Windrose vil ikke motta innholdsoppdateringer på et halvt år ettersom utviklere fokuserer på å fikse problemer

After Windrose, a new pirate survival was launched on Steam via early access on April 14. The game managed to attract a huge number of players, receive a flood of positive reviews, and, more importantly, become a financial success for Kraken Express, the game studio that developed it.

Less than a week since its release, Windrose has sold a million copies on Steam, with a peak of 222,134 players online at the same time. According to the latest analytical report from Alinea Analytics, the game has already generated $30 million for the developers, and the total number of players stands at approximately 1.3 million.

The fans are wondering when the game will receive the new update, which will add some new content, but the latest report from Kraken Express, perhaps, is giving a disappointing reply. On the new Steam blog, the developers revealed their strategy to support Windrose; the game will not receive small updates—instead, the studio is looking to make major updates, which take more time, and now they want to focus on fixing bugs and issues. According to them, such updates will take at least six months. More information from Kraken Express you can check out below:

“Ahoy, captains! We’re into the third week since release, and the high seas remain busy: while Windrose gathered a little less concurrent players over the last weekend compared to the first one, it’s still sailing steady (over 210,000 captains swashbucklin’ at the same time on Sunday!), and the number of daily players actually keeps growing! We’re thrilled to see such passion for our game, and thank you wholeheartedly for this. In fact, we’re preparing a little surprise for you to celebrate, but for now, let’s focus on some serious, yet important things you need to know.

We are introducing a new tool for the community – https://windrose.support/

Consider it a beta for now, but as we streamline it a bit, it will fulfill several duties:

• You can troubleshoot any issues you have with the game there. It contains a growing and systematically organized database of the most common issues and solutions, and will help you to navigate to the information you need. If your problem turns out to be new, you will be able to contact our team directly as well.
• You can easily report the bugs you have found. The form on this website will allow you to do it quickly and place your report into the right category.
• You can provide your ideas for Windrose there, and vote for other players’ ideas! This is the new, transparent way for the community to share their ideas and expectations, and upvote the most popular ones so we can review and consider them.

As this tool is rather complex and new, please expect some bugs here and there, and for now it is localized in English only, however, as we put it to real use, it will be improved. Please note: we are going to gradually sunset the overlapping functions in our Discord, as this new platform makes the process much easier for players and devs alike.

Right now we are internally testing the next game update focused on various important fixes and improvements. We will probably ask some of you to try it in advance as well before we roll it out for everyone. For now it is not 100% clear if we will manage to do it this week – but we will do our best! Here are some of the things that we’re planning to address with it:

• Connectivity issues;
• CPU usage on idle clients and servers;
• Disk usage during gameplay (to reduce the load on SSD specifically);
• Performance and stability improvements;
• Over 40 new building pieces to fill some gaps and inconsistencies;
• Over 50 fixes and QoL changes;

There is also a chance we will be able to address Steam Cloud Saves problems there, complementing the current saves backup system with a more robust solution. If we will, though, your game settings will be set to default after the update, so if these settings are important, please write them down or make a screenshot so you can dial them back later!

Some of you have already completed the game's current story, and some of you are simply (rightfully!) curious about where and how Windrose is heading. Well, here is the current status:

• After we’re done with the fixes described above, we plan to fully switch to the next big content update, which will introduce the next biome called Ashlands;
• The roadmap of this update is very high level now, we’re populating it with our own plans and some popular requests, and then, as it’s always with the game development, we will sit down and cut out some of the stuff to make it actually deliverable. Somewhere at this point we will be ready to present it to you, captains, so expect more information to come in a month or two.
• Our philosophy now is to enrich the current gameplay systems, instead of only adding new biomes with the respective content, so even before we have the full details, it’s safe to say the game will not just grow in size – it will also evolve.
• The scope of what we want to do is rather ambitious, so our best bet right now this update will take at least 6 months to deliver. This might sound like a long time, but we believe it will allow us to roll out an exciting and meaningful expansion to the game of appropriate quality. In other words, we will work very hard so it’s worth the wait.

This is it for today, captains, thank you, and stay tuned!

Kraken Express”

This decision may come as a disappointment to those who were expecting new content in the game soon, but if the developers want to create the best possible product by focusing on the technical aspects of Windrose, their dedication to the game certainly deserves respect. Just like in any pirate simulator, Windrose lets you command a real pirate ship, and below you can check out:

• How to get a ship in Windrose
• All Windrose Ships Tierlist: Best to Worst

Are you disappointed Windrose will not get any major updates in the next 6 months? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The game is now available on Steam via early access.