If I had to summarize this game for you, it’d be in this short sentence; Conan Exiles comes with some hard physics, leaving the rest of the game rather limp.
…That title will come back to haunt me in this article.
Anyone keeping an eye on the Steam store for the last few weeks would have seen another Early Access Survival game come into light. Conan Exiles is a survival game, developed by Funcom, which starts off with your character stranded naked in the desert; you can customise the avatars appearance, you know, stuff like hair, skin, dong size, breast size and the essentials. Just so we’re clear, I did say dong size. Yes. Dong size. Perhaps the most standout feature of Conan Exiles is how it treats nudity, the way the dongs just sort of hang there, kind of makes it hard to look away. I should make it clear that dongs are for males and females get more emphasis on the breast slider.
A lot of people have been discussing this and asking the big question. Why? In a recent Reddit AMA Funcom stated that the dong slider was an early discussion during development, saying they felt it was appropriate for the lore and setting. Then the slider to customise the dong was implemented as they had a similar slider for breasts so “equality and all” If you want to take in all the hard work you’ve put into your dong, Conan allows you to change the camera by simply pressing ‘V’, so you can view your character from all the angles you desire. Just try not to get distracted for too long as you might become dehydrated and die, which is not really the point of a survival game, but then again neither are dong physics.
So what about the gameplay? Well, Conan Exiles is a standard-fare Survival game, giving you hunger, thirst, health and energy to worry about maintaining, whilst you’re out and about, gathering various resources to build up better tools, settlements, and to ward off potential combatants. The game comes with a server browser for standard PVE and PVP combat, from which multiple players can join…However they’ve since been region locked to prevent griefing and trolling.
The game currently sits high upon Steam’s top sellers list, unfortunately an early access game doesn’t come without its flaws, as the general agreement among Steam players is that the connection to the games is the biggest problem, with frequent cases of crashes and plenty of general server issues. It’s fair to say that just because a game ships with Early Access doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be stable for players first, however Early Access gives the developers the time and reason to keep working on new features and fixes. Saying that, however, the game currently sits with Mixed reviews, and a lukewarm reception after it’s initial release. By scanning through the Reddit AMA, however, you can find out a lot of the plans for the future as well as finding out what sort of game Conan will be formed into. When asked, what would make Conan stand out among a world of survival games, the devs responded with plans of adding sorcery as well as creating a fully interactive world where NPCs have schedules and can be influenced by the actions of the player. While that sounds very exciting, the feature that got me excited was the ability to castrate players as a PVP element. Conan Exiles is a game that I’ll be following the development of closely, so, like how Craig did a follow up on Looterkings, expect a follow up of this in the coming months!
Conan Exiles is currently available on early access for £26.99 for the standard edition of the game, expect to see more news on it as features are added and stability issues are resolved.