I haven’t played Conan in about a year or two and recently was playing again after the UE5 upgrade. Overall it’s okay but there are some areas with the graphics upgrade that I feel now look worse, the terrain textures and anti-aliasing specifically. I was just curious if others think the upgrade was overall good or if there’s others like me who feel it’s a mixed bag.
I have found that the UE5 update has brought a lot of the joy back to the game.
I love the graphics, but it’s the inherent stability that I enjoy most. For the last couple of years, I have limited my play to 1 week long tests on official servers due to the inherent infuriating production decision made with the Age of War and Age of Heroes that resulted in the Age of Crap. Now I am in week 3 of a playthrough and still having fun.
There are still serious issues to resolve, but I feel Infleccion is doing a great job updating the game.
The update is absolutely frigging amazing. This is also one of the better optimized UE5 games, so performance is excellent too. This is the best thing happening to Conan since Age of Sorcery.
I particularly love how natural light no longer shines through walls or solid ground, so its possible to be really dark inside when I want it to be. Thats very immersive.
Here are some pics Ive taken. Observe how light shines off the metal of my sword, or how sun glitters off the waters. All the fine details too, such as how my wight horse is now almost invisible in daylight, and leaves no shadow; how my book of kurak becomes visible when I place it on the thaumaturgy table; how the map simply is drawn to further away
And Im not even using the settings at maximum.
Theres functional improvements too, such as how you can now move freely between Exiled lands and Isle of Siptah!
I’ve played since EA, been through it all, have quit a couple times.
Yes it’s quite pretty but the old adage “Chrome don’t get you home” comes to mind. Pretty is not bug fixes, pretty is not solving server issues. For me the pretty wore off when I had to start fragment hunting in the unnamed city and found all the ledges are just as bad as ever. 9/10 I can’t get right up on top of something, I have to continue to try to I finally manage to pop up on the ledge/top I’m trying to get on.
Since we got climbing this has been an issue, and like many legacy bugs, this update didn’t fix it.
Pretty does not make the game run better.
I came back for the fresh server and bug fixes not really for the pretty game. My brick has enough issues running this normally; at high graphics so it looks pretty. So I’m happy it still looks pretty at low settings but I’m more interested in the sorted code and possibility for expansion.
I like the update.
The visual improvements are nice in most places. But the many little fixes are even more welcome. Thralls don’t fall through floors anymore (afaik). The game doesn’t randomly crash or stutter any more. Many objects look so much better now. And just the change itself gives an impression of everything being new - it’s like a bottle of “new car smell” for the game.
The update has brought some new issues, e. g. some building pieces having gaps or “steps” between them. But overall, nothing game breaking (for me) so far. Compared to previous updates, I’m still flabbergasted about how well everything works.
The game runs smoother than before for whatever reason. Haven’t seen a crash since forever, the games actually stops running when you quit it, and in total feels much more polished.
Some lighting and color changes seem questionable. Had to fiddle around with my monitor settings to be able to see indoors again. But some lighting that was weird in UE4 has been improved, so it’s a zero sum change, I’d say.
If you used sandstone corner pillars in your building design, those are probably the cause of any misalignment. I would strongly advise against using sandstone corner pillars until after they are fixed.
Good tip, but I encountered something else with several types of floors, e. g. Nemedian and Argossean. Some floor pieces do not seem to align correctly, and your character cannot move from one tile to the next, as if there was an invisible step.
@bignstrauss I’m curious as to what your Specs are:
PC/Laptop:
O/S:
CPU:
RAM:
M.2/SSD/HD:
GPU:
For Example My specs are:
O/S: Windows 11 Pro 64bit 23H2 (Automatic Malware updates permanently disabled)
Motherboard: MSI Mag Z790 Tomahawk WIFI (Wireless and Bluetooth 5.2; are disabled for security reasons).
CPU: 14th Generation Intel Core processor i7-14700 20 cores.
RAM: 2x 32GB DDR5 5600Mhz.
M.2: 1TB M.2 Solid State drive (O/S only).
SSD: 1TB, 2TB & 4TB Samsung 870 QVO drives. (4TB Steam & Programmes only)
HD: 2x 2TB SATA’s.
GPU: 12GB Nvidia RTX 4070 Graphics Card.
Optical: Pioneer Blu-ray RW up to 50GB per disc.
Soundcard: Creative Sound BlasterX AE-7 Plus Pure Edition.
PSU: Corsair 1000W Gold Rated Modular.
Monitor: (2x): IIYama 28" G-Master GB2888UHSU Monitor (3840 x 2160 Max DPI) Both are currently set for 1080p.
Mouse: Tecknet 6D Gaming Mouse (Cheep but still a good mouse)
Keyboard: Corsair Raptor K55
The only real problem I have is a graphics glitch that starts 1 - 1.5 hours into gameplay (Which is annoying as hell; what’s worse is that you can see it in not only my steams but also the streams of other players).
