Conan Exiles Preview

Rising up from the sands of the desert, with the most simple tools in my hand and my rather microscopic male extremities flopping around in the sun, I set out on my dark and desperate journey for survival and success! For it is my dream to dominate, to rise above the common muck and prove my worth in the exiled lands.

Now I am sure you are all aware of the countless previews for Conan Exiles floating around on the world wide web at the moment, and most likely have already read one or two if you are reading this one but I wish to simply say: unlike them I have reached the top tier of the game after spending hours crawling to get there. I feel that with over 40 hours into the game at this point I can speak freely and hold a reasonable opinion.

There were lag issues, horrible problems of rubberbanding and rather annoying little issues that generally made the game hard to bear with, but on single player these issues were often few and far between. Whilst most people jumped on the bandwagon and blamed the “early access” slapped in front of the title of the game. A change of host and a large flurry of patches has fixed the majority of the issues that were rampant throughout the game, but hey, nothing quite like riding a temple of yog across the lake. As the servers stabilised I found myself bouncing between servers and tribes before I finally settled in with “The Taken”: a rather large tribe that currently have their own server called “Digital Exiles”.

 

With this tribe I have experienced the highs and lows of the game, progressed through the tiers of gear and stood proud at the very top of the game’s world. I feel very comfortable within this community and I am confidently able to say that they really have made the game that much more enjoyable for me, with friends and people willing to help each other and discover new things with. Leading into the game, few of us had any idea of what we were heading into, making it a surprise for us all whenever we discovered a new location or a new item. Now with a fresh wipe and a new update. We can rethink and redo everything; normally this would put me off but thankfully it hasn’t. I am thoroughly enjoying my time on their server and most certainly enjoying their company.

Together we rose above the corpses of strange dragon-like creatures and a variety of other monstrosities. With a mass of thralls, materials and weapons available frequently and with Mitra, Set and Yog at our backs we were constantly ready to push forward and eliminate anything that would dare to threaten us.

The game has a variety of features and on the topic of gods one of the paths of technology and crafting you can focus on is religion; something very strange in my personal opinion and something that isn’t frequently seen in many games of this genre. At tier one you can produce a simple item that allows you to gather a usable resource to produce favour and items from your shrine, for example: a follower of Set will use a dagger to extract the heart their foes and use it to produce antidotes for a variety of poisons, as well as earn favour from your god. Which on the final tier can summon what is, arguably, the strongest thing on the server, an avatar of your god. A giant creature capable of decimating bases and destroying entire tribes in a few mere moments and creating a path of misery and destruction. They took a great deal of effort into balancing this feature. Upon summoning one of these avatars you're entirely vulnerable to being attack, and if you die so does the avatar.

Thralls are another interesting feature of the game, whilst other games such as ARK feature tamable creatures. This game features the ability for you to capture NPCs and use them on the wheel of pain. Breaking their spirits and bodies in order for you to use them to defend your base and its contents. Some can also assist in the production of more advanced gear and improved variants on things that you can produce.

Mini-boss battles… oh my! Where to begin with these? They are fantastic! There are a huge variety of creatures that are roaming around the scorching sands and hugging the cool and delicious oasis, from hyenas to werehyenas! Giant bats, undead and what appear to be dragons! Throughout all this chaos and amongst these monstrosities are easy to encounter and fight bosses. From giant spiders to giant snakes, dragons and lord knows what else because the amount of times I have run screaming from the creatures is almost uncountable.

Overall, I would have to say something that I really do love about this game is the incredible effort put into balancing. Whilst yes, you will always have alpha tribes, unlike in a certain other survival game. You won’t have new spawns running around with clubs whilst the alpha tribe has laser weapons and mechanical dinosaurs! Combat is focused around early era weapons such as swords, pikes, bows and crossbows. Something that I really do enjoy and it feels less like I am getting instantly killed by people who have far more power than me due to lengthy extensions of time on the game.

This game is a must-grab! Wait if you want, but in my honest opinion Conan Exiles is incredible! Unique and fantastic in a variety of different ways; with features such as the thrall and religious system that I have never really encountered before.