After 505 Games decided to pull the plug on Portal Knights—arguably Keen Games’s breakout title at the time—the Frankfurt studio decided to cut their losses and go at it alone with their next project. Released in Early Access in 2024, open-world survival game Enshrouded was not just the culmination of everything the developer had learned so far, but also a sensational success in a genre crowded with the likes of Minecraft, Valheim, Subnautica, and more.
More than two years and 3M copies later, Enshrouded is gearing up for a big 1.0 release this October, a release which will bring numerous quality-of-life improvements and mark the game’s debut on PlayStation 5. Ahead of this momentous occasion in Enshrouded’s history, during gamescom 2026, I spoke with Creative Director Antony Christoulakis about why now is the best time for the 1.0 release, whether the game would be coming to more platforms, and more:
Hello, and thank you for having me! To kick things off: why is now the right time for Enshrouded to hit 1.0?
Antony Christoulakis: So, we basically completed the game as we envisioned it. When we went into Early Access in 2024, we only had half of the world filled with content. And now, step by step, over the course of our Early Access period, we did eight major updates and we are now adding the final biome. What’s more, we put a lot of polish on a lot of things; we reworked all items, all animals, all weapons, we added more heavy and special attacks, and added tons of new enemies. To make the world more interesting, we reworked all the terrain that we launched with, reworked hundreds of points of interest, and added hundreds more in all the biomes.
There is still so much we want to do, but we also want to work with the community and figure out what are the things that they like and what’s missing. We have a feedback board which you can reach from the game, but we’re also watching all the other social channels, for sure. I think we mitigated a big chunk of the major issues people had with the game, like progression or adding water to the game. And so, for 1.0, we tried to add even more to that and a lot of other aspects. We feel we have a good version now and we want to expand to more platforms: we finally have a PlayStation version coming, so that will be exciting for us. It’s a new audience that we haven’t worked with yet.
What would you say is the biggest lesson learned from Enshrouded being in Early Access?
Antony Christoulakis: So, we did Portal Knights before, which also had a period in Early Access, which went really well. But, with Enshrouded, for the first time, we had the chance to work with the community directly, since we published the game ourselves. So, we have full control over the game and we can do what we want to do. It’s nice to be in direct touch with our players. Also, we currently have a closed beta going on in the Enshrouded Discord, with the moderators and other people joining in and giving us feedback. They were super helpful for us, since we couldn’t have a look at everything: we started as a smaller team and grew over time during Early Access. Even deep into development we missed a lot of stuff, but having millions of players who definitely know parts of the game better than we do, giving us feedback was super important.
Is there anything that the Enshrouded community is clamoring for but you can’t or wouldn’t like to add?
Antony Christoulakis: There aren’t any features that I would say are a bad idea or something. There are different survival games out there with different features or a different focus. So, we always have to see how any given feature would fit in our game. For example, in the last meeting, we discussed base invasions, since we don’t have that yet. We’re unfortunately not going to have this feature implemented for 1.0, but we’re still wanting to bring that to the game—it’s not off the table or something. It’s always a question of what to do first… it’s a real struggle to pick the right things to do at the right time! The reason why we didn’t have base invasions early on is because we wanted to lean on the creative side of building. There are a lot of big questions that can be solved, but it just takes a lot of time to get there.
How do you balance feature implementation and bug fixes? And how do you decide what makes it into any given patch?
Antony Christoulakis: So, internally, we only had a very high-level roadmap of the things we wanted to do. We knew we wanted to have this final biome, for example, but we didn’t have any details for what should happen there. With regards to the updates, we always detail them once we get there and once they’re finished. And then we have a rough plan for what we want to do, but then we go through the feedback board and see if there’s an urgent need for something that we didn’t have on our radar, and then try to incorporate these things. Some stuff, like the water, took multiple updates internally… it took more than a year before we could ship it, and we shipped other updates in between.
That was a tough nut to crack, for sure! We’re working in our own engine as well, which also doesn’t make things easier sometimes. On the other hand, we can make crazy stuff with voxels, which, I think, is the standout feature of the game. But, yeah, we have different teams working on different things. And, for every update, we sit with our small design team and look at where we want to go and what didn’t make it in the last update. We always have to juggle many, many wishes. [laughs] And the list is long! But that’s a good thing about the game: we want to keep going for years to come, and so, hopefully our community stays with us for that time and can bear the wait for their favourite feature that we haven’t added yet! I think we can do more things in the future.
Will the PlayStation version of Enshrouded have feature parity with PC?
Antony Christoulakis: There will be feature parity with PC, yes. And we hope to keep feature parity between all the updates because, otherwise, shipping would also become more complicated for us. Branching off too far would make it hard to handle… we’re still a relatively small team! We have to work quite efficiently to make it all work and continue working. That’s also why some features get postponed.
Any news about an XBOX version? Also, is there any desire to eventually bring Enshrouded to Switch 2?
Antony Christoulakis: We will do more platforms, for sure. We are working on more platforms. For sure, for some platforms, more optimization will be needed. I think we have a nice PlayStation version already, but yeah, it would be next year that we plan on having a broader launch for 1.0. We wanted to have a solid game overall before we go broad, basically. And, yeah, over the next year Enshrouded will be coming to more platforms, and we’ll support all of them moving forward.
