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Our Project Director, Scott Junior, would like to address the Xbox community and the current situation with stability issues:
Hello Exiles,
I wanted to update everyone on the current situation with the Xbox One version of the game and what we are doing to fix the issue. I also want to apologize for the current state of the game on XB1 and how long it has taken us to resolve these issues and the lack of updates on the issue.
On August 20th (XB1) and August 24th (PS4) we released update 41 which was a console parity patch to bring the PS4 and XB1 platform to the same code and data version as we had on PC. This build had several bug, exploit, and balance fixes. It also had a major change related to the Funcom Live Services (FLS) system that we released on Steam this summer. FLS is not enabled on either the XB1 or PS4 version of the game, but there are changes that are related to it that mostly impact the server browser and other backend systems.
When this version came out players started experiencing two distinct issues:
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Out-of-memory (OOM) crashes started happening more frequently and happened over shorter play sessions than they did before the patch.
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A pop-up error message started appearing that stated there was corrupt files and instructed players to reinstall.
Neither of these issues happened for us internally when we were developing and testing the build in house. They also did not occur with our external testing partners or show up in the certification/compliance process.
When we saw the increase in crashes we started looking for the issue. Since the crash is OOM related it is hard to nail down. Normally when software crashes you get information that shows where in the code it crashed. With an OOM crash it is a bit different, because the client is attempting to allocate memory for an asset, it can’t because there is not enough available, and it crashes. A team of our developers started going through all the changes between Update 40 and Update 41 to see if there was anything that could be contributing to this.
For Isle of Siptah we have had a team working on console optimizations which also includes decreasing memory usage. For the first patch we attempted on Sept 24, several of these fixes from the Isle of Siptah release branch were included in the hope that if we decreased the amount of memory being used it would get us below the threshold that was triggering the crashes. After thorough testing internally and externally we did not see the corrupted file error or any OOM crashes so we released the patch. Unfortunately, this had very minor impact in the amount of crashes and players were still receiving the corrupted file error.
At this point we changed focus and started looking at other solutions to these two problems. We increased the amount of testing on this issue and started looking at issues that could lead to data or memory corruption. A few issues were eventually located, fixed, and we made a new build that went to our external testing team. Internally the version performed without crashes or file corruption errors and our external partners could not reproduce the issue. This update was sent to certification and was scheduled to be released last week on Oct 15th. After the version was approved by Microsoft we ran a retail check and started seeing the issues that players have been reporting so we cancelled the patch.
What we have found so far is that this issue only happens in the retail environment (when you download the game from the marketplace) and can not be reproduced in our development environment even on retail hardware.
Going forward we are doing the following:
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Dedicating more internal resources to resolving this issue. We have moved two more programmers and several other developers/testers to be 100% focused on this issue. We are also dedicating other developers to be 100% focused on the console version of Conan Exiles/Isle of Siptah to do other optimizations that will try and resolve this issue from a different angle.
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We are bringing in outsourced developers to start working on this issue with us. This process has been underway for several weeks but it takes time to get new people access to our development environment and catch them up to speed on our development pipeline, how the project is set up, etc.
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We are in communication with Microsoft about this issue and asking for assistance on their end to help us resolve the issue
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I or someone on the team will start updating the XB1 community weekly with a status report.
Again, I apologize about the state of the game on Xbox One and want to thank you for your patience and being part of the Conan Exiles community. We are committing as many resources as we can to resolve this issue and will have an update on our progress next week.
-Scott