What's up fam, it’s ya boi Conan Exiles! We’re back at it with another newsletter! It is our final work week before the holiday break and we are all looking forward to some much needed R&R with friends and family. As the year is beginning to wind down we felt that it was fitting to look back and reflect on the previous 12 months.
Since January 2018, we’ve released around 30 patches and hotfixes for the PC version of Conan Exiles alone, adding everything from simple bug fixes and balance changes, to huge content additions and revamps. We’ve rolled out an additional 21 patches for the Xbox version, and 19 patches on PS4, bringing us to a total of 70 patches across three platforms. That’s an average of almost 6 patches per month!
We’ve also released 4 paid DLC packs with new armors, weapons, building pieces, placeables and pet skins. Shoutout to our amazing art team who have been working tirelessly on making all of these amazing looking extras.
Thankfully all the hard work has paid off, and we’re really proud of what we’ve managed to accomplish with Conan Exiles. Come January 31st, the game will have been available for two years! We have several more updates and bug fixes to roll out, after all, including 4 more dungeons that we still haven’t revealed yet!
In case you missed it, we’ve increased the decay timer for buildings on all our official servers, from 7 days to 14 days. This change is already in effect across the board and will remain until we come back from the break in January.
This week and beyond
As you might have noticed, we’ve been working extra hard on upping our level of communication with you, the community. We hired a Community Support person, Ignasi, who will be a frequent face on the forums and our social channels, collecting input and feedback and answering community questions. We rolled out the Community Report Trello Board to provide more transparency, and we’ve been pushing more updates to Testlive again to put them through their paces. This will continue in the next year as well.
This week we plan to release another major patch to the Testlive branch, containing some vital additions to the game. We are going to be rolling out the building optimizations, vastly improving how fast the game loads in building pieces across the board. This patch will also have several undermeshing fixes, which we will talk more about in the patch notes. Our plan is for the patch to sit on Testlive for several weeks, and roll it over to live once we’re satisfied with the state of the build. Testlive is available as a separate branch on Steam, or as a client you can download and install. See how to access it here.
Going forward, our current focus is improving the core aspects of Conan Exiles in the next couple of months. This includes improving the Purge, fixing exploits, and improving AI and thralls.
State of the newsletter
There are going to be some changes to the newsletters next year. The community newsletters came about as a way for us to improve communication with our players during Early Access. We wanted to give you a glimpse into the development process and summarize the current state of Conan Exiles and its development. It would allow us to share upcoming content and discuss some of the things the dev team had been working on.
How we communicate with the community, and the size of the community team, has evolved and grown since the inception of the community newsletters. We feel like the newsletters have served their purpose well, but we have also started using other ways of providing the community with the same information: The Trello Board provides more transparency and insight. We’ve been working on increasing the number of news updates that go out on the forums and on Steam. We have also been working on being more active on social media to respond to player feedback and issues. As such, we’re going to end the newsletters in their current form.
Not to worry though! Even though the newsletters are going away that doesn’t mean we won’t stop communicating with you. We will keep you updated about the work we’re putting into Conan Exiles. News updates will be posted on the forums, on Steam, Reddit, and social media, when available, so keep your eyes posted to our official channels come 2019. We may also start doing monthly recaps, in case there’s been a lot going on.
We hope you all have a happy holiday season, with lots of good food and great times with family and friends. We will see you in the next year.
Sincerely,
Funcom