I’ve already expressed my thoughts here at length a couple of times, so I’ll just say it: I don’t like the graphics in UE5. In short, it doesn’t bring me joy. I find UE4’s graphics more comfortable. I’ve decided that I’m unlikely to ever play the new version, even if new maps are developed for it.
At first I was a little stunned by the stark contrast from what it use to be. To me, the new environment was familiar but also alien to me, so I had to become accustomed to it once more.
I upgraded my graphics card to an AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT - 16gb since my previous card being a 6600 was now (imo) substandard vs the recommended. The Ryzen 7 CPU was fine and I’m running all graphics on Ultra.
I had to make some adjustments to the gamma settings to brighten up the darker tones and bring out some of the highlights a bit to bring some of the natural colors back again. It’s amazing, although I must confess I’m still getting accustomed to it, but I’m not disappointed.
I feel as a stranger in a now strangely familiar land.
Well said.
Mostly I’m fine with the new graphics - like Vahlok suggests, it makes some things feel newer again. Don’t love some of the choices, but overall most are good.
The lighting, on the other hand, is getting me to the point of considering uninstalling. It’s irritating enough that it veers wildly between painfully bright and too dark to see. But the fact that a torch makes so little difference that it’s actually easier to see without it is just irritating. I made a trip up to Skyfall Ridge for some black ice yesterday - even with the torch out and gamma turned to maximum I could not see more than a couple of paces from the character. But I figured, well, that’s night, its irritating and bad game design, but it’s just a part of it. Then I got back down towards the mounds - still too dark to see. Then night fell and visibility was reduced further. It turns out what I thought wa night previously was just it being so dark in the afternoon that torch plus max gamma gave zero visibility…
So yeah, the graphics are fine when they are vivible. But for some reason visibility has been considered to be unimportant and better to remove…
Overall I’d rate it as tremendously amazing with just a few quibbles.
Like some have mentioned I did play around with monitor settings to get it where I wanted it.
I’ll add that I do not have the “Too dark to see where you’re going at night” thing, and that’s at default gamma and I’ve actually turned brightness down a bit, but at night during a sandstorm it does get very dark. Makes me appreciate the night vision mask, potions and such.
If you can offer some suggestions on monitor settings, I’d appreciate them.
Well, it may or may not matter on your monitor but the details are thus: My monitor is an ASUS VP247. It has some presets under a menu option called Splendid. Of those I choose Theater mode then turned brightness down a bit and adjusted contrast a bit as well though I forget if it was up or down. I think it was down.
I tried various other combinations but that’s what I settled on. May try tweaking it some more at some point but so far I’m happy with it.
Probably quite different between monitors, but on mine:
- “Racing mode” ← my monitor has some presets for games. Don’t know what they actually do, but they seem to fiddle with contrast and brightness besides the manual settings. “Racing” seemed to fix most lighting problems in Conen Exiles for me.
- Brightness 50
- Contrast 70
- Saturation 50
- No blue light filter
Thanks folks 
Those will at least give me somewhere to start. (I’m sure they won’t be the same, but I think my monitor did have some presets iirc.) Anything’s got to be an improvment over yesterday’s session…
@ Everyone:
I can only advise to trying out different monitor settings. Several games I played felt too dark for me, but until the UE5 update for Conan Exiles, I never really questioned if they looked as they were supposed to look. The update made me finally use some of those buttons I paid for, and it improved my (gaming) life a lot.
Would be very interesting to see how the game looked at Inflexion’s machines. I suspect some testers and players have a very different experience with the game due to different monitors or monitor settings.
Once I turned the computer on I did a little more digging. It seems the Splendid options may be something for this particular line if monitors only.
I tried to recreate the Theater look in Standard mode by copying all the settings exactly but it was still quite a bit different. Apparently that setting is doing something behind the scenes that can’t be replicated in other modes.
On newer monitors there is a Cinema mode that would appear to have replaced Theater mode. You might try that if you haven’t and see how it looks.
I did reduce both brightness and contrast to 5 and set the color temp to warm. Your mileage may vary.
Yeah, I’ve done a bunch of fiddling with my monitor (but not yet tested it in game, hopefully I’ll get some time for that tomorrow). It seems my monitor is more similar to Khaletohep’s than to yours, I’ve got a few ‘game type’ presets available, including a Racing option, though they also block me from being able to customise things like brightness or contrast. The numbers on my bars also seem more like percentages than (I’m guessing) 1-10. That said, I suspect I will find similar to you that I cannot quite recreate the presets by free adjusting…
I’ve also found a couple of ‘auto’ setting options that I researched a bit . DCR and DDC-CI, both of which could have some relevance as well. I’m going to need to do a lot more fiddling, but at the very least I should be able to improve things from where I was at.
Thanks again to both of you for all the help