《Enshrouded》总监承认 Keen Games 将工作室未来押注于《Enshrouded》，超500万玩家让赌注得到回报

Indie German studio Keen Games may not be a household name in the games industry, but its games have steadily improved since the days of Sacred 3, which launched in 2014. Three years later, they would launch Portal Knights, a cooperative action RPG with sandbox and multiplayer that eventually sold millions.

However, Keen's Magnum opus so far is undoubtedly Enshrouded, which the developers originally described as The Legend of Zelda meets Valheim. Launched in early 2024 on Steam Early Access, Enshrouded became a million seller in four days; by August, it had already surpassed three million units sold.

Now, with over five million players already in the bag, Keen Games is almost ready to launch version 1.0 on PC and PlayStation 5 (the Xbox Series S|X version has been delayed to Spring 2027). Ahead of the October 15 launch date, we interviewed Creative Director Antony Christoulakis to discuss the game's journey through early access and what's in store for the full release and beyond.

Even ahead of the 1.0 launch, Enshrouded is already your most commercially successful game by far. Did you expect this level of success? What do you think was the main driver?

Antony Christoulakis: We had hope that the game would be a success, but it certainly exceeded our expectations. We’ve bet the future of the studio on it, so we were driven to make it the best we can! For the first time, we had full control over the development, as we were able to self-publish. We finally could make a game ‘for us’, hoping that there will be more out there that enjoy our take on the survival genre.

It's an extremely busy time in the survival genre. Valheim and RuneScape: Dragonwilds also just launched out of early access, and Dune: Awakening got a major update. Do you feel like there's space for everyone, or will some of these games inevitably suffer from the competition?

Antony Christoulakis: I think there is space for all of them. For sure, everyone is competing for the players' attention, but survival games don’t need to capture their audience non-stop as much as, let’s say, free-to-play games. If it’s a really good game, players will return if there are regular updates. That’s at least my personal experience, while playing survival games with friends. But it’s true that the genre is getting more attention and more and more titles are being released, so maybe at some point it’s getting more crowded.

We’ll see. For now, I think all of the mentioned examples offer quite unique experiences and can very well exist next to each other. For sure, players won’t buy all of them at once, but if you enjoy the genre you’ll probably revisit them all over time.

After nearly three years in Early Access, what is the clearest example of community feedback that affected your vision for Enshrouded's 1.0 experience?

Antony Christoulakis: There has been plenty of good feedback for the game, and we already tried to address a good amount during Early Access. Fortunately, the wishes from our community overlap very well with our own roadmap for the game. But there has been feedback that we didn’t have on our radar; for example, players complained that while they play as a group, they might miss some of the quests as not everyone will join into every session.

Originally, we didn’t anticipate that as an issue, as we thought progression as a group is always positive, but the feedback certainly makes sense, so we added features to replay quests even if the group had already completed them, so you won’t miss any quest rewards. It was clear from the beginning that we wanted to work closely with our community to refine the experience (it’s for the players, right?). Fortunately, we have a very positive and helpful community, which makes us really happy!

The 1.0 update expands the Enshrouded map with a new location and new content. How will that be integrated into the world? Will it appear seamlessly in unexplored areas, require particular quest progress, or create any edge cases for players whose bases sit close to revised terrain?

Antony Christoulakis: The new part of the world was previously inaccessible to players. It’s expanding the world in the northern region where players could already see our teaser of the flying islands in the sky. It’s extending the progression beyond the Veilwater Basin, so it’s an endgame region. Existing player bases won’t be affected, so players can continue with their existing save games if they don’t want to start a fresh run.

Your focus with 1.0 combat improvements seems to be on mages. What shortcomings in the current mage experience were you trying to address, and how did you ensure those changes do not make magic the new default best build?

Antony Christoulakis: In previous updates, we already spent a lot of time improving combat, but we didn’t get to Mages yet, so it was overdue to give that a bit more love. There will be new heavy and jump attacks, many new spells to allow for more interesting gameplay like crowd control, area effects, summoning skeletons that fight for you, and more. There are new skills, and players have an extended level progression with lots of new armor and weapons to discover (for all classes). We also added a lot more enemy types to all existing enemy factions (not just new enemies in the new biome), so there is more variety and challenge across the full game.

