A few months ago, Gamasutra brought Conan Exiles creative director Joel Bylos onto our Twitch channel to discuss Funcom's hit online survival game. Recently, Gamasutra's Bryant Francis and Kris Graft had the pleasure of speaking with Bylos again about the game's launch on Xbox One's preview program, as well as the design of the game's  new Frozen North expansion and what new features can be expected from it.

You can watch the stream embedded above, or click here to see it. And for more developer insights, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel.

STREAM PARTICIPANTS:

Joel Bylos, creative director of Conan Exiles

Bryant Francis, contributing editor at Gamasutra

Kris Graft, editor-in-chief at Gamasutra

New Zelda: Breath of the Wild-style "climb anywhere" feature in testing

Bryant Francis: The climbing mechanic and world traversal, can you talk about how it's implemented right now?

Joel Bylos: We don't have the leeway to give a paraglider, or anything like they have in Zelda, but basically any surface in the world is climbable, unless we deem it not to be, which we've done in some cases like dungeons, just to prevent people from exploiting certain puzzle mechanics. Essentially you can walk up to anything in the game, if you hold the jump button you'll attach to it, you can do it right from the start if you like, and you'll be pushed into a third-person camera view just to make that work, but basically you can jump up and attach to any of the rocks or cliff faces, and you climb then. Your stamina bar determines the amount of climbing time that you get, and so forth.

We had to refigure a large number of the rocks in the world to make their collision more precise, because otherwise the player would be floating in the air while climbing. And there was areas the players could reach now that would be outside of their theoretical reach before. Pretty much in this game you could reach almost anywhere by building there, we kind of knew what when we were making it, so we did take the time to make sure they looked okay when you got up to them, but now we had to make sure that the actual attach surfaces were fairly close to perfect when you actually got on them.

We had to make sure locations worked well with climbing. We had to make sure locations didn't break with climbing, like in dungeons.  We knew that some of our puzzles would break so we made some of the dungeon walls unclimbable. We tried to make that realistic by making them slick with water, making them difficult to climb.

A problem we had been trying to solve in the game was that people had been building these bases in places that were basically unreachable and then destroying their staircases each night when they logged off. In PvP, they would build a staircase up to their base [...] on top of a very high rock, then they would delete the staircase so players could never get to their base to raid them. It was clever, but it amounted to an unraidable base game, so we decided to add climbing as a way of at least reaching those bases.

Kris Graft: It's one thing to do this in a game like Zelda, that's single-player, you can kind of take into account what players might do. But in a MMO game like this, you could be thrown some curveballs.

Joel Bylos: Yeah. But it's a relatively robust system, it's one of the most polished systems we've launched. It could use some animation polish but it actually works very well, players have not been finding massive exploits or anything like that. It also solved a problem with world traversal with people, who were up on high cliffs, getting down quickly. It's never that fun if you have to find a way down, it's much more fun to jump off a cliff. So we have this whole mechanic where you do what we call the 'heroic plunge,' where you jump off a cliff and spin and grab the wall on the way down, and you'll just slide with both your hands.

Kris Graft: That's how I jump off of cliffs as well.

Joel Bylos: (laughs)

Kris Graft: The other side of the climbing mechanic in Breath of the Wild is the paraglider. Did you consider putting that in, or could something like that be implemented in the future?

Joel Bylos: We've discussed things like that. We can't obviously do paraglider. I mean we could but it'd be kind of lame, it doesn't really fit the setting that well. I don't know if you've ever seen a movie called Yor: Hunter from the Future? It was like an 80s cheesy barbarian movie. In that movie he captures a giant flying lizard creature and uses it as a paraglider, it's kind of amazing.

The unforgettable film Yor: Hunter From the Future

So we talk about things like that we talked about being able to skin certain creatures and maybe use them to do something like that. But we'll see, we haven't reached that point yet.

Kris Graft: Yeah. You previously said everything has to be 'super violent,' I think like skinning a creature, or capturing a creature and then forcing it to be your paraglider...I think that would fit in the Conan world, that's just my personal opinion though.

Xbox One update in late testing

Kris Graft: You hear a lot of people say that one of the major advantages of developing on console is that you just have one or two kinds of platforms to get it running on, and if it runs great one, it's going to run great on all of them, because they're all the same. And you have definitely found that to be true, right? (sarcasm)