Why Conan Exiles 2022 is better than ever

Conan Exiles has been delivering free content for four years and has big plans for Fall 2022 – and it”s more than worth a look today.

Four years after the release of Conan Exiles, just under 8,000 players per day click their way into the Exiled Lands or fight their way through the dangers of the Isle of Siptah. That”s just barely enough to make it into the top 100 most-played games on Steam.

Let”s take a closer look together at why Conan Exiles 2022 is better than ever – there are plenty of reasons for this in my opinion.

This is what has happened since Early Access

To better understand the current state of the game, let”s first take a look back: On 31 January 2017, Conan Exiles launched in Early Access and since that very day I”ve been traipsing through the Exiled Lands. In July of the same year, the climbing system was introduced, and in August 2017, the north of the map was also accessible, along with two new large dungeons.

The November update let you equip your thralls with weapons and armour, a month later weather effects like fog, rain and thunderstorms were boosted and a new armour upgrade system was introduced.

With the release of Conan Exiles on 8 May 2018, the map was expanded to include the volcanic region and the jungle, plus there was fast travel, plant farming, the Derketo religion and the purge mechanic new, as well as a revamped combat system. In October of the same year, the new Jhebbal Sag religion was added, along with the dungeon Midnight Grove and the possibility to raise young animals in animal pens and tame them as companions for battle.

Sidehand combos were also made possible and food troughs were introduced to feed your slaves. In May, 2019 brought not only the new dungeon Sunken City, but also the Medicine Man talent, which you can use to raise skeletal undead as companions. Following the new short sword and two-handed axe weapons, as well as PvP combat standards in September, there was a long-awaited smash hit from fans in December with the newly introduced riding and mount combat system.

The year 2020 was all about the Isle of Siptah, which came into Early Access in September as the first extra player expansion and put a strong focus on PvP through the flood mechanic. In addition, the new faithful management screen and a position indicator for your faithful already made it easier for you to keep track of them in March. Funcom fulfilled fan requests in October 2020 and made the character redesign possible, in addition to a fundamental revision of the crafting system.

Fan feedback on the Isle of Siptah prompted the development team to add NPC camps to the Siptah map in February 2021, and in April this map was expanded with three more biomes. At the same time, the Zath religion was added as a new game element, along with a new way of summoning bosses made possible by discoverable statues, before the Isle of Siptah DLC was finally released in May. From August 2021, not only were character transfers enabled, but also weapon upgrades.

Since January 2022, you can have your faithful perform emotes and no longer have to keep clicking “Join” when the servers are full, as you automatically join queues. Finally, in June, the new Age of Sorcery update was announced, which will not only introduce a spellcasting system in the third quarter of 2022, but will also overhaul the building system:

Free movement (almost) anywhere

One of the features that continues to excite me in Conan Exiles has been in the game since Early Access and continues to challenge me to explore the game world in my own way: With the climbing function, you can get almost anywhere. If a place is not climbable, there is usually a sensible reason for this. For example, to block too easy access to dungeon bosses. Few other games offer anything comparable.

If you ride a certain type of dinosaur in ARK: Survival Evolved, you can also move around on walls and ceilings. In Rust, climbing is only possible through a trick and only works on buildings constructed in a certain way. For climbing in Green Hell, you not only need the right equipment, but it also only works on platforms designed for it – of course, that”s not really free movement by a long shot. Especially people who, like me, like to explore every corner of the map and just try out a lot of things, benefit from the climbing system in Conan Exiles.

The riding system has also given the game world an important innovation: Both the map of the Exiled Lands from the basic game and the map of the Isle of Siptah are quite extensive. On the back of a horse or rhinoceros, you will not only move faster, but also a little safer, since you can avoid annoying groups of enemies quite well. And if you do get stuck in hordes that are willing to fight, you can swing some weapons from the back of your animal. A special challenge is the Parthian shot, where you steer the mount forward and shoot diagonally backwards across the croup!

The control of the mounts could of course be a bit more catchy and natural, the individual gaits are unfortunately not as smooth and fluid as in Red Dead Redemption 2. But riding in Conan Exiles serves its purpose even without smooth changes and provides you with other possibilities than life as a pedestrian barbarian. At the latest, when the exaggeratedly high critical hit chance of the lance is corrected in the Age of Sorcery update, PvP battles on horseback should also be fairer.

