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

[Tyranicon]

It's Dark Souls + extraction shooter + lots of grind.

I'm level 15 + Gnosis I but have yet to fight any kind of boss.

I see a lot of complaints about difficulty but the game is very easy so far. The hardest part I've come across is a platforming section with a very annoying green light that drains your sanity. You reach the end and the rewards are very sub par too.

Most of the game is just slowly grinding on enemies with what feels like very small maps. Guns handle great though, so that helps.

Hopefully it'll get better later on.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

The game is grindy but the gunplay is great. Im playing it in small bursts, while slowlt unlocking weapons.
2nd map has the first familiar afk.

Atm im lvl 22 gnosis II

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

It's Dark Souls + extraction shooter + lots of grind.

I'm level 15 + Gnosis I but have yet to fight any kind of boss.

I see a lot of complaints about difficulty but the game is very easy so far. The hardest part I've come across is a platforming section with a very annoying green light that drains your sanity. You reach the end and the rewards are very sub par too.

Most of the game is just slowly grinding on enemies with what feels like very small maps. Guns handle great though, so that helps.

Hopefully it'll get better later on.

Btw you can unlock gnosis II pretty fast after 2. It doesnt require ALL prereqs to be completed

 

[Tyranicon]

Btw you can unlock gnosis II pretty fast after 2. It doesnt require ALL prereqs to be completed

So I rushed Gnosis II since all it took was grinding witchfire. That was before I knew it makes the game significantly harder and now I'm underleveled and undergeared for the new enemy types. That's on me for wanting to rush things lol.

 

[Tyranicon]

Looks like I finished a good chunk of the game's content:

I did not beat the Prophet of the Whispering God or whatever yet, mostly because getting to it was a huge pain in the ass.

Overall I really like the game, but it's incredibly grindy and lacks content right now. Also, a lot of the balance seems whack. Arcana feels like it has 10% useful effects and 90% completely useless crap, and the prophecies were basically not worth picking up. The guns are the same way, 90% of the available weapons were weak, but then you had extremely overpowered stuff like Hangfire (grenade revolver that detonates on reload) and Hypnosis (bolt action that gives you huge damage bonuses for proper timing).

That being said, once you get into the groove, the combat of this game is amazing. Easily one of the smoothest FPSs I've played in a while. Also, pinning enemies with the Stirga (magic slingshot? that launches sharpened logs) never gets old and it's my favorite gun despite being a little underpowered.

Looking forward to full release.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I think the weapons are balanced fairly well. Most people seem to like the Hangfire (and I mean, it's just so damned satisfying to use) but otherwise people's preferred weapons were all over the place AFAICT. Personally I like the Hailstorm as it has way longer effective range than the Hypnosis, and up close the Echo shotgun is my favourite for the elemental status it inflicts. The fast firing weapons work really well with the chain lightning relic. Arcana is kind of the same way, everything is very specialized and needs to be used with the right synergies to really shine. Which the prophecies help with.

It definitely needs some more content (the different areas are at least decently varied, there really needs to be better incentives to visit them all instead of whichever you feel is easiest) but that's a given.

 

[Zeriel]

It's Dark Souls + extraction shooter + lots of grind.

I'm level 15 + Gnosis I but have yet to fight any kind of boss.

I see a lot of complaints about difficulty but the game is very easy so far. The hardest part I've come across is a platforming section with a very annoying green light that drains your sanity. You reach the end and the rewards are very sub par too.

Most of the game is just slowly grinding on enemies with what feels like very small maps. Guns handle great though, so that helps.

Hopefully it'll get better later on.

I really hate the Dark Souls comparisons because they feel so off to me. Just having a stat distribution system or "XP currency spending" doesn't make something a Soulslike. I mean, sure... there are "similarities", but in the same sense that there are similarities between Doom and fucking Diablo. They are so different that the comparisons end up confusing more than enlightening people on what to expect, imo.

