A new trailer for Conan Exiles is out this weekend, offering a rough overview of what combat might look like (on a variety of scales) when the survival game heads to PC and Xbox One later this year. And it looks like the Conan Exiles team has some novel ideas for keeping the game interesting long after you’ve managed to gear your first character.
For those of you trying to determine what the hell we’re going on about, Conan Exiles is an upcoming open-world, multiplayer survival game being developed and published by Funcom. As the name implies, Conan Exiles will be set in the same world as Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories. Players won’t control (or even see) the famed barbarian; however, longtime Conan fans will undoubtedly recognize the people, places and magics referenced in Exiles .
The game is set in a desert wasteland, where those exiled must fight for what limited resources they can access, and (to some degree) follows the usual survival formula. Players start with nothing, spend the early hours foraging for food or assembling basic tools and eventually it’s time to start hunting for other players or trying to build a permanent home. Conan Exiles will do things a little differently though, integrating pre-existing cities and even allowing you to “recruit” (read: kidnap) local NPCs -- by tying them up and dragging them back to your home or village -- to forcibly add them to your ranks.
Conan Exiles will also incorporate massive summoning spells, which can bring forth everything from gargantuan snakes to a animated statue that towers over the rest of the map. Players will be very exposed to outside damage while summoning, making placement during spell casting very important, but the trailer makes it pretty easy to see why one would be willing to undertake such risks. Leveling an entire town looks like it would be pretty damn fun.
For more on Conan Exiles , take a few minutes to check out the latest trailer from Funcom. Then head down to the comments section and let us know if you think colonization, and the other combat-oriented gameplay shown this week, will be enough to keep Conan Exiles going after the novelty of a new survival game begins to fade.
Conan Exiles is in development for PC and Xbox One. The game hits Steam Early Access on Jan. 31 but isn’t expected to make its Xbox One Game Preview debut in Spring 2017.