Much “can do”, little “must do “

Until now, Funcom has followed a policy of only cosmetic DLCs, adding new building and decoration items, armour and weapons in the style of a particular race and transformation recipes for animal companions to the game. Only the flood mechanic in the Isle of Siptah DLC deviates from this practice; this is exclusively available on the DLC”s separate map. All other new content, such as dungeons, the riding system, the creation of undead with the medicine man talent and the new religions, was made available by the developer team to all players free of charge. It is enough to have bought the basic game once.

In addition, there are countless mods created by the motivated modder community for all aspects of the game. Those who have little money for the Funcom Conan DLCs will find what they are looking for in the building and armour mods and thus get a lot of variety in the game for free. Total Conversions – mods that feature a completely redesigned map and their own game systems – also let you experience the game in a new way and move the scenario to the Fantasy Middle Ages or even to Azeroth.

Funcom also seems to be aware of the modder community and its positive influence on the perception of the game: since the Early Access of the basic game, there has been a DevKit that gives modders easy access to the game files. And at the livestream announcement for Age of Sorcery, in view of the redesigned building system, it was specifically emphasised that modders will be given ample opportunity to adapt their mods to the changes before the update is released.

Sandbox, but do it right

For me, another strength of Conan Exiles is the wide range of options that appeal to many different gaming tastes. If you like hardcore PvP action, you can set up a PvP zone anywhere in the game world using the battle standard, raid the settlements of other clans on the corresponding servers and fight for the revenue in resource-rich areas.

If you prefer a more tranquil setting, you can build your own farm, tame every animal species available in the game and cultivate all the rare lotus varieties, which of course you first have to find in the game world. Explorers go in search of the recipes, ghosts, diaries and language scrolls hidden everywhere. Alternatively, you can collect NPC slaves of the highest possible quality for your crafting benches, rummage around for rare weapons or explore every dungeon.

Building fans will have a lot of fun: Have you already built a tree house settlement, a realistically designed harbour city, a pyramid including interiors or a mountain monastery on the highest mountains in the game world? Especially if you like to creatively search for your own challenges, Conan Exiles gives you plenty of opportunity to realise them.
The active community managers also regularly organise building and other creative competitions and share guide and building videos with the entire community on the Conan Exiles social media accounts. Fan-run role-playing servers with their own background story and self-built settlements round off the offer and let you experience the game world in a completely new way.

Wishes are important

While some development teams solely follow their own visions for their games,  Funcom takes fan feedback very seriously Quite a few newly added contents are based on the wishes of the players, especially new weapons, character customisation or the riding system were talked about for a long time before they were added to the game. The importance of the fans” opinion is particularly evident in the case of the Isle of Siptah.

The original version of the DLC released in Early Access was highly competitive. Human NPCs could only capture players during a periodic or self-triggered flood event at various locations on the map. Especially in crafting and securing one”s own bases, however, it is not possible without a large number of the highest quality NPCs possible.

Consequently, on public servers there was a lot of fighting over this artificially scarce resource. Those who travelled alone had little chance of a good catch and had a hard time with the crowd of opponents. In addition, there were plenty of fans who enjoyed travelling on the Siptah map but had little interest in PvP. Several months later, Funcom delivered the desired NPC camps and new locations, along with three more small biomes to explore, making the Siptah map much more interesting.

In the upcoming Age of Sorcery update, fans should also be given enough time to test the new content – this should avoid problems like with the Isle of Siptah DLC from the outset. In the meantime, the development team should also be aware of how important it is for the fans to be able to experience the game world alone and without PvP constraints 

What I like most about Conan Exiles is that nothing seems to be set in stone: The overhaul of the game”s basic systems over the last few years to improve performance and ease of use shows that the developers are looking closely at how fans play and where the sticking points are, and then tweaking them as needed.

Overall, Conan Exiles 2022 is richer than ever before and there is still no end in sight Even if it remains to be seen how fair the planned in-game shop and the upcoming seasons including Battlepass are designed, Funcom seems to have clear plans for the future and wants to continue to leave all game improvements for free