The open-world multiplayer survival genre has certainly been booming lately, with games like DayZ pitting friends against each other in the fight to simply stay alive. But if you want something a little more … barbaric, Conan Exiles looks like the answer.
Developed by Funcom, the studio behind the recent atmospheric horror game The Park, Conan Exiles cast you as “one of thousands” of exiles sent into the brutal, over-the-top universe of Conan the Barbarian. As with other survival games, it will include hunting, harvesting, and shelter-building elements, but the developer also promises “savage, fast-paced combat” that will feature substantial amounts of gore.
While Funcom says that Conan Exiles “will also feature a single-player mode,” it’s primarily meant as a multiplayer game, and the lack of actual specifics on what the solo option contains suggests that it may be a tacked-on feature. If you’re more interested in a single-player Conan experience, the 2007 video game is a decent option. It didn’t score the best with reviewers (I played it myself, and found it slightly too campy, even for Conan), but it certainly doesn’t skimp on the crazy combat and fountains of blood.
This is certainly a huge departure from The Park, which focused on condensing scares into a shorter experience, in a similar vein to games like Amnesia.
“The fight for survival in Conan’s savage world has been chronicled in comics, movies, and novels,” says Conan Properties CEO Fredrik Malmberg in the announcement, “and now you too will get to experience the same struggle to achieve domination over the exiled lands.”
Conan Exiles arrives to PC in an early access form this summer before launching on both PC and consoles at an unspecified date. Let’s just hope both Exiles and The Legend of Conan film turn out better than some of the franchises’ recent installments.
