Survive. Build. Dominate.
Conan Exiles is a open-world survival game developed by Funcom and set in the world of Conan the Barbarian. You play as an exile, one of thousands cast out to fend for themselves in a barbaric wasteland swept by terrible sandstorms and besieged on every side by enemies. They must raise above all obstacles in their way by gathering resources, growing their crops and fighting animals, and then they are able to explore the world on their own or joining others through multiplayer.
The game was released on May 8th, 2018 and is currently accessible on Steam, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
An expansion pack, The Isle of Siptah, was announced on September 10th, 2020. It entered Early Access on the 15th. The full release came on May 27, 2021. Another big update pack, Age of Sorcery, is upcoming. Age of Sorcery will replace the cosmetic DLC with an in-game store, rework building, attributes, and perks, add a "Seasons" system to earn in-game currency for use in the store and seasons, and add (obviously) sorcery.
Conan Exiles contains examples of the following tropes:
- Annoying Arrows: Downplayed. Readily-craftable bows and arrows deal damage on par with melee weapons a tier below them while legendary bows are hard to find and legendary ammunition is hard to get in any useful volume, so bows pay for their range with weak damage, severely-limited supplies, or both. In the hands of enemies this can become borderline exaggerated; weaker enemies might not even have a noticeable effect on a player's health bar when they land a shot. Averted with the Sorcery-exclusive Abyssal Bow, which does damage on par with a legendary melee weapon but turns the wielder into a Glass Cannon by maxing out their Corruption when equipped.
- Anticlimax Boss: The Degenerate, the last living pure-blooded serpentman. The Serpentmen used to rule a massive empire and were infamous worldwide for their power, villainy, and magical prowess, and this one is the Sole Survivor and the boss of the hardest zone in the game. By the time you battle through the hordes of Skelos cultists and degenerate serpentpeople hybrids to get to this guy you're going to be expecting a climactic showdown. Instead you meet am exhausted nihilistic Death Seeker who waxes philosophical as you approach, sits behind a barrier, summons weak illusions that die in two hits from any decent weapon and do very little damage, and eventually rises from his chair only to immediately keel over from the strain of the sorcery.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- The game changed the cooling effect granted by water its own unique buff. Before it was a generic cooling effect which meant that if you were in the frozen area refilling your thirst with it could cause you to start taking freezing damage. The new buff will now stop cooling down a character if they're already cold, although the buff will remain, so people can drink water normally in the frozen part of the map.
- The game added a new buff called "soothing" that will give you regeneration over time the closer you are to a comfortable temperature. Before you could only get regeneration from taking the Vitality tree, which also gave all players a reason to beeline to the perk that gave said regeneration before focusing on anything else. Now every character gets the benefits of regeneration if they're not in a harsh environment, or have appropriate countermeasures for the harsh temperatures, reducing food usage to heal things like minor falls or an unexpected stack of bleeding. As of the Siptah expansion, "Soothing" has been removed as part of a large overhaul of healing mechanics in general, adding several tiers of bandages and healing potions to compensate, and the lowest tier of bandage is readily craftable from the start of the game with materials found almost everywhere.
- Flint arrows no longer need feathers to craft. Feathers can be gotten in abundance in specific areas, but only those areas which meant that if you were anywhere else using feathers on what are supposed to be the weak, mass-produced arrow type was a waste, as well as making them a lot more beginner-friendly as they're very resource cheep.
- Follower Thralls have a number of ways to prevent them from getting lost or dying due to their limited A.I. They don't take fall damage, so if they fall off a cliff due to their flaky A.I. you won't lose them. If you go somewhere they can't path to, such as climbing up a cliff or closing a door in their face, or otherwise get too far away from them while they're following you, they will automatically teleport to a nearby flat surface after a short time. If you happen to die while they're following you but they survive, they will teleport back to the last place you told them to guard after fifteen minutes.
- A new menu screen was added to allow you to see a list of all combat thralls under your command, as well as their position on the map. You can also teleport thralls to you if they fall through the ground or otherwise get stuck in an unreachable area, at the cost of destroying their inventory and equipment to prevent this from being exploited.
- The ability to return building tiles to your inventory after placing them was added, to allow players to correct building errors when trying to build a complex structure rather than forcing them to dismantle it and lose half of the material needed to craft the tile.
