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Witchfire - dark fantasy shooter from developers of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - now available on Early Access

Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
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Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,104
Definitely got Painkiller and some Darkwatch vibes. Also, love the "this is going to be another walking simulator" beginning of the video.
 

Hines

Savant
Joined
Jan 26, 2017
Messages
258
The Astronauts founders previously worked on the Painkiller games and Bulletstorm at People Can Fly. This could be good.


That was a great reveal trailer, and I'm glad to see the ex-People Can Fly guys get back to making shooters. That said, I bet we won't be playing it until 2019.
 
Self-Ejected

theSavant

Self-Ejected
Joined
Oct 3, 2012
Messages
2,009
Visuals look great, gameplay looks as generic and boring it can get. Moorhuhn shoot-em-up?
 

Martius

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 24, 2013
Messages
1,058
Dashing and magic looks like new Shadow Warrior. Hopefully it wont be too similar.
 

Turisas

Arch Devil
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May 25, 2009
Messages
9,926
Hope there's gore too and every enemy doesn't just burn into ashes.
 

Liquorice

Educated
Joined
Nov 11, 2017
Messages
140
It's gorgeous, but if this is anything to go by, it looks heavily scripted and restrictive. It is just a brief reveal teaser though, so we'll see.
I do hope it turns out well. The visuals are pretty awesome. I like the matte painting look on the backgrounds.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Aw, 2020: http://www.theastronauts.com/2018/12/witchfire-a-year-after-reveal/

Witchfire, a Year After Reveal
What's the status of the game? Also, announcing weekly development updates.


During the 300 years of European witch hunts that started in the 15th century, tens of thousands of women, men and children lost their lives due to superstition, politics and profit.

But that’s our history and our world.

In the world of Witchfire, witches are real.

And you are the punishing hand of the Church.

That’s the core idea behind the game, even if things are not as black-and-white as one might think.

(If you have issues with the video clips or just want the source, here)

There will be some sightseeing…



Witchfire is a first person shooter focused on challenge and mastery. We’re trying to make sure it’s accessible and there are many roads to the ultimate victory but you’ll still need to prove your witch-hunting skills if you’re after all of its secrets.

To get one thing out of the way: Witchfire is not a story-based game. There’s lore to discover and decipher, but no cut-scenes to follow. A project like that – e.g. like Bulletstorm, a game that some of us directed – would be bordering on impossible for a tiny team like ours. More importantly, though, the heart of the game is somewhere else. We will talk about it more as soon as we’re ready.

…you will meet interesting strangers…



Speaking of which, where are we with Witchfire? Why were we silent for a year?

Nothing dramatic is happening. We’re working on the game every day. It’s just that eight people, even with the help of some amazing outsourcers and a fantastic engine (UE4) can’t really move much faster with a project like this. We’re looking for just one more programmer but we still want to remain a tight team for the time being. This might change in the future, when we have all features of the game fully proven.

A lot of asset work has been done. We have dozens of guns ready, they’re being animated at this very moment. We have enough modelled and animated enemy models to make a significant portion of the game, and one of us is currently finishing the work on the core AI that will govern them all. For two years now, the graphic artists have been working on the map assets mostly using the photogrammetry tech. The actual levels are being meshed. The main features have all been designed and just wait until their implementation time comes.

…and you’ll knock on doors to meet friendly neighbours.



Still, we wouldn’t expect the game to come out in 2019. However, 2020 sounds reasonable.

So what happens now?

We’re starting Witchfire Development Updates. Witchfire Diaries. Witchfire Wednesdays. Whatever you want to call it, every Wednesday we will reveal something new about the game, show behind the scenes stuff showing how games are made (so expect a lot of crude assets, basic animations and other dirty things), or explain the design ideas. For example, we will talk why it took us a day to have a functional gun, but three months to have a great feeling one, and we will show at how we arrived at the final form of a creepy monster after the first sketch that just made us laugh.

Every time an entry is published, we will announce it both on our Twitterand Facebook. Feel free to ask us questions, we will try to answer them in one of the next posts.

And remember,

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
– Exodus 22:18
 
Joined
May 8, 2018
Messages
3,535
The Way We Tell the Story in Witchfire

Oh, so there is a story?

Normally, we’d have a development update here, or we’d take a peek behind the curtain, and then we’d finish up with a Question of the Week. But this time, we’re combining the two, as these words from one of the previous entries…

To get one thing out of the way: Witchfire is not a story-based game. There’s lore to discover and decipher, but no cut-scenes to follow.

