Arr, Captains!
Two days shy of six months on Steam! Has it really been that long? The time just flew by...
Looking back, I originally thought that Windward would be in Early Access for about two months, but listening to all of you offer awesome suggestions on how to make the game better I kept reconsidering and pushing the date back. The "date" itself has never been announced; it was always something that existed only in my head. Well, no more! It's time to draw a line in the sand: Windward will officially leave Early Access on May 12th! (although I fully expect the updates to continue well past that, so don't worry)
And now, onto the look of what happened over the last few weeks.
At the beginning of March there was PAX East. That... was an interesting experience. It started with me and a friend of mine driving from Toronto to Boston, getting stopped at the border, and basically being forced to fork over a thousand bucks just to be able to bring a few computers across. Ridiculous? Oh yes.
Once we finally made it to Boston and figured out how to navigate the city's ridiculously convoluted tunnel system, the rest of the trade show went quite well (pic 1, pic 2). I had 3-4 people helping me out with the two booths I had at the show (the other being Starlink) and both were quite packed with people of all ages, from older gamers with grey hair to young and extremely adorable ones. All in all, Windward was very well received with some players even having entire impromptu LAN parties while there! All in all, high expenses aside it was an excellent trip. I just wish I had more time to do things like this.
Well, moving onto the world of actual development, the past month has been quite busy as well. The majority of updates have been focused on balancing, polish and squashing of bugs, but I did get Windward running on NVidia Shield at 60 FPS! Shield is an Android tablet, in case you aren't familiar with it. Windward for mobiles? Quite possible, it seems.
The most obvious change for returning players will be the redesigned menu system and deeper Steam integration that allows players to open up their local games to their friends without having to host a server.
For players seeking a peaceful, relaxing experience there is now an option to create a Questing / Trading instance in the game. Much like the Combat instance type that preceded it, it allows players to create a private region hand-tailored to their current level, except that there won't be any pirates present. This makes it uniquely ideal for sailing around and earning some gold without having to fight for your life.
The functionality of the game's difficulty slider has been changed as well. Where before it was simply scaling all HP and damage, now it controls what abilities AI ships will get. Above 100% challenge AI will be able to hire allies to follow them around, for example. This way players that wish to increase the challenge can get a more interesting experience without making players handicapped in the process.
For higher level players, heroic instances have been revamped as well. While still very challenging, they can now be done by smaller teams and siege towers found there are now going to be quite a bit more effective against pirates. If you've been waiting to try them, hop onto one of the public servers and team up to give them a shot. The loot will be very worth it!
As usual, if you want to read the full list of patch notes, you can find them here.
See you on the high seas!
-ArenMook