Conan Exiles review

Update 12-05-2021

On the 4th of May, a patch was released that fixed the online co-op issue. Now, we were finally able to achieve the Tower of the Elephant trophy which was our last trophy needed to gain the platinum trophy. At least some closure to the game.

Intro

Some games are only fun when playing with friends. Conan Exiles is one of those games. I downloaded the game when they gave it away for free as part of the Playstation Plus monthly games in April 2019. After struggling for about half an hour I immediately discarded the game because I had no clue what I had to do and kept dying all the time.

Two years later, I picked this game up again after completing Fallout 76 with a friend. Thanks to Fallout, we were familiar with the concept of surviving and base building. This time, Conan Exiles got me hooked.

Starting hurdles

Conan Exiles is not a very welcoming game for first-time players. Nothing is explained, your main source of information is the Conan Exiles Wiki.

Co-op vs online

In the main menu, for example, you need to choose if you want to play online or single player/co-op. Here’s the first dilemma: which one should you choose if you want to play with a friend?

Co-op seems the most logical option here. It lets you invite or join a friend’s game, but there are some caveats. Firstly, the save game is on the host console. If you join your friend, you can only play when he/she’s online (and vice versa). Secondly, the joined player needs to stay in the vicinity of the host. If you stray too far, an invisible wall will prevent you from going farther away.

We choose the online option. Not without a fight, though. You first need to choose in which mode you want to play: PvP, PvP (conflict) or PvE. Again, no explanation. PvP stands for Player versus Player, this mode lets you attack other players. In our case, it’s more likely we’d be attacked by other players so we choose PvE: Player versus Environment. In this mode, you still encounter other online players, but you can’t damage them or their buildings. I still don’t know what PvP (conflict) is, but we were good with PvE.

Next, you need to choose server to play on. A gigantic list appears with a mix of private and official servers. There are far more private (password protected) servers that are owned by players than official servers, so it took us some time before we found a server we could enter. Once entered, the game starts with the creation of your character.

After we both put a lot of work into creating our character, we were dropped in the same desert but were unable to see each other. It turned out we both choose a different server… And guess what? Your character and progress are server-bound. So one of us had to abandon his server and recreate his character on the right server.

Your first steps (and deaths)

We were finally together on the same server, standing bare naked in the desert. What now? Again, no explanation or tutorial. Only three tasks in the upper right corner of your screen: climb, drink and eat. That’s it, no “press button X to run” or “this is your health bar, do this to keep it full”. In the top left corner of your screen, there are two bars (health and stamina) and some meters (hunger, thirst, encumbrance and temperature). All without labels, so you need to figure out yourself what they mean.

Luckily, the controls aren’t hard, so we figured out soon enough how to run, fight and use our inventory. The weapon wheel, however, took us some time to get used to. The hunger and thirst meter drains fast the few hours in the game and since the game doesn’t tell you how and what to eat and drink we both died multiple times of starvation and dehydration. When we found out we could eat bugs and eggs and drink water with the right button when laying in the water, we were hit by a sandstorm. Dead again.

This is important to note: when you die, all your stuff is dropped on the ground near your corpse. Your armor, weapons, food, everything. You get spawned bare naked at your last saved spawn point which can be created by sleeping in a bed or bedroll. Of course, we didn’t have one of those so every time we died, we got spawned in the desert and had to run all the way back to the location we died to pick up our stuff and continue our journey. Looking back now, I wonder why we didn’t throw the game in the bin.

Crafting

When we’d got our surviving business sorted out, the real fun started: building a base. The crafting menu is not very user friendly, but when you get the hang of it, you can go all-out. Walls, floors, furniture, weapons, you can craft it all. Most need to be unlocked with feat points which you get when leveling up.

The best part about the crafting in Conan Exiles is you can build almost anywhere in the world without limits, even in the water. We found a nice spot in the starter area of the game on a small island in a river. I put down some floor tiles, walls and sloping roof and we got ourselves our first home. With our bedrolls placed inside the house, we didn’t have to run through the desert again when we died.

