Funcom's Conan Exiles hits early access on January 31st
Another survival sandbox
We're not short on multiplayer open-world survival games but coo 'eck, I can't think of many with spectacles like Conan Exiles [official site]. Funcom today announced they'll launch their new MOWSG into early access on January 31st, 2017 and celebrated this with a new trailer showing such delights as a metal colossus stomping through a scrappy fort to punch a giant snake in the face. Good stuff. My dream is for fantasy monsters to look like Harryhausen stop-motion animated models and real reptiles composited into scenes but hey, if wishes were thrushes beggars would eat birds.
Conan Exiles looks like a MOWSG in the vein of Ark, one where you fight monsters and can build (and destroy) settlements with your pals. As is customary, you'll start in the nip then craft tools and weapons and work your way up to building big fancy things. The land is filled with fantasy monsters too, of course.
Given how violent ol' Conan is, yorp you'll get to lop limbs off and drag people around from ropes. Youth of today, eh? The MOWSG genre is hardly short of violent dickheads so encouraging them is a curious decision. But! All this brutality can serve a purpose. You can curry favour with the gods by sacrificing your foes' hearts to them, and presumably those honking great monsters are rewards from The Folks Upstairs. Funcom say you can also "Enslave the bandits of the exiled lands to do your bidding by breaking them on the grueling Wheel of Pain." Jolly times.
Or you can play on your tod in singleplayer.
January 31st is the day for early access, though who knows when it'll actually properly launch. Here's the new trailer: