Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship - Remastered news & patch notes

Hello Riders! 🐎 🚧 We are currently rolling out a new patch to address some bugs and improved the performance of the Winter Wonderland DLC! ⚠️ If you do not see the update available for your region, you may have to wait until it is fully available for you or trigger the update manually by verifying the integrity of your installation files!

🦟 Bug Fixes:

• Potential fix for a severe save game bug caused by overlapping mission IDs of the base game and the DLC causing the game to skip missions in some cases.
  • ⚠️Warning: this may cause some mission progress to be reset!⚠️
• Fix for DLC Photo Missions 4 and 5 not being recognized as completed in the Photo Book
• Adjusted height of the deep snow obstacles
• Adjusted the Christmas Market unlocking to work with the save game fix

🛠️ Technical Updates:

• Performance improvement
• Increased HLOD Instance Size
• Decreased HLOD Load Raster
• Switch back to traditional HLOD Settings from UE5 (HLOD Popping with old tool)
• New Instancing Tool
• Nanite Optimized Trees
• Shadow Profiling
• Material Optimization
• Optimization in Nanite Buffer
• Approximate Instances for Landscape Meshes
• On low and Mid Settings: decreased Lumen Quality
• Large Forest Imposters Lighting fix
• Lighting fix on Landscape and certain Foliage (Grass and Bilberry Bushes)
• Game Stats (VRAM 6.5 | RAM 5.5)

❤️ We are always seeking feedback to improve the performance of and any issues within the game. Please let us know what you would like us to improve. You can leave a comment here or come into our cozy Discord to discuss the game with us and other riders! See you in Kaltenbach!

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Hello winter riders! 🐎 We have fixed a few bugs and improved the performance of the Winter Wonderland DLC:

• Deep Snow Obstacles added to Mission 2, 6, 14 and 22
• Sleigh VFX adjustments for Deep Snow Obstacles
• Fixed DLC loading images accidentally appearing within the base game
• Collectables moved to ensure they can be reached in all Christmas market states
• Achievement Unlocking Fixes (Winter Wonderland, Christmas Market)
• Visual Reigns fix for Summer and Winter Mika on Horse

Multiple Performance improvements Improved adding depending on machine 5 – 10 FPS e.g:

• HLODs and WP Streaming Distance
• UDS Performance tweaks
• Triplanar Projection Performance tweaks
• Meshes Light resolution changes for non-nanite meshes
• Animals fur materials cast shadow optimization
• Horse Performance update with restructure

We are already galloping straight towards the next patch with more updates. Please let us know what you would like us to improve. You can leave a comment here or come into our cozy Discord to discuss the game with us and other riders. See you in the next update!

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Greetings Riders! Can you already hear the christmas bells? Because winter is coming earlier this year! Grab your winter clothes because Winter Wonderland is our now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3145870

Explore Kaltenbach like never before

Discover the magical Winter Wonderland with Mika and Windstorm! Experience exciting new sleigh and snowball missions, and many new collectibles to discover. Help Mrs. Kaltenbach prepare for the winter fair by setting up stalls and decorating the courtyard with sparkling lights. Load Mika’s sleigh with gifts and explore the snowy Alpine region, discovering new areas and festive activities along the way. From thrilling sleigh rides and action-packed snowball challenges to relaxing horseback rides through the snowy landscape, Winter Wonderland has something for every player to enjoy. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44962085/bab90033f4fb9859e58671f0ffdf07a48e34dee3.jpg

Features:

• Ride with Windstorm through a beautiful winter landscape
• 24 new main missions and 12 new side missions, like sleigh and snowball missions
• Special winter outfits for Mika and Windstorm
• Find new hidden collectibles
• Earn 10 extra achievements

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44962085/8d949bbc1e0c3e83e7e687fbed9c68eda50130e8.jpg

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The "Winter Wonderland" DLC transforms Kaltenbach Ranch into a magical winter landscape. Help set up the winter fair, go on thrilling sleigh rides, play around in the snow, and discover all kinds of beautiful places throughout the frosty environment. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3145870 Features:

• Ride with Windstorm through a beautiful winter landscape
• 24 new main missions and 12 new side missions, like sleigh and snowball missions
• Special winter outfits for Mika and Windstorm
• Find new hidden collectibles
• Earn 10 extra achievements

There will also be a ''Complete Edition'' available from the 7th of November with both the base game ‘Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship Remastered'' and the ''Winter Wonderland'' DLC. Watch the trailer:

Hello, Riders! It's Patch Day!!

