The soundtrack itself doesn't have any credits listed. On their soundtrack store page on Steam, it says "Kraken Express" (the development company) is the artist, composer, and label, with an "other credits" featuring Seán Dagher.

To each their own.

I find the sea battles got boring really quick. I think the game devs knew the sea battles would get boring fast, which is why they have such extensive options for fast travel in the game -- to avoid the 'focal point' of sea battles/sea travel.... they implemented systems to avoid what they try and promote as a key feature of their offering. It feels sorta like selling an FPS based on its first person shooter gameplay, but then implementing a bunch of features like AI bot control, mission spectator mode, etc, to make it so players don't have to do any FPS gameplay..... because you've made it so boring you know no one is gonna stick around if they gotta play your game the way its marketed.

There are, though many have focused a bit more on flying ships. For example: Lost Skies, Forever Skies. Though I didn't say 'vehicular' stuff in my comment, because it's more the broader category of open world survival crafting that's saturated with half complete/abandoned early access games. Vehicular combat in Windrose is just a 'niche' gimmick they're trying to use to differentiate their offering a bit, and to distract from the weakness of the games play loops in other areas. Even the vehicular combat is pretty routine/mundane after one or two sea battles, as Windrose basically uses the same mechs for all its sea battles currently, with level gating being the only thing impeding progression -- eg. You fight a level 2 boat, it's the same as fighting a level 13 boat, things just hit harder and you need more hp. I mean, it doesn't take much to pause and think "Hey, this is a game about pirates/piracy, why aren't there merchant ships to pirate, in a pirate game?" or "If sea travel/open seas combat is meant to be a focal point in the game, why is 95% of travel done via fast travel points, avoiding open sea travel/combat?" (its likely because they realised how boring/monotonous that sea combat would get for players as they progressed, but rather than address that weakness, they put in a "quality of life" benefit to try and mask it). Even in terms of coop play, it's more that you each get your own boat -- a missed opportunity in my view, to have deeper gameplay of having players actually play different functional roles on a single boat, working together as a unit on the high seas.

Just to disambiguate a bit too, EA in the context I used it was about Early Access, not Electronic Arts. I'm not totally sure if that was miscommunicated, as your comment sorta works even with the distinction, but it's a bit confusing when I read your response and you use EA to ref the company.

As for things getting supported etc, it's a double edged sword. I still view Valheim as being a gold standard for many Open World Survival Crafting gameplay options/features, but it's been in EA now for like 5+ years, with very little progress made generally speaking -- they've added a bit more content, and made some minor mech tweaks, from a player perspective. They haven't moved on to a "Valheim 2" where they could make bigger changes/progress in the genre. Other developers have so far failed to meet certain 'standards' that Valheim set for the genre, and without that studio pushing things forward, the genre feels like its stagnating with sub-standard offerings that chase weird 'niches'/gimmicks to hide their failings. Like think about proc gen as a game feature in owsc games, and how it enriches the exploration/replayability of the game -- Valheims implementation of it is 'ok', but it's not really that random or flexible, in that what they did was generate a large map (4x larger than playable space), and then their 'proc gen' just plops down a pin somewhere as the start spot, and then randomizes the biomes on the pre-determined landmasses surrounding. Improving that, and getting truly randomised land masses, as well as the option for players to select world sliders for 'continents' or 'archipelago' or 'pangea', or 'land locked lakes' type configurations, is a logical step forward. Such things are pretty much missing though, even 5 years on. We instead get other studios devolving on the randomness of worlds (Enshrouded for example, with its static world / highly guided progression), or we get these infinitely repetitive and meaningless 'island' setups like in Everwind. Or we get some frankenstein between the two, like Windrose. None of these approaches is improving on replayability or exploration gameplay -- they're regressing. I'd be more than happy to pay a single AA studio $20-30 per year if they were making clear progress / making games with new/cool/progressively better gameplay and features.

But, yea, what we get ain't that, be it triple A or double. But $30 now and then, is less painful a trade to get half-ass junk, than $80 + all that paid DLC you mentioned, which is still sorta half-ass junk.

Whether one likes the game or not is whatever, I just take issue with the article pretending these 2 games are at all comparable beyond being games about pirates. Is Windrose also what TES: Redguard was supposed to be?