- In the overhaul regeneration takes only 5 points in health meaning if you still want the skill it's much easier to go out of build to get.
- The overhaul also changed crafting so that you get material reduction and crafting speed up from upgrading your station instead of thralls. Before high level crafting thralls were both annoying to get, since either the RNG needed to be kind or you went out of your way to get a high level/master crafter that might have you dragging them literally across the map, and in PVP it was an easy sore spot to poke by either robbing or destroying a person's high level crafters in a raid setting them back in materials needed and time to either craft or find another high level thrall unless they were Crazy-Prepared.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: At the start of the game, the player character is crucified for a series of crimes that are randomly generated which can result in this trope when among the charges include fixing gladiatorial matches, breaking oaths or defecating on statues.
- Artificial Stupidity:
- Even after leaving early access, for a long while the Thrall A.I. was still a buggy mess. Thralls would de-equip their weapons and fight with fists after their first combat, refused to use a shield after their first combat unless you manually re-equipped it on them, often ignored enemies that were right in front of them, if given a shield they would often just stand there blocking instead of trying to counter-attack, and they could fall through the floor and die if you had them follow you inside a player-built structure. Most of these issues were fixed over time, but a few remain. Notably, if you give a thrall a weapon type other than the one they started with (i.e. a two-handed weapon thrall being given a one-handed sword) they will often simply forget how to swing a weapon until you give them back their normal weapon. Thralls stuck in this state will follow enemies around with their weapon drawn, but never actually attack.
- The Kinscourge is a normally somewhat difficult boss, but he will almost always choose to use his quick, damaging melee attack if you're right next to him. If you maneuver him onto a raised section of his arena, then drop down and stand right up against it, he will walk up next to you and begin spamming his melee attack despite the fact it can no longer hit you.
- Barbarian Hero: Naturally, you can play as one, especially if you choose Cimmerian, Nordheimer, Pict or Kushite as your race. Even if you're a "civilized" race, odds are you'll be forced to embrace your inner barbarian to survive.
- Bat Out of Hell: Foul Bat Demons make the Exiled Lands their home. A scripted encounter at the start of the game, has the player encounter one scavenging out in the dunes, before flying off once it spots the player. In the game proper, they make their home near the Forgotten City, and are an ever-present threat.
- Beef Gate:
- You need to be strong enough to fight off the hyenas and spiders that occupy the area north of the Noob River, or find a longer path around them, before you can have reliable access to iron.
- With the Age of Sorcery updates, the game's magic system is gated behind a feat learned by acquiring the Tome of Kurak. The Tome is located in Shaleback Hollow, a cave filled with undead shalebacks that are significantly tankier than most enemies found nearby.
- Bestiality Is Depraved: One of the crimes you might have been crucified for. Apparently, it's Serious Business in the Hyborian Age.
- Black Magic: Typical of the Conan universe, the game's sorcery system is steeped in The Corruption and involves quite a bit of Human Sacrifice in the crafting process. Words of Power are frequently gated behind corruption thresholds, and certain actions enabled through sorcery (such as consuming soul essence to artificially improve your attributes) inflict corruption that cannot be removed normally.
- Blood Magic: Demon blood is needed in your inventory to access a specific boss, demon blood is used to upgrade a required item, you need demon blood to build explosives and the map room... You also have to perform a blood sacrifice to access the first boss of the game. The item description for blood also invokes this trope.
- To upgrade the Tome of Kurak in Age of Sorcery and gain new spells, you need to craft sorcerous spell pages. These pages are written using flasks of "sacrificial blood" for ink, which can only be acquired through Human Sacrifice on a specialized altar.
- Bowdlerize: Depending on where you're located, you may not be able to set the game's nudity option past "None," to comply with censorship sensibilities in different parts of the world. Other places, such as the US, allow partial nudity, but nothing beyond that. There's also a server region lock that doesn't allow you to get past what's considered acceptable by your country's rating system, presumably to avoid any lawsuits. Unless you're on a PC and edit the game's .ini files.