Since the exciting release of Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship REMASTERED, we have received so much incredible feedback from the community about potential changes or issues within the game! With the latest patch rolling out today, we wanted to give a full breakdown of all changes made to the game since launch! We separated changes into these major categories: Balancing and Quality of Life Changes, Technical Updates, and Bug Fixes! Saddle up, because this is gonna be a long ride!

Balancing and Quality of Life Changes

• Improved Hiking Trail visibility
• Sprinting Field of Vision effect added
• Added new Poses for Photo Mode (Cuddling, Rearing, Walking, Sprinting, Idle, Jump)
• World Map updates (Mountainside, Mountaintop, Labyrinth, Eastern Plains, Kaltenbach)
• Added the new Intro Video to the game
• Re-enabled Force Feedback for controllers
• Added a check if the gamepad is active for some Force Feedback events
• Added minor camera game feel animations added
• Wood Footstep SFX Volume adjusted
• Added Keyboard and Gamepad mappings for the new Photo Mode and added Localization
• Implemented a failsafe for the obstacle jump so the horse can no longer get stuck when landing
• Implemented a jump tweak that improved the jumping behavior on some platforms
• Adjusted obstacle jump indicator bounds (would sometimes show perfect jump when still in normal area)
• Properly greyed out the Poses tab when jumping
• Added a UI element in Free Ride Mode to inform players of the new Photo Mode
• Added feedback (UI and controller rumble) to stamina consumption
• Updated the Windstorm Splash Screen
• Rebalanced the Ghost Races on Horse Whisperer and Njorsodsch difficulty
• Adjusted the obstacle jump indicator bounds (would sometimes show the perfect jump when still in the normal area)
• Improved background landscape
• Added DLSS as an option of choice for PC Players to Options Menu
• Added a UI element in Free Ride Mode to inform players of the new Photo Mode
• Added feedback (UI and Controller Rumble) to stamina consumption

Technical Updates

• Fixed some issues with English localization
• Corrected some animation and physics effects in both cinematics and gameplay
• Mission Static meshes can now be marked as Obstacle meshes
• Obstacle jumping now uses a smooth camera transition
• Mesh and Texture Reworks performed on Gut Kaltenbach
• Texture Rework performed on Bridges
• Polished the obstacle jump (refuse animation improved)
• Polished some foliage shader settings and adjusted them to Morning/Night/Rain view
• Polished the Jump Reset (and implemented a jump prediction)
• Polished World Map Scenes: North-Eastern Plains / Forest / Airstrip
• Upscaled Textures performed on Wagons and Houses
• Updated some mesh and blocking volume collisions
• Updated the Audio component to fit the new CCC and reenabled some horse sounds
• Included some Foliage Actors (Billberries) in the HLODs
• Disabled Depth Of Field
• Tweaked some settings for foliage and rocks in morning/rain/night settings
• Tweaked settings for the landscape grass (height and shadow)
• Set Grass Shadow enabled and tweaked the distance for performance
• Foliage now interacts with the player (by swaying)
• World Map Update: painted more grass plains
• Deactivated and deleted unused plugins (XESS, FSR upsampling)
• Removed broken rendering filters from Photo Mode
• Windstorms is no longer playing breath sounds in Photo Mode
• Improved background landscape
• Puddle decals are no longer displayed on Windstorm
• Adjusted locations for some Puddles
• Trees near the street support nanite now
• Street Crossing at train station fixed collision
• Screen Percentage has been added to options menu
• Foliage Master Material added and implemented (to reduce the overall material count)
• Mesh Master Opaque and Masked Material added (to reduce the overall material count)
• DLSS as an Option of choice for PC Players added to Options Menu
• The auto benchmark applies settings more accurately instead of defaulting to ultra (PC only)
• Windstorms is no longer playing breath sounds in Photo Mode
• Greyed out the Poses tab when jumping
• Adjusted the location for some puddles (they were not displayed correctly)
• Made adjustments to the auto hardware detection
• Reworked Mika’s Powerstop animation
• Trees near the street support Nanite now
• Reduced the overall shader count

