CONAN EXILES
What is best in life? Fighting, crafting, and climbing, apparently
We only review finished games, so in Viewpoint, we go hands-on with near-final code of a game that has just missed our review deadline. Alex Spencer visited Funcom in Stockholm to go hands-on with Conan Exiles, and these are his final pre-release impressions.
Have you ever longed to cast off the shackles of civilisation and head out into the wilds – but know that if you tried going all Ray Mears in real life, you’d last about ten minutes? Today, plenty of survival games let you safely fulfil this fantasy, but in the 1930s the only option available were books, and Robert E Howard’s Conan The Barbarian stories were some of the most popular. Now Norwegian developer Funcom is bringing past and present together with a survival game set in the world of Conan. If you’ve ever read the books or comics, or watched the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, you’ll know what to expect: swords, sorcery, and snake men.
The game’s creative director, Joel Bylos, tells us about the appeal of the Conan setting: “It’s very different conceptually to a Lord Of The Rings-type world, which is high fantasy. Conan is very low fantasy. The world is a dark, gritty, disgusting place where there are cannibals, and there are sorcerers selling their souls.
“You’re a straight shooter, you don’t put up with s*** from people. You’re not a politician and you’re not a schemer. ‘Just give me a sword and a straight path to my enemies,’ as Conan says in the stories.”
BUILD-A-BARBARIAN
Just about all the trappings of classic Conan stories are present and correct… except for the man himself. He pops up briefly in the opening cutscene, but you won’t get to live out your Arnie fantasies. Instead, you create your own barbarian, with all the usual customisation options (gender, race, haircut) plus a couple of interesting additions. There’s the ability to choose which god you worship, and, of course, the infamous ‘endowment’ slider which lets you decide, um, how much loin there is beneath your loincloth. Or not beneath, if you choose to play on a server with ‘full nudity’ settings.
Either way, you’ll start the game in a state of undress, left to die in the middle of a desert. At which point, the survival game mechanics kick in. As well as crafting clothes, you’ll need to make sure your barbarian gets enough to eat and drink, and ideally build yourself a home. This gives the game the immediate, satisfying loop that will be familiar to any players of Ark: Survival Evolved, Don’t Starve, or even Minecraft’s Survival mode.
You pick up a branch and a rock from the ground to make an axe. That lets you chop down a tree, which you use to build a shield. Which means you can finally beat that enemy with the powerful attack. Who you can then flay, giving you the hide you needed to craft yourself a waterskin. All because you got a little thirsty and didn’t fancy travelling all the way to the lake again.
CONAN THE AGRARIAN
Completing these tasks isn’t always intuitive – crafting, in particular, requires you to navigate a string of menus – but the game guides you through with the Exiles Journey feature. It’s a basic quest tracker that starts out with the essential task ‘find something to eat’ and leads you through to building, besieging, and even farming.
“It goes from a tutorial to an achievement system in a lot of ways, and each step of that journey, you grow in power,” Bylos says of the Exiles Journey. It’s one of the many lessons Funcom has taken from its history developing MMO games for PC. It’s aiming to make Exiles, its first PS4 title, stand out by taking the compelling loop of survival games and building on it with systems more commonly seen in MMOs, like dungeons and character progression. This isn’t the only genre influencing the game, either.
When it comes to combat, Bylos says Exiles should compete not with other survival titles but with dedicated action games, as befits its brutish hero. The team looked at the likes of Dark Souls and The Witcher, and while the fighting’s not quite as polished as in either of those, one-on-one fights can be genuinely tense and elegant, as the two opponents circle each other, dodging attacks and waiting for the right moment to strike.
Another of the game’s highlights is its freeform climbing system that enables you to clamber up practically any part of the expansive world, and stop yourself from falling to your death by grabbing onto a cliffside with your bare hands, all with a quick tap of q. It’s a simple setup but one, that once mastered, opens up the world for unrivalled exploration.
These are just some of the disparate elements Conan Exiles is trying to pull together. It can be played multiplayer or alone, with elements of survival games, MMOs, RPGs, and even tower defence. Read next issue’s review to to see if the result is worthy of Conan himself, or just plain barbaric.
“TWO OPPONENTS CIRCLE EACH OTHER, DODGING ATTACKS AND WAITING FOR THE RIGHT MOMENT TO STRIKE.”