To build together, however, we needed to set up a clan together. Otherwise, my friend would be just another random player on a PvE server unable to interact in any way with my buildings.

Story and quests

Main story

The story is pretty simple: you are an exile wearing a slave bracelet and need to find a way to remove that bracelet and escape the Exiled Lands. Your story progress is tracked via journey steps divided in 10 chapters. Each chapter consists of 10 or more steps and can be completed in any order. There are simple steps like eating, drinking and climbing, but also harder ones like defeating a boss enemy deep inside a cave.

Through the world, you’ll find lore stones, notebooks and characters providing background information about the Exiled Lands and your bracelet. This information combined with the journey steps should guide you in your journey to get rid of the bracelet. We still needed the internet, though, because this information is nowhere recorded. There is some dude telling you what artifacts you need to remove your bracelet, but he gives so much information that I already forgot half what he said when he stopped talking. All you really have, are the journey steps and with these alone, you won’t escape the Exiled Lands.

Quests

There are none. Journey steps are all that is. Some steps come near quests, like “Destroy a Dragon”. We created our own quests which we called expeditions. After we built our own tiny house, we started expanding it with extra floors and larger surrounding walls. Soon, we needed materials we couldn’t obtain around our house so we made plans to acquire that materials.

Iron, for example, is required for a lot of buildings and gear. We prepared for an expedition into the unknown lands. Equip good (repaired) armor and weapons, bring enough food and water to last for a while, a torch for when it gets dark and of course tools for gathering stone.

These expeditions could be quite exciting because you know the penalty of death: losing all your stuff setting you up with a new expedition retrieving it. We found a good spot with lots of iron and built a small house there for storage. Whenever we needed iron, we travelled to our “holiday home” to gather some.

After iron, we needed steel, so we set up expeditions to gather brim stone which is required for crafting steel bars. The brim stone gathering spots seemed closer than we thought so we needn’t to build another holiday house.

Then, there we animal expeditions on which we would set out to capture bears, tigers, rhinos and other animals to tame and bring along to protect us on other expeditions and quests.

Thralls

Which is a nice bridge to another big part of Conan Exiles: thralls. Another word for slaves. There are animal thralls and human thralls. Animal babies can be captured and raised in animal pens, human NPCs can be captured by knocking them unconscious and putting them in a “wheel of pain” before they obey you. Yeah, Conan Exiles is quite a savage game.

Thralls can be placed as guards in and around your camp or can be set as followers to protect you on your journey. Some human thralls have a profession like blacksmith or armorer. These can be set to work on a specific workbench and give some benefits when crafting at these workbenches.

During our time in Conan Exiles, we really created a bond with some of our animal followers. The fact that you can give them names contributes to this. We started with hyenas called “Poekie” and “Fikkie” (classical dutch dog names) and we mourned when my bear (Winnie the Pooh) and my friend’s tiger (Tijgetje) died battling a huge spider.

The Purge

To give the base building a purpose, the developers added a purge meter which slowly fills over time. When the meter is filled up to about 3/4 there is a possibility your base gets attacked by a few waves of enemies. The difficulty of the enemies depends on the location in the world. Since we remained in the starter area for the entire game, the purges were never that hard.

Our house

As the game lets you completely free in what you want to do, the first 60 hours or so, we were only crafting and building. At some point, our island got connected to the main land on both sides of the river and we even confiscated another island. We had to give names to our surroundings to know where what was:

• The main island was the island where we originally started building.
• The animal island was the confiscated island where we tamed animals.
• The good guy entrance was on one side of the river where the non-hostile NPC stood who teaches you an emote.
• The crocodile entrance was on the other side of the river where a hostile crocodile would spawn every few minutes.
• The swimming pool entrance was on another confiscated island where we build enough floor foundations around the river to form a swimming pool.

We started building towers with elevators just for fun and my friend went crazy placing foundations as far as possible around our house (even underwater) just because he could.

Because the house got so big, I created my own tiny one-room house in the backyard.

My friend built a tower.

I built a tower.

