Welcome to March and the next Conan Exiles community newsletter.

It’s been very cold here in Norway for the past few weeks, but we’re finally over that February hump. It’s getting (slightly) warmer and we’re keeping our eyes locked on spring and the launch of Conan Exiles on May 8th.

We have about three more weeks until content lock, which is when we need to be done implementing all the content that’s going into the Gold Build and the Day 1 patch. After that it’s nothing but polishing, bugfixing and optimization until launch.

In case you missed it on Friday you can catch up with our latest developer stream over on our YouTube channel. Lead designer Oscar Lopez Lacalle subbed in for Joel to talk about changes to the game’s bow mechanics, armor tiering, creature updates and armor tiering. It’s an informative stream, so we suggest you check it out:

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.

Monster Hunters

From the Monster Hunters this week we’re bringing you some gifs to showcase the work they’ve been doing. Creatures and monsters have been given taunts and greater attack variety, giving them a bigger deck of cards to choose from when going after a player. It will also make them more dangerous to fight.

There are also special threat and taunt animations coming in to signal to players that creatures are liable to attack. These animations will activate when players move within a certain range, giving you a brief window to turn around run in the other direction. We’ll have more gifs of these in the coming weeks.

Terraformers

The Terraformers team have been preparing the game for implementation of the Purge mechanic. This involves playtesting our internal version in order to give feedback to the designers so they can iterate on what they’ve made.

The Purge mechanic will spawn in creatures and NPCs to attack your base in order to destroy things, even when you’re not logged in. You’ll need to consider the placement of traps, walls, thralls and other defences to protect your stuff. The Purge mechanic will be active on all official servers. On private servers an administrator can customize and configure the Purge or turn it off completely if they so choose.

Beyond that they’ve been giving the character creator a makeover, adding more elements to the scene so it looks like a space within the Exiled Lands. This, coupled with the new post-character creation in-game cinematic, will explain how your character came to consciousness near the lore stone in the beginning of the game. The idea is to create a better flow when going from character creation to the game proper.

Berserkers

We covered a lot of further combat changes in our livestream, but if you don’t feel like sitting through an hour and 15 minutes of livestream footage we’ll give you guys a quick summary here as well.

Ranged weapons have gotten some more love, with new aiming and accuracy mechanics. Bows will be inaccurate when moving and shooting, so we recommend planting your feet if you want to land your shots. Your Accuracy score reduces the penalty, but you might still miss if you’re firing while on the move. The bow has also gotten a light attack three-shot combination, letting you fire off three arrows in quick succession. Finally, the bow’s heavy attack zooms in again, for better accuracy. It’s still a timed attack, but we’re considering what our options are with the bow’s heavy attack down the line.

Target locking has been changed so both characters will always be visible when fighting and camera movement has been smoothed out. Check out the gif below to see it in action.

We are reviewing and balancing the different weapons against each other. We’re now at a point where we can iterate and change things in the combat system to improve balance and fun factor. These are all recent changes that aren’t currently represented in the Testlive version but will be rolled out soon.

Vanguard

Coming out of the Vanguard camp are more bug and crash fixes and this week we want to give particular attention to fixes done to the decay system. The system hasn’t been working optimally and so we’ve been working on changing it for the better.

We also want to address the subject of placeables. They are supposed to decay alongside buildings, but haven’t so far. This has led to floating placeables mucking up servers, making things look weird. Our decay system revamp will also work on placeables, improving immersion.

Finally, and I know this is something private server admins will appreciate, we’re going to be rolling out RCON support for Conan Exiles. RCON (Remote Connection) allows server admins to remotely connect to their servers to spawn items, kick and ban players, use any availble admin command on a targeted player, as well as access the game database. This access is a very powerful tool and allows admins to look at the current live saved state of the server using SQL. The initial list of supported RCON commands will cover the most important features, but we have an option to expand this list based on community feedback.

The technical manual will be updated before launch with a short guide on RCON functionality.

Final wrap up

We’re doing a contest this week, starting from March 8th, where you can win a special prize celebrating the amazing women from our games over the years. More details to come on Thursday.

Keep that Testlive feedback coming in, but please keep it delegated to just the main patch notes thread in the Testlive subforum. Please do not open new threads.

Sincerely,

Funcom