Crosswind preview: More like Yarr-heim, get it?
By Marco Wutz
Pirates had to be an adaptable bunch, simply due to the nature of their occupation. It’s a trait they have in common with the game developers hoping to take all the romanticism of the pirate fantasy and pour it into a fun video game. Rare managed this with Sea of Thieves and Ubisoft is 50:50 so far, giving us both the excellent Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and the less well regarded Skull and Bones.
Crosswind Crew is the next studio full of blackhearted romantics aiming for the horizon with its upcoming game, Crosswind. Just like sailors riding the wind, the team already had to change course with its open-world survival-crafting game, a member tells me at Gamescom 2025.
Crosswind started development as a free-to-play live-service title, but recent failures of games with this business model led to a decision to switch things up. Instead, it will be launched under a premium model via Early Access. A recent alpha test with several thousand people reassured the team in regards to this decision.
“We were very nervous, but it ended up being pretty cool,” Crosswind Crew tells me. “We are very enthusiastic about how it’s moving forward.”
Fortunately for the studio, the change in business model didn’t affect the core gameplay, which is fairly standard for the genre: Starting with nothing, you gather resources, build up your base, and equip yourself with better items.
“We are trying to apply best practices from the other great games of the genre and improve on them,” Crosswind Crew says. But how do you stand out from such a competitive market?
Naturally, part of that answer lies in the setting. “We believe there hasn’t been a good pirate game in a while,” the team answers. “There is Sea of Thieves, of course, but that’s a very different game, right? We strongly believe that the last good pirate game was Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. It may be the best pirate game ever and it was released a long, long time ago.”
With the setting come different experiences: “We’re almost building two games in one.” There is the more traditional, land-based exploration, gathering, and building. But on the other hand, you have the entire naval experience, including ship combat and boarding. Both are built to flow into each other seamlessly. For example, players can call in their ship whenever they want, enabling them to explore an island, cross to the other shore, and continue sailing onwards without losing time to backtracking.
“One of the strongest points in favor of our game is that it provides this adventure feeling. We care a lot about exploration — how it feels, how it plays,” the developers explain. “During the alpha test, one of the things players mentioned was that Crosswind provides a lot of those Indiana Jones vibes of venturing into the jungle, finding a ruined temple, and in the end you find this cursed treasure.”
Crosswind Crew is aiming to convince players with a full package, though. From visuals over combat fidelity to equipment and progression systems, the team wants to offer high quality in every aspect.
“Maybe it’s not too humble to say, but we really think that we can make one of the best survival-crafting games out there,” the team says. “There are many very good games and we appreciate them a lot, but we believe we can compete with them.”
It’s an ambitious target, but not unjustified. What Crosswind Crew shows me at the event is quite impressive, starting with the building tools, which follow a simple philosophy: “A building system is not flexible enough if players cannot create a Millennium Falcon.”
Lo and behold, standing behind a large island base housing workshops and NPCs is a wooden replica of Han Solo’s beloved freighter. Though equipped with a physics system akin to Valheim, Crosswind’s construction tools are fairly liberal to allow players to express their creativity. Those players not too enthusiastic about building can simply put down pre-planned modules. Sharing blueprints is something that might be possible one day, but the game’s shift to a premium model has put the feature down the priority list.
The mentioned NPCs are another important part of the setting. “We believe that the pirate fantasy is also about finding your crew,” the developers explain. As you go through the game, you can find and hire characters to employ at your base or on your vessels. “We are trying to reinforce this sense of pirate camaraderie.”
At the same time, the character system solves another survival-crafting game problem: Chores. It may be fun to cut down a couple of trees initially, but doing it a hundred times more is getting repetitive. In Crosswind, you can delegate such tasks to your trusty crew members instead.
Crosswind’s world is procedurally generated, but dotted with handcrafted points of interest. You can either explore it alone or team up with two friends — though the developers hope to expand the co-op feature to allow for teams of four players.
While the developer wanted all players to have their own ships, the alpha test showed that a large number of users wished for the ability to team up and crew a single ship like in Sea of Thieves. Crosswind Crew will implement a solution for this, though the team says that it won’t dive as deeply into micromanagement. There won’t be any “running around punching fires.”
Similar to Valheim, the game’s overall progression is based on exploring different biomes and beating their bosses to advance to the next one. Crosswind Crew wants the biomes to be as different as possible, which includes introducing new mechanics and exploration options.
Combat is described as using a “Souls-lite” system. Players can chain together light and heavy strikes, parry, and dodge. Different weapon combos are possible, from two-handed weapons to hybrid styles using a cutlass in one hand and a pistol in another. Equipment has all sorts of buffs and abilities as well as unique visual effects. The developers don’t want gear to be boring — or annoying: Items are picked up automatically as you go near them.
As we explore a crumbling ruin in the Ashlands, an island devastated by an erupted volcano, we find an old journal unlocking a side quest — one of the dynamic ways the world’s lore is weaved into the gameplay. The Ashland’s unique exploration mechanic is the ash itself: Players can dig their way into it, uncovering hidden passages or buried treasures. It’s like being the first person to uncover Pompeii.
Returning from the treasure hunt, we get involved in a naval scrap during a storm, making the encounter quite challenging. Crosswind has you control the ship’s movement and cannons, so there’s a lot to do during combat. It’s not light on the spectacle either. “Cannon salvos can even hit crewmates and toss them overboard,” the team tells me. “It happens very rarely, but it’s fun to watch.”
Though ships have weak points that allow you to deal more damage, you currently can’t target individual parts like the masts, but there are mechanics for hull breaches and torn sails, so the tactical approach to sea skirmishes is something that could still be expanded. Sinking a ship is not the most lucrative business anyway, as you only get half of its loot — boarding is where the real money lies, as you get the enemy’s entire haul after your crew bests the opposing one in the melee.
Crosswind Crew is looking forward to getting the game into the hands of players, implementing more of their feedback and perfecting the fundamentals during Early Access before moving on to any bigger expansions.
“The only thing we want is for players to love our game,” the team concludes.
Crosswind is sailing towards launch in 2026 — as the crew puts it: “After Gamescom, we’ll go back home, lock ourselves in the basement, and work as hard as we can.”
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