor would be more powerful if all cores were utilized. Consequently, we noticed that newer Intel I3 Dual Core CPUs managed to run the game quite well. There's a limit to how much we can change without incurring huge engineering refactoring costs. We might change our system requirements accordingly, though nothing's been decided just yet.

In the table below, we have summarized our findings from the compatibility tests. The results are relatively conservative and should allow you to have a good experience if you have similar configurations. Obviously, if you're playing in a stressful scenario with lots of players and buildings, performance will be different. If your game performance is severely different from our estimates in the table below, please get in touch with one of our community managers, as there may be some compatibility issues that we're not aware of.


(Right click on the image and select "Open in New Tab" for a better picture)


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.


Our intrepid monster hunters have been tweaking creature attacks and behaviors, working closely with the Berserkers team to prevent players from simply stunlocking creatures during fights. This week in particular the rhinos have gotten new melee and charge attacks, which will force players to be more active when fighting them. We'll have gifs of this very soon, after it's gotten some additional polish.

And now, some gifs of creature taunts:

Panther Taunt

Bat Demon Taunt


Last week we mentioned some changes to the decay system and now we can talk about what those changes mean for the game. Placeables are meant to decay the same as buildings, removing themselves from the overworld once their timer runs out. We're introducing a change that will make placeables attach to a building's decay score if it's inside the building's land claim bubble. Anything placed outside the land claim bubble will get its own decay score and become abandoned at its own pace. Lone placeables decay much faster than if they're in the proximity of a building.

The Vanguard has also been working on Testlive bugs, specifically an exploit that would allow players to run incredibly fast. This fix will be rolled out in the next Testlive build, along with over 300 other changes and bug fixes we've been working on internally.

RCON support will roll out with the next PC patch. We've already seen a lot of feedback from server moderators since the announcement, which has been incredibly helpful for sussing out what kind of functionality you expect from an RCON feature. Please continue to provide us with feedback.

Finally, our lead programmer has been testing out ways of improving building replication, making the game load in buildings much faster. This should also improve server performance and take care of some exploitative play along the way.


As always, it's all about combat balancing and changes for Team berserkers. Specifically, dodging. The new combat system was designed to be more tactical, forcing players to think a few moves ahead and choose when to go in for an attack and when to get out of the way. It's about looking for an opening and striking at an opportune moment.

What we noticed during combat test, and what our community has told us via Testlive feedback, is that there's a lot of dodging being done in all fights. If your Grit Attribute was high enough you could dodge roll circles around your opponents and never get hit. So, we've changed dodging to have a percentage-based cost. This restricts you to dodging 4-6 times before your stamina runs out, forcing you to be more selective with your evasions.


We're streaming again this Friday, at 5pm CET. This will be our first re-streamed dev stream, broadcasting to both Twitch and Mixer. We ran a quick test on Tuesday to see if everything was working properly and we might do some additional tests before we go live on Friday. Joel will be back to answer questions and talk a bit about new stuff making it into the game.

There might not be a traditional newsletter next week, since our community manager is in San Francisco at GDC, but maybe we'll be able to do a quick update.

Welcome to March and the next Conan Exiles community newsletter.

It's been very cold here in Norway for the past few weeks, but we're finally over that February hump. It's getting (slightly) warmer and we're keeping our eyes locked on spring and the launch of Conan Exiles on May 8th.

We have about three more weeks until content lock, which is when we need to be done implementing all the content that's going into the Gold Build and the Day 1 patch. After that it's nothing but polishing, bugfixing and optimization until launch.

In case you missed it on Friday you can catch up with our latest developer stream over on our YouTube channel. Lead designer Oscar Lopez Lacalle subbed in for Joel to talk about changes to the game's bow mechanics, armor tiering, creature updates and armor tiering. It's an informative stream, so we suggest you check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5vk9qs70gQ


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.


From the Monster Hunters this week we're bringing you some gifs to showcase the work they've been doing. Creatures and monsters have been given taunts and greater attack variety, giving them a bigger deck of cards to choose from when going after a player. It will also make them more dangerous to fight.

Scorpion stinger attack

There are also special threat and taunt animations coming in to signal to players that creatures are liable to attack. These animations will activate when players move within a certain range, giving you a brief window to turn around run in the other direction. We'll have more gifs of these in the coming weeks.

Horn attack


The Terraformers team have been preparing the game for implementation of the Purge mechanic. This involves playtesting our internal version in order to give feedback to the designers so they can iterate on what they've made.

The Purge mechanic will spawn in creatures and NPCs to attack your base in order to destroy things, even when you're not logged in. You'll need to consider the placement of traps, walls, thralls and other defences to protect your stuff. The Purge mechanic will be active on all official servers. On private servers an administrator can customize and configure the Purge or turn it off completely if they so choose.

Beyond that they've been giving the character creator a makeover, adding more elements to the scene so it looks like a space within the Exiled Lands. This, coupled with the new post-character creation in-game cinematic, will explain how your character came to consciousness near the lore stone in the beginning of the game. The idea is to create a better flow when going from character creation to the game proper.


We covered a lot of further combat changes in our livestream, but if you don't feel like sitting through an hour and 15 minutes of livestream footage we'll give you guys a quick summary here as well.

Ranged weapons have gotten some more love, with new aiming and accuracy mechanics. Bows will be inaccurate when moving and shooting, so we recommend planting your feet if you want to land your shots. Your Accuracy score reduces the penalty, but you might still miss if you're firing while on the move. The bow has also gotten a light attack three-shot combination, letting you fire off three arrows in quick succession. Finally, the bow's heavy attack zooms in again, for better accuracy. It's still a timed attack, but we're considering what our options are with the bow's heavy attack down the line.