…have worried some people:

firefox_2018-12-26_16-46-27.png


So I know that "Story" is not your main focus & I'm not asking for "Cutscenes" per say, but I'd like to know if you are going to tell a story, if there is going to be a narrative governing the game progress. Or if it is going to be minimal/non-existent ?

Otherwise I'm excited.

— Sameer Monier (@SameerMonier) December 16, 2018

Let me address this in more detail, then.

There is a story in Witchfire. It’s just that it’s not a traditional cinematics-filled journey like Uncharted or Bioshock, where you spend a relatively short time in an area, unlock a cinematic and move on to the next area. This is a format that works well in games, but it would not work for us for two reasons.

First, we’re way too small to attempt anything like that. Cinematics (aka cut-scenes) are often considered a reward, and so they need to feel like one. That’s not something we can realistically achieve.

Second, and more importantly, the structure of the game requires a different solution. I mean, in theory we could do the traditional story-telling, just using some clever, relatively cheap stuff like what Remedy did with Max Payne in 2001:

huzG5Qd.jpg


It’s just that for Witchfire, we feel something else will work better. That something is the distributed narrative: “a narrative partitioned across a network of interconnected authors, access points, and/or discrete threads. It is not driven by the specificity of details; rather, details emerge through a co-construction of the ultimate story by the various participants or elements.”

I guess this is a fancy way to say we want to do it like they did it in Bloodborne and Dark Souls. The player collects the bits of information written, spoken or existing as a visual clue, and ultimately discovers the truth. Also, this technique allows us for a bigger investment in the world rather than just the story surrounding the hero.

This is from a small fake parody account, but it actually sums up the idea perfectly:

I tell worlds, not stories.

— Hidetaka Miyazaki (@HidetakaMiyazak) May 22, 2017

A well designed world could tell its story in silence.

— Hidetaka Miyazaki (@HidetakaMiyazak) April 25, 2013

The extra benefit of such an approach is that some players can easily ignore the world and the story and just “shoot some shit”. That’s fine. But for those who care, there will be lots of dots to connect.

As a side note, originally instead of using the term distributed narrative, I wanted to write that we’re using a combination of diegetic and embedded story-telling. In my presentation at Digital Dragons 2014, I offered Soulsbornes as a great example of the diegetic story-telling (at 27:41)…



…but after some thinking, I’m no longer so sure. I mean, where do these item descriptions come from, after all? Like, we find a skull, and we see it’s called “Madman’s Knowledge” and that we can “use it to gain Insight”. How do we know that? Who tells us this stuff?

The embedded story-telling is legit, though. We use it everywhere, even though it makes the development that much harder. Everything needs to make sense, be it an element of the scenery or an enemy. Like this guy here (3D model by Marcin Klicki):

marcin-klicki-render-03b.jpg


It was not designed just so it looks cool. We went that way with Painkiller, where we started serious but ended up in later levels with evil clowns and zombie pirates. In Witchfire, we’re much more disciplined and everything matters. The rich ornamented armor counterpointed by the rotten corpse inside, the symbol on the helmet, or the glow in the eyes (as seen in the teaser video). Even the way he’s animated. It’s all a part of the bigger story, and he’s just one element of the puzzle.

So, once again, to avoid any confusion: there is a story to experience and there is a world to discover in Witchfire, and we’re investing a lot in both. It’s just that we don’t plan on having any cut-scenes. That’s it!


http://www.theastronauts.com/2018/12/story-in-witchfire/
 

Boleskine

Arcane
Joined
Sep 12, 2013
Messages
4,045
http://www.theastronauts.com/2019/02/witchfire-combat-2/

The Basic Philosophy Behind Witchfire's Combat, Part II
By Adrian Chmielarz Posted in Witchfire on 2019/02/06


Literally half of the team is sick, so no real Witchfire material this week. At least nothing visual, as what I want to talk about does concern the game.

Posted under one of our Facebook updates, specifically the one about the way we approach combat in Witchfire, a certain comment caught my eye.

To me, this combat style sound like it may become stale or predictable. For me, part of the fun of being in a gunfight in a game is the unpredictability. When you’re not always sure where you are going to be shot from, it forces you to get faster at reacting and learning to counter. If you can make it through a game unscathed then the challenge is not hard enough or the action is too slow and predictable. This leads to the problem of memorizing encounters and destroys replayability.

