Windward - Sail around, upgrade your ship, take over towns.

[Malakili]

I figured there would be some interest for a game like this around here, but there is no thread, so here it goes.

My friends and I went in on a 4-pack of this game yesterday and we're already having a lot of fun with it.  It's sort of a sailing sandbox game with procedurally generated maps.  You sail around, you upgrade your ship, gain experience, take over towns, kill pirates. It's good stuff.  You can play single player or co-op, or you can join public servers.  I haven't checked out too much of the public multiplayer stuff yet, but my friend joined a server with 60 players on it last night and it was apparently great fun.  Worth checking out if you're into this sort of thing.

It's 15% off on Steam for release: http://store.steampowered.com/app/326410/

[Paelos]

Is there trading?


Asks the dorky CPA.

[Malakili]

I don't know if there is trading between players, but there is trading between towns.  So you can ferry goods between a town that has a lot of resource X and needs resource Y, etc. Sometimes there will be explicit quests in one town that just say "Hey, please deliver this cargo to this other town." There are also "rumors" at most towns that can help point you towards those things "Rumor is that Asheland needs Wood."  You can also specialize yourself through an RPG style talent tree for trading/"diplomacy" which helps you buy things for cheaper.  (I honestly haven't spent a lot of time looking at the talent trees yet, so I don't know how deep that specialization goes) You can hire different kinds of crews for your ship, some of them give a bonus to things like diplomacy while others might specialize in combat.

[Falconeer]

Seems like an evolution of the legendary Pirates! and that makes me super interested by default, but in all honesty reading around makes it sound like not that much of an evolutuion. Loot and big floaty damage numbers, but little else. Not a personal history, a historical career, not much, kind of shallow. Am I wrong? Please tell me I am wrong.

[HaemishM]

My buddy bought it yesterday at work and he seemed to enjoy tooling around in it.

[Ghambit]

If you guys wanted this genre and had a gaming group already, why not just play PotBS?

[Malakili]

Seems like an evolution of the legendary Pirates! and that makes me super interested by default, but in all honesty reading around makes it sound like not that much of an evolutuion. Loot and big floaty damage numbers, but little else. Not a personal history, a historical career, not much, kind of shallow. Am I wrong? Please tell me I am wrong.

It's not a huge evolution, but there is a bit more to it than that.  I saw this user review on Steam earlier that addressed the question:

It's very comparable to Sid Meier's Pirates. Here's some of the main simularities:
- Camera Angle
- Economy (Buy at one place, sell at another for a profit)
- Regions can develope
- Many ships to choose from, with different play styles
- Different types of ammunition to utilize (However, in Windward you level up to unlock them)

Here are some of the differences:
- No crew moral
- You don't control when your ship fires it's normal attack, it's just a steady stream of iron flowing from your cannons.
- There are regions in this game, you can liberate them for your faction. Once liberated, trade and quests open up.
- Coop!
- No shanty esque music :c
- Good music (despite lack of shanties)
- Bigger naval battles
- No landing party, and capturing a city is as simple as killing all the pirate ships around it and camping it.
- Can build defence towers to help hold your land
- Periodic pirate invasions

Seems about right.

[Paelos]

I hated pirate morale more than anything, so I'm glad that's gone.

No shanties is a huge blow though. Huge.

[Sky]

No dancing!?! 

[Falconeer]

Dancing wasn't in the original Pirates! though.

Anyway, yes, it seems a multiplayer  but stripped down version of Pirates! and in general a much worse game than PotBS. I think I'll pass. I can see myself enjoying for two minutes, but then I'd just miss the other two games.

[Tmon]

I've been playing this and it is very reminiscent of Pirates.  I do miss is boarding battles and accumulating a fleet of captured ships.  You can hire NPC ships to accompany you which comes in handy when you are pushing up to a pirate town, but isn't quite the same.  All in all it is fun and has a great deal of "Just one more..." appeal.

[Paelos]

I'll wait and see for a sale if they add more to it with patches.

[MrHat]

This fell in my impulse buy range of $12.

It's fun. Pretty light though. It's RPG boats without a story. Mostly quest here quest there buy/sell upgrade.

At least delivery quests make sense.

Haven't tried large scale MP because I'm old and tired of people with more time wrecking me online.

[Tannhauser]

I picked it up.  Fairly fun but shallow.  I'm playing a trader, basically grinding for gold to upgrade my ship.  It's $15 so that's good but if I had bought it for $20 I'd probably regret it.  It just needs more meat or something.

[Malakili]

Friend and I were playing and we liberated a zone, founded two new towns in that zone, benefitted a lot from numerous trading runs that upgraded other towns, etc.  And we've only gone one zone out of the beginner area.  Going to take a while before we can win the whole map.

I think this benefits a lot from playing multiplayer.  Solo is kind of relaxing, but co-op is loads of fun.

[Tairnyn]

Pu in a few hours and I'm already done with it. Started as the traders (yellow) and activities seem limited to deliver quests, pirate kill quests, building lighthouses and towers, and buy/sell trading where you hope the demand doesn't change before you reach your destination. Most of these are just sailing to a place, then maybe to another place. The only real dynamic event that occurs on the way to completing these quests are boxes and barrels in the water you can pick up, which gets old quick. Battles are circling each other and using one ability on cooldown.

I enjoy the gearing up aspect, where there are different levels of items that can drop, but the system is very sparse with loot being a rarity and the options to purchase usually much worse than what you start with. I was hoping for more breadth of activities with more robust town and faction development, but I don't have the patience to grind through to see if it's there as you get higher level. The multiplayer seemed no different, just more people in the sandbox. They have combat "instances" that adjust to your level, and I have heard require more than one person to beat the combat ones. But, you have to coordinate to set them up.