The free add-on introduces a vast amount of enhancements for improved gameplay, including new port views, the ability to fight on land in island battles, the introduction of multiplayer modes "Beehive" and "Breakthrough", history graphs to help track long term progress, and many more new features to make East India Company a deeper experience than ever before.

“In 'Designer’s Cut', we made several improvements to the original game to make it even better," said Kim Soares, lead designer for East India Company. "Some features were chosen from the ideas presented to us by the East India Company community. This kind of feedback from the active players is invaluable, as they have spent hundreds of hours playing our game and know it inside and out."