About the game
Conan Exiles is an open-world survival sandbox from Norwegian studio Funcom, released in May 2018 after fifteen months in Early Access and rebuilt on Unreal Engine 5 this spring. The 2026 version carries the name Conan Exiles Enhanced, arrived on May 5 as a free upgrade for Steam owners, and was built together with Inflexion Games, the Edmonton studio behind Nightingale. Eight years of patches now run on a different engine, which makes this a fair moment to ask what the game is like to actually sit down and play.
Two very different readers arrive at that question. One has never touched the game and wants to know whether a 2018 survival title justifies its asking price in 2026. The other has four hundred hours on a private server, stopped logging in somewhere around 2024, and only wants to know whether the engine swap broke the things they cared about. Those answers diverge more than you would expect, so this review keeps switching between the two.
What Conan Exiles Enhanced Changed, and What It Broke
The Enhanced build is a rendering and plumbing job rather than a redesign. Funcom moved eight years of content onto Unreal Engine 5, aimed at 60+ FPS on mid-range hardware, redrew the interface, improved Steam Deck behaviour, and connected the two maps: a single character can now move between the Exiled Lands and the Isle of Siptah without restarting, provided you own the Siptah expansion. Crafting stations pull materials from nearby chests and from your follower's inventory, which sounds like a footnote and quietly deletes about a third of the inventory shuffling the game used to demand.
Launch week was rough for anyone running mods. UE4 mod packages do not load in a UE5 binary, so the entire Workshop catalogue stopped working overnight and every author had to rebuild against the refreshed Mod Dev Kit. Funcom hedged against that by partnering with several popular modders for day-one compatibility, but abandoned projects — the custom UI overhauls, the stack-size tweaks — are gone unless somebody adopts them. Server admins on the official forums also reported ping on some regions climbing from double digits into the hundreds while decay timers kept ticking.
Three months and several patches later the situation has settled. The visual upgrade is real: the desert reads as sand and heat haze rather than orange texture, armour and faces hold up in close shots, and the north actually looks cold. What the upgrade does not do is add systems. Everything below was already there in 2024.
The Exiled Lands: Hyboria Without the Heroes
The map is a prison, and almost every design decision follows from that. The Exiled Lands run from southern desert through a river valley into jungle, highland and frozen north, ringed by a barrier that the bracelet on your wrist will kill you for crossing. Robert E. Howard's Hyboria supplies the population — Stygian soldiers, Darfari cannibals, Cimmerian raiders, the pirates of the Black Hand — but you meet them as camps to be looted rather than as quest givers. The story sits in ruins, journal fragments and the occasional named NPC, and reconstructing it takes real curiosity.
This is Conan by way of the pulp stories rather than the films. Human sacrifice is a mechanic instead of a cutscene, nudity is a server setting rather than a censored afterthought, and the gods are literal: pledge to Mitra, Set, Yog, Derketo or Jhebbal Sag, build their altar up through its tiers, and the payoff is a summonable avatar large enough to flatten a fortress, subject to whatever the server owner has enabled. A newcomer will find the game's clearest identity here. A veteran will notice it is also the part that has changed least in eight years — the north still has more ambition than content, and Siptah still feels grafted on.
Starting Conan Exiles: The First Few Hours
The opening is deliberately hostile and almost entirely unguided. You start crucified in the desert, Conan cuts you down, and the game hands you a bracelet you cannot remove, a horizon with no waypoints, and nothing else. Within ten minutes you are punching plant fibre out of shrubs, knapping a stone pick, and learning that the sun will kill you faster than any animal. Water comes before food, shade comes before water, and the first real milestone is a campfire with a pot of gruel on it.
Progression runs on two tracks that stay separate for the whole game. Character level tops out at a cap of 60, feeding attribute points into a system where each threshold hands over a named perk rather than a flat stat bump, while recipes come from knowledge points spent on a separate tree. A new player will hit level 60 in a weekend of steady play, which is the point at which the survival layer mostly stops mattering and the building layer takes over. Climbing deserves a mention: stamina permitting, you can scale nearly any surface in the world, and the map is built with that in mind.