- Bragging Rights Reward: You receive very little for defeating a dragon, some of the most difficult enemies in the game - all full-sized ones fall into the Superboss tier. The only really unique drop you can get is their head, which can be made into an enormous trophy and mounted on the wall at your base. You do also get dragonbone and dragonhorn, which is used to craft dragonbone weapons, but you can get those by killing the much easier infant dragons at the Spawning Pools in the Unnamed City.
- Breakable Weapons: Weapons degrade over time with each hit. Lower tier weapons (stone) break very easily, but once you learn how to smith metal ones, degradation becomes far less of a problem due to the inherent superiority and quality of the weapons.
- The Corruption: Its a status effect in the game caused by contact with dark magic. Exposure to it will severely damper your health and stamina. Areas saturated with corruption are almost inevitably infested with The Undead. Corruption will be linked heavily with the Sorcery system in Age of Sorcery.
- The Cameo: Conan himself briefly appears in the intro, to let you off from your cross, before disappearing into a sandstorm.
- Cannibal Tribe: The Darfari, worshippers of Yog, a cannibal deity. You can play a Darfari and/or worship Yog yourself, making you one of these, as well.
- Casual Crucifixion:
- In the intro trailer
, Conan himself rescues Razma of Shem from crucifixion (bondage variant). Despite however long she was on that cross in that desert waiting to die, she's ready to spring to Conan's aid with the axe he used to cut her down. - In the game proper, Conan rescues your Player Character from the nails-in-the-hands variant. One exhaustion-and-sandstorm-induced episode of unconsciousness later, and you're fit to run, jump, climb, grab stones, strip bushes, weave clothes, make axes, chop down trees, and beat animals to death with your bare hands (though this is inadvisable, you should make a weapon first).
- In the intro trailer
- Chainmail Bikini: Several available choices for Exiles of both genders; for example, the Derketo Acolyte Robe which leaves vital areas like the chest exposed, but is justified by the fact it's an outfit worn by followers of a dark Love Goddess and seduction being one of the points of wearing it. On the other hand, options like the Zamorian Dancer Skirt don't provide much protection in gameplay terms. However, most armor is covering in proportion to its effectiveness, with the more revealing options being obviously (in stats and appearance) improvised with limited materials. The best armors available tend to be full-coverage plate types. One notable exception that plays the trope straight is Hyperborean Slaver Armor, which provides only marginally less protection than other heavy armors while being practically a chainmail bikini.
- Crossover: The Shining Trapezohedron from H. P. Lovecraft story The Haunter of the Dark shows up as one of the McGuffins you need to collect to win the game, linking the Conan the Barbarian setting to the Cthulhu Mythos.note
- Also the Sunken City dungeon is inhabited by a cult of Dagon, also a Cthulhu Mythos element, complete with Deep Ones to fight and references to R'lyeh.
- Crucified Hero Shot: The player character is introduced crucified and naked in the desert.
- Cruelty Is the Only Option: In order to make your crafting stations work more efficiently and unlock a few unique recipes you need to make a thrall to do it. Thralls are made by knocking somebody out, forcing them to do manual labor until their minds are broken, and then using them as you see fit. In general the only NPCs that help you are thralls and pets, which you kidnap from an early age and raise to listen to you. It's not required to beat the game, but there are several major time saving convinces that you can only get through making thralls.
- In the overhual this is no longer the case. You still need them for certain unique recipes but instead efficiency and time has been tied to a new crafting station quality system where you upgrade the station itself the same you would a weapon or armor. In fact with the update you don't need thralls for any of the systems as you can buy, for a pretty penny, fighters to get access to followers. You still can grab thralls and its more convenient but if you just want to avoid the system the game made it rationally possible.
- Deadly Force Field: The "Ghost Fence" that surrounds the Exiled Lands. As long as you're wearing the bracelet, if you cross it, you die. If you take your bracelet off, you also die.
- Dem Bones: Skeletal Soldiers haunt the Nameless City, reanimated by dark magic; damned to battle for an eternity. Additionally, there's the Priest-King in the Barrows and the Silent Legion in the north.
- With an update the Exile can find a book in the summoning pits that lets them create skeletons, basically pets or thralls with a skeletal form, in an alchemy station.
- Disproportionate Retribution: As noted elsewhere the crimes for which the Player Character was exiled can be very minor. Beyond this a note from an unnamed Cimmerian woman in the Forgotten Tribe's base has her confessing that, very happy to have become pregnant by her husband, she prayed to Crom for the child's health. She believes the misfortunes that led to her tribe's capture and exile (and the death of her child) were all Crom punishing them for insulting him by praying.
