Conan Exiles

I've tracked survival sandboxes long enough to know that most of them front-load the promise and quietly abandon it by year two. Conan Exiles has done the opposite. Released in 2018 and still receiving substantial free content updates, Funcom's open-world survival game has compounded its systems year over year until the gap between what launched and what exists today is almost comical. The most striking proof of this commitment is the recent shift to Unreal Engine 5, a full engine migration that is, frankly, almost unheard of for a live game of this age. The client footprint has been cut roughly in half compared to the old build, the UI has been ground-up redesigned, and performance on mid-range hardware is noticeably improved, though large, high-density player builds remain the one area where the game has historically struggled and the jury is still out post-patch. The actual systems are where Conan Exiles earns serious attention from a depth perspective. The Thrall system is the centrepiece: you capture NPCs in the world, break them on the Wheel of Pain, and deploy them as crafting specialists, fighters, or followers with their own stat profiles. Building is its own full discipline, with hundreds of piece types, biome-specific styles, and a Creative Mode that removes resource gates entirely for players who just want to design. The religion mechanics layer in actual choice, as selecting different gods opens different crafting trees and purge interactions. On top of all this, the Age of Sorcery update introduced a corruption-based magic system accessed through the Tome of Kurak, where you sacrifice maximum health and stamina to unlock spells. Summon demonic mounts and undead followers, cloak yourself from enemies, call down lightning, or corrupt your attribute perks for enhanced dark-arts bonuses. A December 2025 patch addressed longstanding sorcery friction points: the Arcane Staff now casts faster, early Tier 1 spells no longer eat into your reagent stockpile, and Tome of Kurak progression has been re-paced so the build becomes viable well before the late game. For newcomers, the learning curve is the honest problem. The crafting system is not self-explanatory. You will spend real time cross-referencing the wiki to understand which workbench produces which components, what armour stats actually mean, and how the purge timer works. The tutorial nudges you in the right direction but stops well short of teaching you anything about thrall levelling, religion choice, or how to read the late-game content gates. Server choice also matters enormously: official PvP servers are brutal and unforgiving for fresh players, while private servers, which the game explicitly supports with great admin tools and mod access via Steam Workshop, let you tune practically every system variable from resource harvest rates to day-night cycles. First-timers are genuinely better served by a well-configured private PvE-Conflict server. Treat the first twenty hours as investment, not payoff, and the return is substantial. The weaknesses are real and worth naming. Performance under high player-build density has been a persistent complaint since launch, and while the UE5 migration improves the baseline, that specific problem may not be fully resolved. The battle pass and cosmetic bazaar won't appeal to everyone, though all gameplay content has remained free. The melee combat, while improved over the years, remains the kind of deliberate, stamina-managed system that rewards learning but punishes players who expect snappy, responsive hit feedback. Bugs surface more often than they should for a game this old. None of it is disqualifying, but you should go in with calibrated expectations. If you have any interest in deep base construction, faction-style thrall management, or the rare survival game where a sorcery build is a genuinely different experience from a strength-and-armour one, Conan Exiles at its current state is worth serious consideration. The modding ecosystem is healthy, the private server infrastructure is mature, and Funcom has earned some credit for continuing to invest in the game long past the point most studios would have moved on.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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