Early access survival games can be dangerous for players, and not just when it comes to murderous monsters. As games get patched and updated over years of early access development, the consequences for players can occasionally be dire: corrupted saves, lost items, overwritten bases, and sometimes flat-out world wipes that sets everyone back to square one.

Windrose is the new early access survival game hotness, and today its developers, Kraken Express, wanted to reassure players that on the long voyage to a 1.0 release, they don't need to worry about losing all the piratey progress they've been making.

Probably.

"We stated it before, but looks like it is worth repeating: NO WIPES are planned!" Kraken Express said today in its Discord. "We do our best on tech side to allow all the future updates to keep your progress intact all the way to 1.0 release."

Still, this is early access, and the developer quickly caveated that statement:

"Of course shit happens," Kraken Express said, "but our plan, intentions and our current implementation of the game is that we can roll out major updates while keeping everyone's progress and worlds. This was one of the common pain points we noticed when we started working on Windrose, and this is something we have always taken into account."

That's reassuring, mostly. As a frequent early access survival game player, I can attest to logging back into a few games (they shall remain nameless) after a major patch and finding my base was swallowed up by a change in the world's terrain system, or learning that my save file was no longer compatible with the newer version of the game. Hopefully, Kraken Express can avoid those sorts of heartbreaking (though understandable) events with Windrose over the next couple years of early access.

Pirate survival game Windrose is a megahit, but after two weeks of sailing the early access seas, a lot of pirates have run out of new discoveries and have fully explored the game's initial three biomes. Many players are naturally asking: what's next? And, perhaps as importantly: when?

Today developer Kraken Express outlined some of its plans for the future. That includes a host of fixes it expects to deliver over the next couple of weeks, including performance and stability improvements, solutions for connectivity issues, CPU usage on idle clients and servers, and a bunch of "quality of life" changes.

As far as new content like more biomes and boss, that's going to take considerably longer to arrive.

"After we’re done with the fixes described above, we plan to fully switch to the next big content update, which will introduce the next biome called Ashlands," Kraken Express said on Steam.

"The scope of what we want to do is rather ambitious, so our best bet right now [is] this update will take at least 6 months to deliver. This might sound like a long time, but we believe it will allow us to roll out an exciting and meaningful expansion to the game of appropriate quality."

"Some time ago we asked you to let us cook, and you did—it is now safe to say it was worth it. Please have faith in us once again, and we will make it worth the wait," the dev said on Discord.

"Our team was hard at work to roll out this Early Access, and we are not going to slow down. However all the new content and features we want to deliver takes time, and we do believe it is much better to roll out a big, exciting expansion-like update that you will enjoy exploring than making several small ones that will have much less impact on their own."

Kraken Express expects Windrose to remain in early access from 1.5 to 2.5 years, and estimates the game currently contains only half the content the full game will, promising "more biomes, bosses, enemies, ships, loot" are coming. A proper development roadmap hasn't been released yet, though the studio says players can "expect more information to come in a month or two." The dev also announced a new way for players to submit bug reports and feature requests via a dedicated support page.

Resident Evil Requiem offered up two protagonists, two ways of playing its horror game, and two perspectives, with the choice to switch between first and third person at any point throughout the game players could finally decide just how scary they wanted to make things.

If I'm honest, I reluctantly did my first playthrough as intended: Grace in first person and Leon in third. But then as soon as I started my subsequent playthrough I switched to third person throughout. I told myself it was so I could experience all the stumbles and falls that make Grace's third-person so unique, but frankly I'm just a coward, plain and simple. What's worse than being a coward, though? Finding out no one else is.

Director Akifumi Nakanishi recently revealed in an interview with Denfaminicogamer that a minority of players switched to third person while playing as Grace: "Looking at the data from about a month after release, we can see some interesting trends. First of all, for the first playthrough, about 90% of people play Leon's scenario in TPS mode. On the other hand, in the Grace chapter, 60% of players play in FPS mode, while 40% switch to TPS mode."

Playing through Grace's sections in first person was truly horrifying. The basement section took at least five years off my life, what with all the monster jumpscares, flickering lights, and stealth sections; my poor blood pressure will never recover.

I know I'm not the only one to have given in to the appeal of third person (it helps me dissociate). But really the choice whether to go first or third person is just a preference, driven by what other games players have experience with.

"In fact, there are clear differences in this data depending on the platform and region," Nakanishi explains. "Players in Japan and other parts of Asia tend to prefer TPS games, while on PC, the number of players who play FPS games increases."

"I think familiarity with the game genres that players are used to playing is a major factor," producer, Masato Kumazawa adds. "From the development side, the results were largely as expected."

The beauty of having two protagonists in Requiem, though, was that it would push players towards different styles. There was the action-oriented side which favoured third person for its strategic view of the battlefield which made taking on larger groups easier. Then there was the horror, which was largely Grace's domain, and which worked well with first-person because it made the action feel more chaotic and suffocating.

"In this game, we chose to feature two protagonists, Leon and Grace, who have very different gameplay styles," Nakanishi adds. "Because we were confident that this would allow us to create a wider range of emotional fluctuations for the player than ever before."

That it certainly did. Although my range of emotional fluctuations went from B-lining down dark hallways as Grace in first person with my heart in my mouth, to hunting down any and every zombie that crossed my path as Leon with absolutely no fear. There wasn't much in between, if I'm honest.