I find this comment legit and interesting, and it’s a good excuse to dive deeper into our design philosophy. But first, let me counter the comment’s assumptions in two ways, with practice and with theory.

The best practical example I can offer is Dead Cells. A very successful game. Replayability is its core value, and one can neither say the challenge “is not hard enough” (it’s a roguelike, after all) nor that “the action is too slow and predictable” (it’s full of mad action, and your manual skills matter a lot). And yet, no damage runs are absolutely possible.



Now for a bit of theory. Since I always operate on examples, let’s say we analyze what sniping someone in a PVP game means.

A good game, to me, is about action and reaction. The reaction part is easy. I see an enemy, I point my sniper rifle at their head and fire. To be good even at this simple little thing, dozens if not hundreds of hours are required for the muscle memory to work properly. Still, it’s all about reacting.

What about the action part, then? Well, action means the ability to plan. Planning requires at least certain levels of predictability. You can’t really plan for chaos, you can just hope for the best.

And indeed, even in PVP games, that predictability exists. That’s literally what heat maps prove. So, for example, if you know that most of the time, enemies prefer to get from A to C through the B corridor, you can hardscope that lane and take them off before they have the time to react.

But that’s not predictability at 100%, is it? If the enemy is any good, they will either use an alternate, less popular route, or they will slide through the corridor, making it harder for you to snipe them.

Funny thing is, though, that this is also predictable in a way. After all, that’s how most multiplayer maps, especially in arena shooters, are designed – for predictability. So you hardscope B ready to shoot lower if they slide in, and you check the alternate route every now and then to see if they maybe decided to use it.

What I am trying to show here is that predictability is actually inherent to gaming, even when playing against human opponents, let alone AI.

In my opinion, even if a challenge is 100% predictable, that can still provide for a super fun game. When we were making Painkiller, late nights we played a lot of Grand Turismo in the basement. Four guys, one track, one car, no “enemy” cars. Just trying to see who’s going to have the best lap time. We had tons of fun, and being limited to one track only did not destroy the replayability at all. We played on that single track for over a month!

gt1.jpg

The point is: predictability is not the enemy of gameplay, especially if the game is both about action and reaction. On the contrary, predictability, at least certain levels of it, is absolutely necessary for the experience to feel right. A good example is the second part of the comment:

To keep the fights fast paced and unpredictable with this mindset it sounds as though the character would need a fast and powerful regen ability that is not automatically but manually triggered by the player. No damage runs and high action-high-skill first person shooters have no business together as far as I’m concerned. What makes fps games fun is adrenaline packed high speed high action quick reaction gun and super skill fights where you can’t always see and predict what’s coming. If this were a strict gun based war style game maybe this would work but you have supers and magic.

Fights should have the feel of being jumped in a barfight. You’re not going to react to the dude who snuck up from behind you until you feel him hit you. From that instance the way you react and counter would determine the outcome of the fight. Point being if it’s unpredictable you’re going to get hit. If it’s predictable it’s going to get stale.

The bar fights example is great. But the thing is, once you learn that enemies can sneak up from behind, doesn’t that feature become …predictable? Wouldn’t you start to often look behind you, or wouldn’t you start positioning yourself with your back to the wall?

And we can keep introducing these surprises – people who rush at you with a broken bottle, or people who you think were knocked down, but suddenly stand up and attack when you’re not looking – but sooner or later you will know and understand all elements of a bar fight, and you will use that knowledge to try to win. It’ll “only” be the question of your manual skills and game sense.

So, predictability exists in games whether we want it or not …but it is not a word I would use to describe our approach to combat. Well, at least not in the meaning of whether encounters can be memorized or not – that’s a whole separate subject.

The word that explains our approach better is fairness. Internally, we call it “fair damage” or “avoidable damage”.

Sticking to the bar fight example…

Imagine we spawn a silent enemy out of thin air, who then attacks the player from behind. Absolutely no way to predict that, it’s always random and you can’t know it’s about to happen until you’re attacked. How is that fun? To me, that just sounds annoying.

Okay, so let’s spawn this enemy silently somewhere out of the player’s view (so it looks like he came from the street or whatever), and then have him silently approach and attack the player from behind. That’s better, right? Sometimes you will get attacked, and sometimes you will randomly turn around and spot him at the last second and panic-punch him in the face.

