Good evening you saucy minxes!
We're back at it again with another newsletter to give you a quick update on the further development of Conan Exiles.
Last week we rolled out our first paid DLC, the Imperial East Pack, containing weapons, armors and building pieces inspired by the eastern lands of Khitai. There will be more to reveal about the next piece of DLC later on.
If you're interested in seeing the Imperial East Pack in action you can check out the trailer our awesome video producer, Lars, put together:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAO3ocGepiA
We also rolled out a new Testlive patch last Tuesday with hundreds of fixes and changes. We've added several exploit fixes to prevent building inside parts of the level geometry, fixed the Light Armor Journey unlock bug, redesigned the clan menu, fixed the NPC faces, and added more Lemurian priests to the Pagoda of Boundless Lust.
You can find all these, and more, in the patch notes on our forums if you want to check them out. This build is currently undergoing stabilization and compatibility testing before we push it out the door to the live branch, and we're working as quickly as we can in order to get it out on the default Live branch.
Finally, we have recently updated the forums with status updates on the most reported community issues. You'll find lists for Xbox and PC, and we're working on getting a PS4 list ready as well.
What the teams have been working on in the past week(s):
Every Friday, the development team meets up to highlight and talk about what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. To not make this newsletter overly long we're only sticking to the highlights. Even if something isn't explicitly mentioned things are still being worked on "behind the scenes", and we'll mention these when they're relevant.
Terraformers
The Terraformers team is made up of designers and environmental artists and is the team in charge of producing new gameplay content and mechanics, focusing specifically on level design, dungeon and world design, and new features we can add to the game. They've been the team behind creating the look and feel of the two map expansions and creating the dungeons, the repair system, the thrall system and a host of other features.
Currently the team's artists have been knee deep in designing and building the new dungeons we announced previously, while the designers are working on making the new pets system. The latter is starting to come together and is in a pretty good state right now. We hope to have an internal test version ready in early July.
Monster Hunters
Speaking of dungeons and pets: the Monster Hunters team are the guys populating the dungeons with creatures, new and old, while also helping out with certain aspects of the pets system, like how a tamed animal will behave and animate when under your control.
With the recent absorption of the Berserkers into their ranks, part of the Monster Hunters team have been crafting new off-hand combos and dual-wielding. If you missed it last week, here's a quick recap:
The idea is to better integrate off-hand items (shields and throwing axes) into the combat system. They will have their own attacks in certain combo chains, allowing you more flexibility when fighting. Wielding a battle axe and a throwing axe will allow your character to around spin and do several, low-damage attacks in a row. A battle axe and shield will integrate a shield bash with knockback into your combo. The throw animation will also be much faster than before, letting you do a quick, low-damage attack that doesn't drain your stamina bar too much.
We're ready to begin internal testing of these combat editions very soon.
Final wrap-up
We're back at it again with another community stream this coming Friday. This week we're very happy to have YouTuber and Conan Exiles fan J0hnbane take us on a tour of his private server, which he runs with his fellow content creators.
Join us on our Twitch channel (twitch.tv/funcom) or on Mixer (mixer.com/funcom) at 5pm CEST / 11am EDT / 8am EDT on Friday, June 29.
Next week's newsletter will be the last newsletter for the following three weeks as Jens Erik, who writes them, will be away on vacation. Once the the vacation's done we'll return to business as usual with the weekly recaps.