Windward Horizon Steam Charts & Stats

The original Windward is one of our favorite multiplayer games, The only one I believe we managed to do all but one achievement on. This feels like a true sequel! Can't wait to get further into the game and make our own provinces.

If you don't like radiant quests, you won't like this game. If you're OK with radiant quests, you may like this game. If you [b]like[/b] radiant quests, be very, very afraid... for your time. To elaborate, Windward Horizon is (mainly) an ARPG set in the Age of Sail, with ships as the characters. You equip your ship with cannons, armor, sails, crew(s), a mortar, a captain and a first mate, which, true to ARPG traditions, have various stats, and you're always aiming to increase the stats you need for your build, even at the cost of others you don't. The game plays out on randomly generated worlds, and while there are a few unique questlines focusing on some permanent characters of the five factions, mostly you'll be doing random quests for the towns for gear, money, experience and reputation, hence the caveat at the beginning of this review. There is no big, overarching story or real goal to the game, but a constant striving to get stronger. While the game [i]is[/i] an ARPG for the most part, it has a somewhat complex economic system -- provinces need food and drinks, optionally clothing, to grow, while workshops (which produce goods for consumption and sale) need lumber, masonry and metals to develop, each of which categories has many possible items with production chains of varying complexity. This also adds a trading sim aspect to the game, where you get goods from province A and sell them with a profit in province B. One cool aspect of the game is that the five factions give various bonuses if you befriend them and select their bonus in the registrar's office -- for example, Sojourn gives you more speed and sight, Exchange more health+armour and mortar damage, etc., so you can choose your allegiance depending on what you need for your build. (That said, you have to wait 60 minutes before you can change it again.) All in all, the game is very fun to play, and the dev is constantly working on updates and is quite responsive (ETA: seriously, I complained about the AI-founded towns making stupid building choices on Discord, and a workaround was in the game [i]the same evening[/i] -- it was likely rather simple to implement, but still!). While the game's [i]mainly[/i] aimed at co-op play, it's quite playable solo as well for the most part (aside from some very end-game encounter where AI helpers just don't play well enough). There are some minor inconveniences (such as "delivery bonus", which makes for most of your profits, being unclear -- it's supposed to depend on distance, but this is not always the case), but on the whole, the game plays very smoothly and I can recommend to anyone who doesn't mind the lack of an overarching story/goal and the game being mostly randomized.

they need to fix many things, other wise it would be a good game. from not being able to due some quest because the game breaks, to balancing issues with taking supplies to other ports just to find out that only some port can take certain supplies, this game need work. there is also a learning curve because a lot of these things you just have to find out through trail and error one of the quest requires you to investigate a wreckage, but the game will not let you investigate it to complete the quest. the last one is probably the worst since your trying to make profit by buy low and selling high, just to get caught with things you bought that you can't sell. this forces you to play the game as a make your own base and and upgrade it, but that locks you in a grind for just supplies to upgrade your towns, and when you add quest that can give you those supplies, and don't forget that some quest are broken things start feeling more limited and more grindy in the wrong ways. the other option for playing the game is to wait for pirates to invade and attack them, and to do fishing, diving, and treasure hunting quest while waiting for the next set of pirates. of course there are quest but some are buggy

The game wastes you time, it is too slow to level up and too much time wasted.

I do enjoy the game. I have a lot of things i do like Sailing, the Arcardy Fighting. Trading, Building Provinces.. very fun. Once you understand it. [strike] What i dislike is the very abitrary way it is treating progression... I am on my 3rd Ship Next would be a Frigate but i am Almost MAXIMUM Level. I have more then enough crowns to buy a new one but can't cause Pirates raping every provice that tries to reach pop level 12. :( This feels a bit to MMO and not really Single Player. [/strike] EDIT: Someone definitly added a Slider i just now noticed. Now i am definitly gonna sink even more Hours into this... God damn it... It is lovely :) Allright now i own a ship of the line... a very fun game. Nice and completely out of the blue, the dev is taking the suggestions to hard. Ninja Implementing most of them. Made it a great experience for me 105 hours only short 5 Achivements. I had a god damn blast :D I only wish for a few more ships maybe rest is sold. :) Thanks

Launch issues crippled the multiplayer scene right out the gate with atrocious enemy scaling, needlessly grindy skill progression (progression partially resets on every ship you purchase), and in my opinion, a woefully underbaked skill system that doesn't change anything about the gameplay besides giving you a tiny number of skills. Gear is 99% more important than skills, so why bother having skills at all in the sequel? The prior game had actually unique skills like one that gave you huge bonuses to defense and turning when anchored. The skills in the sequel are nothing but tiny percentage boosts. Boring and uninspired.

It is a bit boring. As many other people I crave for a good naval game (not a pvp grind fest ones), but this game, quite unfortunately, doesnt perform well for me. Areas are sort of bland, combat is not engaging, nor interesting in any way, and there is a lot of unnecessary downtime when you just need to move from area to area. Ships feel a bit "samey", most of the upgrades are just percentage numbers.