- Dual Wielding: How daggers are used (a pair of daggers is considered as a single item).
- Similarly one-handed weapons can change their combos based on what's in the other hand. Shields will add in extra moves to most movesets while a hand axe will sometimes affect combos as well.
- Dungeon Crawling: As part of a goal to combine elements from sandbox games and traditional RPGs, Conan Exiles contains handcrafted dungeons and bosses with unique loot alongside the open world where you can build what you want.
- Easy Logistics: Thralls and pets will happily work their assigned tasks 24/7 with no need of rest. Pets and Thralls not attached to a workbench need food (but not water) but those thralls that are on workbenches don't even need this much.
- A patch changed it so that you don't need to feed thralls anymore. Feeding them their favored food gives them a buff now, but they will live without it.
- Eldritch Abomination: Yog takes the form of a tentacled monstrosity, straight out of a Lovecraft story. His cultists are noted to be almost always insane increasing the parallels. Set would also qualify as an Animalistic Abomination, as he manifests as a giant serpent.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: You not only have to contend with the many monstrous creatures and enemy factions that want you dead, but the very weather is your enemy. Taken to 11 in the August 16th update, which adds an arctic biome to the map and introduces climate effects like heat and cold, requiring insulated (or cool) clothing and even insulated buildings if you wish to remain warm in cold climates. The only non-hostile NPCs in the entire game are several lone quest-givers that are scattered around the game world, baby animals, female deer, antelopes and rabbits.
- Evil vs. Evil: The backstory of the Exiled Lands features a war between the Giant Kings and the Lemurians, neither very morally upstanding civilizations.
- The Exile: The player character, and human NPCs are known as Exiles, having been banished for various crimes, and are marked by a bracelet on their right arm.
- Exploding Barrels: A buildable object that can be set off with a fire arrow.
- Felony Misdemeanor: Crucifixion is considered one of the most brutal types of capital punishment, usually reserved for the worst of criminals, but due the randomized nature of the crimes that sentenced you, some charges can make your punishment seem excessive such as cultural appropriation, bad punctuation in phrases and so forth.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: The player starts out as a condemned prisoner left to die in a humiliating manner in the desert, and they can turn into some really, really ruthless individuals in order to survive.
- Full-Frontal Assault: Especially prevalent early on in the game, as you start with literally nothing, and many of the NPC exiles are not much better off. Any fights around the starting river usually involve multiple combatants with their junk hanging out.
- Game Mod: Very unusually for an MMO, the game has legitimate mod support and an expansive Steam workshop where you can download and install mods for single player. Private servers are available which can also run mods. Many mods are actually geared towards increasing the social aspects of the MMO styling, adding player-driven economy, mail systems, tougher content encouraging group play, and so on.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- According to its flavor text, ambrosia sometimes appears on Mitra's altars as a reward to fruit offerings. In-game, you can't make fruit offerings to Mitra.
- Conan will refer to an Exile at the start as a soft, civilized person who probably doesn't have what it takes to survive being pulled off the cross, even if you picked a barbarian race like Nordheimer, Pict, or Conan's own Cimmerian.
- Gang Up on the Human: Creatures will sometimes fight each other if they're natural enemies, but they are far more likely to ignore each other and attack you. It is quite possible to have a wolf, a dire wolf, a sabretooth tiger, a woolly mammoth, an elk, a bear, and a moose all attacking you at once, or to watch a wolf cheerfully ignore an entire herd of deer only to beeline right for you the instant you get close. Improvements have gradually been made to the NPC A.I. so that they more consistently attack each other instead of only aggroing against the player.
- Giant Spider: Naturally, the game features these, with smaller (roughly wolf sized) examples as regular enemies and a few truly gigantic specimens as bosses.
- Glass Cannon:
- Pets are this compared to Thralls. Pets generally do more damage (at max level the better pets can do legendary weapon-level damage), but with their lower health and inability to wear armor they don't last nearly as long in combat.