Bow combo

Target locking has been changed so both characters will always be visible when fighting and camera movement has been smoothed out. Check out the gif below to see it in action.

Target locking

We are reviewing and balancing the different weapons against each other. We're now at a point where we can iterate and change things in the combat system to improve balance and fun factor. These are all recent changes that aren't currently represented in the Testlive version but will be rolled out soon.


Coming out of the Vanguard camp are more bug and crash fixes and this week we want to give particular attention to fixes done to the decay system. The system hasn't been working optimally and so we've been working on changing it for the better.

We also want to address the subject of placeables. They are supposed to decay alongside buildings, but haven't so far. This has led to floating placeables mucking up servers, making things look weird. Our decay system revamp will also work on placeables, improving immersion.

Finally, and I know this is something private server admins will appreciate, we're going to be rolling out RCON support for Conan Exiles. RCON (Remote Connection) allows server admins to remotely connect to their servers to spawn items, kick and ban players, use any availble admin command on a targeted player, as well as access the game database. This access is a very powerful tool and allows admins to look at the current live saved state of the server using SQL. The initial list of supported RCON commands will cover the most important features, but we have an option to expand this list based on community feedback.

The technical manual will be updated before launch with a short guide on RCON functionality.


We're doing a contest this week, starting from March 8th, where you can win a special prize celebrating the amazing women from our games over the years. More details to come on Thursday.

Keep that Testlive feedback coming in, but please keep it delegated to just the main patch notes thread in the Testlive subforum. Please do not open new threads.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Welcome to March and the next Conan Exiles community newsletter.

It's been very cold here in Norway for the past few weeks, but we're finally over that February hump. It's getting (slightly) warmer and we're keeping our eyes locked on spring and the launch of Conan Exiles on May 8th.

We have about three more weeks until content lock, which is when we need to be done implementing all the content that's going into the Gold Build and the Day 1 patch. After that it's nothing but polishing, bugfixing and optimization until launch.

In case you missed it on Friday you can catch up with our latest developer stream over on our YouTube channel. Lead designer Oscar Lopez Lacalle subbed in for Joel to talk about changes to the game's bow mechanics, armor tiering, creature updates and armor tiering. It's an informative stream, so we suggest you check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5vk9qs70gQ


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.


From the Monster Hunters this week we're bringing you some gifs to showcase the work they've been doing. Creatures and monsters have been given taunts and greater attack variety, giving them a bigger deck of cards to choose from when going after a player. It will also make them more dangerous to fight.

Scorpion stinger attack

There are also special threat and taunt animations coming in to signal to players that creatures are liable to attack. These animations will activate when players move within a certain range, giving you a brief window to turn around run in the other direction. We'll have more gifs of these in the coming weeks.

Horn attack


The Terraformers team have been preparing the game for implementation of the Purge mechanic. This involves playtesting our internal version in order to give feedback to the designers so they can iterate on what they've made.

The Purge mechanic will spawn in creatures and NPCs to attack your base in order to destroy things, even when you're not logged in. You'll need to consider the placement of traps, walls, thralls and other defences to protect your stuff. The Purge mechanic will be active on all official servers. On private servers an administrator can customize and configure the Purge or turn it off completely if they so choose.

Beyond that they've been giving the character creator a makeover, adding more elements to the scene so it looks like a space within the Exiled Lands. This, coupled with the new post-character creation in-game cinematic, will explain how your character came to consciousness near the lore stone in the beginning of the game. The idea is to create a better flow when going from character creation to the game proper.


We covered a lot of further combat changes in our livestream, but if you don't feel like sitting through an hour and 15 minutes of livestream footage we'll give you guys a quick summary here as well.

Ranged weapons have gotten some more love, with new aiming and accuracy mechanics. Bows will be inaccurate when moving and shooting, so we recommend planting your feet if you want to land your shots. Your Accuracy score reduces the penalty, but you might still miss if you're firing while on the move. The bow has also gotten a light attack three-shot combination, letting you fire off three arrows in quick succession. Finally, the bow's heavy attack zooms in again, for better accuracy. It's still a timed attack, but we're considering what our options are with the bow's heavy attack down the line.

Bow combo

Target locking has been changed so both characters will always be visible when fighting and camera movement has been smoothed out. Check out the gif below to see it in action.

Target locking

We are reviewing and balancing the different weapons against each other. We're now at a point where we can iterate and change things in the combat system to improve balance and fun factor. These are all recent changes that aren't currently represented in the Testlive version but will be rolled out soon.


Coming out of the Vanguard camp are more bug and crash fixes and this week we want to give particular attention to fixes done to the decay system. The system hasn't been working optimally and so we've been working on changing it for the better.

We also want to address the subject of placeables. They are supposed to decay alongside buildings, but haven't so far. This has led to floating placeables mucking up servers, making things look weird. Our decay system revamp will also work on placeables, improving immersion.

Finally, and I know this is something private server admins will appreciate, we're going to be rolling out RCON support for Conan Exiles. RCON (Remote Connection) allows server admins to remotely connect to their servers to spawn items, kick and ban players, use any availble admin command on a targeted player, as well as access the game database. This access is a very powerful tool and allows admins to look at the current live saved state of the server using SQL. The initial list of supported RCON commands will cover the most important features, but we have an option to expand this list based on community feedback.

The technical manual will be updated before launch with a short guide on RCON functionality.


We're doing a contest this week, starting from March 8th, where you can win a special prize celebrating the amazing women from our games over the years. More details to come on Thursday.

Keep that Testlive feedback coming in, but please keep it delegated to just the main patch notes thread in the Testlive subforum. Please do not open new threads.

Sincerely,

Funcom

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!