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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