The sandbox nature of Conan Exiles… figuratively speaking, though there is also a lot of actual sand in the virtual world of Conan and the map is a big rectangle, which lends itself to the metaphor as well… means that there really isn’t a story or anything to point you towards a particular goal.

You can hang about doing things like base building or crafting or whatever… at least on a PvE server like ours… and the game won’t get impatient or start sending NPCs your way to intone meaningfully about how great it would be if only you would go take a look down some dark dungeon down the road and look into whatever it is that has been plaguing the local populace.

That said, there are, in fact dungeons.  I am not sure how Potshot found out about The Dregs, one of the early dungeons in the game… he does things like read up about the titles we are playing rather than just embracing ignorance like I do… but he mentioned last week that he had found The Dregs and that it was said to be soloable, so the two of us with followers might be able to manage it.

The Dregs can be found at the west end of the river that runs by our main base.  Potshot had scouted it out, so we picked a pair of followers and rode off down the shore of the river to get there.  There is a whole settlement just outside of the citadel where the entrance is, so we had to chop our way in, but that wasn’t so bad with the two of us and two followers.

We made it there and I got the location update because it was my first visit.

Welcome to The Dregs

Then we had to get in.  Apparently you don’t just walk into The Dregs.  The door requires blood to be spilled on it, something communicated by what looked like a holoreel on the sealed way in.

Unfortunately, as one of the first of many mistakes, we had killed all the baddies close by, so there wasn’t anybody to pull and bring onto the location.  CE mobs, like modern MMORPG mobs, will only chase you so far before giving up.  Eventually we had to settle for an alternate plan, one of us dying.  We set some bedrolls up the hill from the building, then back inside Potshot did the “remove the bracelet” thing, which kills you dead.

Potshot collapses on the seal

That was just what the doctor ordered and, as his blood ran onto the stone, it opened up, revealing stairs down to the dungeon.

Hey, neat trick

Potshot ran back from the bedroll, there being no real penalty beside inconvenience in dying, and we headed down into the dungeon.

Here we go

There was a question about what to do with the horses.  We decided to have them stop following us.  That meant they ran back home on their own and we ended up having to walk back when we got to the other end, but we’ll get to that.

Like the rest of the map, The Dregs looks good and is a well done environment.  There is a lot going on, so much so that we missed a lot of it on the first pass.

The first open area

We fought with the mobs in the initial water area, then headed deeper in.  The whole thing seemed pretty linear and we just kept heading deeper in.  There are some puzzles to solve to get past obstacles, but the hints of how to proceed were obvious enough that even we caught on after exhausting attempts to climb.

This one was pre-marked with what we needed to do

The puzzles all involve water which, when you unlock it, rises and falls, allowing you to swim up to high points to carry on through the instance.  That meant sometimes getting to the rise in time and sometimes having to wait for high tide to show up again.

Potshot didn’t make it up on this go

There were some skeletons and a couple other mobs to fight, but honestly we found ourselves at the boss in fairly short order.

Oh, here he is

And the boss fight went pretty well.  He is in a pool of acid, so you don’t want to get in with him.  But followers are apparently unaffected by that, so they dove in and did most of the heavy lifting.  We banged away on the boss when he decided to beach himself now and then, and peppered him with some arrows when he was in the middle of his acidic hot tub.

Soon we had prevailed.  The boss was dead.  We got the achievement and whatever.

Victory in The Dregs

When he died the pool drained.  I ran in and skinned him, which yielded a couple of things.  But the main focused seemed to be three chests in the bottom of the now empty hot tub.

They were locked.  We looked around the room and in our inventory.  Had we picked up any keys?  No we had not.  Well, that was bunk.  Some online research indicated that one needs skeleton keys to get into boss treasures like this.  Those come from skinning overland world bosses as well as skinning the two bosses earlier in the instance.

Two bosses?  Did we miss two bosses?  I guess we had.

