Earlier this week, Funcom released the big one for survival game Conan Exiles: a free Enhanced edition upgrade that visually overhauls the game, among other things.
A curious side-effect of the update, however, was bestowing players with the potential for making the game’s dangly parts even larger – Conan Exiles famously (or perhaps notoriously) has full nudity, and customisable “endowment” and breast sliders.
What scant evidence there was at the time suggested Funcom did this deliberately, but I, being the rigorous journalist that I am, decided to investigate further.
“Thank you, Bertie, for asking the important questions,” Funcom told me in response. “It’s not quite the email we expected at 9am on a Wednesday morning, but we’re happy to respond.
“We always wanted Conan Exiles to be a mature survival game, in line with the look and feel of Conan’s world, and full nudity was part of that in the first release back in the day. The endowment slider did get a lot of attention, so the fact that you can now enhance things even further is a fun nod to that.
“Conan Exiles Enhanced is a lot about nostalgia, giving players who played it many years ago the chance to relive those moments of adventure in a game that is bigger and better than ever before.”
The Enhanced edition of Conan Exiles seems to have had a sizable impact on the popularity of the eight-year-old game, with daily concurrents spiking on Steam at 30k – easily the game’s busiest moment since a free-week spike in 2022 (Steam chart data provided by SteamDB).
Conan Exiles is an on and offline survival game, where you climb down off a crucifixion cross in the middle of the desert and then set about carving out a life and existence for yourself, building shelter, killing animals, and so on. Where the game differentiates itself is in its group play and group battling, as teams of players take on other teams and assault their so-called impregnable fortresses. There are huge summonable gods, fantastical creatures, and lots of loin cloth.
It’s been a long time since we appraised Conan Exiles but our original review was very favourable. “If Ark and Rust are the flaccid alpha males of survival gaming, Conan is the cocksure challenger angling for an advantage.” Where Conan Exiles is concerned, a willy pun is never far behind.
Nudity in Conan Exiles is, incidentally, optional.
