Conan Exiles Review Summary

Rich and immersive open world: The game features a vast, diverse world with biomes like deserts, jungles, and ruins, along with dungeons, secrets, and NPC quests. The atmosphere and lore, inspired by the Conan universe, create a deeply immersive experience.

Deep crafting and building systems: The game offers one of the best building systems in the survival genre, allowing players to construct everything from huts to fortified cities. Crafting is equally robust, with a sense of accomplishment tied to rare resource gathering and upgrades.

Exceptional solo and multiplayer experience: The game excels in both solo and multiplayer modes, offering a flexible and engaging experience. Players highlight the freedom to explore, build, and face challenges, with strong social features like co-op and PvP enhancing the fun.

Regular updates and expansions: The game receives consistent updates and DLCs, such as 'Age of Sorcery' and 'Isla de Siptah,' which add new content, mechanics, and improvements. This keeps the game fresh and engaging over time.

Thriving modding community: The game boasts a strong modding scene with active developer support, offering mods for customization, quality-of-life improvements, and new content. This extends replayability and allows players to tailor the experience to their preferences.

Unstable Multiplayer Experience: Multiplayer is marred by lag, disconnections, and poor server stability. Official servers often crash or become unplayable, while private servers suffer from performance issues and mod-related conflicts.

Severe Bugs and Glitches: The game suffers from countless bugs, including game-breaking issues like enemies disappearing, inventory glitches, and server crashes. These problems persist despite repeated updates, making the game unplayable for many users.

Rampant Hacking and Cheating: Official servers are plagued by hackers and cheaters, with weak anti-cheat measures and little developer intervention. This ruins the multiplayer experience and drives players away from PvP.

Poor Developer Support: Developers are criticized for slow bug fixes, neglecting core issues, and prioritizing monetization over gameplay improvements. Many players feel the game has been abandoned despite its long-standing problems.

Outdated Graphics and Optimization: The game’s graphics feel outdated, and performance issues like lag, stuttering, and poor optimization persist. These problems are exacerbated on official servers and high-population areas.

Open-world survival core: The game centers on survival mechanics like hunger, thirst, and temperature management in a vast open world. Players gather resources, build bases, and explore diverse biomes to progress.

Thrall/slave system mechanics: Players capture NPCs (thralls) to serve as crafters, defenders, or companions. The system includes taming, training, and role-based mechanics, with modding enhancing customization.

Dark Souls-inspired combat: Combat emphasizes positioning, stamina management, and weapon variety, with brutal melee-focused mechanics. Boss fights and mounted combat add depth.

Role-playing and customization: Players customize characters (e.g., disciples of Derketo), build unique bases, and engage in RP servers. Mods further expand role-playing options.

Technical and balance issues: Criticisms include loading times, hit detection problems, and PvP balance. Mods often address these gaps, but base mechanics can feel unpolished.

Severe game crashes and instability: Players report frequent crashes, freezes, and fatal errors, often requiring restarts or manual fixes (e.g., deleting .json files). These issues persist even with clean installs and affect both modded and vanilla gameplay.

Memory leaks and hardware strain: Memory leaks degrade performance over time, and the game demands low settings even on high-end PCs. Stuttering worsens with many NPCs nearby, indicating CPU dependency.

Mod-related instability: Mods introduce crashes, sync errors, and increased load times. Modded servers are less stable, and conflicts arise from DLC or file corruption.

Multiplayer lag and desync: Online play suffers from lag, rubberbanding, and teleportation due to poor netcode. These issues are exacerbated in PvP and during raids or large base loading.

Minor but persistent bugs: Annoying but non-critical issues include graphical quirks, movement bugs on login, and inventory glitches. These affect immersion without breaking gameplay.

Buy on sale due to bugs: While the game offers value, it is frequently recommended only at steep discounts (e.g., $10 or lower) due to persistent bugs, stability issues, and a steep learning curve. Full-price purchases are discouraged by many reviewers.

Avoid if seeking polished AAA experiences: The game is niche and lacks the polish of AAA titles, with reviewers warning against expectations of narrative depth or technical refinement. It is better suited for players tolerant of jank, grindy mechanics, or hardcore survival challenges.

Mods critical for long-term enjoyment: Mods are widely considered necessary to address core issues (e.g., solo play, thrall customization) or to unlock the game’s full potential. Players are advised to carefully select modded servers to avoid instability or pay-to-win scenarios.

Best experienced with friends or mods: The game shines in co-op or private server settings, especially with a fixed group of friends. Mods are often cited as essential for enhancing solo play or addressing core gameplay gaps, making unofficial servers a preferred choice for many.

Ideal for survival and crafting fans: The game is highly recommended for players who enjoy survival, exploration, crafting, and base-building mechanics, particularly those inspired by ancient mythology or games like *ARK* and *Valheim*. It appeals to both solo and co-op players seeking a challenging open-world experience.

Time investment too high: Players frequently mention the game requires excessive free time and is overly time-consuming, which may deter casual or busy players. The large game size exacerbates this issue.

DLC clutter and bloat: Downloaded content includes unused resolution files and DLC items that unnecessarily clutter the crafting menu, disrupting gameplay flow. Players have shared workarounds to hide these items.

Rich dark fantasy lore: The game’s lore draws heavily from Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Lovecraftian themes, and classic sword-and-sorcery elements, including mature topics like slavery and demonic rituals. This appeals to fans of grimdark settings.

Private server fees controversial: Players criticize the mandatory monthly fee for private servers, with speculation that developers are forcing this model to monetize multiplayer access. This has sparked frustration over perceived greed.

MMO potential unfulfilled: Players suggest the game could expand its world and server capabilities to rival MMOs like *Dune Awakening* or *Rust*, but current limitations and monetization focus hinder this vision.