Gameplay looks shit. Case closed, your honor.
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Witchfire - dark fantasy shooter from developers of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - now available on Early Access
- Thread starter Boleskine
- Start date
Gameplay looks shit. Case closed, your honor.
New update
Early access has been delayed to 2023.
Early access has been delayed to 2023.
In the blog post with the Summer game Fest trailer, we wrote:
It’s only the second week of Q4 2022 but I am here early to tell you: we are not going to launch to Early Access in Q4 2022. We are now aiming for early 2023. That is three “early words” in one paragraph. No, wait, four.
Usually, games miss their target date simply because developers underestimate the time needed to make a good game. It’s as simple as this. While we have not 100% committed to a day, month or even a year, we can also admit we will release later than anticipated. However, in our case, the reason is different.
And that reason is: we have redesigned the core experience of the game.
Well, not all of it. But a certain crucial element nonetheless.
To be clear, Witchfire is still a rogue-lite dark fantasy first person shooter. That did not and will not change. But the way the player experiences the world has changed significantly. We’ve upgraded combat and exploration from arena style to semi-open world style, and that took time.
I honestly thought that if we were ever late it would be because we tried to make a game that was too big or too complex for a small team like ours. While that is somewhat the case, there’s a pretty big chance we would have released in a month or two if not for the redesign.
All right, so what that redesign is about?
Originally, Witchfire offered you these vast regions to play through in a specific, very rogue-lite way. You enter an area, fight some monsters, and then have a choice: take this reward and go left, or take that reward and go right.
Hades is a good example of this approach. Here is the hero/player deciding between two rewards and thus paths:
Hades
There are many rogue-likes and rogue-lites with such design. From The Binding of Isaac through Slay the Spire to Returnal. Basically, the game world in such games is a series of connected areas, each with two, three or four exits:
Slay the Spire. Sometimes it’s a choice between Treasure and Treasure and that’s ok.
Returnal. Like Hades, built out of (wonderful) prefab arenas.
But how did it work in Witchfire? Don’t we have, as I just said it earlier, “vast regions”?
Well, here’s where magical barriers enter the play. Two years ago, in one of the updates, I wrote:
A magical barrier from Devil May Cry.
And barriers made sense. They helped control the flow of the game, and lore wise, they were witch’s traps. They were invisible from far away, and only materialized when the player got pretty close to the edge of the combat area. So they were not obstructing the view, and never got in the way. Well, other than blocking the player from progressing until enemies were dealt with.
In theory, then, we had the best of both worlds: barriers that served the rogue-lite gameplay while being kind of invisible.
Let me share a secret now, one additional idea we had (and prototyped, was working great) was that every new area finished by the player was merged with all the previously conquered ones. So imagine starting the game in the Camp near the castle, then fighting on the Bridge, then entering the Castle Hall. Because at this point both the Camp and Bridge are yours, you could retreat from Caste Hall, have enemies follow you through Bridge to Camp, and fight them over there.
But you could only retreat to the previously conquered territories, never push forward. Because: barriers. Still, the feature was something we have not seen before, and was quite fun.
A couple of months ago, though, I realized I hated the barriers.
Sure, they made sense, blah blah. But they felt old school, looked kind of bad, and limited the potential of the game. I knew I could not stand them anymore.
“Look, guys. We have these beautiful open regions, but during combat it’s all merely a decoration. It’s fake. I can’t use the environment to the max because I am limited by the barriers. I propose we remove them and redesign the game for that semi-open world experience.” – I said during the next meeting.
Almost everybody protested. Barriers are fine. We are too close to the Early Access release. This is too much for the player to handle. You get the idea.
Karol, who designed a lot of the game and implemented most of the gameplay, was protesting the most furiously. He argued that redesigning and rewriting all the systems connected to combat and traversal will take months, and it is not clear that the outcome will be even worth it.
However, I am not only a seasoned designer but was also a lead (and only) programmer for quite a few years early in my career. So looking at the systems and what we had I felt he was overreacting and the task was very much doable and relatively easy and fast.
I was, of course, wrong, and Karol was right.
Clusterfuck is maybe too strong of a word, but things were going neither smoothly nor fast. And whatever little we had was indeed just …bad.
