Conan Exiles may look like it is just another survival game loaded with crafting options and a bloody huge world to explore; and really, in all honesty, that’s all it is. It doesn’t offer anything different to most survival games and instead it’s just wearing a pretty face and has hanging junk.
Conan Exiles, developed by Funcom is set in the mythological times of Conan the Barbarian, and your setting is a desert. Well, it is to start with. It eventually opens up to lands rich with rivers, forested areas, and canyons with a few locations bearing giant structures of a marvellous nature. Structures of a previous civilisation. Your goal as this new member to the world is to survive the terrain, build structures, battle tribes and creatures, and you can do it alone or online.
While it is has only just hit Early Access, Conan Exiles looks breathtaking in most areas, but can look dull in others with textures struggling to load up in rare occasions, or maybe the light just makes everything look flat in regards to the shading. The atmosphere however becomes dazzling and magnificent to witness in specific locations, and the lightly forested areas littered around the world bring a nice feeling of life to the world. This becomes appreciated more after you’ve just had to spend ages in the outskirts, fighting for your life in dry, dusty areas.
“That was my main issue with the game, while there is a huge mass of supplies surrounding you, it’s hard to gather enough supplies needed for various defensive things when you can’t even go through your inventory because some NPC’s start attacking you.”
For my time with the game I didn’t delve into the online multiplayer servers mainly because the one server that I joined I found myself asking another player through the text box, if the house I was looking at was their house. They said yes. Then murdered me. Almost instantly after that moment I felt like this was going to be another one of those games where you can only enjoy it with friends because random strangers hate you and won’t form a friendship with you.
In light of this, I just ran singleplayer mode, which weirdly requires you to host your own server anyway.
Server hosting gives you incredible control, with you being able to control the time cycles, allow no clip, setting the nudity level, sorting out damage multipliers, changing harvesting options, and much more. And this is before you’ve even set the server live! These options give you total control of your server if you do choose to host it with the intention of playing online, but If not then you can just play it solo and enjoy a single player experience…while hosting a server.
While in your game there is an option for admin settings, although this will only be a setting for admins obviously, but it allows you to set the time of day, time cycles, and choose what level you want your character, the option to no-clip, etc. While this can be handy for those who want to experience what the game has to offer when it finally leaves Early Access, it does leave very little the the imagination for when that time comes.
“The world looks breathtaking, the combat mechanics are simple and powerful, the inventory is easy to go through, as is the crafting.”
After the lengthy wait times that Conan Exiles pushes onto you, with my longest wait time hitting in at about six minutes to load the character selection screen, and then about seven minutes to load up the world after that, you can get going!
Character customisation gives you standard options you expect to see in a survival, RPG game of this type. Hair style, colour of skin, player height, eye shape, and then one feature that many people seem to have found humour in, was the penis size and breast size sliders. There were a lot of penises on my Twitter feed on the day Conan Exiles launched for Early Access.
When players start in the world, they’re naked. There’s not really much information to help you figure out what you do, and for some reason my subtitle feature totally borked up and I couldn’t understand the mystical voice talking to me from the stone that lit up. I found myself going with basic intuition and just headed in a direction and started gathering plant fibers and stones. Eventually you level up to level one fairly quickly, and mostly through just running.
“I just ran around the map naked, cock and balls swinging, or my boobs bouncing”
Levelling up is fairly straightforward, you level up, you gain a point, you spend that point on either vitality, strength, toughness, survival, stamina, etc. The “Learn Recipes” screen is where things started to get confusing. I saw no understandable indication as to what I was doing. Some things that were saying I could learn them, and others were saying I didn’t have enough points when I did. In the end I just found myself clicking everything until the “Learn” button became interactive. Just to explain though, the learn recopies area is where you can add more structures, weapons, and other survival elements to your crafting area in your inventory.
The inventory was fairly easy to navigate around, with what you are carrying on the left, your stats and characters clothes and weapons in the centre, and the crafting options on the right. A simple mouse over will show you how many of a specific resource you will need to be able to craft that element. As for the GUI, you don’t find it too distracting, the simple inventory quick select in the bottom of the screen is nice and big, but not an eyesore, and then along the top left you have your characters stats, showing health, stamina, experience progress, hunger, thirst and more.
There are enemy NPC’s in Conan Exiles that can either be found in small camps or tribe civilisations. They will attack you, and they will give chase for an annoyingly long time. I found myself scaling some rocks on the side of a mountain just trying to get away. Thankfully the AI couldn’t figure out how to walk around a rock and they remained stuck there until I decided to leg it again. Before I did leg it though, I witnessed an amazing bug in which these two tribesmen were trying to attack me with swords from afar, and one of the tribesmen were clearly hitting the other guys shield, thus eventually smashing the shield into pieces giving that guy less protection.
Shortly after this point I had started my run for freedom which lasted about ten minutes with only mere seconds to have a break from running and rebuild the stamina bar. I eventually died at the hands of some elder tribesman. Previous to finding myself within a tribes camp I had had no time to collect materials and build anything or create clothes because I was literally just running away from hostile creatures, which then formed into running away from small camps I was accidentally stumbling upon, and then that led to me being stuck in this tribes village in which I met my death.
That was my main issue with the game, while there is a huge mass of supplies surrounding you, it’s hard to gather enough supplies needed for various defensive things when you can’t even go through your inventory because some NPC’s start attacking you.
I did try to enjoy the game as much as I could and I managed to find an elephant at one point stood around nearby a waterfall; but I had achieved nothing at all in terms of levelling up or crafting items. I just ran around the map naked, cock and balls swinging, or my boobs bouncing when I started another server. It felt like I was being forced to choose between running around and appreciating the world, or taking it slow and attempting to survive, but not get to see anything.
I could…I could just suck at it.
While I didn’t particularly enjoy my short time with Conan Exiles, nor did I get to really experience the game in-depth due to so much hostility from the AI; I can tell that it is a game that has been carefully thought through. The world looks breathtaking, the combat mechanics are simple and powerful, the inventory is easy to go through, as is the crafting. The level up system and recipe learning could do with being sorted out and being more user friendly with clear notifiers and specific colours. The hostile creatures were a huge bother, and I felt really put off with the fact that I couldn’t just wander around an area gathering supplied without having something start attacking me way before I’ve learnt how to craft a stone sword.
There were a huge litter of bugs, which is understandable for an Early Access, but these were fairly big game breaking bugs. Character selection menus getting jumbled up or totally vanishing, shaders causing a crash, and the long wait times may put people off. Some bugs, such as NPC/Creature movements are incredibly jerky, but humorous to watch.
Conan Exiles is a pretty game, and it is a good game, but right now it’s a little bit too overwhelming. There’s no easing the player into the gameplay and it is certainly rather hard and tiring collecting enough materials to construct structures, then dying and having to start all over again. But it is an experience that I hope will find its way back into my life. I wish to return to a world that is less brutal, and a world that I can wiggle my junk around without being chased by a crocodile type creature, because Conan Exiles knows what it wants to be, but doesn’t seem to be there yet.