- The Arena Champion, an Always Female boss in the Warmaker's Sanctuary. Her attacks take off gargantuan amounts of health and sunder armor to boot - She's one of the few enemies who can reliably one-shot players and kill max-level thralls in epic equipment. She's also one of the most fragile bosses; she has an incredible armor value but very low actual health and isn't immune to flinching or knockdown like almost every other boss, so weapons with good armor-piercing and stagger power like maces kill her surprisingly quickly.
- God of Evil: Set is the straightest example, and the premier evil deity for the franchise as a whole. Yog also fits the bill.
- God of Good: Mitra is identified as the "god of justice" in this setting, though his zealous followers are consumed with expanding his religion at the detriment of all others, making him more of a Knight Templar.
- In a lesser sense Derketo is one, as lore found on the map indicates she is seeking to free the exiles from their cursed amulet.
- Greater-Scope Paragon: Conan the Barbarian himself. It's his name in the title and cover, and he shows up in the opening to free the playable character before disappearing among the sands. You can find him later on in one of the NPC cities.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The lore entries reveal that Thoth Amon is the one controlling the serpent bracelets and responsible for dumping an entire population of prisoners into the Exiled Lands, though he doesn't appear in person during the game (a final boss fight against a minion of his is referenced in the game files, but doesn't seem to have been implemented despite the game having come out as a full release).
- Grievous Harm with a Body: When you butcher a human corpse, you can sometimes get severed arms or legs as one-handed or two-handed weapons, respectively.
- Grim Up North: The free expansion pack titled The Frozen North takes the players out of the desert and move them to the cold, snow-capped mountains of the north, which is inhabited by Wolves, Mammoths, Ice Giants and other snowy horrors.
- Guide Dang It!:
- The Exiled Lands PvE storyline all but requires one as directions about where to go and what to do are easily missed. Notably the item that gives you those hints is itself locked behind a boss you may never find if you don't explore a very specific encampment with the right equipment which is only hinted at by drinking a potion you have no reason to make.
- The temperature system is extremely poorly-communicated. Due to how the game displays the information nearly every piece of armor appears to have the same insulation value even though one piece might be four times better than another. Food also affects insulation, but this is only mentioned in a loading screen tooltip and no numbers are given so you don't know how effective any given food or drink is. Not helping is that in the Exiled Lands the hottest area can only be accessed from the coldest area, ensuring you need both cold-weather and hot-weather preparations or need to figure out which armor protects equally against both.
- Thralls come in multiple different types, tiers, and races, all of which have effects on their stats, then have twenty levels they can gain that further change their stats, with different effects based on the aforementioned types and tiers. The game tells you none of this and several critical stats aren't listed anywhere players can see them, meaning you either need to consult an external guide from someone who manually extracted and compiled the data or do a lot of Trial-and-Error Gameplay to figure out which ones are worthwhile. Further, certain tiers of crafter thrall may unlock new and important recipes when put on certain stations, something that isn't mentioned anywhere in the game.
- A key component of melee combat is knowing how to manage stagger. Certain weapons have 'hyper armor' that ignores stagger when performing certain moves, letting a player break a stagger lock and potentially stagger their opponent in turn. Enemy NPCs also become immune to stagger after a short while so they can't be chain-stunned. None of this is mentioned anywhere in the game and even the developers have admitted in a developer letter that it's so badly-communicated that it's nearly impossible to understand how it works without being told.
- The procedure to get star metal involves finding it in specific parts of the map then blowing up the outer shell with explosives, which you'll only see references to in a loading-screen tooltip. Further, which pick you use matters - Hardened steel and star metal picks will mine star metal meteors but Acheronian picks, which unlock after star metal and require hardened steel to make, are considered too low-level to mine star metal and will just break the meteorite without gaining any ore.
- Healing Shiv: Downplayed. There's a recipe for "Healing Arrows," which are a relatively realistic version of this trope. Just behind the heads (according to the inventory icon) is the bundle of healing stuff that bursts on impact into an aerosol cloud, healing PCs and converted thralls in range, but the arrow itself still does damage (not top-tier damage, but not bottom-teir, either). The point isn't to shoot injured friends with them, but to shoot the thing your friends are fighting, damaging it and healing them (and to at least mitigate friendly fire damage).
- Heinous Hyena: Hyenas are a ubiquitous threat throughout the desert regions, with both the spotted and striped varieties presentnote .