Playstation Trophies

On the Playstation, you can earn trophies for objectives in the game. Most are connected to in game events like reaching a location on the map or defeating an enemy but some have literally nothing to do with the story. There are three examples I’d like to highlight:

The Cliffs Reel

Description: Fall for 3 seconds without dying.

We built a small tower for this from which we jumped into the water. No problem, but a bit weird it sure is. Here we collapse this tower:

Iron Shadows in the Moon

Description: Reach the skies above the Exiled Lands

For a long time, we thought we eventually would reach a place somewhere high up in the sky, but after a search on internet we found out we had to reach a certain altitude to receive this trophy. How you reach this altitude doesn’t matter. Most guides on the internet tell you to climb the volcano. We, however, decided to build a tower. A very big tower:

Tower of the Elephant

Description: Kill something by standing on its head

This obviously is a reference to Super Mario and the hardest trophy to earn. The description is misleading as it’s not just “something” you have to stand on. It actually is another player. Also, simply standing on another’s player head is not enough, you have to be over encumbered while doing it.

What’s more, you have to do this in co-op mode. It won’t work on PvP and PvE servers. Unfortunately, the co-op mode is broken at the moment of writing so it’s impossible to achieve this trophy.

Trophy cheating

When you are a server admin or just playing in single player mode it is possible to assign yourself admin rights. This gives you access to an admin panel in which you can make yourself invisible and the ability to fly. You can also manipulate your character stats and spawn every weapon, armor or every other object you can think of.

While playing online with my friend, I reached level 59 and earned most of the trophies. Only 7 trophies remained (included the platinum). I cheated with five trophies from which two were an accident. I started a single player game for fun so I could check out the volcano up close. When I reached the volcano, I received a trophy. When playing with my character stats, I set my level to 60. Pling, level 60 trophy.

Now, only five trophies remained. Since the aforementioned update took the fun out of the game I though I might as well collect the other trophies by cheating. So I activated god mode and slaughtered three normally very difficult enemy bosses for their trophies. Now only two trophies remain: the impossible “Tower of the Elephant” and the platinum.

I don’t take pride in the way I achieved these last trophies, but at this point I’ve put so many hours in this game and it seemed that the harder we tried to complete all journey steps, it more difficult it got. So when the update messed everything up (see below) I was done with the game and cheating the trophies felt like a sort of compensation for this.

Update misery

On the 19th of April, update 2.3 was released on the Playstation 4. It improved some things, but wrecked even more. They introduced so many changes, again without any form of explanation, we felt we needed to rediscover the most basic things. This really took the fun out of the game. And on top of that, the official server we played on kept crashing more and more making the game unplayable sometimes. If that wasn’t enough already, this update also broke the online co-op mode. When my friend joined my game, my camera froze and he took over my character. Now that is messed up.

Ratings

Since I didn’t follow my usual review pattern, I’ll briefly describe my ratings here.

Story

There virtually is none.

Rating: 5

Gameplay

I think I wrote enough about this.

Rating: 7

Graphics

The character models are very detailed (especially with full nudity activated before the patch ruined it) and the world is beautifully crafted. The different biomes with their own climates all feel vivid. The desert feels hot, the jungle dark and the norths really cold. The sand storms are amazing, too. Watching the huge clouds of sands rolling over you really looks awesome. Climbing can be glitchy sometimes and when it’s dark it can be a little too dark.

Rating: 8

Audio

Conan Exiles has an epic soundtrack. A little bit too epic for a loading screen, if you ask me. The background music does what it has to do and can really spice up the excitement during expeditions. The enemy cries and shouts can use a little more variety and it sure is weird an enemy still shouts when his head is rolling over the floor.

Rating: 7

Memorable

Is this game very memorable? I’m not sure yet. It’s a bit like Fallout 76, I’ve mostly been crafting and surviving so nothing new here.

Rating: 6

Conclusion

Conan Exiles is not for everyone. You have to put in some serious efforts to make this game fun. There are no quests and tutorials, it’s mainly you and your imagination. I really recommend playing with friends as the game’s just too hard on your own.

Played on the Playstation 4.