1,500,000+ wishlists — thank YOU!
You are amazing! Seriously, after climbing to the top demos of Steam Next Fest and reaching one million wishlists we were not expecting this momentum to continue — but here we are, with over 1,500,000 sea wolves waiting for Windrose to finally set sail. Another impressive number — over 800,000 captains have tried the demo! And by the way, you can still do it, the demo is staying up until the Early Access launch.
Demo feedback: what we’re working on
Thanks to your involvement in the demo, we’ve got tons of feedback to work on, including over 12,000 completed surveys, 7500+ Steam reviews, and lots and lots of in-game reports and numerous social media messages. So now we’re working on several of the most frequent things you talked about to incorporate them into Early Access.
The list is not complete and is subject to change, it’s work-in-progress, after all. Some of these features may change or never make it into the game, but we will do our best to bring as many of them to life as possible!
Co-op on one ship — manning the cannons. We’re introducing the ability to man the ship batteries (one player per battery), so you will have more reasons to bring friends along!
Loot variety. Sorry, no more “always dig here to find the Rapier of Thousand Cuts”. To better support the spirit of exploration, whenever you find a piece of armor or a weapon it will be randomized, so you never know which item you will get from a chest. The loot will also be different for different players on the server, so it will be more exciting to find new stuff with your friends. Enemy loot is also being improved, so high-risk encounters have a clearer payoff and the overall risk-reward ratio of combat feels more satisfying.
More players in co-op. We’re testing the increased limits of co-op capacity. While the real performance in the end will be affected by many factors, including those beyond our control (connection of each player and the specs of each server), we will do our best to increase the coop limit from 4 to 8 players. That said, in terms of gameplay difficulty scaling, we believe the best experience lies in the 1-4 players range. With more people in your crew at the same time, you will probably steamroll everything laughing hard, but that’s fine if that’s the way you want to have fun!
Hold to gather resources. An optional experimental setting will let you simply hold your mouse button when working hard with that axe or pickaxe instead of clicking.
FOV slider. The ability to fine-tune field of view to your liking.
Shanties feel. While we absolutely love the work Sean Dagher did, we’re adding a couple of coarser, less melodic voices into the backing vocals so that the shanties feel a bit more pirate-y.
Signal fire. Signal fire. We (and poor Dr. Galen as well) have noticed that many of you have been building makeshift lighthouses out of Bonfires, which do not work very well in this capacity. That ends now! We’re adding a special Signal fire building element, which you can see many miles away. Nothing beats sailing to the beacon of your home base at night!
DLSS/FSR support. You’ll be able to select Nvidia DLSS or FSR as your upscaler.
Controller improvements. While we still don’t consider our controller support perfect, we are gradually improving it to make it more usable. You should be able to play the game with the controller now, but we still recommend playing with mouse and keyboard where possible, and plan to further improve the controller support in one of the post–Early Access updates.
Dismantling workbench. Surviving on the Archipelago means being resourceful. Early in the game, you’ll be able to build a dedicated workbench for dismantling unwanted items. There is still a cost to doing so: you only receive the base crafting materials back, and any resources invested into upgrades are not refunded.
Target lock switch. You will be able to cycle between targets by swiping your mouse across them, or by binding specific hotkeys to switch to the nearest target in four directions (up, down, left, and right).
Conclusion
We hope it was an interesting read. Thank you all once again for your passion and input. We can’t imagine a better community for Windrose, and will keep working hard to deliver.
See you soon, captains!
Always yours,
Windrose Crew