- Hero-Tracking Failure: Averted; ranged enemies will lead their shots, so to avoid their attacks you need to either change direction at the last moment or turtle up behind a shield.
- He Who Must Not Be Seen: Crom is the only god whose physical form is unknown - all other gods manifest themselves as physical avatars, but Crom is only displayed in his symbol (a mountain surrounded by lightning). Justified since he is a god that doesn't care about humans and doesn't have any interest in helping them, let alone appearing in the mortal world. Which, to be honest, has it's own benefits. A player choosing Crom as their deity is essentially choosing not to be involved in the game's religion system at all.
- Hollywood Darkness: Averted, nights are pitch black and you'll need a light source to see (which can be a problem, as wielding a torch prevents you from using a shield or 2-handed weapon). However, if there's a full moon and you're in a wide open area (i.e. not in a valley or other obstructed location) the night can be almost as bright as daytime from the moonlight.
- Human Sacrifice: Deities demand their followers to sacrifice their enemies to gain their favor in different ways: Set has their hearts' cut out, Yog demands their enemies to be devoured and even the noble Mitra requests the souls of vanquished enemies. Ironically, Crom is the only one who doesn't demand it, but that is because he doesn't care about his worshipers or intervenes in anyway. The first boss of the game requires you to sacrifice an NPC on an altar to access it.
- I Am a Humanitarian: Yog, god of cannibalism, demands that his followers consume human flesh to gain their favor. This really isn't good for their sanity, and as a result most of his followers tend to be raving, borderline feral, lunatics. There's also nothing stopping the player hacking up human corpses and cooking and eating the resulting meat, though there's little reason to; the meat is less effective for filling the hunger meter (and healing) than most animals.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: From easier to harder: Civilized, Decadent, Barbaric.
- Ironic Echo: Combined with Mythology Gag. When Conan pulls your character off the cross, he gives an abbreviated and rearranged version of the speech he gives Constantius in "A Witch Shall Be Born." Whereas the original speech was mocking Constantius for being a soft, civilized man more fit to inflict suffering than endure it, his speech to your Exile about being "civilized and soft" and not having "your life not nailed to your spine" is encouraging the Exile to fight and conquer in the face of adversity thrust upon them.
- A Lighter Shade of Grey: The Relic Hunters. With every other NPC faction in the game all members will attack players on sight. With the Relic Hunters only some of them will attack you on sight and some will sell you useful things. At absurd prices but still.
- Love Goddess: Derketo, the Shemite and Stygian goddess of fertility and sex, though she focuses more on debauchery and decadence rather than love. The Stygians call her "Set's Whore."
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields in this game have something of a dual role. Their main role is what you'd expect in that they block attacks. They will completely soak up the damage so long as the shield is pointed in the direction of the attack, and will lose durability in place of your HP. Secondly is weapons will have different attack chains based on what single-handed weapon you use. Some, like the short sword, hardly change while others, like the one-handed mace, will change up the last two attacks of the chain fairly significantly.
- Made of Plasticine: When fighting with bladed weapons, human characters often have dying animations where they lose limbs or are chopped at the waist. Even if the weapon used is an improvised sword crafted with wooden sticks and shards of stone. You can also lop arms and legs off or even cut someone in half at the waist with a bow and arrow. Ridiculous, but oh so satisfying, to shoot an enemy and watch their top half come clean off and fall to the ground.
- Magikarp Power: Darfari thralls are found in the starter areas and have extremely low health, making them appear to be terrible thrall choices. However they gain levels very quickly and their stat multipliers are very, very high, meaning they get more out of those levels than almost any other thrall. A level 0 named Darfari fighter might die in one or two hits, but a level 20 named Darfari fighter with good traits and strong gear can tear apart many bosses without any help.
- Male Frontal Nudity: The game features full-frontal nudity for both genders, with male characters even getting a genital slider during character creation.
- Mêlée à Trois: In the full release, enemies will fight each other as well as you and your clanmates/thralls. Wandering around you can often see roaming monsters starting fights with other monsters or NPC encampments.
- Money for Nothing: Gold and silver coins can be found reasonably often and can even be crafted but most of the game's merchants don't sell anything you can't find yourself relatively easily. And they charge through the roof for it. It can become more useful to grind down coins for gold and silver dust, which is used in several crafting recipes.
