No, you weren’t being silly. Pirate survival game Windrose really was making your SSD work way too hard.
To quickly fill you in, following the game’s early access release last month, many Windrose players found themselves experiencing unusually high I/O (that’s Input/Output) workloads in certain situations. As reported by TechSpot, there were times when Windrose was “reading and writing large amounts of data to disk”, with the publication noting there could be “spikes of up to 30MB/s when the player’s character was roaming around a base”.
Meanwhile, YouTuber Pixel Operative noted Windrose could write up to 108GB/hour to an SSD (a write is the process of saving data to the drive), which could wear down the tech. In layman’s terms and just like any tool such as a mobile phone battery, the more usage an SSD gets, the more it gets worn down, until eventually it dies altogether. In the case of Windrose, the game was forcing players’ SSD to do way too much work, and many worried this would result in damage to their hardware.
Thankfully, though, these issues should now be a thing of the past, as Windrose developer Kraken Express released a patch which, among other things, fixes “unnecessary CPU usage on idle servers and clients” as well as reducing the disk usage during gameplay. Huzzah, and long live the SSDs! A more recent Windrose patch has also implemented a new storage and backup system for save files, as well as adding an updated Wolf Head item icon.
Despite these SSD niggles, Windrose has still been a success for Kraken Express (unexpected spot of poetry, there). Windrose shifted 1m copies in just six days, with the developer calling the fan support “truly heart-warming”.
Our Matt took the earlier Windrose demo out for a whirl, and he had a ship shape time with it. “Windrose already has my piratical heart aflame,” he wrote in Eurogamer’s Windrose feature. “I went from optimistic to completely sold.”
