Conan Exiles Producer Letter

Scott Junior, the new executive producer for Conan Exiles brings us this open letter where he talks about the currently planned updates and improvements that should be coming to Funcom’s survival RPG in the near future. He starts with the recently released first part of the follower overhaul and then goes from there. Have a look:

Hello Exiles!

I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. I’m Scott Junior the new Executive Producer for Conan Exiles. I joined the Exiles project in January and I’m excited to work with the development team and with the amazing community we have. There are a lot of exciting things planned for 2020 and I wanted to give you a quick glimpse into what the team is currently working on:

FOLLOWER MANAGEMENT UI

In today’s update we introduced the Follower Management UI. The goal of this system is to allow players to manage their Thralls in an efficient manner. You can now see where they are on the map, check their stats, rescue them if they end up in a non-retrievable location, and break bonds with them. This is the first step in our efforts to improve how Followers work in Conan Exiles. You can find more information about this feature here.

FOLLOWER COMMANDS

Step two is our Followers Part 2 update. The goal of this patch is to allow players to have greater control of how their Thralls behave. It’s too early to give exact details on how this will work, but we are planning to add Thrall Commands, rework some of their base AI, and add additional default behaviors. We also want to make Thralls and Mounts work better together, which includes allowing an active Mount and Follower at the same time. This update is still early in the process, so some of the above may move to a future update.

THRALL LIMITER

We will start a process of adding a Thrall Limiter feature to official servers. We have talked about this feature before, but the short version is that on Official Servers players/clans will have a max number of followers allowed. Exact numbers are still being evaluated, but you can expect an in-depth explanation of exactly how the Limiter will work before it is released. In addition, you will receive at least 2 weeks notice so you can prepare properly.

TESTLIVE CLIENT

Changes are currently underway to how the TestLive Client is used. Updates will stay on the TestLive Client longer than they have before to give players time to give feedback, and to give us the chance to react to this feedback before the update is released. The Followers Management patch was on TestLive for three weeks and had four updates based on player testing/feedback. Thank you to everyone that has been involved in this round of testing, your input is appreciated!

UNDERMESHING

The team is working on several ways to combat Undermeshing and other exploits that allow players to build outside the intended area. Some of these changes are risky and may have unintended side effects, so we want to make sure our solution is tested thoroughly before it’s released on all platforms. TestLive Client currently has one enabled, so give it a try and let us know if anything isn’t working properly (or try to Undermesh on the Testlive Client and let us know if you still can!).

That’s it for now. We have a lot of other great things in development that we will be communicating soon!

-Scott