Dear Exiles,

The last 3-4 weeks our engine team has been hard at work moving Conan Exiles from one version of Unreal Engine to a newer, more updated version. During this time our game coders have continue fixing exploits and bugs, so we are still rolling out hotfixes while the engine updates are happening in the background. In parallel our artists and designers are working on the new biome, which was revealed earlier this month.

As the title of this blog post says we’re upgrading from Unreal 4.12 to 4.15. It’s a pretty big leap. This most recent version of the Unreal Engine allows to take advantage of some new features that will help us during the development process of Conan Exiles, for example optimization of both server and client, which should result in a smoother experience for all players.

An example of one of these features is blueprint nativization. Blueprints are slow (very, very slow), and porting them to C++ is time consuming and makes things difficult to modify for modders. Nativization should offer us some of the gains of rewriting things in C++ for certain blueprints as part of the build process, while still allowing modders the full flexibility to make changes to our game.

Moving to an updated engine also represents a challenge. Conan Exiles is an unfinished game currently released under the Early Access banner, meaning there are always bugs and glitches in need of fixing as we add new features and content. On top of the already existing bugs there are new bugs being introduced with the move from 4.12 to 4.15 that also need fixing before we can push out a new update.

What this means for the game is that the next update, which adds climbing to the game, won’t be released before the Unreal 4.15 version is ready to roll out. We were hoping to do this some weeks ago, but the process of moving to 4.15 has taken more time than initially anticipated and so you’ve had to wait a little longer for the climbing system to come out.

In the long run, however, moving to this newer version of Unreal is nothing but beneficial, both for us developers and for you, the players.

Your cross awaits, Exiles