The dicks are cloth-physics objects right now, so they don't have hitboxes."
In addition to laying out Conan Exiles' Early Access roadmap—you can read all about it right here—Funcom's creative director Joe Bylos talked at length about dicks when I met him at the Game Developer's Conference last week. Conan Exiles, in case you've been living in a cave for the past month, has physics-enabled full frontal nudity, and players choosing a male character can adjust the size of their character's penises.
"Lots of people ask me about the dicks," Bylos said—though I would like to point out that I specifically did not ask him about the dicks. I was planning to wait until he brought up the topic, which he thankfully did, immediately.
"I expected people to get a five minute laugh out of it," said Bylos, "and it was way bigger than I expected people to even think about it, it was crazy."
Bylos was also surprised it became a big deal on Twitch. "That's why we put in the non-nudity option, right? We were like, well, some people don't want that. And then on Twitch, all the big streamers running around with their dicks out."
Later in the meeting, I did ask Bylos about the survival game's dicks, specifically, if dicks have hitboxes. (The dongs in Rust, another Early Access survival game, do.)
"The dicks are cloth-physics objects right now," he explained, "so they don't have hitboxes. But we have individual hitboxes we can set up, we just haven't done it."
I do want to allow people to build a necklace of dicks they can wear.
The conversation moved on to comments we reported on last month, about the possibility of cutting the genitals off other players, which Bylos explained more fully.
"People went wild because I said in one of the Reddit AMAs something about castration. But the idea for the castration is actually more... when you've killed somebody, you can click the body and you can say 'harvest trophy' and you might get an ear or a dick or a foot or a hand. Like, it's not necessarily going to always be... and it won't be a dick if it's a female anyway, right?
"It's more like a harvest trophy system," Bylos explained. "I do want to allow people to build a necklace of dicks they can wear. Why not? It's fun."
In terms of the reaction to the inclusion of male nudity, no one seems to be upset, Bylos said. "Women seem to feel like it's overdue that men get a slider, and men seem to think it's hilarious. It's all good."
For the record, I wasn't the only one asking dick-related questions. According to Bylos, everyone else he met with at GDC wanted to discuss Conan Exiles' male nudity, too.
"I feel like I'm gonna be the dick guy forever now," he added.
