In the ever-expanding sandbox survival genre, only a few recent titles have managed to capture the attention of players quite like Enshrouded. Currently in Early Access and developed by Keen Games, it’s a blend of survival action RPG elements, featuring a detailed and highly customizable world full of exploration, crafting, and intense combat. With its lore and immersive co-op friendly gameplay, it has quickly become a favorite among gamers.
In this exclusive interview, we delve into the development of Enshrouded, speaking with Keen Games to uncover the inspirations behind the game, the challenges faced during development, and what players can look forward to in future updates. Join us as we gain insights into the creative minds that brought this successful Early Access title to life.
How did the idea for Enshrouded come about?
The design for Enshrouded evolved naturally from the experience we’ve had with the development of our previous title, Portal Knights. It was clear that at some point, our publisher (who owns the Portal Knights IP), would stop further development, so we took our learnings of what we’d like to do better for our next project and started outlining the design for Enshrouded. We wanted to create a more advanced building system based on a voxel world to really embrace player freedom and creative expression. We also wanted to make a handcrafted and continuous open world, so exploration & discovery feels meaningful. Challenging combat with free class development was also important to us, as Portal Knights felt too button-mashy (it was aimed at a rather young audience) and we also wanted players to experiment with a free class building system. The idea for our split world existed even much earlier than Portal Knights, but back then the project felt too ambitious. With Enshrouded, all our goals clicked well together and we felt ready to go for it. In general our goal was to make Enshrouded a ‘place’ where you can go on adventures with friends and fully embrace player freedom and creativity.
Can you discuss the team’s approach to integrating the survival, crafting, and action RPG elements seamlessly within the game?
For us the survival-crafting experience is generally defined by the mix of features, and that you have a lot of freedom to do many things in a single game. The idea is that you can play together with a mixed group of friends and everyone can contribute something to the group’s success. Not everyone needs to be equally skilled in combat, some might focus more on building, or farming, or exploration and that’s fine. On our journey towards Early Access, we had a lot of debate: which features could be cut (and maybe added after release) and which ones needed more depth and polish. Our main focus was to have a well-balanced core game for early access that players can truly enjoy already, so we have a solid foundation to expand and build on. Similar to Valheim, we deliberately softened a bit on the survival side (so you don’t die from hunger, but rather get rewarded with buffs for eating), but we also plan to strengthen that with some future additions. I hope we created a good balance of progression and the combination of skill and stats based combat. It’s not easy to distribute and scale the player’s different sources of power between all systems and in single and multiplayer. We favored creative building over things like base invasions which can destroy something you’ve invested a lot of time in, but we will look into that as well again. For sure not everything is ideal yet, but that’s what early access is for – to continually refine and expand towards our full release, and we are really thankful for all the constructive feedback we get from the community, so we can build towards that goal together.
How has the Early Access release on Steam influenced the development of Enshrouded? What feedback from the players has been most valuable?
It was important for us to have an Early Access phase for the game. The game is quite complex and it’s hard to anticipate the perfect balancing or right mix of features without getting any outside feedback. Fortunately, we have a very active community and there are already thousands of suggestions in our ‘feature upvote board’. That was also a reason for us not to launch with a fixed roadmap, but rather gather feedback first, align that with our own plans and release a roadmap a bit after launch. For sure there are a lot of things we want to add or improve anyway, but there were also things we didn’t anticipate. For example, one of the biggest issues was that players wanted to have an option to complete all quests on their own even when they played as a group on a dedicated server. We’ve recently added a solution for that with our latest update. We will continually look into player feedback on all channels (the feature upvote board, our Discord community, Reddit etc.), so please continue to help us.
The art style of Enshrouded is distinctive and atmospheric. Can you elaborate on the artistic direction and the process behind creating the visual aesthetic?
We’ve recently started to share some of our concepts on social media, so I’m happy to hear you like the look of the game. We will continue to refine the visual quality both from an art design and technical rendering perspective. Fun fact about the look of the game is that it had a more stylized look in the beginning. It’s still slightly stylized, but we shifted to a ‘more realistic’ approach due to early player feedback. A key thing for us was the split world where you have the world above the Shroud which is more friendly and beautiful, so you can build a cozy home anywhere in our world, but also have the much darker and mysterious world below the sea of clouds where the world transforms into something new.
What were the key inspirations for the narrative in Enshrouded, and how do you plan to develop it further?
We still have some work to do to flesh out our world towards our 1.0 release (and that is certainly not an endpoint as we plan to support the game for many years to come). As explained earlier the idea for the world was around for a bit before we started the project. A core theme was to have a ‘post-apocalyptic’ fantasy world that embraces the romantic beauty of abandoned places. There are big communities around this topic on Reddit for example, and for me that was always a fascinating topic. For sure there are always many sources of inspiration, like the movie ‘The Fog’ (I’m a Carpenter fanboy), paintings by William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich and much more. The world and its lore has been designed by a team, so there are many ideas coming together. Overall it was important for us to create a world that has history and lore – that feels like a place, and it’s not so much about literal storytelling. Unfortunately I can’t tease any future updates yet 😉
Can you share any details about the upcoming features or content planned for Enshrouded as it progresses through Early Access? What are some of the challenges that will need to be tackled?
I would recommend anyone interested to check out our roadmap. We’ve already added some of these features, but there is still a lot to do. It also doesn’t include everything we plan to add during early access and it’s obviously a ‘living roadmap’, so we can include new feedback along the way. There are some technically challenging topics like weather or water for example, but also things like making the game more connected and enabling sharing of player created locations much easier. We’ve already added some new members to our dev team to push forward with new content and features.
What are your long-term goals for Enshrouded beyond Early Access? How do you envision the game evolving?
We will continue to flesh out and expand the world and overall experience far beyond our ‘full release’. The fact that millions of players already joined us during early access is giving us confidence that Enshrouded will earn its place within the survival sandbox space. A key goal for us is really to make the game a connected space where it’s easy to find others to play with (although we will also always support single player) and where players can also share what they have created with the community in an accessible way. I’m amazed every day to see what players have built in the game. We are really lucky to have such a nice and friendly community already and would love to see it grow, so please join our Discord if you haven’t already and help us to shape and refine Enshrouded together!
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