- Never Smile at a Crocodile: Crocodiles are an ever-present threat near waterways in the desert biome, particularly the main river system; making them a constant menace for low leveled players. Several truly enormous specimens can also be found, and serve as bosses.
- Nominal Importance: The unique highest tier human enemies that pose the most challenge (and make the best thralls if captured) get individual names while others just get descriptions plus their level.
- Perpetual Beta: The game never quite seems able to get rid of its problems and usually has a few major bugs at any given time, such as not being able to snap and place building pieces for no reason, randomly falling off things while climbing, gathering stations like fish traps not gathering anything, star metal not spawning at all, or the many problems with thralls. The developers' success rate at fixing these varies, with some bugs having been unsuccessfully patched numerous times.
- Power at a Price: Sorcery plays heavily on The Corruption:
- Several Words of Power are gated behind corruption thresholds, forcing the player to sacrifice their maximum health and stamina if they want to play a dedicated sorcerer.
- Consuming soul essence crafted at a sacrificial altar gives you "corrupted attribute" points, allowing you to improve Strength, Vitality and Authority much faster, and it even unlocks alternative perks at the stat thresholds. However, each corrupted attribute point inflicts 2.5% permanent corruption, which persists until you re-roll all your attributes using a yellow lotus potion.
- Using a Transportory Stone or performing Summon Corpse at a ritual circle inflicts "tainted corruption", a more severe affliction that can pass the normal 50% corruption limit, reaching as high as 99% with repeated abuse. It can't be cured through the usual methods, but unlike normal corruption it gradually fades on its own.
- Production Throwback: A Desert Dogs camp named "The Ruins of Al-Merayah", and the locust model are pulled directly from The Secret World and its Egypt storyline.
- Religion is Magic: Choosing which deity to worship influences your character's development, granting unique boons (such as special weapons and armor sets), and also lets you summon their avatars to wreck enemy fortifications and hordes. There is a total of seven gods, four of which were initially available in early access. Choosing Crom, however, is analogous to choosing "Agnostic" in other games, as Crom does not listen to prayers, and players choosing him as their deity are essentially opting out of the religion system.
- Religion of Evil: The worship of Yog and Set are the most malevolent of all deities presented, which include depraved acts such as human sacrifice, cannibalism and dark sorcery. Most hostile NPC cultists are followers of the above two deities.
- The Remnant: The Lemurians (already The Remnant from their sunken civilization) used to control the entire jungle to the east of the Exiled Lands. The ancient war with the Giant Kings reduced them to a small jungle tribe occupying a single camp and an insane Dagon cult.
- Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Downplayed. The Age of War Act 1 update saw modifications to damage tables that cause human enemies to deal very high amounts of damage relative to a player's health. A low-Vitality character may die in one hit from a high-level NPC even in epic medium armor and even the weakest NPC can potentially remove most of a character's health by catching them in a combo. This makes other humans, especially high-tier ones like Cimmerians, among the most dangerous enemies to fight.
- Savage Wolves: Wolves are the most common predators in the northern regions of the map, with both regular and dire wolves being present. Even the regular wolves are much larger than real life wolves, and are noticeably tougher opponents than tigers or jaguars.
- Shout-Out:
- Several of the Steam achievements are named after the titles of Conan the Barbarian novels and short stories. Some others are named after quotes from the stories.
- The Abyssal Remnant (a gigantic, bloated snake) speaks to you constantly as you progress through its dungeon in something that sounds suspiciously like parseltongue.
- One of the Legendary weapons you can find is the "Jedias Greatsaber, a great sword that glows and hums." It does shed some meager light, but doesn't really hum.
- A large outcrop of rock in the savannah called "Swagger Rock" area has a rather familiar shape and a lion lounging on it.
- Spikes of Doom: There are traps that will shoot wooden spikes up from the floor. They do a surprising amount of damage, and despite being ground traps they'll still fire if you jump over them.
- Spin Attack: Most world bosses have one that also knocks people down to punish attempts to swarm and surround them.
- Squishy Wizard: Invoked. Many spells in the sorcery system are gated behind percentile corruption thresholds, so a player that speccs into a dedicated sorcerer build will have less health and stamina available than other characters.
