Demo Feedback

[CombatWombat]

Sorry to say, but this is not it. Coming from Windward 1 I would chose 1 over 2 any day.
I'll try to give some constructive feedback.

1. Everything seems to be extremely un-intuitive
- Why do I have to know and manually open my inventory to sell stuff? IF selling is done by drag&drop there HAS to be a splitscreen between the town and my ship.
- Comparing is not done by hovering over the new item but by draging AND NOT releasing the item over the slot. I can't think of any other game that has something like this.
- I don't now why, but I have to click the worldmap multiple times until the cross appears and my ship starts to move.
- Losing quests when you move out of a zone is no biggy but still annoying.
- No wind indicator. Yes I know now, there is the flag on top but even as a windward 1 player it took me way to long to realize and find it (again). The flags seem to be way less obvious than in windward 1 and are hard to read most of the times.

2. Wasted time
- The game has lots and lots of dead time/wasted time. Almost every text takes ages to finally appear on screen then you still have to wait for the options to turn up. No escape either. Just give me the damn text and options in a split second. No animation is fancy enough to not be boring after the 10th time.
- Large conversations/texts need and escape button.
- Town names!!!!!! Please just let the town name hover over it constantly. I don't understand why it needs to be hidden and then animated in only when you are close enough
- This is probably just me, but I find the font hard and slow to read compared to others.
- Why waste our time sailing to the edge of the map, only to than take MORE time sailing on the world map. If we already sail on the worldmap, just let us enter the worldmap without necessarily sailing to the edge.

3. Boring
- Where are the Pirates?
- Combat seems to be immensely worse than in Windward 1. The one quest I took where you actually have to kill a ship was a complete borefest. Volley seems to auto aim now there is nothing to do but drive in circles while the enemy shoots you to bits. It took me 4 ships to grind this health sponge down. Tactics I used in Windward 1, like sailing in his cannon shadow while still being able to shoot him seem to be ineffective and would only drag the fight out longer.
- I had really hoped windward 2 would add some interesting wind mechanic to the game. Something that takes time to master. Like manual sails or something similar.


Positives:
I like the worldmap idea but it seems underutilized at the moment.
Fishing is interesting!
The skill system looks similar but more interesting.
The game is beautiful!

[Seikarius]

Generally spot on, combat and the ui need a lot of work.

[Limdood]

honestly I like the combat in this one more. The fighting is....poorly explained in game, but once you understand it, it really works.

The tooltips for health are terrible though....explaining the "light and dark green" bars but NOT the brown bars that are moving all over the place in each combat? seriously?

anyways, for anyone trying to figure it out, the brown bars (and the quickly moving bars on the sides of your ship) are your armor. Think of it like shields on a spaceship combat game. the shields (armor in windward horizon) have to go down before you can hit the hull. "Repair" skill and amount seems to directly influence the speed of regeneration of the....armor. So the defensive entry talent (talents were a whole additional thing...it took until level 6 before i realized that there were two TABBED skill trees and that the mortar wasn't a higher level unlock) that increases repair by 40% is meant to keep your armor regenerating faster....use it after getting hit with a volley or mortar to make sure you're patched up for the next one.

The shields idea is a staple of space combat games, but....well, it feels out of place here. I can work with it, and I think it's here to stay, but man it feels odd in a 1700-1800s naval warfare game.

What the armor means in combat though is that you need to wear down their armor to damage the hull, and each side of the ship has its OWN regenerating armor. The AI will periodically try to switch which side of the ship it's showing you....which tactically is a neat concept. You or the computer can turn to try to show the other side of your ship, presumably with healthy armor, but that means a few moments of not having the enemy in your cannon arcs. If you want to take a target down, burst is the name of the game. Also, unleashing the burst when the armor is already slightly damaged should somewhat increase the amount that hits hull. Normal cannon-fire for a couple of shots so that their armor isn't at full, combined with a mortar hit that hits around the same time, and then volley to apply a big damage burst to the weakened or nonexistent armor. All at once, right back to back. Using your abilities right on CD every time is kind of a trap, since it means you aren't lining up your burst all together.


I wholeheartedly agree with the wind indicator complaint and ALL the text-based complaints. The slow-crawl of text for dialogue, and ESPECIALLY for town name (and entry, which is the only way to enter those brand new size 0 towns) is an atrocious design choice that sacrifices a LOT of functionality for a bit of ambiance.

[Chicken Weenie]

I was pretty annoyed with the text in this game, the writing was boring and rather they stuck without a story in this game

[LegenDaddy]

I whole heartedly agree with the author of this thread on everything written in the original post.

[Seether18]

Personally I really like the game so far. I like the direction they are going in but it def needs some tuning.

[KodaTora]

right click enter when it appears and assign a hotkey to enter towns, now you'll never need to wait for the button to appear just use the hotkey soon as your in the zone

[CombatWombat]

Thanks for the tips. I was wondering what the "moving second healthbars" were for.

[Your weakness is your own]

Pretty accurate. Discoverability in the UI is pretty bad. Trading effectively seems to require taking manual notes, as there's no memory of good buys/sells even at places you recently visited.

Tip for the text speed: right clicking the dialogue will speed it up.

Whoever decided that was a good control for it was wrong (we expect to find it on a "mash key" on the keyboard [space, tab, esc, enter], put it there). Whoever decided games should have rolling text reveals for very small portions of text was wrong, and whoever decided this game should do it was wrong. Whoever decided on the scrolling speed was probably a victim of "no child left behind" education strategies, it's horribly slow.