What else can you share about 1.0 enhancements that haven't been shared with the Enshrouded community yet?

Antony Christoulakis: I think we mentioned most new features already, like our Sparkworks logic system where players can add interactivity to their bases. Think a bit of redstone in Minecraft, but different. This will allow players to create worlds with actual gameplay themselves and share that with the community via our Adventure Sharing platform. There will be more quality-of-life improvements that we might not have announced yet – for example, a nice addition to our building system that we’ll show pretty soon.

What can you tell us about your plans to expand Enshrouded post-1.0? Would you consider releasing premium DLCs, too?

Antony Christoulakis: 1.0 is certainly not the end of development for us. We plan to support the game for years to come and will continue to work on Enshrouded with our full team. We plan to add free and paid content to the game to sustain our development efforts. When we offer paid DLC, we want to offer good value to our players. We certainly don’t want to go ‘free to play’ or ‘pay to win’.

Enshrouded reaches PS5 with 1.0. What performance target and features can PS5 and PS5 Pro players expect at launch, and what are the practical reasons cross-play will not be available immediately?

Antony Christoulakis: The PS5 version will run at 60 fps on both the standard PS5 and the PS5 Pro. PS5 Pro will have enhanced rendering features. The regular PS5 will offer an alternative ‘quality mode’ with rendering features on par with the Pro, but locked at 30fps – I personally prefer ‘performance mode’ on the regular PS5 as it runs at 60fps and looks pretty close to the Pro version after all. We will have dedicated server support for PS5, but unfortunately no cross-play yet.

We still want to add cross-play and will work on that for future updates – it just wasn’t possible due to time constraints. We really invested a lot of time into optimizations for both PC and PS5 to make the game run much faster while even improving the visual fidelity. We released a video on YouTube titled 1.0 Performance Improvements that explains some of the things we did there.

Are you supporting adaptive triggers and haptic feedback? If so, will they work on PC too when using a DualSense controller?

Antony Christoulakis: We will support rumble, adaptive triggers, gyro controls for precision aiming and flying with the glider, touch pad control for scrolling the map and controller sound – all of these options can be customized. I’m unfortunately not sure right now if they can be supported on PC as well.

Is the main reason for the Xbox delay the extra challenge of optimizing the game for the Xbox Series S?

Antony Christoulakis: We certainly want to bring Enshrouded to more platforms in the future. We are still a moderately sized team, so we decided to add more platforms step by step, as each platform will create a certain overhead for each following update. Focusing on PC and PS5 first allowed us to polish these versions more. We are sorry that Xbox players have to wait a bit longer, but we’ll bring it to Xbox next year and we’ll make sure it will be a polished release as well.

Are you planning to add DLSS Frame Generation and/or Ray Reconstruction at some point?

Antony Christoulakis: Not right now, but this might be something to support in the future.

What do you think about DLSS 5? Would you consider adding it to Enshrouded or a future game of yours?

Antony Christoulakis: We don’t have plans yet, as our focus was on PC 1.0 and PS5 only for now, but we are certainly always looking for ways to improve rendering quality for the game and new technology features. For example, our 1.0 version will feature our improved voxel renderer (Brick Renderer) that allows for incredibly high detail of the voxel world in the distance. We developed our own engine for Enshrouded and will continue to add new features that improve the game.

In general, what's the stance of Keen Games on using AI tools during development?

Antony Christoulakis: We’ve forbidden the use of AI for development and assets internally for now. There are a lot of questions about copyright unresolved at the moment, so we don’t think it’s a good idea (independent of all the other questions and concerns around the topic). In the end, it’s new technology, and we are not categorically opposed to that, but we very much value the creative skills of everyone on our team to make Enshrouded a distinctly crafted experience, and that will always be more important to us than taking a bit more profit.

Thank you for your time.

About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.

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