Conan Exiles launched out of early access on 8 May 2018, and it arrived carrying the weight of a genre that had already been defined by other games. Funcom built it for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One. The premise is simple and brutal: your character is convicted, sentenced to death and crucified in the desert. Conan cuts you down. Everything after that is up to you.
The game is set in the fictional prehistoric Hyborian Age, the world of Conan the Barbarian. It is a survival game first, an RPG second, and a war game third. That order matters, because Conan Exiles is at its best when it is asking you to endure, not when it is asking you to conquer.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Crucified in the Exiled Lands
The opening is the strongest thing Conan Exiles does. You begin on a cross, and the game does not rush you off it. Conan himself saves your life by cutting you down from the corpse tree. From there you are an exile in the Exiled Lands, a harsh desert landscape, and the game hands you almost nothing.
This is a survival game in the plainest sense. You weather scouring sandstorms. You shield yourself from intense temperatures. You hunt animals for food and resources. The desert in the south is burning. The snow-capped mountains in the north are freezing. The world is seamless, and it does not care whether you are ready for it.
Funcom’s community manager, Jens Erik, put the finished base game’s world size at around 53 km2. That is a real number, and it feels like one. The map is not padded with busywork. It is a place you learn to read, and the reading takes time.
From Peasant to Barbarian
Progression in Conan Exiles runs from lowly peasant to mighty barbarian, and the game means both halves of that. You start with nothing. You end with a character who can hold a line in a siege.
The building system is the spine of the whole thing. You construct anything from a small home to entire cities, piece by piece. That is the pitch, and the game largely delivers it. A clan can raise a shared city together, and the difference between a shack and a fortress is entirely the work you put in.
Combat uses swords, bows and siege weapons. The game also lets you take control of giant avatars of the gods to crush the homes of your enemies. That is the endgame fantasy, and it is a loud one. It is also the part of Conan Exiles that feels least like survival and most like a strategy game wearing a barbarian’s armor.
The Frozen North and the Volcano
Conan Exiles did not ship as a finished map and stop. A later update added a biome called the Frozen North. That update brought new armor to build, new land to explore, and Star metal, which is used to make strong armor and better tools and weapons.
The Highlands arrived in 2017. A high-level Volcano area followed in the second quarter of 2018, in the northernmost region of the map. It added Obsidian, used to create powerful tools and weapons that rival their Star Metal counterparts.
Three more biomes — The Savannah, The Floodlands and The Ashlands — came with the Isle of Siptah expansion in the first quarter of 2021. An enhanced version for Xbox Series X and Series S landed on 8 June 2021. Conan Exiles Enhanced followed on 5 May 2026, moving the game to Unreal Engine 5.
That is a long tail for a 2018 release, and it is worth naming plainly. Here is the running order as the game stands:
| Date | Release or update |
|---|---|
| Early 2017 | Early access versions released |
| 2017 | The Highlands biome added |
| 8 May 2018 | Leaves early access |
| Q2 2018 | Volcano area added, with Obsidian |
| Q1 2021 | Isle of Siptah expansion, with The Savannah, The Floodlands and The Ashlands |
| 8 June 2021 | Enhanced version for Xbox Series X and Series S |
| 5 May 2026 | Conan Exiles Enhanced, Unreal Engine 5 update |
Single-Player, Co-op, or MMO
Conan Exiles can be played in full single-player. It can be played in co-op. It can be played as persistent online multiplayer. The modes are single player, multiplayer, co-operative and massively multiplayer online, and the game does not treat any of them as the afterthought.
That flexibility is a genuine strength. A player who wants to build a home alone can do it. A clan that wants to wage war can do that too. The same systems serve both, which is rare and hard to pull off.
The perspective shifts between first person and third person. The genres the game claims are fighting, role-playing, simulator, strategy and adventure. Themes are action, fantasy, survival and open world. That is a lot of labels for one game, and Conan Exiles does not fully earn all of them.
Where the Sandstorm Stings
The survival loop is the part that holds up. The temperature system, the sandstorms, the hunt for food and resources — these are not decoration. They shape where you go and when. The desert teaches you to respect the north, and the north teaches you to respect the volcano.
The building system is the second thing that holds up. Piece-by-piece construction of a city is a real commitment, and the game rewards it. A shared city built with strangers is the kind of thing players remember.
The combat is where Conan Exiles thins out. Swords, bows and siege weapons are all present, but the fighting is not the reason to stay. The avatar system is spectacular and shallow at the same time. Crushing an enemy’s home with a god is a moment. It is not a foundation.
The RPG Label Does Too Much Work
The RPG layer is the weakest of the bunch. Moving from peasant to barbarian is a long climb, but the climb is more about resources than about character. The game calls itself a role-playing game, and that label is doing more work than the systems behind it.
A player who comes for the sieges and the god avatars will find a thinner game than the marketing suggests. A player who comes to build, to endure and to explore will find one of the more complete survival sandboxes of its era.
What the Score Says
Conan Exiles holds a published critical score of 7.1/10, an aggregate across 11 outlets. That number is fair, and it is fair for a specific reason. The game is ambitious, it is generous with its world, and it has been supported for years. It is also uneven, and the unevenness is not in the parts you would expect.
The survival and building systems are the real product. The combat and the RPG progression are the parts that ask for patience. The long support tail matters here. The Frozen North, the Highlands, the Volcano, the Isle of Siptah biomes, the Xbox Series X and Series S version, and the move to Unreal Engine 5 in 2026 — that is a game that kept being finished after it shipped. Few survival games of 2018 can say the same.
The 53 km2 figure from Jens Erik is the one to hold onto. It describes a world that is large without being empty, and it describes what Funcom actually built. The sandstorms, the temperatures and the corpse tree are the details that stick. The avatars are the noise.
Conan Exiles is not a great fighting game and it is not a great RPG. It is a great survival game with a building system strong enough to carry the rest. That is worth 7.1 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
