Overview
Conan Exiles is a multiplayer survival game developed and published by Funcom, set in the savage world of Conan the Barbarian. Released in May 2018 for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, it puts players in the role of an exile condemned to die in a brutal wasteland, saved only by Conan himself before being left to fend for their life. The game spans a massive open world stretching from scorching southern deserts to frozen northern territories, with a progression arc that runs from scavenging your first stone tool to commanding armies of thralls and summoning divine avatars to flatten enemy cities.
What makes Conan Exiles stand out in a crowded survival genre is the sheer density of systems layered on top of each other. Building, crafting, religion, slavery, corruption, siege warfare, cooking, brewing, and temperature management all coexist in a world that actively tries to kill you through weather as much as enemies. The game supports full single-player, co-op, and persistent online multiplayer, giving players control over how brutal or relaxed they want the experience to be.
Gameplay and mechanics: how deep does the survival loop go?
Survival in Conan Exiles goes far beyond tracking hunger and thirst meters. The world presents constant environmental threats: sandstorms scour the desert, freezing temperatures drain health in the north, and prolonged exposure to dark magic gradually corrupts the player character's mind. Managing these systems while also gathering resources, building shelter, and fighting off hostile NPCs creates a survival loop that rarely lets up.
The core mechanics include:
- Building piece-by-piece construction from small huts to full cities
- Thrall capture via the Wheel of Pain to create NPC workers and defenders
- Religion systems tied to gods like Ymir, whose avatar players can summon in battle
- Temperature and weather survival across distinct biomes
- Siege warfare using explosives, catapults, and god avatars
Combat is melee-focused with stamina management, directional attacks, and a dismemberment system that makes fights feel consequential. Weapons and armor span a wide material tier list, from basic iron up to star metal and black ice equipment found in the frozen north.
World and setting: the Exiled Lands and beyond
The Exiled Lands serve as the game's primary map, a massive region packed with ruins from ancient civilizations. Exploration rewards players with knowledge fragments, inscriptions, and lore that piece together what happened to the peoples who lived here before. The world isn't decorative filler: ruins hold dungeons, dungeons hold bosses, and bosses drop materials tied to endgame progression.
The Frozen North expansion, available free to all players, added a second major region that increased the world size by 70%. Snow-capped mountains, haunted forests, frost giant patrols, and the Ymir religion system all arrived with it, along with brewing and cooking crafting systems and new dungeon content including Tyros the Deathbringer.
Multiplayer and social: who is Conan Exiles actually for?
Public servers support persistent online play where clans form, wars break out, and cities get razed. Private servers let players tune nearly every variable, from resource rates and progression speed to avatar availability and god damage. Admin tools let server owners spawn enemies, adjust time of day, or turn off PvP entirely. The Steam Workshop also supports mods, with a custom Unreal Editor available for players who want to build their own content.
Co-op mode handles smaller groups, and full offline single-player is available for anyone who wants the experience without other players complicating it.
Conclusion
Conan Exiles is one of the more fully realized survival sandbox games available across PC and consoles. The combination of deep building systems, god-summoning warfare, thrall management, and genuine environmental danger gives it a distinct identity within the survival RPG genre. The free Frozen North expansion alone doubled the scope of the game, and the breadth of server customization options means the experience scales from brutal PvP warfare to a relaxed solo building project. For players who want a survival game with actual lore, real stakes, and enough systems to keep sessions running long past midnight, Conan Exiles delivers that consistently.
