‘Conan Exiles’ Impresses With 360 Degree Screenshots, On Track For January Early Access

Funcom emerged Tuesday to provide an update on its upcoming open-world PC survival game, Conan: Exiles. The developer provided a set of new screenshots to show the upgrades to its graphics engines since the debut trailer. This includes some impressive 360-degrees shots using Nvidia’s Ansel technology plus an update on when the title will get its Early Access release.

The debut Conan: Exiles trailer released in June of this year did not wow the graphically inclined. Funcom has spent the last several months improving the look and fidelity of the survival title in hopes of pleasing the ever-unpleasable Crom.

“After the first pre-alpha gameplay trailer in June we received a lot of feedback from the community about the game’s graphics. Some of you liked how it looked, others didn’t. Several people asked if, and how, the look of the game would improve during development,” the development team shared on the game’s fresh and new dev blog.

“There have been significant changes to Conan Exiles in the past few months. Graphical fidelity and art direction has been updated, points of interest have been added to the environment, and the game world feels much more vibrant now.”

The screenshots also serve to reveal much more variety to the game world of Conan: Exiles than was previously shown. The previous trailer and screenshots showed a vast desert-like landscape. The new images still have their share of sand, but also show grassy landscapes, oasis, and bleak caves.

Perhaps the most interesting is an underwater shot featuring fish, plants, and a rather vicious looking creature. This confirms players will have more than just dry land to explore. It confirmed highlands, snowy mountains, jungle, forest, swamp, and more biomes as previously reported by the Inquisitr.

Funcom also teamed up with Nvidia to use the graphics card maker’s Ansel technology to create 360-degree shots of the game world. You can view the full gallery on Nvidia’s website and they certainly show progress made on the visual front.

As for progress on the release date front, Funcom is still targeting a January 2017 release to Steam Early Access. One thing the developers have worked on is making Conan: Exiles playable in different languages. The game will accommodate 11 languages at release: English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese.

The developer also reports progress on the number of creatures, features, and items in-game.

“In addition to updating the game’s look and feel we’ve added more creatures, tools and items, and lore to the game in the past few months. Furnaces, tanning benches and other crafting machines have been implemented to expand the crafting opportunities for players,” Funcom explained.

“There’s been significant changes to combat, which now feels more responsive and impactful. We’ve also mo-capped and redone some of the character animation because we felt it wasn’t up to snuff in its original state.”

It appears the Thrall system may be in place when Conan Exiles enters Early Access. Full details haven’t been shared yet, but it’s likely something along the lines of NPC slave or companion characters.

Conan: Exiles comes with all the trappings of an open-world survival game. Players will be able to gather resources to build tools, weapons, and bases in a large open-world based on the harsh land of Hyboria from the Conan franchise.

Players will have the option to join multiplayer games on both public and private servers, or they can do it alone in a single-player mode. There will be both PVP and PVE servers, but there is a definite PVP focus with players able to sacrifice enemies to the gods for added power.

The game also features human NPCs that players can kill to take over towns, and they will have to defend their fledgling bases and villages against. Conan Exiles introduces the Purge System to keep a server from becoming stale. The system will occasionally introduce invading NPC armies to the game world that will attack players and their structures.

Other twists include graphic fatality kills during combat, combat options with multiple different attacks available based on the weapon used, and a 53 km world size with multiple biomes.

PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launches are planned for Conan Exiles, as well. There’s no word yet on if it would appear as part of the Early Access-like Xbox Preview Program.

[Featured Image by Funcom]