For the returning player, this stretch is the least-changed part of the game. The desert behaves exactly as it did, the same NPC camps sit in the same places, and the muscle memory holds. The redesigned menus are the one genuine friction point — quick-stack, transfer and radial commands have moved, and the first evening back involves relearning where things live.
Combat in Conan Exiles: Weight Over Precision
Combat is built around weight, and it divides people. Every weapon class — sword, axe, mace, spear, katana, two-handed hammer, bow, throwing axe — carries its own combo string of light and heavy attacks, stamina governs dodges and blocks, and swings have recovery frames you cannot cancel out of. Landing a two-hander on a Darfari raider feels appropriately like swinging a girder. Fighting three of them at once shows the seams: target tracking is loose, your thrall picks the worst possible moment to stand in a doorway, and the dodge roll's invulnerability window is forgiving enough that duels between good players tend to collapse into rolling.
Mounted combat, added free in 2020, lets you fight with lance and sword from horseback, though horses work better as transport than as cavalry. Fatalities from the Age of War finish dazed enemies with weapon-specific animations, which is exactly as gratuitous as the licence demands. Against bosses the system holds up — the Unnamed City dragons punish greed and reward footwork — and against groups of humans it stays serviceable rather than sharp. Nothing in the Enhanced update touched any of it.
Building, Thralls and the Loop That Keeps People Playing
Base building is the reason most people stay, and it remains one of the better implementations in the genre. Pieces snap to a grid but tolerate manual placement, structures obey a stability rule that punishes unsupported spans, and the tier ladder runs from sandstone through stonebrick to reinforced stone and beyond, with hundreds of decorative and structural pieces on top. The purchasable building sets are cosmetic reskins of pieces you already have access to, so a player who buys nothing is never locked out of a shape.
Then there are thralls, the system that ties everything else together. You knock a human NPC unconscious with a truncheon, bind them, drag them across the map to a Wheel of Pain, and feed the wheel until they convert. Named tier-four crafters are the prize: assign one to a bench and it unlocks recipes and stat bonuses you cannot reach otherwise, which turns hunting specific NPCs at specific camps into a genuine mid-game objective.
The Age of Heroes update in late 2024 rewrote what happens after conversion. Crafters now sleep, eat and wander your settlement instead of standing frozen at a bench, each placeable has a toggle controlling whether followers may use it, and two voiced companions — the Khitan sorcerer Liu Fei and the Aesir warrior Freya — come with their own quest lines and perks. It makes a large base feel inhabited. It also adds needs to manage, and the same update reset every thrall's combat preset, which is exactly the kind of housekeeping that greets a veteran on their first login back.
Is Conan Exiles Pay to Win?
No. Conan Exiles sells cosmetics and nothing else — no stats, gear or progression are purchasable, and no shop item shortens the grind. The base game runs $39.99, twelve cosmetic DLC packs sit alongside it at around ten dollars each, and the Isle of Siptah expansion is $19.99. A Complete Edition bundle exists for people who want the whole shelf at once.
The live-service layer is where players push back. The Bazaar sells rotating cosmetics for Crom Coins, and the recurring community complaint is arithmetic rather than principle: item prices have historically sat just above what a single coin pack covers, so a purchase that looks like ten dollars becomes twenty. The Battle Pass that arrived with Age of Sorcery in 2022 was retired in October 2024, with Funcom saying the effort behind it would go into free updates instead — a reversal the forums had been demanding for two years, and one of the few times a studio has walked a battle pass back rather than deepening it.
One purchase deserves a warning. The Isle of Siptah expansion sits at Mixed on Steam, with roughly half of its fifteen hundred reviews positive, and the map has always felt like a parallel product rather than a continuation of the base game. The Enhanced update makes it more attractive by letting one character use both worlds, but if you are buying in cold, buy the base game first.
Purges, Dungeons and Where Conan Exiles Runs Out of Road
PvE content is broad but finite, and a determined player can see most of it. The Exiled Lands hold a dozen or so hand-built dungeons — the Dregs under the river, the Well of Skelos in the volcano, the Midnight Grove, the Warmaker's Sanctuary — plus the Unnamed City, a ruined giant capital patrolled by dragons and skeleton bosses that serves as the closest thing to a raid zone. Sorcery, added in 2022, runs on a corruption cost rather than a mana bar: every spell eats part of your maximum health until you cleanse it at a fire, which keeps casters from simply replacing warriors.
