Welcome once again to the Funcom community newsletter! If you’re just joining us, where have you been all this time? You have some catching up to do, friend. All the previous community newsletters can be found on our website, or on the Steam community hub.

This will be the last community newsletter before the holidays, as we’ll be on break from the 23rd of December so we can spend time with our families and recharge our batteries. Everyone will be back to work again during the first week of January.

Until then we want to wish all of our fans and supporters happy holidays and a happy new year. We’ll see you in 2018!

Current state of PC

We released Update 32 last week and there’s been some issues popping up here and there that we need to take care of. We’ve released a hotfix for Testlive, so please leave any feedback you may have about this build in this thread. This patch will sort out the most egregious stuff and hopefully leave you with a stable and enjoyable game experience for the holidays. As always, keep those bug reports and feedback coming. We wouldn’t be able to do this game without you, the community.

We’ll also be doing a 2x event over the holidays, doubling the experience points and harvesting rates on normal PvP and PvE servers. We’re kicking off the event on the 21st of December and it will last until the 4th of January.

Current state of Xbox

That 2x event we mentioned earlier? There’s going to be one on Xbox One as well, during the same period! Because we love you.

Unfortunately, we have some bad news too. There won’t be an Xbox One patch this week. Since this is the week before Christmas (and Xbox patches need to go through certification), we don’t have any possibilities to fix things in case they break. We’re going to be sitting on these changes until after the break.

The parity patch that will bring Update 32 to Xbox One will be out after the holidays.

What the teams have been working on in the past week:

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.

Audio design

Arild, our Audio Director, wanted to talk a bit about what he’s been working on. Because without decent audio the game would be kind of drab. Among the various improvements and fixes coming from the sound department are updates to monster sounds and more diverse character vocals. Arild has been bringing in a bunch of different voice actors to spruce up the voice work, and we’ve brought on a new sound designer to help us out with animal and monster sounds.

There’s also more music coming from composer Knut Avenstroup Haugen. He’s creating 14 new tracks for the game, some of which is combat music that will change based on which threats you’re facing.

Vanguard

In addition to fixing bugs and helping the Berserkers improve the combat system the Vanguard have implemented a way for admin commands and server rule changes to be displayed in the chat window. This is to help with admin/player transparency and will hopefully ease the fears of players who worry about admin abuse on private servers. Please let us know which admin commands or server rule changes you would like to see pop up in the chat window (examples: “Admin [USERNAME] has set harvesting rate to 2x” or “Admin [USERNAME] has started flying”).

The Berserkers

Testing continues on the new combat system. If you caught our release date announcement trailer you got a brief glimpse of a player fighting with daggers and with a sword. The Berserkers have recently implemented target locking, so now it’s time to break the heck out of it so they can iron out all the kinks. We hope we have something more to show you guys very soon.

Terraformers

Work is progressing on the volcano and jungle we’ve been teasing you with for a couple of months now. You’ve already seen some of them in the recent trailer and we’ll have more to reveal at a later date!

Last week we mentioned that the team is doing some prototyping and testing ways we can improve how the game loads and streams in assets. If successful, it should us save on memory when the game is running. The basic gist of this prototyping involves splitting up the play field into smaller sized chunks and experimenting with NPC population, resource density, spawn density and frequency, and creature diversity.

This is all still in the testing phase, obviously, but we’re hoping for good results.

Tech/Tools

Achievements! You want them, we’ve been working on them, and now they’re done! So we can confirm, right here and now, that there will be Achievements and Trophies in Conan Exiles. This has been a joint effort between a designer from the Vanguard team and one of our coders on the tech team. Well done guys!

Wrapping up

There will be a final stream before the holidays this Friday, but it won’t be to highlight any coming content or features. It’ll just be the community managers, Nicole and Jens Erik, playing Conan Exiles alongside the community. We’d be very happy if you could join us! Please feel free to suggest a fun and welcoming server for us to play on.

In case you missed it earlier today, we announced a community competition!

Finally, there’s nothing left for us to do but wish you guys happy holidays and a happy new year. We’ll see you guys in 2018!