So we started to work our way back, only to find that dungeons in CE respawn with the day/night cycle, just like the main map.  Still, we found a boss we had missed, a giant spider called The Devourer , and went in to assault it, only to come out worse for wear.  We had slain the spider, and skinning it had yielded a skeleton key, but both of our followers had gone down in the fight.

Well, that isn’t good

And, working our way back through the respawns we quickly got in over our heads.  The followers were out main firepower it seems, and a batch of skeletons killed Potshot and sent me fleeing back towards where the main boss fight had gone down.

At least when you die in a dungeon you revive back at the start.  Difficult if there are respawns to get through, but at least it didn’t require opening the door with the taste for blood again.

After some more comedy and fleeing from mobs, we ended up leaving through the back door and walking back home to our base, making plans to re-arm.

There was a crocodile boss at an oasis not far from our base that we went after once we had some fresh followers with us.  We have to keep a recruiting drive going pretty much all the time to sustain our losses.

There is the croc

The fight with him… well, I think we won in the end, but both Potshot and I went down along with another follower.

Oh man, corpses again

We couldn’t find the follower’s corpse… not the first time this has happened… which was a pain because we like to recover the equipment, clean it up, and re-use it… kind of like the opening of Netflix version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

We went back to base, stowed they key, then went for the spider, where we had a bit more luck.

Spider on the mesa

We had tuned up out follower a bit, going with some hardened steel weapons that we had obtained elsewhere.  We didn’t bother to use them because when they wear out, as all gear does, we couldn’t repair them fully.  But follower gear never wears out fully.  So the spider went down without loss and skinning it yielded another skeleton key.  We took that back to base and did some repair and updates and then decided to head back to The Dregs with the morning sun.

We got on our mounts, which had returned home without us last time, made sure we and our followers had food and supplied, then headed back up the river to the dungeon.

This time we managed to use the blood of one of the locals to open the door and headed in, this time with horses in tow.

We had looked up the instance and found a map on the wiki, where we found we had totally walked by the first boss, the raging albino komodo.  He was not too tough to slay, though when we skinned him and got a skeleton key, we realized we had left the other three back at base.

We’re just not that good at this.

Still, we pressed on, clearing our way through, followers protecting us, horses in tow.

The horses at one of the puzzle sections

The horses, like followers, would just materialize by us to catch up if they ever got stuck behind.  We pressed on, and found the side passage where the second boss, the spider lay.  We did better on this run, losing no followers.

Spider down, ready to be skinned… also I seem to be throwing up

Then it was down the final stretch, through the big water room to get to the boss again.

The big room at high tide

That brought us back to the main boss, the Abyssal Remnant, who we took on in the same way we had the first time.  It didn’t seem to go as quickly or as smoothly… perhaps our damage types were better the first time as we had focused more on blunt to smash skeletons than stabby stuff… but we won in the end.

When the acid hot tub drained we went down, read the scroll on the floor, which taught us some recipes, and had to pick two of the three locked boxes to open.  I don’t know if we chose poorly or not, but we ended up with a legendary dagger set and some other items.

Done, we posed for a shot… screen shots are a bit tougher in CE than some other titles, and the followers were not cooperating, but we managed.

At the end of the instance

So we managed our first dungeon run in Conan Exiles.  Granted, I think we were both in our high 40s in levels when we did it, so we had some benefits that fresh characters might have lacked, but we sort of needed that to make up for our lack of skill.

The sandbox nature of Conan Exiles… figuratively speaking, though there is also a lot of actual sand in the virtual world of Conan and the map is a big rectangle, which lends itself to the metaphor as well… means that there really isn’t a story or anything to point you towards a particular goal.

You can hang about doing things like base building or crafting or whatever… at least on a PvE server like ours… and the game won’t get impatient or start sending NPCs your way to intone meaningfully about how great it would be if only you would go take a look down some dark dungeon down the road and look into whatever it is that has been plaguing the local populace.

