Conan Exiles Preview

By: Logan Manfredi on Ps4

***NSFW DISCLAIMER***
        Conan Exiles is a VERY adult game. There are themes far beyond violence or nudity present in it. If you are offended by things like cannibalism, necrophilia, and having slavery present in the game world, then this is NOT the game for you. This game is about surviving as a barbarian, and it's as brutal as possible in that regard. 

Overview:        
        Conan Exiles is a beast of a game. A beast in ferocity and mechanics, Exiles spends zero time holding the player's hand. From the get-go, the player starts in the desert, Naked if the server allows it, hungry and thirsty. It took me a good five minutes to realize that I could interact with anything near me because the level design of the desert is barren, but not empty. Once I realized that I can press square to interact with almost anything in the environment, I was hooked. Instantly I was flashing back to those first moments in Breath of the Wild when I could climb or eat anything. As a player, I appreciate it when developers remove the "invisible wall" or things like doors that don't open, or areas being time gated. Exiles bulldozed that invisible wall. Any surface you can touch is climbable, including the ceiling. The gathering is tedious, but the intuitive design in the crafting system combats that perfectly and makes it work. The building on console is a delicate dance of radial wheels and inventory management that makes me think this game is best on PC. That being said it's not unbearable and the large variety of shapes and depth of the building system allow for the creation of mind-boggling player made cities.

        At its core Exiles is a survival game, and for the first few hours, that's most likely what the player will experience. Once the core mechanics feel comfortable, and you can establish a starter base the game busts wide open. Inventory management and armor weight become crucial factors of how you build your character. Exploring outward farther into the map reveals dungeons and areas lush with other players to meet or wage war against. The middle or leveling portion of the game will see players crafting gradually stronger items and learning exactly how to use the world around them. This is when bases grow to ridiculous sizes, and some of the more unique features like taking thralls or capturing pets are possible. In and towards the endgame, PVP (if you're on a PVP server) picks up, it is at this time that I found myself raiding other players' structures and causing general havoc across the map.  

(Here's a picture of me stealing a players inventory and replacing it with dung)

        Conan Exiles is tough and has one of the steepest learning curves I've seen in recent years. Personally, I found the first few hours pushing me to my limits, but as I survived longer in the world and began to master the detailed mechanics, I felt a sense of accomplishment that few games provide. I would recommend it to anyone who's up for a challenge or appreciates detailed mechanic driven games they can get lost in with numerous friends. 

 The First 5 minutes:

        Immediately after the cut scene, the player starts in the desert with an empty inventory. This first thing you should do is find a Waterskin and note somewhere in your immediate vicinity. The Waterskin will make maintaining thirst in the early game much more manageable, and the note will provide essential XP for leveling up. XP is granted numerous ways, killing animals harvesting resources or even just surviving a certain amount of time. The fastest way to gain XP is by completing "Journey steps" these steps are sometimes listed sometimes unknown but share a common concept in that accomplishing each one helps the player to better understand and play the game. That's why I highly recommend keeping track of these and doing them as often as possible. You can grab bugs from bushes that will help fend off your hunger, but to do any substantial healing, you're going to need meat. The easiest way to get meat is to kill an animal and carve it from its body. Full disclosure this took me WAY longer than I expected to figure out. Just killing an animal will not give you meat. You must first craft a hatchet (with sticks and stone) and then use it to carve the meat from the animal. When you craft an item you can equip it will not go in your inventory, but instead, automatically assign it to the radial menu. Hopefully, this will save you some time, and no more turtles have to get punched to death for no reason, I'm sorry. Once you've found the Waterskin and have some meat, it's time to pick a direction and just go. The biggest mistake beginning players make is setting up camp too close to the starting area. What this does is it limits the resources you can gather to the starter resources, and that stops the player from progressing and enjoying the game. So that's why I say when you think you've found a home, go just a little farther. Once you have reliable location deep enough into the map that's when the game opens up, and you can explore crafting recipes and the incredible depth this game has to offer.

Mechanics to watch out for:

        Some mechanics that hide from you are your attributes and feats. Attributes being your typical RPG skill tree, with areas for combat, survival, and so on. Feats, on the other hand, are a little more complicated, in all reality, they're just recipes for crafting. Unlocking feats will help to unlock subsequent recipes resulting in more powerful weapons, armor, and items in general. Not all the recipes will go to your default crafting screen, but rather to the blacksmith bench, or whichever station the recipe is crafted at. 

Armor and weapons alike will have varying weights and rates at which they drain stamina. This is important to consider as you go on more extended harvesting missions and want to maximize how much you can carry back. Something I did was invest in multiple sets of armor and weapons that catered to specific tasks I was trying to accomplish, such as a light armor set for harvesting, and a damage heavy defense set for excessive combat excursions.


Notable Tips and Tricks: 
*You can eat insects to regain small amounts of health and fight off hunger.
*To more greatly heal and fend off hunger for longer you can cook meat from animals at campfires. 
*To get meat from animals you need to attack the corpse with a hatchet.
*Different meats will heal you at different rates.
*You can drink water from a lake or small body of water without penalty.
*Use any source of water to fill a Waterskin.
*Tools for harvesting are different from weapons, so even though your hatchet looks cool, you better make a dedicated weapon fast.
*You learn new crafting recipes through leveling up and the "Feats" page of your character sheet.
*Not all NPC will attack on-site, just most of them.
*Add friends to a Clan to be able to always see their location on the map and share buildings.
*When you're offline, other players can see your unconscious body and access your inventory so make sure you log off in a safe place.
*If you're having a hard time with online servers, you can be the admin of your own solo or coop server and have full control over all aspects of the game. This is what I did for a few hours to feel more comfortable before real people tried to murder and enslave me. NOTE* if you play solo/co-op whoever starts the game will control the save and need to be online to use the server.

If you like it:
        If you find yourself enjoying Exiles as I did, then there is a vast mechanical survival game full of secrets to explore and fascinating PVP waiting for you. Some of my favorite features later in the game are the Thrall and pet system. Players can find baby animals of just about any species in the game and with the use of the animal pen and the proper food you can raise a loyal beast to guard your base or follow you into battle. My faithful companion is Steve the hyena.  

The thralls work similarly, first, you need the Cudgel to knock them out safely and some rope to drag them back to camp. Then like with your animals you merely put the thrall into a wheel of pain (a structure like the animal pen for humans) and add some food. After some time, you'll have your very own Thrall. Captured NPC's can be set to follow or guard just like your pets, but they can also be assigned to specific crafting stations to speed up the crafting process significantly. Not any thrall can work a job efficiently, it takes a carpenter to woodwork or a blacksmith to smelt faster, so you should keep a lookout for these specific types of NPC's out in the world. Beyond thralls, there is still a ton of late-game content in Exiles. There are numerous dungeons around the map filled with epic bosses that drop legendary loot, along with world bosses on the map that will require cooperation and teamwork to take down. A recent patch added a large jungle section to the game, and future updates are imminent making me quite excited to see what comes next. If you have a PS4, it would be a shame not to get this game while it's free with PS plus. There is a hundred hours of content at least, and the community is more active than ever.