Windrose, the co-op pirate survival game from Kraken Express and Pocketpair Publishing, has hit one million copies sold in just six days since its Early Access launch on April 14. The team also revealed that Windrose has surpassed 200,000 concurrent players, which is pretty wild for a game that’s been out for less than a week. Coming off more than 1.5 million Steam wishlists ahead of launch, Windrose clearly had an audience waiting for it, but hitting these numbers this quickly shows how healthy the crafting survival genre is.
For those unfamiliar with it, Windrose is a PvE survival adventure set in an alternate Age of Piracy. You play as a captain who dares to challenge Blackbeard, only to end up shipwrecked and forced to rebuild from scratch. The gameplay blends what you’d expect from a crafting survival game, including gathering resources, building a base, crafting gear, and managing a crew, with open-world naval combat that features ship-to-ship cannon battles and boarding actions. Combat is described as soulslite by the developers, with a parry-based system and challenging bosses to take down. It can be played solo or with friends in co-op.
The Early Access build includes three biomes scattered across around 30 procedurally generated islands, three playable ships, a full building and crafting system, Tortuga as a central hub town, factions with their own quests, and NPC workers. The developers have said the full release is expected to include roughly 50 percent more content, and they estimate another 1.5 to 2.5 years of Early Access development ahead.
We enjoyed our time with the Windrose demo and are looking forward to jumping into Early Access, but right now we’re still working our way through everything Soulmask’s 1.0 release has to offer, including the new Shifting Sands DLC. We’ll get to Windrose eventually, and given how actively the team has already been pushing out fixes, there’ll probably be even more to dig into by the time we set sail.