The problem is, “silent” is unfair. A gaming monitor’s screen is far from emulating real life. Your vision is restricted and not unlike walking around with a welding helmet on your head. You see much less than you should and there’s basically no true peripheral vision.

Or this: I’m sure we all experienced this phenomenon of knowing that someone is looking at us without actually seeing that person or having any “real” reason to believe we’re being watched. Something like this is impossible to achieve in a video game, at least in 2019.

In other words, unless compensated by special cues, being silently attacked from behind would feel unfair. When the player rightfully blames the game, not themselves, to me that’s bad game design.

So if in Witchfire we wanted to have a bar fight with people sneaking up upon us, the enemy would have to, for example, be accompanied with the sound of his heavy boots on the creaky saloon floor, and the blip on the radar.

The players would still get hit.

A lot.

But at least when that happened, they would go “Damn, I forgot to check the radar” or “I got a tunnel vision and forgot to keep monitoring my surroundings” or “I need better headphones” rather than “How was that fair?”.

I’m not saying you should get the full health back but you should never be able to go unscathed through an entire game. If you can, either the game will lose replayability or it’s predictable.

To make it super clear: with all due respect, you will not get through the game unscathed. I will not get through the game unscathed, and I doubt anyone else on the team will. I’m not even sure there is a person alive who will. Hell, I don’t even know if the final structure of the game will allow for no damage runs at all.

The “unscathed” mantra is simply just another way of saying that the way the combat goes, the player always needs to feel that when they were hit, it was because of the error they made, and not because the game is unfair. That’s all.

It’s not in the way of action and intensity, and it’s not in the way of being surprised on the battlefield.

Question of the Week
firefox_2019-02-06_20-29-14.png

First, hey, this is cool, a Witchfire subreddit!

Second, hopefully we’ll be able to show some gameplay next month.
 

Wunderbar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 15, 2015
Messages
8,809
Magic abilities, floating damage numbers?
I thought they are making old-school shooter, not some borderlands style rpg hybrid.
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
13,997
Location
Platypus Planet
The floating numbers ruin the immersion hard, especially if they are trying to make it a horror themed game. It better be optional.
 
Self-Ejected

theSavant

Self-Ejected
Joined
Oct 3, 2012
Messages
2,009
Horror themed? Maybe that was once their intention, but in these action scenes it almost looks like NuDoom in a medieval fantasy setting. A funny-bunny-hopping-shooter.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Blog post from April we missed has some explanation about that: http://www.theastronauts.com/2019/04/is-witchfire-the-next-painkiller/

Is Witchfire the Next Painkiller?
No. Saved you a click.

Some people who work on Witchfire were the creative force behind Painkiller. I guess this is one of the reasons we’re seeing this a lot of hope – be it in YouTube or Reddit comments – that our new project is basically Painkiller 2.

So to make matters clear, let me use this week’s entry to clarify that no, Witchfire is not the next Painkiller.

I guess there’s a hunger for run and gun games that even the new Doom could not satisfy. All action, no reload, no ADS (Aiming Down Sight), ultrafast movement – everything that the old school was, as was the tribute to that, Painkiller.

But while obviously Witchfire shares some DNA with these games – it’s a First Person Shooter, after all – here’s a couple of reasons why it’s not Painkiller:

Combat loop
Let’s be honest: as much as shooting monsters in the face is fun, Painkiller was mostly about two moves: backpedaling and circle-strafing.



In Witchfire, we want a much, much higher range of combat dynamics. Everyone should be able to do well if they excel at their niche: be it a close range dance with the hand cannon and a shotgun, or sniping campfest (emphasis on excel, though: you won’t survive in your campspots without perfect aim, clever use of abilities, and occasional repositioning).

We’re also extending the number of tools of destruction to your disposal. It’s no longer just weapons, but also spells of many kinds (including melee). Not to mention passive abilities…

Oddly enough, Painkiller’s Black Tarot system was our attempt at this…



…but it felt neither necessary nor was of depth we’re after.

Movement
It’s going to be fast, and you have the dash, but we put much more emphasis on physicality and immersion. ADS, weapon sway when jumping or landing (or, in general, weapon weight), different reaction to landing depending on the height of the jump, pushbacks by external physical forces – we work on a lot of these things to make sure you really feel your presence in the world.

Of course we’re not going for a realistic simulation, that’d be boring and basically unplayable. We’re making sure the control over your character feels snappy and responsive, and it doesn’t take eternity to switch weapons. However, bunny hopping around the level with the speed of light is not something we’re after either.

