Conan Exiles: Isle of Siptah Producer’s Letter and Developer Q&A

Last week, Funcom launched Isle of Siptah, their big Conan Exiles expansion, into early access. We then got this producer’s letter that talked about early access, told us what to expect in the near future, and then, discussed the game’s healing items.

Afterwards, there was this lengthy developer Q&A livestream that covered a lot of ground, including the new expansion features, the upcoming console launch, new character customization options, and more. You can either watch the full thing below, or check out a recap on the official forums. Have a look:

And here’s the producer’s letter:

Hello Exiles!

First, I wanted to thank everyone that has joined us during the first week of Siptah launch. We are incredibly excited to see so many new and past players return to survive, build, and dominate in the world of Conan Exiles.

For the first few weeks of Early Access we will be rapidly fixing and patching issues as we discover them. We released our first hotfix– 2.0.1, on Wednesday and today we released 2.0.2 which addresses some of the feedback and bugs you have told us about. This includes crash fixes, toning down the surge audio, addressing some issues with the healing changes, making the mounted version of the Rhino easier to obtain, and other fixes you can find here!

WHY EARLY ACCESS?

The first reason is that Isle of Siptah does a lot of things different than Exiled Lands and we want to get feedback from the player base and make the necessary changes. Early Access was very successful on the original Exiled Lands map and we will engage with the community and incorporate your feedback to improve Isle of Siptah. The goal is to make the map the best that it can be.

The second reason is that the Expansion was not ready to release on the Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Due to the pandemic and our work from home situation we have not been able to spend as much time testing and developing the expansion on consoles. Two of our studios, and several of our testing partners are still working at home which limits the sharing of dev/test kits. Console submission times have also greatly increased due to the pandemic and first party changes related to the next generation of consoles. One of the benefits of doing PC Early Access first, is that the platform allows us to more quickly patch out new fixes, improvements, and try out gameplay changes, allowing us to spend the next few months efficiently fine-tuning the experience. This will no doubt greatly benefit console players when they finally get access in early 2021.

WHAT’S NEXT?

We will be using the Early Access period to work on some major changes that will impact both Isle of Siptah and the Exiled Lands. The first will be an update to the economy and crafting systems, balancing some of the Siptah systems, and introduce a character re-customization feature which includes new character creation options exclusive to Isle of Siptah owners. As we get closer to the launch of the update we will give you more details on changes, as well as preview some of the art and assets associated with it. We are also working on feedback about the game mechanics of Siptah. We will be adjusting certain mechanics like wild surges to make them more solo player friendly, and adding additional land masses throughout the Early Access period.

HEALING AND FOOD

I wanted to discuss the changes to the healing/food system in update 2.0. Prior to this update, healing was primarily a function of food your character ate. The mechanical effect was that when you activated a food item, you would receive a small duration buff that would heal you for a small to moderate amount based on the item quality. Therefore you had to eat a piece of food every time the buff had dissipated until your health was full.

Food items weigh very little and are abundant throughout the world, which allow you to carry multiple stacks when doing any activity. Additionally, these items can be activated at any moment, while sprinting, in knockback or even during an attack. The gameplay that this system promoted was continuous item activation during any activity, in some cases allowing you to heal through many encounters without repercussion. This ended up trivializing health as a resource and invalidated several of the other healing options in the game.

The goal of the new system is to create windows of safety in which you can heal mid combat while also having options for cost effective out of combat healing solutions.

This boils down to – more interesting and dynamic combat encounters, more meaningful and decisive use of healing items, and less need to carry stacks of random foodstuffs.

HEALING ITEMS BY ROLE:

• Potions- are intended as an in combat tactical heal, you perform an animation for two seconds, at one and a half seconds the healing buff is applies. If the you are knocked out of the animation before the buff is applied, you do not receive the healing effect.
• Wraps- are intended as a strong/fast out of combat heal, however you can risk using them if you feel confident in your safety. On use you are locked into a ten second animation during which you heal for the duration or until you reach maximum health.
• Food- is intended as cost effective background healing effect that players use between encounters. Update 2.0.2 will increase the out of combat healing amount.

We are listening to your feedback on this feature and will continue to make improvements over the Early Access period.

We are also doing a Q&A stream next week, so please drop by the forums and send us your questions: https://forums.funcom.com/t/q-a-dev-stream-ask-your-questions-here/137620. I look forward to talking to you all next week!

As with every journey in the world of Conan, this one will be long and bloody. But together we will fight our way from the wreckage strewn beaches and, one day, climb to the top of Siptah’s tower and look out over all we have accomplished.

Thank you for being a part of our journey, Exiles. The Tower waits…

-Scott