Dear exiles,
Technically it’s getting cold outside. Hope everyone’s been enjoying the first week of October! It’s getting colder by the day, the perfect time to curl up under a blanket, drink some hot chocolate, and play a video game.
For this week’s community letter, we’re trying something different: fewer words! And possibly some more gifs and pictures, depending on what I’m allowed to show.
Current state of PC
Work is well under way on the next PC update, which will add thrall inventories and new building pieces to the game. Entertainers, fighters and archers you break on your Wheel of Pain needs to be clothed and equipped before they can fight for you, so if you’ve always wanted to make a giant, uniformed army of thralls you will be able to do that. With this patch we’re also updating the basic creature AI. Best case we’ll be rolling out the patch in about two weeks.
Current state of Xbox
Last week we patched Xbox with the Big PC/Xbox Parity Update™. This moved a heap of changes, optimizations and improvements to the Xbox version of Conan Exiles, bringing it in line with the PC version. The full change log can be found here. Going forward we will continue to keep the two versions in sync. Keep in mind that there will always be a delay from PC to console, due to the certification process, but we are working on reducing the time it takes for the console versions to reach parity.
What the teams have been working on in the past week:
Every Friday, the entire development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete. You can find their names and descriptions in the first community letter.
Vanguard (Bugs and exploit fixes and gameplay updates)
In addition to the usual bug fixes the Vanguard team has started working on improving the new ragdoll setup that has been added to the combat system. Because knocking someone down with a giant hammer isn’t the same when you can’t send that person flying in a heap of limbs.
The Vanguard has also been fixing some usability issues in the Xbox version. Finally, there’s a new addition to The Vanguard: a junior programmer named Marius. Welcome to the team!
Terraformers (New areas and content)
On the dungeon side of things the Terraformers have been concepting and experimenting with lava flow patterns and maps. We need that molten rock to look hella good. Here’s a work in progress look at the latest version of the area surrounding the dungeon.
Beyond the virtual landscaping, work has begun on a cleaver item to help gather meat more easily.
The Berserkers (Combat and movement)
The Berserkers have finished up the auto-targeting and lock-on systems for the combat system prototypes. We saw some concerns about this following last week’s community letter. We’re currently only prototyping and testing new targeting systems. Nothing is being added until we have something that we think fits well with our desired combat paradigm.
Art team (Character designs, outfits, animations and effects)
The art team is cranking out new weapons, building pieces and creatures. There are also animations happening. It’s better if we just show you what they’ve been working on.
PUPPY!!!
KITTY!!!
Tech and tools (Client and server stability and performance)
The tools guys are working on improving what kind of information we get in crash reports. Things like knowing the location of players when the client or server crashes, for example.
On the tech team side of things there’s been crash fixes and optimization work, especially on the Xbox parity patch that was rolled out on Friday. Work continues this week on further bug and crash fixes.
Finally, the guys working at Coconut Lizard have managed to hack together a playable build of the PS4 version.
Wrapping up
Players have been asking for a status update on the new features, and we wanted to give you guys some information on that front. We are currently focused on polish and stability. We have a certain threshold of polish that we would like to reach before we start adding new features again, as we don’t want to do things half assed. We’ll provide more updates about features in the future.
Sincerely,
Funcom