Bug Fixes

• Fixed some issues with obstacle jumping in Easy Mode
• Fixed an issue that prevented the change of screen resolution
• Fixed an issue where the Photo Mode could not be opened when game is paused
• Fixed an issue where the horse played the walking animation on an obstacle jump
• Fixed an issue where the loading screen was cut too fast and Kaltenbach wasn't fully loaded
• Fixed an issue where some trees levitated above the ground
• Fixed an issue where the indicator for the hay minigame started flickering
• Fixed an issue where you could drain stamina while not being able to spring
• Fixed an issue where the exhaustion state was not triggered when reaching 0 stamina
• Fixed an issue where some foliage rocks had no collision
• Fixed an issue where instanced Rock had no collision (converted to static meshes with collision
• Fixed an issue where the character could get out-of-bounds (World Map Collider now unaffected by World Partition)
• Fixed an issue with the jump reset, which was not triggering correctly (Jumping into an non-navigable object now instantly resets the character with a black-fade; also should fix the falling through terrain issue which was temporarily active again)
• Fixed an issue with race conditions on some saved games (in edge cases this could lead to crashes; the game now utilizes asynchronous saving)
• Fixed an issue where a bridge colliders didn’t spawn the navmesh correctly
• Fixed an issue where the player could get stuck in a reset loop in the tutorial
• Fixed an issue where some collectibles weren't reachable due to colliders
• Fixed an issue where some buttons and sliders icons weren't displayed correctly
• Fixed an issue where a wrong style was displayed in an achievement tooltip
• Fixed an issue in the hay minigame where the player could not put down hay
• Fixed an issue where the wrong pace in the tutorial was set
• Fixed an issue where the jump prediction prevented jumping over a small fence
• Fixed an issue where the bridges didn't play footstep SFX
• Fixed an issue where some foliage bushes popped in too harshly
• Fixed an issue where the Refuse SFX could be spammed and layered
• Fixed an issue where a nanite material was used with translucency
• Fixed an issue where the Resilience Achievement could not be triggered in some cases
• Fixed an issue where a rock blocked a way in a mission
• Fixed an issue where the World Map Depth of Field affected the Care Minigame negatively
• Fixed an issue where a pursuit mission was tracked through a wall
• Fixed an issue where RVT caused artifacts on some rocks in Morning settings
• Fixed an issue where 200 decals on the world map were not set correctly
• Fixed an issue where the physical material on a log was not set correctly
• Fixed UI outline issues for the Overview Map and Mission Briefing
• Fixed an issue in the Photo Mode: Player can no longer hover with poses, if they open photo mode while jumping / obstacle jumping
• Fixed an issue in the Photo Mode: Player model is flickering while entering photo mode in jumping / obstacle jumping
• Fixed an issue in the Photo Mode: If the player plays with fixed camera and enters Photo Mode they could not rotate the camera with the right stick
• Fixed an issue where the happy animation in the horse care had an offset
• Fixed a bug that prevented mouse sensitivity changes from working
• Fixed a bug that prevented the changing of the camera distance in Photo Mode
• Fixed some mesh positions on the World Map
• Fixed a bug that prevented some players from lowering the graphic settings in the menu
• First adjustments to the auto hardware detection
• Fixed a bug that crashed the game when riding back into Kaltenbach from Free Ride Mode
• Fixed an issue that prevented mouse sensitivity changes from working
• Fixed an issue that prevented the changing of the camera distance in Photo Mode
• Fixed an issue where puddle decals were displayed on Windstorm
• Fixed some mesh positions on the World Map
• Fixed an issue that caused Windstorm to get stuck on the roofs in the area of Kaan's trailer
• Fixed an issue that prevented some players from lowering the graphic settings in the menu
• Fixed an issue that caused a crash when the character was riding back into Kaltenbach from Free Ride Mode
• Removed broken rendering filters from Photo Mode
• Fixed an issue with the collision at the Street Crossing of the train station
• Fixed an issue for lower-end hardware: Post Processing would render the World too dark on Low and Mid
• Fixed an issue in Chapter 4 Mission causing the objective meshes to have an offset to the collection area
• Fixed an issue in Gold Story Mission 5 causing the objective meshes to have an offset to the collection area
• Fixed an issue in the horse brushing mini-game where edge scrolling with the mouse would always keep rotating the camera to the minimum/maximum rotation
• Fixed an issue where the DLSS settings were not automatically excluded on console platforms
• Fixed an issue where UDS Shader changes resulted in compiler errors for the Background mesh shaders
• Fixed an issue where the Saved Game defaulted the settings for DLSS to not enabled (PC only)
• Fixed an issue where the Dutch localization for a DLSS related tooltip was broken
• Fixed an issue where some foliage assets had the wrong shading
• Fixed an issue where the game could crash at a photo mission on PS5

WHEW you made it! Proud of you! To our wonderful community: Thank you for your continuous feedback and your overwhelming support as we maintain, update, and improve Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship REMASTERED!

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Hello, Riders!

