Conan Exiles Early Access Preview

I’m being pursued by an alligator. An ancient, unrivaled predator that laid in wait for me in the river where I sought to refill my depleted waterskin, the gator’s been chasing me for what must be miles, snapping at my heels and taking away nearly half of my health every time it lands a hit. I’ve determined by now that it isn’t going to relent, and lacking the power to kill it, I opt for an alternative strategy: I spend the next fifteen minutes gathering shubbery, logs and stone, stopping only to mine or chop a few times before breaking off into a desperate run again. Only when I can carry no more so I circle around and start putting what I gathered to work, the alligator still hot on my tails as I lay foundations, build walls, and lash together a wooden door. Leading the gator off once more, I circle back around, install my door, and lock it just as the giant reptile approaches, sparing myself and allowing me to beat the alligator to death safely through the doorway it can partially attack through, granting me an eventual hard-earned reward of meat and hide.

This strange story probably sounds pretty familiar to anyone experienced with the budding survival genre, and particularly those in Early Access. Despite the growing popularity of the genre over the last few years thanks to the likes of Day Z, Rust, and ARK: Survival Evolved, they almost unanimously have a reputation as perpetually unfinished, buggy titles that focus on lucrative new features to attract players over the requisite polish and optimization of a completed game. While Conan Exiles might initially seem like it follows in that potentially unappealing direction, after twenty hours in the Early Access, I feel fairly confident saying that Funcom is showing a greater dedication to polish and their development roadmap than their contemporaries.

Shrines to the gods can give you new equipment and abilities.

Like in many survival games, the basic gameplay loop of Conan Exiles is simple: you start stranded in the wilderness with nothing, not even clothes, and need to gather, build, and fight to survive. By mining stone and ore, chopping lumber, and constructing shelter, you gain experience points that can be used to level up and focus your character. Here is where Conan Exiles first departs from many other survival games I’ve played. There’s a greater emphasis on RPG-like character development here, such as the ability to specialize in melee or ranged weapons, craft certain forms of gear, or have greater stamina at the cost of less health.

The polish in the core systems is impressive. In most survival games, I’m used to having to deal with glitched abilities, intense framerate drops, and a lack of cohesiveness to character development. For a game just now in early access, Conan Exiles is relatively bug free, though as I mentioned before, there’s some serious weirdness going on with impact collision, resulting in creatures passing through walls, objects, and each other.

The primary concern I have with the game is content. While there’s plenty to build, there’s not all that much to actually do. Players start on the edge of a fairly large map, and are encouraged to work their way inward for better resources, stronger enemies, and even NPCs that can be enslaved to perform tasks for the player. Once you have an interesting base up and running, however, all that you can really do is engage in (basic, unfulfilling) combat with other players/NPCs, build a shrine to your God of choice to pursue an Avatar (admittedly super cool), and keep expanding your base.

While this is plenty of fun for a few dozen hours, in the longevity-focused field of survival games, I feel like the biggest concern is whether they’ll add objectives worth pursuing in further updates. While more options in combat, including a more complex melee system, would be nice, I’d also be curious to see more ‘quests’, since the universe of Conan and intent of the game feels very PvE-oriented.

All in all, though, for a game just coming out of Early Access, Conan Exiles is promising, much moreso than I feel most of its genre are during the same time. For now, it’s hard to say if it’s worth the thirty dollar entry fee – it depends on how much you enjoy contributing to incomplete games, even interesting ones – but I’m definitely keeping an eye on it as it develops.