The Purge is the game's answer to a static world. Rather than waiting for a timer, you proclaim your wealth at a treasure chest and invite an attack scaled to what you have accumulated, then defend the base you spent forty hours on against waves of raiders, sorcerers who drop meteors on your roof, and thieves who pick your locks. Age of Heroes tuned that scaling to the strongest base on the server, which is generous on a busy PvP server and brutal on a quiet one where a solo builder gets a clan-sized siege.
Fresh content is arriving again after a slow 2025. Legacy of the Giant-Kings launched on July 21, sending players beneath the Unnamed City into the Cyclopean Halls with a guide named Akhamet and a boss fight at the bottom; it is the first of four free parts due across the rest of the year, and it brought back Legendary repair, a long-requested system that lets worn legendary gear be restored instead of retired.
The honest limit sits here. Once the dungeons are cleared, the named crafters are collected and the base is finished, Conan Exiles stops handing out goals. It expects you to invent the next one — a themed city, a new server, a self-imposed challenge run — and players who need authored objectives to keep going will feel the floor drop out somewhere past the hundred-hour mark. The four-part story arc helps, though four dungeons across a year is a thin schedule next to what the Age updates used to deliver.
PvP, Raiding and Why Private Servers Matter
Official PvP is the harshest way to play and the one most likely to put a newcomer off permanently. Death drops your inventory where you fell, raid windows restrict when bases can be damaged, and building decay quietly deletes anything left unattended too long. The recurring argument in the community is offline raiding: outside protected hours, a clan can take apart a solo player's base while they are at work, and Funcom's server settings mitigate this rather than solve it.
Private servers are where most long-term play actually happens, and they always have been. Admins tune harvest rates, decay timers, purge frequency and thrall conversion speed, run PvE-Conflict rules that allow duels without base destruction, and stack mods that change the game past recognition. That ecosystem is the real reason an eight-year-old survival game still has a population — and also why the Enhanced launch hurt more than a graphics update should have, since it took the modding scene offline for weeks.
Newcomers should start in single-player or on a co-op session with friends, learn the systems where nothing can be stolen, and only then decide whether they want other people's raiding parties in their evening.
Does Conan Exiles Still Have Enough Players in 2026?
Yes, with a caveat about where they are. Third-party trackers logged a Steam peak near 48,000 concurrent players in the days after the Enhanced launch — Funcom called it the highest concurrency since release — against weekly peaks of roughly 7,000 to 9,000 before the upgrade. By late August the daily peak has settled somewhere in the 7,000 to 11,000 range, depending on which tracker you read, so the surge has largely receded to the previous baseline with a modest gain on top.
Those figures understate the real population, and the gap is unusually wide here. Steam counts only Steam, private servers do not report, console players on the Legacy build are invisible to PC trackers, and a survival game where a single session runs four hours behaves differently from an MMO measured on daily logins. Steam review sentiment on the Enhanced store page sits around 79% positive lifetime and close to that over the last month, which is the same tone the game has carried for years: liked, not adored.
Verdict: Where Conan Exiles Stands in 2026
For a newcomer, this is the best moment the game has offered. The engine upgrade removed the strongest argument against starting — that it looked its age — the survival opening is short enough not to become a chore, the building system is deep enough to eat a winter, and nothing sold in the shop will make another player stronger than you. Buy the base game, play single-player or with two friends on a private server, and treat official PvP as a later decision rather than a first one.
For a veteran, the calculation is narrower. The systems you left are the systems you return to, plus Living Settlements, plus one new dungeon with three more promised. If your reason for stopping was thin endgame or the direction of the Bazaar, the Enhanced build does not answer either complaint. If your reason was that the game had begun to look tired, it answers that completely — assuming your mod list has been rebuilt, which is worth checking before you reinstall.
Funcom spent a year with its own game on the Wheel of Pain. What came off it kept the same bones and the same appetite for your evenings, and gained a considerably better face — and like every thrall that ever came off that wheel, it works tirelessly and well, right up until nobody is left to give it something to do.