More on topic, I'd highly recommend this game to anyone who is looking for something different in the shooter market. It's got a really nice gameplay loop. I'm not a fan of extraction games at all, but it works here. The gradual (or not so gradual) climb from being clueless to mastering the enemy types and maps is really satisfying. I suppose if I could understand a comparison to Dark Souls, it would be to 1 or 2, and not Soulslikes in general, in that sense that the difficulty arises mostly from lack of knowledge, and once you have that knowledge everything clicks into place and mastery happens regardless of some intrinsic twitch skill.

Superficially, the Painkiller dev influence is very noticeable and appreciated. Great moment to moment gunplay and I love the aesthetics and overall "flavor".

 

[tritosine2k]

I really hate the Dark Souls comparisons

Wtf. How do you even knock off bloodbrown in a more philistine fashion.
Like cdprojekt rips off GITS left&right.

It's blatant.

 

[Ravielsk]

So following all the praise here I decided to get it on sale and I have to say I regret the purchase. This is a 20€ beta that might in the future be worth the 40€ asking price but currently its more a very well done proof of concept rather than anything else.

For every neat idea the game has there is a moronic counter to it that essentially invalidates it. For example the game gives you a dodge to reveal enemy weak points, great idea solid way to reward accurate shooting. But then it binds said weakpoint mechanic to you having 100% stamina. So if you jumped, ran prior to battle or god forbid got hit a second ago that entire mechanic is effectively disabled. Worse yet weapons in this game have essentially 0 accuracy outside of scoped in mode so even when you reveal said weakpoint there is still a 50% chance to completely miss it because you did not scope in when shooting.

This is essentially the same as if Elden Ring temporarily disabled poise damage for enemies after the player got hit. Its just a weird limitation, especially when there is already a stamina bar there to prevent the player from just spamming the move ad infinitum.

Or how about the weapons. All very nice and fun initially but all faceplant hard around the third level because the number of enemies and their HP rockets far past what those weapons are capable of. So by the time I am hitting the third encounter in the castle I am already running dry and outside of the RNG ammo chest there is nothing I can do about it.

Genuinely feels like the game is being made and balanced around some future additions and/or cheese builds that I simply do not have.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Or how about the weapons. All very nice and fun initially but all faceplant hard around the third level because the number of enemies and their HP rockets far past what those weapons are capable of. So by the time I am hitting the third encounter in the castle I am already pretty running dry and outside of the RNG ammo chest there is nothing I can do about it.

What weapons are you using? Some of them are way more ammo efficient than others. Sometimes you want to use the 'kill it right the fuck now' guns, sometimes you want the 'I can kill dozens of you with this' guns. I never found myself having any ammo issues unless I was using specific weapons like the Psychopomp and Hailstorm together, or whiffing a ton of shots or wasting them by firing from out of range, but that shit's on me obviously. Relics and spells can save you a ton of ammo as well, not to mention getting multiple kills with a single shot from the demonic weapons. You also get drowned in ammo if you fight through a cataclysm.

 

[Tyranicon]

Also some weapons are plain better. Hangfire (grenade revolver that detonates on reload) is so good that mathematically it probably doesn't make sense not to have it equipped for most tasks. Meanwhile the SMG-type weapons seem to be meh at best.

I will agree that late game enemies are super tanky for no reason at all.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I mentioned it before, but the SMG weapons are pretty good with Kirfane. Free lightning bolts once per second does crazy shit when you pair it with other elements.

 

[Damned Registrations]

For example the game gives you a dodge to reveal enemy weak points, great idea solid way to reward accurate shooting. But then it binds said weakpoint mechanic to you having 100% stamina.

Fired it up again to check I wasn't going crazy, and I'm pretty sure the mechanic actually requires you to have over a certain flat stamina threshold. If you level up your stamina, you can afford to dash or run around a bit and still reveal weakpoints with a dash. The game, admittedly, is shit at explaining how this works. Basically, if your bar is yellow/longer than the notch in it, you can use the mechanic. Also, your max stamina goes down when you get injured, but goes back up when you kill shit. You can definitely get into a sort of death spiral situation where you take a bunch of damage and then lack the stamina to properly run away/fight back and take even more damage.