While I enjoyed playing this game for a while I would definitely not recommend it for now. There are multiple reasons, including the fact that I enjoyed the original Windward a lot more than this new game, but one of the more recent and annoying one is the fact that the trade system design seems weird to me. Let me show you what I mean by the following example (the following is taken directly from the forum of this game): "I go to a province that has a lumber mill. I see that they desperately need raw materials and have no lumber for sale. They need everything from driftwood to all kinds of wood. I think, that is great, 'cause I know that there is a town nearby that sells some of the raw materials. So I go there and load up on driftwood. I go back to the lumber mill place, check the market and see that they will pay a ton of cash for any raw materials including driftwood. I try selling them the driftwood they desperately want and I get a message that "this place does not want to buy that"... What?!" "Originally posted by ArenMook: Driftwood is a very low tier commodity. Instead of selling driftwood, craft it into lumber yourself, then go sell the lumber." My original point still stands as far as this issue is concerned though - if driftwood is better crafted into lumber, why then do these places want to buy it? Why not tell the player, through the game, that driftwood needs to be crafted into a different commodity first, before the player can sell it? The above is just an example of certain design choices that the developer has made in this new game that strike me as odd and is why I do not recommend this game to other players for now. I do hope that this game will get better in time and that I will eventually enjoy it a lot more. I will definitely keep my eye on its development and hope to reverse the not recommended status of this review in the future.

Personally I don't think its a scratch on the original Windward. I used to enjoy you actually had to sail with the wind in mind, now it's point and go. Game play (completing missions, battles, levelling towns up) seems a lot slower and trading seems a lot more borderline on ease and usefulness. On the plus some of the story quest look like they had some effort (I'll keep playing through to complete them) and the graphics are nice and smooth. It seems shame the game just doesn't seem to live up to the original. Note: I haven't tried this multiplayer - that always used to be the best way to play the original but I cannot recommend my friends get this version yet.

Edit: The dev has responded and said they will be lowering the wait time in-between quests that require mandatory wait times from 30 minutes down to 10, they are also lowering the 1m undock feature down to 20 seconds. Bless 'em. Hello gamers, here are the cliffnotes: If the idea of an ARPG (diablo-like game) where you mix and match gear for various age of sail boats plus have factions/region/town building sorta' like Sid Meier's Pirates than this is the game for you. Full review down below. [h1]Good:[/h1] • Has online servers you can host yourself with a public server from the dev always up. Gives you the server code, game won't die in the future. • Community is very friendly, helpful, and drama free (as of writing this, these things often change). • Developer is responsive if not sometimes a bit snarky, aren't we all. • Game has a fair bit of content to go through and if you are into role-based game play MMOs often give you, like tanks - healers - DPS of various types you will like this. • Has great trading mechanics. • Decent enough music, sound design, etc. • Loads of customization for your boat including unlocking loads of cosmetics for free, like the good ol' days. • Very playable offline, online, or both. • Fixes, patches, nerfs, and buffs are reasonable. • Loads of abilities, skills, and more to customize how you play. • No micro-transactions thank the heavens. [h1]Take it or leave it:[/h1] • Dev will personally help you out with a quest and fix if you are stuck. This is also a bad thing because the dev had to do that to begin with. • Some of the base mechanics are confusing, such as ship building, town rising, etc. Once you learn it though it's simpler than you first thought. • There are only 10 total different boats in this game, which is a fair few less than the first Windward. Due to the customization system there is a whole lot more you can do with said boats, so it is a trade off. This is a quality vs quantity problem that could be solved with more boats added in the future to have the best of both worlds. • The over-world sailing is kind of a nothing burger. It isn't bad, it isn't good. It is mostly boring with you watching a little ship graphic sailing around. This could be improved upon by having a small window showing your boat sailing around to at least give you something to look at. • Tutorials are plentiful but do a bad job at explaining some of the harder parts of this game to figure out and the questing tutorials are so bad they should just be rewritten. [h1]BAD:[/h1] • The quest system is esoteric in a very bad way. I am not sure how you are going to get through this without asking loads of questions in-game online, through the discord, or waiting for guides. Semi-impossible to figure out on your own. Very badly designed. • • Additionally all boats past the first 5 boats must be unlocked through this quest system making it compoundingly bad. • The official server tends to fill up fast disallowing for players to try out the town building mechanics online on the main server. • The world gen is kind of sloppy, it's just a fractal map and when you really explore the world it becomes obvious how unnatural everything is. [b]I really want to focus on this next one[/b] • There are a lot of moments that waste your time, such as sailing into a town to do some trading and it puts you in a bad spot, you spend many minutes sailing around looking for a port. Worst still is you gotta often leave while sailing against the wind, thus going twice as slow, to escape. There are mechanics to bypass this via gaining a lot of rep with each faction but this takes dozens of hours and EVEN THEN... When you get to "insta port" that is, when you enter a region you are friendly with you are placed at a dock right away with no sailing, [b]you still have to wait an entire minute before you can "insta' undock" or leave the region.[/b] [i]I cannot stress enough how frustrating the random mini-time sinks in this game are[/i] and the 1 minute timer makes me want to pull my hair out I hate it. It is in the game for seemingly no reason at all. If you are doing frequent trade runs you will waste hours to this over the span of a playthrough. You also will have to wait sometimes up to 30 minutes to do the next story quest because the character "needed time to do X thing" this... I mean I get it, you are telling a story and I fully understand I could just go do some 'raids' etc, but what if I am fully focusing on story progression? This just slams you with up to 2h of wait time during some story missions. [h1]Conclusion for sure[/h1] This game has a ways to go, it feels almost like a polished Beta more than anything but it is still very fun. With some more tweaking, which happens often, I feel like this could become one of the best age of sail games out there. I mean it's an ARPG but ships and pirates and more. Please Aren if you are reading this please remove the 1 minute "region leave" button thing, it is horrible for no reason.