Conan Exiles

Survival is an interesting gaming genre. When you hear the word survival, then you tend to think of a horror or zombie apocalypse. Games like Left 4 Dead or Friday the 13th come to mind. What you should be really thinking about is Conan Exiles. Conan Exiles is a true, hardcore survival game that truly tests your gaming skills and knowledge, through difficult gameplay, and that’s a good thing. The difficulty makes it more fun and motivates the gamer to keep progressing. It will take a couple of tries to understand and get used to the gameplay, but the payoff from the game is worth the effort.

The game starts off with a brief intro of the one and only Conan the Barbarian cuts you down from a cross.  After a more Jason Momoa Conan releases you, you are not given any instructions on what to do or where to go, rather you have to explore your way through Conan’s world. All you are given is tasks in the top right corner, which are minimal in detail and give no hint of what to do or where to go. That is how hardcore of a survival game it is and provides no set of directions, which is what makes the experience more like a sandbox game.

Progressing in the game is tough. You want to move north and set up a camp by the water at the beginning.  Establishing a home base camp involves gathering a number of resources you need, which is extensive, and putting together the best camp that you can. It’s a difficult process, but a necessary one because you’ll need a place to go and a place to begin life in CE.  When you’re not building and gathering, you want to travel farther on the map to progress along the exploratory narrative of the title. The problem here becomes that if you leave your camp, then you’re taking chances, but if you don’t leave your camp, then you’re not progressing in the title. It’s these decisions that weigh heavy on the player and that make Conan Exiles a huge game filled with stress and tough decisions.

Staying with creating, the building/crafting aspect of the game is incredible. As your character levels up, you will learn new things to create, which equal out to an insane number of items. This game is crafting heavy. By gathering, building, and leveling up, Conan is eventually going to create a town of his own. A town with guards, giant walls, a town with its own currency, and massive altars. Maybe something along the lines of Conan SimCity (kidding). There may seem like a lot of items to create but everything has its own purpose. For example, certain creations, like an artisan table or blacksmith table, make more advanced items. By spending time creating these items, then you’re bound to play the slow burn game of having a big payoff. It is so rewarding to finish crafting a big important piece knowing that it will help you advance your settlement.

The graphics here are nothing to boast about and essentially the worst part of the game. Just like in the Fallout or Skyrim series, where the graphics aren’t going to blow your mind with intricate details, you should not really expect much though when playing a massive open world survival game. It’s more about the world’s girth and its function, rather than if the leaves on the trees have details embedded on them. You’re giving away the beauty of a current generation game for a more deeper experience.

In addition to average graphics, Conan also contains glitches here and there. Most glitches I have encountered have happened when playing Co-op. Sometimes when fighting enemies, my character will jump forward by himself, or on some occasions, I cannot see rocks of ironstone while my partner can without a hitch. The game has been in early access on PC for a long time, and just recently was it released in its full game for consoles, so I imagine they are still working out the kings. Let’s hope they fix these annoying bugs in the near future.

There are a variety of enemies in Exiles. They all come with unique qualities of speed, size, and strength. Early on, you might find yourself fighting against shalebacks, imps, and crocodiles, just to name a few enemies. The further north you go, the harder enemies you will encounter, as you will find large camps of humans, tons of hyenas, and giant spiders. Certain areas, even early on, have harder enemies, like a large crocodile or an incredibly creepy, giant spider. No one enemy is easy to fight, and each is unique, as one wrong move could be your downfall. Some of the more brutal points in the game, as they pertain to the enemies, are the enemies that come at you in packs. Those are certainly the toughest opponents to beat. In addition to these, human enemies become especially hard when going into caves and dungeons. Archers strike hard, while close combat fighters tighten up on you making it really hard to defend. Sometimes in Conan, the best fighting strategy is to retreat. Anyway, these are just some of the enemies you will run into during your journey in Conan Exiles.

Since Exiles is a survival game, there are no exact quests telling you what to do or where to go. The best guide is the task list in the menu. It will guide you in leveling up and give you vague instructions which force you to progress further. If you really wanted, you could sit by the river and cook shaleback meat all you want, not do a darn thing, but what would be the fun in that?

Anyway, and this is just advice for gamers wanting to learn to craft and prepare their Conan character, after setting up a decent camp, it’s best to find ironstone. Ironstone will allow you to craft more things which in turn allows you to create more weapons and tools. You really want to level up your character and his or her crafting skills to get farther in the game. In the long run, crafting this will propel you further in the map with better armor and weapons.

Conan Exiles is a great game that you can get lost in for hours on end, single or co-op. You will be able to get so much done when you work with others in this game, which is a huge positive. It is very satisfying to work together and build a large settlement with a partner. It is easy to accomplish in a much shorter amount of time in co-op mode. What would normally take 10-minutes to finish in solo, takes five-minutes in co-op.  Not only does the game become easier, it also becomes better and more fun. Having a common goal between people, and finishing that goal together is incredible. For example, you can then divide up who needs to gather what resources to craft big items.

Crafting and building settlements is one good thing about co-op, but another amazing part of playing with someone is the combat. Taking out enemy camps, alone, was nearly impossible. Now, my partner and I cut enemies like a hot knife through butter. When multiple people play, everyone is going to have their own fighting style, and weapon choice comes to play here. Together your partner will want to take down enemies that in a manner that uses the strengths and weaknesses of your weapon choice. For example, I play with the pike, essentially a spear. While on the other end my friend would use daggers. Our tactic became, me sweeping enemies and knocking them down, while my partner quickly jabbed the enemies with his daggers. Now every time we engage in combat, we implement this.

There are a lot of things missing from playing co-op though. One of the biggest gripes is that there is no marker to see your ally. If you are traveling kind of far from each other, it gets hard to see where the other might be. In addition, when both of players look at the map, different things are seen by each player. If I put a marker on my map to indicate an important location, my friend will not see it, which provides a visual communication issue and hinders co-op just a bit.

Also, combat can get annoying with co-op sometimes. For example, if you lock onto to an enemy while you and your friend are fighting, the game will more than likely switch your target to your partner, which could end up bad if you still have PvP enabled. I know many games have a “tethered” feature that forces partners to stay close to each other, which can become such a nuisance in Conan Exiles, especially if the host of the game dies. This means that non-host players will get teleported to the host’s spawn location. I believe the biggest problem that my partner and I found with co-op was the server itself. When playing the game with someone, you are bound to host’s game. This means you cannot boot up the game whenever you feel like and play on that server by yourself. You can only play when the original host is on. Yes, you can purchase a dedicated server, but that can get expensive for just a couple of people, which doesn’t make sense in the long run.