Troy here with some important updates for Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship Remastered! First above all, THANK YOU for such a successful launch!! From the whole Aesir Interactive studio, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us in your reviews. A 90% Positive rating is an incredible reboot of this journey and we are far from finished. Keep those reviews coming! 🤗 Now is actually the best time to revisit Kaltenbach Ranch and meet all your familiar friends from this incredible franchise. If you haven't picked up your copy, here are some exciting additions to the new version of the game:

• ✨ New updated graphics fidelity on Unreal Engine 5!
• 📌 New special areas to discover!
• 🚸 New hiking trails to explore!
• 🔍 New collectibles to gather!
• 📸 New robust and expansive Photo Mode!
• 🏆 New achievements to unlock and show off!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2829790/

Bug Fixes

The community has been pivotal in identifying issues and bugs in the initial release. Our developers are aware and actively seeking fixes for the following issues across all platforms, thanks to your super fast feedback!

• 🐞 Issues moving or controlling Windstorm in some levels
• 🐞 Raining effect causes graphical issues in some levels
• 🐞 Input issue when attempting to collect 5 horses in some levels

The first patch will be deployed this week, which should release this Friday at the latest. I promise to keep you updated on what to expect as each patch is certified and released for y'all. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your passion and dedication; we'll see you soon! Troy Director of Community Aesir Interactive

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Hey Horselovers! In Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered, both fans and new players can experience stunning new graphics and enhanced animations created in Unreal Engine 5, as well as a brand new photo mode to capture Kaltenbach in all its beauty!

Main features of Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship - Remastered:

- Updated graphics, featuring more details to the characters you know and love - All animals, including Windstorm, have been updated with new animations - Complete World Map overhaul with new trees, plants, lighting and weather effects - Explore every corner of the game world to find new collectibles - A new photo mode to take beautiful pictures; edit and add filters to make your photos unique! - 30 FPS support and 4K upsampling - Full controller support (Steam) - Smoother controls - Dynamic Lighting with Unreal’s Lumen System

New Trophies and Achievements, among them:

- Discover notable Places of Interest and new Hiking Trails throughout the Kaltenbach Estate - Fully upgrade each of Windstorm's primary Attributes - Recover all of Mika's lost Polaroids scattered through the region For more information about Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered, visit our Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2829790/Windstorm_Start_of_a_Great_Friendship__Remastered/ Windstorm Links: Official website Instagram TikTok Twitter Discord

Hi horse enthusiasts! We're very excited to announce Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, an epic open-world adventure game where players will explore breathtaking landscapes on horseback, featuring high-fidelity graphics and unparalleled realism in equine behavior and animation, developed on Unreal Engine 5. Taking on the role as an ancient courier rider, players will complete difficult missions, cultivate their nomad camp, and train and care for majestic horses as they unravel the mystery of Khiimori, the mythical “wind horse” and the spirit of the earth and sky. Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori will launch in Early Access on Steam in September 2024. In Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, players will embark on an epic adventure set in 13th century Mongolia, stepping into the role of a young courier rider. Horses will be essential to survival and safety as players breed horses, tame new ones and train them to aid them in their charting of the sprawling Mongolian landscape. As they immerse themselves into the game’s expansive open world full of wonders and intriguing tales, players will need to strategically plan their routes through different biomes of beautiful, yet harsh terrain, and master the challenges of the wilderness to complete their missions. Building on the open world aspect the Windstorm games are known for, Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori advances gameplay mechanics that are unique to the game’s core experience. As players explore the world and complete missions, they will cultivate their nomad camp along the way, building yurts, managing important items and resources, and training and caring for their horses. Throughout their journey, players will take on quests that test their capabilities and require riding mastery and thoughtful planning in order to build their legacy as one of the greatest ancient courier riders in 13th century Mongolia. Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori will launch in Early Access on Steam in September 2024, at a very early stage in its development, so the development team can iterate and develop gameplay based on community input. A roadmap of planned updates during the Early Access phase will be released in the coming months. To keep up to date on the latest news surrounding Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, wishlist the game! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2697000/Windstorm_The_Legend_of_Khiimori/

Hey horse lovers! We're very excited to share the news that the beloved game: Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship can be rediscovered by fans and new players in the upcoming remaster! Celebrate this with us by watching the brand new trailer and have an early look at the improvements of the game! ːsteamhappyː With Unreal Engine 5, the Remaster receives brand new, updated graphics and details for the loveable characters. Windstorm and the other animals have received enhanced animations that further immerse the players into this horse-adventure. The open world has also been improved, with new plants, lighting and water effects that invite players to explore every corner in order to find all the hidden collectibles the games has to offer. The game now lets players capture their experiences with the new photo mode. The mode offers multiple filters and editing options to make the photos look unique. Additionally, new achievements have been added and the game will offer 30 FPS support and 4K Upsampling. Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship - Remastered will be released on June 20 this year. Wishlist Now!