[Belinar]

the original was clean and simple -- peaceful -- this seems to try to be piling on a lot of layers which takes away some of the relaxing nature of the first game. beautiful graphics. agree on a lot of the comments... slow response time - wordy -- lots of menus

[CombatWombat]

Ok, combat makes a bit more sense now. I still don't know if I like it though. I hadn't had to much combat yet and death seems to come very surprising.

Adding to un-intuitive:
- Information seems to be hidden in unusual places for example I have a crew that can fish and a crew that can dive but once you press shift or ctrl AND move off and on the crew icon again it reveals that both crews can do both.... 🤷‍♂️
- If you drag an item over the vault tab icon but are still in the merchant tab the item gets sold instead of put in the vault.
- Why am I shown a massive inventory when I can only use a few slots???
- General information that should be readily available are a pain to gather. For example Town names in other regions. Or the town name of the town that is selected as spawn point :P

In general:
- When you right click on skills you can rebind them, but also deselect auto aim, which is nice!

- What the hell do I do with all those notes/parchments? They seem to do absolutely nothing but clog your inventory.

- What are the couple of magnifying glass slots at the bottom of the inventory?

- How do I talk to a fisherman?


I think what shocks me the most is the stark contrast between the very intuitive windward 1 and the lack thereof in windward 2.

[a sideways mob]

The notes from treasure hunts are 'collector pieces', added by testers/backers.
The magnifying glass slots are where you place store items (possible purchases). Once placed there, you can then grasp, hold and drag over equips to compare item stats for possible replacement.
For Lani's (?) mission, each possible fisherman workshop produces a fisherman to talk to about the crate. Usually, there's a quest indicator for regions that have fisherman workshops.

The slots in the inventory you see but don't have access to is the grid for these ships and bigger vessels. The largest in the dev build right now is the frigate, which is about twice the hold space and item equips of the schooner.

Anyways, I'm nobody special, so some of my info may not help or be 100% accurate.

[AKSlayer]

Not impressed with this Demo.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time in the original, around 60-70hrs, but I love it, one of my favorite games to get off work, hop on, fight some ships, do a bit of relaxing sailing, then call it a night, and thats perfect for someone that works a lot.
I was VERY exited to hear about Windward 2. The fact that it only took me about an hour to rage quit and go play Windward 1 again is disappointing and the reason i decided to write my first ever comment on Steam. I genuinely LOVE Windward, hoping Windward 2 can get better.
Completely agree with the original post, here are some things I personally found frustrating:

1. Diving minigame is horrendous, it takes forever, there's always 3-4 POIs but you only ever have time for 1-2, but mostly just end up stuck my fish and disappointed. I only gave it like 10-12 tries so maybe there's upgrading in the future that helps this, but Im here to sail around and do some fun Ship combat, NOT to drag my mouse around the screen for 30mins trying to complete a single diving quest.
2. Fishing minigame, not as bad as the diving, but im still not here for boring minigames that are pretty much the same thing and just take up time.
3. Traveling. WHY add a "faster" travel mode thats still slow, but also MORE boring than sailing around, and why do i still have to sail to the edge of the map before entering a more boring travel mode? The larger map mode could be cool if it was more interesting, something like the map in Tempest: Pirate RPG, and they even had like a speed-up in the larger map.
4. Combat is okay, but theres something missing from the original Windward 1 combat. Turning the auto aim stuff off makes it a bit better, but idk, i just cant quite put my finger on it so maybe this isn't helpful at all.
5. Font, Ive seen a couple other people mention it so im not going crazy, the Font is a pain to read. In Windward 1 i would get a quest with one destination, then just scan all the other contracts with the same destination, much more annoying to do that now.
6. Local quests, why is everything so spread out now? original Windward you could stay in one area and grind some quests, maybe grind some town levels. Windward 2 has lots of quests, but only 1-2 quests before you have to sail to the edge, get into the boring slow world map, click around trying to find your way to the next area, then slowly sail to the quest area for a SINGLE quest. Also with things being more spread out its harder to stack similar destination quests like i was talking about in the Font section.
7. Everyone has talked about the UI so i wont beat the dead horse too much, just wanted to put this here to emphasize its pretty bad.

Overall it just feels so incredibly slow and tedious, and has somehow lost the charm of the Slow relaxing feeling of Windward 1

OKAY, some things I liked:

1. Stacking more quests, thats a much needed improvement over Windward 1
2. more ship customization is cool
3. It looks great!

[CombatWombat]

I cannot, for the life of me, find these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fishermen. There is no quest indicator everyone I talk to has nothing to say. I have started the quest a million times. Worst thing is I think this is blocking me from joining the Sojourn :(

[Tweety]

Originally posted by CombatWombat:

I cannot, for the life of me, find these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fishermen. There is no quest indicator everyone I talk to has nothing to say. I have started the quest a million times. Worst thing is I think this is blocking me from joining the Sojourn :(

Are you looking for ? on the "world" map? Not in the province you got it from.

[CombatWombat]

Originally posted by Tweety:

Originally posted by CombatWombat:

I cannot, for the life of me, find these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fishermen. There is no quest indicator everyone I talk to has nothing to say. I have started the quest a million times. Worst thing is I think this is blocking me from joining the Sojourn :(

Are you looking for ? on the "world" map? Not in the province you got it from.

Yes, I have removed all quests. Taken the quest again and I see no ? on the world map nor on the local map.


Edit: I've started a new world and there I could finish the quest without problems. Seems my PG world is broken :(

Also, why is the World map so freaking fractured? Couldn't there be a big body of water in the middle with large landmasses on the sides? Maybe some smaller islands in the middle?

I would also like to zoom out fully on any (world) map.

Traveling is barely enjoyable while holding shift. I cannot imagine doing this without the speed up.