Dear exiles,
Happy November everyone! Hope you all had a great Halloween and that you didn’t overstuff yourselves on sugary sweets. We celebrated the only way we could think of: Smashing pumpkins. Literally. Many thanks to our American community managers Nicole Vayo and Andy Benditt for taking time out of their work schedules to partake in what we hope will become a great new pastime.
We’ve had some new people joining us this week: a new coder, Marcine, a new 3D artist, Gunnar, and a new project manager, Ramona. Welcome to the team, guys!
And now, for your favorite pastime: reading the rest of the weekly newsletter.
Current state of Xbox
The patch we mentioned sending to Microsoft late last week passed certification, but we needed to wait for a store upgrade from Microsoft before we could push it to live. It’s now been released into the wild, so hopefully players can summon avatars again. We also hope the dancers no longer crash your servers.
Current state of PC
We’re currently in the process of building a new live candidate from the version of the game currently up on Testlive. There are bugs and exploits that we’re currently working on fixing that will be included in this live candidate. Chief among them are duplication exploits and a speed increase bug. They’re both fixed in Testlive, along with a host of other bugs. There are some additional bugs in the Testlive version that need to be fixed (another duping bug, for example), but once those have been sorted out, we will move this version from Testlive to live.
However, we should have hotfixed these bugs much, much sooner. We should also have been more communicative with you, the community, about what was going on. For this we apologize. Please understand that we haven’t been ignoring you or keeping you in the dark. It was just a case of human error.
We’re currently planning for the patch to go live on Thursday. We’ll also be doing some cleanup on the official servers.
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. So as not to make this newsletter overly long we’re only sticking to the highlights from the teams. Things are still being worked on “behind the scenes”, and we’ll mention these when they’re relevant.
Vanguard (Bugs and exploit fixes and gameplay updates)
The Vanguard has grown since last week! The Featureama team has been integrated into The Vanguard to help out with bug fixing, now that we’re in our polish phase. More people means more bugs fixed! They’ve fixed the speed exploit and the duplication exploit previously, and one of the coders are working on a different, final duplication bug on Testlive.
Art team (Character designs, outfits, animations and effects)
The art team is still pumping out new outfits, creatures and weapons. You can see the brand new Kambujan Shaman outfit in the image below, and we’ll be bringing you renders of other cultural styles in the coming weeks. On the creature side of things, they’re experimenting with creating more fantastical beings to further fill out the creature pool. Maybe you’ll see some of them on this blog?
Terraformers (New areas and content)
“We’ve been working on making things wet. Very wet,” was the single-sentence summary out of the Terraformers team on Friday. In addition to some cool secret projects (to be revealed later) they’ve been helping out with the new dynamic weather system to make thing look nice and wet when it rains. Now we feel like we need a shower.
The Berserkers (Combat and movement)
We had a round of combat testing on Friday afternoon to see how the newest additions to the combat prototypes behave “in the wild”. There’s even a nifty arena set up for our testing. Because obviously you need a proper fighting pit when you’re doing combat prototyping. Again, keep in mind that this is just prototyping and testing. There’s no set date for when any of this will make it into the game.
Wrapping up
Thank you once again for reading. We hope you enjoy reading these newsletters. We do read and appreciate your feedback, even if we’re not always there to immediately respond to it. Please do not mistake silence for apathy. We really care about this game and we are doing our very best to make it as good as we can.
As mentioned previously we are currently in a polishing phase in the development of Conan Exiles. This means we’re working on improving the current features we already have in the game before we start working on adding additional features. This is why we haven’t mentioned things like pets, city management, The Purge or the sorcery system in this blog. Once we’re satisfied with the game’s level of polish we’ll continue working on new features.
Sincerely,
Funcom