Loot
There’s going to be loot. Weapons will have random perks, and so will other gear.

However, we’re trying to avoid calling Witchfire a looter shooter, because we feel that it often suggests a game that’s more about the loot than the skill. The game we’re trying to make is not going to play itself for you as soon as RNGesus blesses you. Our loot is about inventing synergies and amplifying your skill with the loot but you’ll still need to keep hitting those shots while controlling the chaos of events unfolding with your movement, positioning and abilities.

Think Dark Souls. There’s loot, and you can even farm certain areas for more loot and exp, but at the end of the day there’s enough skill checks in the game that you feel you truly earned that ending.

Structure
Painkiller was a linear game and the endgame was basically people finding the fun in speedrunning or exploiting. Witchfire’s structure is very, very different, but the reveal of that is for much later.

Lore/story
There was a cut-scenes told story in Painkiller. Not that anyone really cared or that it made sense (FWIW, that was the only thing forced upon us by the publisher, details in Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Painkiller), but it was there. But no real lore and the world you could invest into and immerse yourself in.

Things are completely the opposite in Witchfire. We don’t have the traditional story-telling but we do have the world worth exploring and deciphering.

With all of the above in mind, it’s not like there are no similarities between the two games. Things are much more serious in Witchfire, but just like in Painkiller, the dark fantasy/horror undertones are very present. The craziness we have in our blood might leak into Witchfire as well. You still shoot monsters in the face. And there’s one more thing, but let’s not spoil the surprise.

Question of the Week



firefox_2019-04-18_19-17-54.png

firefox_2019-04-18_19-17-40.png

firefox_2019-04-18_19-17-19.png



To us, the damage numbers “issue” is not really an issue at all. You literally have both an enemy health bar and a damage number displayed with each hit in Bloodborne, and no one complains that this external, artificial UI elements ruin anything. When the game is done right, all such stuff becomes transparent to the player very quickly.

In a way, this topic connects to the main post: as you can see, Witchfire goes “a bit” deeper with minmaxing, builds and synergies (things that numbers help with) than Painkiller.

However, I don’t see an issue to have an option to turn the HUD off, or maybe even select elements of it, in the game menu.
 

Tancred

Learned
Joined
Jul 10, 2016
Messages
105
I'm really bothered about that rapid-fire revolver having 12 shots but when you look at the cylinder it clearly only holds six cartridges! Fucking magic!
crazyrobot.gif


Anyway seems like they intended that video to be taken in context with their devblog but I think it was a mistake to make a video so completely different in tone to the original teaser. Just about all those YT comments are negative or disappointed. It doesn't help that they're additionally tip-toeing around the 'looter shooter' phrase.

They also posted this in the video comments to ward off the negativity, take it as you will:

Fear not, we're not making Borderfire. The problem is, we're sharing various stages of development with the public -- but our work instead of looking like a real "work in progress" (i.e. no textures here and there, glitches all over the place, etc.) gives out the vibe of an almost finished game. Like: this is what we want in the final release. But that's not the case, including this very video. As an example, the colors are too happy and bright, it's just what we use at the moment before we focus on the proper "dark" atmosphere when Unreal Engine 4.24 comes out (it has a completely new lighting model, so it'd just be a waste of time to play with it now). There are also multiple other issues not clearly seen at first glance (e.g. knights are too small and move too slowly, HUD is already outdated, etc.). We might dedicate a post one day to explain how it all works, but for now: the teaser video is still our target. Not that the game will all take place in a gloomy sandstorm, but that it is a DARK FANTASY shooter. Stick with us for a while, and you'll see how it all progresses towards that goal. To hijack this comment for some other stuff others mentioned: health bars and damage numbers are here to stay. They're in every Soulsborne ever made and no one can say they ruined the mood. They offer a gameplay information (like your gun's damage fall off or which target to prioritize) we feel is important to decision making. Having said that, you will be able to turn it all off in the menu, and we also have a couple of surprises in store, too. Finally, is Witchfire a looter shooter? It's not possible to answer this with a simple yes or no (e.g. the "looter shooter" term itself means different things to different people), so we guess we know the subject of our next blog/dev-diary update. If you need a quick and dirty answer now, then no, we don't call it that, as in our heads the core value of the game is the challenge it offers, and the loot - that does exist - is merely a tool.
 

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