Before they were known for developing Dune Awakening, Funcom were perhaps most familiar for their work on Conan Exiles – an open-world multiplayer survival crafter set in the Conan the Barbarian universe. With the title soon set to hit its 8th anniversary on the market, the team at Funcom have announced a surprise free update coming to the game next month, upgrading the title to Unreal Engine 5.

Making the surprise announcement, the team at Funcom officially unveiled Conan Exiles Enhanced, writing: “We’re excited to announce Conan Exiles Enhanced — a free, massive visual overhaul of Conan Exiles launching on the game’s 8th anniversary, May 5th.”

While sentiment surrounding UE5 is far from stellar, Funcom claims that this upgrade will not only boost the game’s visuals, but should allow for smooth performance, adding: “With the advanced capabilities of Unreal Engine 5, Conan Exiles Enhanced targets smooth 60+ FPS gameplay across Low, Medium, High, and Ultra settings on most PCs, while also delivering strong performance on Steam Deck.”

Of course, Funcom at this point do have experience working with Unreal Engine 5 and so hopefully this upgrade does prove to be well optimised.

Beyond visuals, the free update will also introduce a number of welcome additions, including the unification of the Exiled Lands and the Isle of Siptah; the ability to have multiple characters per-account and a “revamped” UI.

Unfortunately, as of right now this Enhanced Edition is only coming to the Steam version of the game, meaning console users and even those who own the title via the likes of the Epic Games Store are being left out.

That said, the team did claim that they “are not ruling out a future release on those platforms” so we will have to wait and see. Full details on the upgrade, including a comprehensive FAQ, can be found HERE.

KitGuru says: What do you think of this upgrade? Why do you think only Steam users are getting the update? Let us know down below.

Today, Funcom announced Conan Exiles Enhanced, a free upgrade that brings the game from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. Conan Exiles Enhanced will launch on the game's eighth anniversary: May 5, 2026. The upgraded version was developed in collaboration with Inflexion Games, the studio behind the survival game Nightingale. Conan Exiles Enhanced introduces four specific rendering improvements: The Enhanced version targets smooth 60+ FPS across Low, Medium, High, and Ultra settings on most PCs, with Steam Deck support. Notably, despite the graphics improvements, the client size has been dramatically reduced from 120GB to just 40GB. But there's more: the Exiled Lands and […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/conan-exiles-enhanced-free-ue5-upgrade/

Dune Awakening developer Funcom has outlined some major changes coming to the game soon. First and foremost, there's the fact that the game is essentially pivoting to be PvE-first. Funcom said that over 80% of the game's players engaged only with Player-versus-Environment content, forcing the studio to rethink the existing convergence of PvE and PvP towards optional PvP. Starting in Patch 1.3.20.0, the following changes will be introduced to Dune Awakening: Another big news is that the long-requested self-hosted servers are finally on the way. The initial iteration, which will soon be available for testing, will require a few extra […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/dune-awakening-pivots-pve-first-self-hosted-servers/