That said, there are, in fact dungeons.  I am not sure how Potshot found out about The Dregs, one of the early dungeons in the game… he does things like read up about the titles we are playing rather than just embracing ignorance like I do… but he mentioned last week that he had found The Dregs and that it was said to be soloable, so the two of us with followers might be able to manage it.

The Dregs can be found at the west end of the river that runs by our main base.  Potshot had scouted it out, so we picked a pair of followers and rode off down the shore of the river to get there.  There is a whole settlement just outside of the citadel where the entrance is, so we had to chop our way in, but that wasn’t so bad with the two of us and two followers.

We made it there and I got the location update because it was my first visit.

Welcome to The Dregs

Then we had to get in.  Apparently you don’t just walk into The Dregs.  The door requires blood to be spilled on it, something communicated by what looked like a holoreel on the sealed way in.

Unfortunately, as one of the first of many mistakes, we had killed all the baddies close by, so there wasn’t anybody to pull and bring onto the location.  CE mobs, like modern MMORPG mobs, will only chase you so far before giving up.  Eventually we had to settle for an alternate plan, one of us dying.  We set some bedrolls up the hill from the building, then back inside Potshot did the “remove the bracelet” thing, which kills you dead.

Potshot collapses on the seal

That was just what the doctor ordered and, as his blood ran onto the stone, it opened up, revealing stairs down to the dungeon.

Hey, neat trick

Potshot ran back from the bedroll, there being no real penalty beside inconvenience in dying, and we headed down into the dungeon.

Here we go

There was a question about what to do with the horses.  We decided to have them stop following us.  That meant they ran back home on their own and we ended up having to walk back when we got to the other end, but we’ll get to that.

Like the rest of the map, The Dregs looks good and is a well done environment.  There is a lot going on, so much so that we missed a lot of it on the first pass.

The first open area

We fought with the mobs in the initial water area, then headed deeper in.  The whole thing seemed pretty linear and we just kept heading deeper in.  There are some puzzles to solve to get past obstacles, but the hints of how to proceed were obvious enough that even we caught on after exhausting attempts to climb.

This one was pre-marked with what we needed to do

The puzzles all involve water which, when you unlock it, rises and falls, allowing you to swim up to high points to carry on through the instance.  That meant sometimes getting to the rise in time and sometimes having to wait for high tide to show up again.

Potshot didn’t make it up on this go

There were some skeletons and a couple other mobs to fight, but honestly we found ourselves at the boss in fairly short order.

Oh, here he is

And the boss fight went pretty well.  He is in a pool of acid, so you don’t want to get in with him.  But followers are apparently unaffected by that, so they dove in and did most of the heavy lifting.  We banged away on the boss when he decided to beach himself now and then, and peppered him with some arrows when he was in the middle of his acidic hot tub.

Soon we had prevailed.  The boss was dead.  We got the achievement and whatever.

Victory in The Dregs

When he died the pool drained.  I ran in and skinned him, which yielded a couple of things.  But the main focused seemed to be three chests in the bottom of the now empty hot tub.

They were locked.  We looked around the room and in our inventory.  Had we picked up any keys?  No we had not.  Well, that was bunk.  Some online research indicated that one needs skeleton keys to get into boss treasures like this.  Those come from skinning overland world bosses as well as skinning the two bosses earlier in the instance.

Two bosses?  Did we miss two bosses?  I guess we had.

So we started to work our way back, only to find that dungeons in CE respawn with the day/night cycle, just like the main map.  Still, we found a boss we had missed, a giant spider called The Devourer , and went in to assault it, only to come out worse for wear.  We had slain the spider, and skinning it had yielded a skeleton key, but both of our followers had gone down in the fight.

Well, that isn’t good

And, working our way back through the respawns we quickly got in over our heads.  The followers were out main firepower it seems, and a batch of skeletons killed Potshot and sent me fleeing back towards where the main boss fight had gone down.

At least when you die in a dungeon you revive back at the start.  Difficult if there are respawns to get through, but at least it didn’t require opening the door with the taste for blood again.

After some more comedy and fleeing from mobs, we ended up leaving through the back door and walking back home to our base, making plans to re-arm.

