I did try the demo a few months ago, enjoyed it. The current EA release has more in it, but for sure it’s early access!

Baseline first: If you’ve played Valheim or Enshrouded, you have a decent idea what to expect here. Punch trees, build tools, mine rocks, build better tools, and die against ever increasingly difficult enemies. Oh, and you will build a hut of dirt, then eventually of diamonds. Windrose doesn’t change much in this model, yet there are enough tweaks to add some flavor.

• Food adds buffs, but that’s about it. You don’t need to eat/drink to stave off death. Food buffs leave when you die. There are some rather substantive buffs from food, so worth considering farming early.
• Combat is generally melee focused as ammo is very hard to acquire for a long time, and reloading takes forever. You can block and dodge. Enemies have stun bars. You can’t really block, but parry, and if you miss the timing you either take damage or are stunned. Fights against multiple enemies are very, very difficult.
  • Armor seems to have no real purpose that I’ve found. Set bonuses on rare items are cool, but the armor itself isn’t useful.
  • Weapons have types with different advantages. Enemies have resistances. Find one that fits your style.
  • Armor + Weapons have quality levels with benefits (and sets), which are mostly pointless now. Or at least, I see no difference.
  • You will die in 1 or 2 hits for a very long time. There are no real penalties to death, you keep all your armor and need to trek to collect other items. You will die a lot. Not a little. A lot.
    • It is possible to create a spawn point that is too close to enemies so that when you spawn, you are effectively ‘camped’ by the NPCs. Takes about 10 deaths or so before your spawn point is reverted.
• Crafting is pretty much as expected here, no big surprises. Build a roof, put in stations. Oh wait, the amazing part is that you craft from storage from the start. AMAZING!
• There’s slightly too much variety in inventory vs. size. In particular for items you can trade later that do nothing but take up space.
• There are side quests + discoveries to make. This is where 99% of your character growth comes from – do them.
• There are character levels which are acquired by doing ‘stuff’. They give you stat points to distribute and eventually talents, which are just stat more stat boosts.
• The crummy boat you get at the start is crummy. The quest to get the next ship is arduous, effectively closing the tutorial. You do not want to die on another island, that trek is very long.
  • Spoiler-ish I guess here. One particular step of this larger ship quest has you enter a mini-base with 8 enemies. You will die. And die. And die. Build 2 revive points, a decent distance from each other in case things go really wrong.
• Related, the world is quite large and moving across it takes a lot of time. You do NOT want to die while on the boat, so prioritize upgrades there.
• You can fast travel, which is essential. Need to create a Bell, which comes from copper, so it’s relatively early stuff.
  • More specifically. 2 Bells allow to travel between them. A single Bell station means anywhere on the map, when in a boat, you can teleport to that Bell. This is a really cool system!

Overall, the mechanics here are solid enough and either maintain or improve on the existing model. While I will always have a soft spot for Valheim (it’s pure and raw and glorious), Enshrouded is my current gold standard for this type of game. It’s still quite EA mind you, with a significant need for balancing – in particular at the front end. But really… there is no game that let’s you be a pirate in such a free form state. This is more or less what I had expected as a base option from Skull & Bones. And here we are.

Point of interest here, from demo to here, the dev team has performed a significant balance pass. I’ve yet to reach the second biome, but feedback to date says that is as unbalanced as the demo was. This not only validates why EA exists, but also shows that the devs are extremely responsive to feedback. Impressive.

Windrose is less a technical achievement than a statement. A team of 60 can launch something like this and Ubisoft instead spends 10 years and nearly a billion dollars to build a live service game that nobody wants to play. Are survival games economically sound? Not with the AAA payrolls they aren’t. Valheim has a team of 8, and I would actually argue is a better game in nearly all aspects. I know we’re at the edge of AI-slop-fest game development, and we’re sitting pretty. Let’s enjoy it.