Conan Exiles has let adventure-minded people live out their wildest Hyborian Age fantasies since the game’s 2017 Steam Early Access debut and 2018 full release. Now, the enormous survival game receives a massive expansion: The Isle of Siptah. Featuring a new island full of monsters, treasures, and secrets, the $19.99 PC game is packed with content. Although The Isle of Siptah retains some of the core game’s issues, notably bugs and frame rate issues, it is a worthy addition to the base, Funcom-developed title.
Days of High Adventure
Conan Exiles is an open-world survival game in the vein of Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved. Like those titles, Exiles tosses you into an unforgiving land with little more than the ragged clothes on your back. To survive, you’ll need to search for sustenance and protect yourself against the elements. Items, such as wood and stones, are required to build tools, weapons, and structures. After a time, you’ll forge armor, weapons, and supplies that let you explore more of the hostile world. This, in turn, lets you obtain higher-quality crafting materials that are useful for forging even better items. This is the survival genre’s basic cycle, and Conan Exiles is no different.
Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian setting distinguishes this title from its peers. Like the original pulp stories, comic books, and movies that inspired it, Conan Exiles’ world brims with danger. Every locale—from arid deserts, lush jungles, and frozen tundras—has something waiting to kill you. Though treacherous, the land’s mystical essence and allure urges you to explore it. You’ll never know what lies within the many caves, ancient ruins, or enemy forts.
Unlike the lonesome Conan, you needn’t trek the land by yourself. Although you can play the entire game solo, linking up with other players increases your survival chances. Building and defending forts against human and supernatural forces is certainly easier with a group of friends. Conversely, you’re free to fight other players to obtain their loot and equipment. Of course, this also means you may lose your items.
Though combat feels floaty and unrefined, besting human opponents in battle makes you feel like a true Hyborian warrior. Whether it’s in public or private servers, Conan Exiles thrives because of its dedicated, online community.
A New Land of Intrigue
The Isle of Siptah begins much like Exiles. Instead of starting in a desert, you find yourself stranded on a beach littered with shipwrecks. The boats and dead crew members offer enough crafting materials to give you a decent running start. Before long, you’ll have a decent base set up, along with armor, weapons, and other tools. The game doesn’t make life easy for you. Undead beasts and other horrors aren’t too far from your starting area. Though dangerous, The Isle of Siptah’s initial hours are more user-friendly than the base game’s.
The core gameplay loop remains unchanged. You still need to scour the land for materials to craft equipment and forts. In that sense, this is a true expansion since it provides you with more of what you already know. If you’ve sunk hundreds of hours into Conan Exiles, you’ll appreciate having a gigantic island full of new environments to explore.
A giant, black tower at the island’s center is the source of the ever-present storms that plague the land. Instead of rain, the eldritch maelstroms flood the land with hordes of extradimensional monstrosities. These creatures attack anything in sight, be they human, animal, or other monsters. Killing these creatures earns rare materials not found on the map. The storms happen randomly, keeping you on your proverbial toes. Reaching the looming tower is the central goal of the lengthy campaign, so it’s best to level up as much as possible before attempting to storm it.
The Wheel of Pain
Obtaining Thralls (player-allied NPCs) remains an important gameplay factor. In the base Exiles game, you gain Thralls by finding them in forts or other defensible areas. After knocking them out with a blunt object, you drag Thralls back to your fort and “break” them on the Wheel of Pain (the same one from the Conan the Barbarian film). Depending on their specialties, Thralls fight alongside you, defend your headquarters, or forge items. They’re extremely useful.
Obtaining Thralls in The Isle of Siptah isn’t as straightforward as before. The aforementioned storms always end with giant tentacles emerging from a gaping hole in the sky. If you head to the tentacles’ location, you’ll find a fresh crop of Thralls. The other method requires you to enter temples and use a material, Decaying Eldarium, to summon them. This method is more reliable than waiting for storms to occur. However, you’ll need to grind dungeons to find Decaying Eldarium. Either way, you’ll need Thralls to progress.
What Lies Beneath
Vaults house a myriad of puzzles, traps, monsters, and sweet, sweet loot. Built by the Elder Races, vaults give you insight into The Isle of Siptah’s lore. Unearthing ancient secrets fills you with the same sense of dread that Conan experiences when exploring long-forgotten ruins. You’ll need to solve intricate puzzles in order to progress or uncover super-rare loot. Goblins, the undead, and giant spiders do their best to prevent you from leaving vaults with your skin (and soul) intact. Vaults provide a different experience from the large open world; just make sure to bring a friend or two to make things somewhat easier.
The Isle of Siptah isn’t free of the core game’s inherent issues, which, to be fair, plague many online-only titles. Even with the beefiest PC possible, you’ll still have instances of characters and environmental elements appearing and reappearing. There are also many instances of clipping and random other bugs. Striking foes with swords, axes, or any other weapon doesn’t deliver the visceral impact it should due to the flat hit detection and almost non-existent enemy reaction. Again, this is all inherent to online survival and MMO games, and many people overlook these issues to enjoy the communal experience. Still, these problems prevent the game from feeling as immersive as it should.
Can Your PC Run Conan Exiles: The Isle of Siptah?
To play Conan Exiles: The Isle of Siptah, your gaming rig needs at least an Intel quad-core i5-2300 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 GPU (with 1GB of memory), 6GB of RAM, 69GB of storage, and the Windows 10 operating system.
Playing the game on my PC, with its Intel i7-4790 CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU, proved a mixed experience. The game’s frame rates typically danced between 30-45 frames per second, but dipped to 20fps during heavy action. There aren’t many visual options to adjust; you can enable/disable v-sync and anti-aliasing, and tweak the texture quality, shadows, post-processing, and foliage.
The Hyborian Age Lives On
Overall, Conan Exiles: The Isle of Siptah is a solid, but flawed, expansion. While mostly more of the same, it introduces enough new elements to liven up a game already brimming with content. The titular island teems with loot, secrets, and lore that drive you to explore every inch of its world. In terms of lore, The Isle of Siptah is a worthy addition to the Conan mythos that enrichens the fictional Hyborian age. If you already own Conan Exiles, this expansion is worth checking out—if you don’t mind its performance issues.
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