There was a crocodile boss at an oasis not far from our base that we went after once we had some fresh followers with us.  We have to keep a recruiting drive going pretty much all the time to sustain our losses.

There is the croc

The fight with him… well, I think we won in the end, but both Potshot and I went down along with another follower.

Oh man, corpses again

We couldn’t find the follower’s corpse… not the first time this has happened… which was a pain because we like to recover the equipment, clean it up, and re-use it… kind of like the opening of Netflix version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

We went back to base, stowed they key, then went for the spider, where we had a bit more luck.

Spider on the mesa

We had tuned up out follower a bit, going with some hardened steel weapons that we had obtained elsewhere.  We didn’t bother to use them because when they wear out, as all gear does, we couldn’t repair them fully.  But follower gear never wears out fully.  So the spider went down without loss and skinning it yielded another skeleton key.  We took that back to base and did some repair and updates and then decided to head back to The Dregs with the morning sun.

We got on our mounts, which had returned home without us last time, made sure we and our followers had food and supplied, then headed back up the river to the dungeon.

This time we managed to use the blood of one of the locals to open the door and headed in, this time with horses in tow.

We had looked up the instance and found a map on the wiki, where we found we had totally walked by the first boss, the raging albino komodo.  He was not too tough to slay, though when we skinned him and got a skeleton key, we realized we had left the other three back at base.

We’re just not that good at this.

Still, we pressed on, clearing our way through, followers protecting us, horses in tow.

The horses at one of the puzzle sections

The horses, like followers, would just materialize by us to catch up if they ever got stuck behind.  We pressed on, and found the side passage where the second boss, the spider lay.  We did better on this run, losing no followers.

Spider down, ready to be skinned… also I seem to be throwing up

Then it was down the final stretch, through the big water room to get to the boss again.

The big room at high tide

That brought us back to the main boss, the Abyssal Remnant, who we took on in the same way we had the first time.  It didn’t seem to go as quickly or as smoothly… perhaps our damage types were better the first time as we had focused more on blunt to smash skeletons than stabby stuff… but we won in the end.

When the acid hot tub drained we went down, read the scroll on the floor, which taught us some recipes, and had to pick two of the three locked boxes to open.  I don’t know if we chose poorly or not, but we ended up with a legendary dagger set and some other items.

Done, we posed for a shot… screen shots are a bit tougher in CE than some other titles, and the followers were not cooperating, but we managed.

At the end of the instance

So we managed our first dungeon run in Conan Exiles.  Granted, I think we were both in our high 40s in levels when we did it, so we had some benefits that fresh characters might have lacked, but we sort of needed that to make up for our lack of skill.

With reports that Embracer Group allegedly cancelled an upcoming Deus Ex game, hopes of a return to the series have been fading. The industry is in a sad state now, so if you want to cheer yourself up with a dose of Adam Jensen, you can pick up Mankind Divided for free next week.

That's one of the titles being given away over on Epic Games Store. The other is an indie puzzle from 2013 called The Bridge. Both will be available between March 14 and March 21. They will be replacing the sci-fi combat game Astro Duel 2.

While it may not be the most lauded Deus Ex entry out there, it's still a nice little freebie for those who have yet to play it.

You can't resist all that sincere moping

Things are so up in the air for Eidos-Montreal's celebrated series. With voice actor Elias Toufexis being told to stop talking so much about Adam Jensen, there's definitely a sense that we won't ever get to see a follow-up to Mankind Divided.

It's a story we're all getting sick of hearing, no doubt. The video game industry is in dire straits at the moment, as huge publishers issue redundancies and studio closures. Eidos was one of those recently, which effectively put a nail in the Deus Ex coffin. Honestly, it's hard to keep up with the amount of job losses that have occurred these past 12 months or so.

While we won't likely get to see a new Deus Ex entry, maybe take some comfort in being able to get a copy of the latest installment for free. Sorry, didn't mean to bring the mood down there.

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