Funcom doesn’t want players to think of their Conan Exiles towns as nothing more than a “protective box for their assets.” That’s according to a new Q&A penned by Lead Designer Oscar Lopez, who takes a stab at explaining the point of the city life update.
“The general design philosophy is to allow players to create interesting setups for their towns. Stuff like centralized resource storages, upkeep/wages, automatic chain production, job scheduling for thralls, sleeping quarters, thralls automatically opening drawbridges, operating siege cauldrons, repairing your walls, serving your bar and so on,” he says. “All of those and more are on the table and we are looking forwards to get our hands on this system.”
Lopez also covers nonsensical animal drops, the upcoming Highlands biome, camera options, stamina drain from climbing, chat progress, custom equipment hotkey sets, and hardcore servers. Helmet-hiding isn’t on the table, and there are no plans for boats or rafts yet, but maybe soon: “It’s a cool vehicle type that’s very likely to make it if/when we add biomes with larger areas of open water. Right now, we are focusing on land mounts.”
Finally, there’s a note about Xbox One development.
“Adding console support is always tricky because you must maximize visual fidelity on a performance limited GPU. We need to fit the game in a limited amount of shared memory, accessible by both GPU and CPU. We also need to do extra optimization work on our gamecode, as it currently runs mainly on one thread and on Xbox each CPU core is quite slow compared to a modern PC GPU. On the other hand, fixed hardware allows us to make assumptions and makes certain optimizations possible. A lot of the Xbox integration work will also benefit the PC builds as well as our server performance! The experience playing on Xbox sitting on a couch is pretty awesome and different from PC.”