- Superboss: A number of humongous King Mook versions of regular enemies can be found at certain specific locations in the overworld; these guys are apparently intended to be endgame Raid bosses for clans of multiple players to take down; attempting to fight one solo is basically pointless due to the insane amount of health they have. This is something of a Guide Dang It! moment as they sometimes pop up in areas that are frequented by lower level players.
- Thirsty Desert: The Desert Biome, the first area available to the player, is a very typical example of this trope, mostly consisting of rolling sand dunes, filled with the remnants of long-dead civilization, hungry animals, and crazed cultists. Thirst is an ever-present problem, with the only real source of water being the Nile-esque river in the middle of the map, alongside a handful of scattered oasis's. The area is dry, and the heat blistering Once you get deeper into the desert, players will stumble across the Unnamed City, which is essentially a massive dungeon. and takes this trope up to eleven. It once belonged to an forgotten race of giants that have long since disappeared from the world, and since then it has been corrupted by foul and blasphemous magics. Filled with blood-red sand dunes, undead soldiers, flying bat demons, and other, more ancient evils, the area is constantly eroded characters sanity.
- Tribal Face Paint / This Means Warpaint: Unlocking the "Decorative Warpaints" feat gives you the ability to craft and apply cosmetic warpaint patterns to your character, which fade after awhile. A second "Functional Warpaints" feat unlocks patterns that give stat buffs, meaning there's an actual gameplay benefit to applying them just before a big fight.
- Turns Red: The Champion of the Warmaker, the final boss of the Warmaker's Sanctuary dungeon, grows visibly larger, with accompanying boosts in speed and power, at 75% health, then grows larger still at 50% health. As part of the final increase, the visor in his plate-style helmet glows a fiery red.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Your method of acquiring thralls means capturing people, dragging them back to your base and breaking their will on the Wheels of Pain. In short, you basically torture people into becoming your slaves. For some extra cruelty, human flesh can be used as fuel for the wheel of pain and depending on where you got it you can essentially force your thralls to eat what may have been their friends or family.
- War God: Ymir, the Northern god of war worshiped by the Aesir and Vanir, two proud warrior races in the setting.
- Weak, but Skilled: The dual daggers fighting style used by dancers and cooks doesn't inflict much damage, but allows them to perform acrobatic dodges as well as stack bleeding effect on you; if you don't have bandages to stop the bleeding, it's quite common to bleed to death from your wounds even after killing them.
- This is also true of players. If a character hasn't put points into strength or ranged then the best combat option is the daggers as their strong attack inflicts bleed which will do more damage than they could with any other weapon, although they will need repairs more than other weapons.
- Weaksauce Weakness: When the Witch Queen personally steps in to fight you she's not immune to stagger, which means that two people with spears can kill her without ever giving her a chance to attack.
- Our Imps Are Different: Imps are apelike nuisance enemies in the terrain closest to where new players start.
- Our Werebeasts Are Different: The Dogs Of The Desert faction feature werehyenas with the implication that the rest of the faction is planning on becoming such one day. They seem to be permanently changed into a human/hyena hybrid form and their intelligence is debatable (unlike human enemies they don't speak while attacking but this may be a physical limitation rather than a mental one). There are also a few werewolves around, though they are far less common.
- Wheel of Pain: Not surprising given that this is a game based on the Trope Namer. Here, it is used to break the will of captured NPCs so you can make them serve you.
- A Winner Is You: Similar to ARK: Survival Evolved, the "goal" of the game is to collect several artifacts from the game's several boss monsters in order to unlock the ending. Unlike Ark, there's not really an endgame dungeon or a Final Boss, and the ending is simply a 10-second video of your character walking out of the Exiled Lands. The ending also permanently deletes your save game instead of allowing you to transfer your character to a new server like Ark does. A final boss fight against a sorcerer working for Thoth Amon called the Mummy of the Ring or the Servant of the Ring is referenced in the game's Journey milestones but doesn't seem to actually happen, likely due to not being programmed before the release deadline.
- Wrongfully Accused: A new opening narration in the most recent update states you may or may not have actually committed the crimes for which you've been crucified. Considering the potential for Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking and Felony Misdemeanor already present, adding this possibility can make your Exile a true Butt-Monkey.
