I noticed the steam player count has shot up from a respectable 8k to a whopping 50k after the big new update and am in the mood for diving into a new open world survival game. I’ve heard there are some serious netcode issues with the game affecting perform. This isn’t a decision breaker for me as long as it gets fixed in the future and on that note my question is will there be a roadmap of sorts discussing the future of this game? I don’t want to invest my time into something that has no future prospects after all. Appologies if the devs have already discussed this but I can’t seem to find anything out there about it.
Hi, and welcome to the forums 
Regarding the server performance issues, there have been a couple of community updates expressing that this is a focus (it’s also received a lot of mentions from various figures involved in the development) -
Community Update 1
Community Update 2
So, it’s a known problem, but they are still working on fixing it. (Also worth noting that the CEO of Inflexion (the company actually handling the development of the UE5 version of the game) has on Discord expressed his disappointment that this issue has come up and messed up the opening weeks of the upgrade after they spent 16 months working on it.)
As for future plans - again on Discord, the CEO of Inflexion has said they have ‘lots of plans’ for the future, but I’m not aware of any specifics. There tends not to be an actual roadmap provided to us.
The prevalent suspicion is that all future plans are somewhat dependent on how well the upgrade goes - certainly the jump in numbers seems like a good sign, and I’ve heard that there are even new players on console (though also many players lost there, because the release on Steam came with a statement of ‘No current plans’ to upgrade on other platforms, which feels like a betrayal of loyal customers - this has been walked back somewhat as ‘looking at the feasibility’, but nothing concrete).
You’ll find a mix of opinions here - there are many who enjoy the game (and are enjoying the upgrade) and many who are frustrated by one issue or another.
It’s also worth noting that the performance problems primarily seem to be affecting the official/public servers (which historically have a number of issues, as they also have only limited moderation) - some private servers are also affected, others are reporting having no problems. Singleplayer is working without problems (though not entirely bug free - there will always be some bugs, but they are fairly limited minor issues right now). So to some extent it also depends how you intend to play.
If mods are your thing, there are already a few hundred mods available for the UE5 version (legacy mods do not work with the new version, so have to be recoooked or remade to do so - some are more complex that others) - but mods only work on private servers or singleplayer, there are no mod options on official servers.
Hopefully that helps a bit with your decision making. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask
This game is alive, developed and supported for 8 years by now and it’s rewritten for UE5 - unbelievable thing for me. Now I’m sure that Funcom isn’t going to abandon CE for some years more.
That’s good news, thanks for the informative replies
Which discord is the inflexion CEO talking about the servers?
Conan Exiles discord (unofficial/fan-run, but a few Inflexion folks drop in from time to time)
Hopefully this link should work - https://discordapp.com/invite/mGd7BeG
(for some reason it doesn’t seem to ever show up when I directly search discord itself…)