Windbound Update #1

Hi all,
Thanks so much for playing Windbound, and also for taking the time to give us your feedback. We can’t address every piece of feedback in a single update, but please know that we are working through it all and we will be providing more updates (and additional features and content) in the future. But right now here’s what’s changed in our first update on PC (with consoles to follow).

Game Stability
We’ve addressed a bunch of issues with this update, but we’d like to ask for your help in tracking down any remaining crashes. We really want to resolve these issues as quickly as we can, so what would help us enormously is that if you do experience a crash after this update you send us your log and crash dump files. Email them to brent (at) 5livesstudios (dot) com

The log is located here:
C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\LocalLow\5 Lives Studios\Windbound\player.log
And if there’s a crash dump it’s located here:
C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Temp\5 Lives Studios\Windbound\Crashes

Saving progression
The next biggest and most consistent theme we see in your feedback is that you want the game to save your progression automatically.

We’ve added auto-saving as you acquire each Nautilus key.
We’ve also added an additional auto-save as you use the final Nautilus key before Kara enters The Crossing.
We already auto-saved when you successfully emerge from The Crossing and begin the next chapter, and this remains the case.

Game Difficulty
Storyteller vs Survivalist
The feedback we’ve got is that parts of Storyteller felt too punishing, and it wasn’t clear what the difference was between Survivalist and Storyteller.

• We’ve renamed Storyteller to Adventurer mode, and updated the description of the difficulty modes to make the difference between the two modes clearer. This is in English first, but localised text will follow.
  
  
• Adventurer Mode
  
  • This is now the default mode when you start a new game.
    
  • Full inventory is retained upon death.
    
  • Boat is retained upon death, go through the portal and you’ll be reunited with it.
    
  • Chapter progress is retained upon death, no more going back to Chapter 1.
    
  • Combat difficulty is easier than in Survivalist Mode.
  
  
• Survivalist Mode
  
  • This is the classic Roguelike mode.
    
  • Only items in "Held" inventory slots are retained upon death
    
  • Boat is lost upon death.
    
  • Return to Chapter 1 upon death.
    
  • Standard combat difficulty.

Hunger
Some of you have told us that food goes bad too quickly and makes the game too punishing. So we’ve made a few changes to how quickly different types of food go bad. These should make a big difference for players who have been struggling managing their food and hunger levels.

• Berries and mushrooms will last for 40 minutes instead of 30.
  
• All raw meat will last for 30 minutes instead of 20.
  
• All cooked meat will last for 50 minutes instead of 30.

Additionally there’s been some confusion around the “Food has degraded” pop-up. Previously it popped-up as food got 30% of the way to rotting, and some users interpreted this as the food having gone bad already. So we’ve changed it to only appear one time just before food goes off and then a final “Food has gone bad” pop-up appears.

Stamina
Stamina is a key resource for Kara, and it perhaps recharged a little too slowly.

• So we’ve increased the backup stamina recharge rate by 25%.
  
• Additionally we’ve reduced time to recover from dodging when you have no stamina by 50%, so Kara should be able to get moving again in combat much quicker.

Storage/Inventory
Crafting containers for your boat is a great way of increasing the amount of items you can store, and they’re perfect for holding items you don’t need to consume all the time. However the capacity of some containers was a little low. So we’ve adjusted the capacity of containers as follows:

• Grass Container now has 5 slots, up from 3.
  
• Bamboo Container now has 9 slots, up from 5.
  
• Wood Container now has 12 slots, up from 7.

Additional Bug Fixes

• Fixed an intermittent crash in shadow culling.
  
• There was a bug in the Gameplay Options menu that if you reset to default options it reverted difficulty to Survivalist as well. This was obviously not a good experience for those of you who chose to play in Storyteller mode. This has now been fixed.
  
• The “Food has degraded” prompts were intended as regular warnings that the food is slowly going bad, but many players seem to think the first warning out of three is actually telling them that the food has already gone bad. So we've reduced the frequency of the prompts so it only starts to warn the player about food degrading when it gets down to 33%. And we’ll be making the phrasing clearer pending localisation.
  
• Players may have been prevented from climbing some towers when large rock formations were generated too close, blocking the route. These rock formations are now being created further away from towers to ensure player progress is not blocked.
  
• At times coral was popping in too close to the player and when sailing at speed that didn’t give a fair chance at avoiding it, this has been fixed and coral is now visible from a further distance.
  
• Fixed an issue where Koji Berries were sometimes not appearing in player inventory.
  
• Fixed the Ancestors outfit not appearing wet after Kara has been in water.
  
• Corrected a number of Achievement descriptions.
  
• Fixed a bug with the Pro Skater achievement where sometimes it would not correctly trigger despite the boat catching air for longer than 2 seconds.
  
• Removed an unintentional feature where F11 would toggle the UI off/on. Players accidentally did this and had no idea how to bring it back.
  
• Fixed an issue where player settings were not always being properly being applied.
  
• After finishing the game players can now continue in the same slot from Chapter 1 with all their blessings in a New Game+ mode. This mode does not replay the intro cut-scene.
  
• Fixed an issue where creature navigation meshes were not properly cleared between Chapters potentially causing odd behaviour.
  
• Added the TAB key to be the default crafting menu button, ~ key still works as well.
  
• Improvements to game loading time.
  
• Fixed potential memory leak when saving game.
  
• Fixed issue where 2 held item slots contents could be lost on death if the player had the “Arms of Imakl” blessing.

Known Issues
There are other issues that we’re still investigating. Thanks for your continued feedback and bug reports.

• Occasional lock-up on exiting the game.
  
• Loss of items between Chapters.
  
• Some achievements are not triggering correctly.
  
• Issues with UI visibility.
  
• Occasional erratic ragdoll behaviour when defeating creatures.
  
• Ongoing balancing.

Thanks again for all your feedback and your patience. We’re working hard on Windbound to fix issues and improve your experience.

5 Lives Studios