‘Conan Exiles’ Release Mod Support, Funcom Says 320,000 Sold In First Week

Funcom shared good news Friday both for Conan Exiles players and for itself. The official mod dev kit for Unreal Engine 4 was released plus announced plans to attend GDC and PAX East. Additionally, the open-world survival game released to Steam Early Access last week has already recouped its development costs.

The promised mod dev kit for Conan Exiles is now available to download for creators. Those interested will need to head to UnrealEngine.com and download the Unreal launcher for free. The dev kit can be accessed from there.

This opens the game up to mods both small and large for players to download from the Steam Workshop. It will be interesting to watch what direction these go as quality of life improvements will likely hit first followed by player and weapon skins and then all new ways to play.

On the more immediate front, Funcom is currently working to bring official servers back online after changing host providers to improve performance. This includes all-new “clean servers” for now. North American servers went online first yesterday and European servers just went online this morning per a post from the official Conan ExilesTwitter account.

Conan Exiles servers that retain character progress prior to the server shift will take a little longer to bring back online.

“We ran into a few snags when bringing up servers with the old databases. We could fix that by simply wiping the databases clean, but that would mean those of you who played on those servers would lose all your belongings and all your progress,” the development team explained in an update posted to Steam. “As such, we have decided to bring those servers down again and our coders are now working hard on fixing that issue so we can bring them up again as soon as possible – with all your items and all your progress intact.”

Servers are coming back online with just 40 player slots to start. Expect to see that increased over the coming weeks as Funcom continues to tweak the game via frequent patches. Those concerned about not getting into an official server should consider trying unofficial servers. There are around 12,000 such servers currently sitting with plenty of space. They also feature custom settings to play with the harvest and experience gain rates of your liking.

Meanwhile, Conan Exiles sold 320,000 copies in its first week on Steam Early Access, per a development blog post. This was enough to completely recoup the development costs of the game which also secures its long-term development future.

“We are deeply humbled and very grateful for the initial success of Conan Exiles,” says Funcom CEO Rui Casais. “Funcom has gone through some challenging times in recent years and seeing the game we have poured so much time and effort into gain this amount of traction so quickly is very invigorating for everyone who works here. This is just the start of the Early Access adventure and we will do whatever it takes to make sure Conan Exiles turns into a fully-fledged game that has something to offer new and old fans of both Conan and survival games.”

Those challenging times include layoffs that affected approximately half the development studio’s employees in 2012, per Polygon. So, consider Conan Exiles’ immediate success a welcome bounce back for the Norwegian studio.

Development on Conan Exiles will continue to focus on the “teething issues” that come with launching a game in Early Access. This includes both server issues and bugs. Once the development team at Funcom reaches a good spot on that road, it will split into one team dedicated to squashing bugs and optimizations with another focused on adding new content and features.

Expect to see Funcom and Conan Exiles at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco at the end of this month followed by PAX East in Boston the weekend of March 10. This is where the developers will showcase the game along with some of the new content and features planned.

[Featured Image by Funcom]