Conan Exiles Interview with Oscar Lopez

During PAX East 2017, WCCF Tech has managed to interview Oscar Lopez, the Lead Designer for Conan Exiles, Funcom’s survival game. They talked about how the Early Access has been treating the game, the future plans to introduce proper siege warfare, and a few miscellaneous topics. An excerpt:

Wccftech: First things first, tell me a bit about Conan Exiles and how it differs from your previous Conan game, Age of Conan?

Lopez: Conan Exiles is a survival sandbox MMO. Your main objectives in the game are to survive first, to build an empire, and to thrive against other people. It’s a different setup than what you would get in Age of Conan. Age of Conan is an MMO with a different sense of progression and activates that you do in the game. In this game [Conan Exiles] your activities revolve around food and water and building a base, building better tools to fight. You adventure out to find more material to make even better weapons, castles while taking on other players. The two games are completely different genres and we are making sure we are letting players before jumping that this isn’t a sequel to Age of Conan but its own thing.

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Wccftech: You mentioned before about Player vs Environment, is there going to be an offline or a story component to Conan Exiles?

Lopez: There’s no guided story arc for the game. What we have is a rich setting for a game with a lot of lore and story beats that you can discover via talking to NPCs or discovering ancient tablets in the world. The narrative is fragmented and you have to put together on your own with your adventures. It’s similar to what Dark Souls does with its storytelling, the world has a lot to say.

Wccftech: What sort of challenges will players face if they decide not to take part of the PvP?

Lopez: There are wild animals like snakes and rhinos. There are also monsters like dragons and giant demons. You will also find human enemies to fight against. These are exiles, like you, some are NPCs that belong to their own factions and have their own camps.

Wccftech: Can you attack these NPCs?

Lopez: Not only can you attack them, but you also knock out unconscious and drag them back to your base and turn them into workers that do stuff for you.

Wccftech: So you can essentially have your own thriving community of NPCs that you “recruited?” Can you assign these people to specific tasks?

Lopez: They already know what to do depending on what their profession was before you captured them. You can find a guy who was an archer or a blacksmith and they will have jobs in your base already. A blacksmith for example, you capture him and put him on the Wheel of Pain like in Conan movies and he becomes your blacksmith. He is assigned to a blacksmith station and improves the station. There are a lot of NPCs in the world.

Wccftech: Then could you do the same thing to another player’s NPC in their base? Can players essentially launch raids for useful NPCs as opposed to just trying to destroy a base?

Lopez: As of right now it doesn’t work like that, it is our intention to do that in the future since we are still in Early Access. Workers or Thralls are pretty much loot you can get from taking on other people’s bases.

Wccftech: How’s Early Access been working out for you guys?

Lopez: It has been a tremendous success for us. We did not expect the amount of traction the game has gotten. We are playing close attention what people are doing in the game and following standard feedback channels like Reddit or the Steam forums. We also look at Twitch a lot and see how people are playing it and the way they play it. Right now we are basically working on a gigantic content patch for Siege. A lot of what we are doing now is a direct response to how people are playing the game.

Wccftech: Are we expecting to see things like battering rams and trebuchets?

Lopez: We are putting out trebuchets which you’d have to set a counter-weight and do range-finding. You can load them up with different types of ammunition like boulders or corpses. You can actually gather corpses put them in a corpse locker to let them rot and load the trebuchet with them. When you get hit by a corpse it leaves a poison cloud, it’s a good way to get people out of the bases and fight them in the field.