After almost two months, I was ready to give up. I asked Karol if maybe we should go back to the barriers.
I expected an easy yes, because he was clearly not a fan of the new direction. Instead, he replied with: “No, hold on, I am actually seeing potential in this…”. And I knew he was having fun again, and if he was having fun, we were on the right track after all. So the new direction was not cancelled and we continued working on it.
To give you a small example of why this feature was a pain to develop… With the barriers, you trap the player, spawn the monsters, and voila: either they kill the player, or the player kills them, the barriers go down and we can move to the next area. Clean. Under supreme control. Easy.
With the semi-open world, the player can enter the area, spawn the monsters, then …escape. Should the enemies stay? Should they follow? But what if the player runs to another new area and triggers even more spawns? Should both groups of monsters merge? If so, what reward should the player get: one from the new area, or from the old one, or both? If both, isn’t it basically an incentive to run away to a cave and kite enemies to a narrow corridor? And what about the player just running amok and triggering one area after another, can the game handle a hundred enemies at once? Certainly not, so what do we do? Despawn? Freeze those behind walls?
Etc. etc. Hundreds of questions that needed answering. Hundreds of small solutions that needed implementing.
The feature is now 95% implemented. It makes the game better. It is kind of hard for me to imagine the player did not have that freedom before. Sure, you can still be trapped by the witch in this or that spot, and some doors will be closed until you find a key, and it might be too dangerous to enter areas closer to the boss before you are ready – but the world is wide open for you to explore in almost any order, and you can both push forward and retreat as you please.
It’s funny, but the whole thing made this fantasy game more …realistic.
But yeah, the cost of this is we are not ready with the game just yet. We have “lost” a few months with the redesign, and are only now back on track with the regular development. The good news: a great programmer and designer joined us recently, so the team got a bit bigger and that should help keep the development nice and steady.
Last but not least, expect something nice in a week or two. Let’s call it Witchfire Halloween Week. It won’t be any gameplay footage or stream or such, but if you are interested in the story and the world and great 2D art, it’s going to be a treat.
Question of the Week
Facebook or Twitter, we keep seeing this question:
We already said it when announcing that Early Access is exclusive to Epic Game Store, but of course some people might have missed the message, so here it goes again. After the Early Access phase, we will release on other platforms.
Epic is fine, Epic Game Store is fine, we like our cooperation. But the choice of where to buy Witchfire is yours. If you want to support us and play the Early Access version, it is coming to EGS soon. If you prefer Steam or maybe you don’t even play on PC and want a console version, just please wait a little longer, until the game is done. As simple as this. Peace <3
Rocket-Propelled Game
Educated
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2022
- Messages
- 187
Oh my God. I forgot this existed (despite being initially psyched about it because it was from the Painkiller devs) and hearing it's STILL not even in early access boils my blood for some reason. 
I effectively left the boomer-shooter community late last year and I feel like I'm missing less and less. I know programming is hard, but this is a relatively normal shooter! Not a giant MMORPG from scratch! This isn't rocket science! Where the Hell is the work ethic?
I effectively left the boomer-shooter community late last year and I feel like I'm missing less and less. I know programming is hard, but this is a relatively normal shooter! Not a giant MMORPG from scratch! This isn't rocket science! Where the Hell is the work ethic?
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Baron Dupek
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2013
- Messages
- 1,870,856
After trying to parrot Destiny 2 for years they jumped into even more time&resource waster?
petty lies
Friendship with Destiny 2 ended, now open world garbage is my new friend?
oh yeah and Chmielarz humbled up at the same time
petty lies
Friendship with Destiny 2 ended, now open world garbage is my new friend?
Peacefriend
Novice
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2014
- Messages
- 37
I don't think I've played an FPS with double jump, but on the surface of it it sounds ok to me?
Why is that such a commonly criticized feature?
Insect Hordes
Augur
looks like bioshlock infinitron
vortex
Fabulous Optimist
Baron Dupek
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2013
- Messages
- 1,870,856
Still skeptic since this is dear eshter / amnesia machine for pig dev. This is just the most wait and see moment.
Wunderbar
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2015
- Messages
- 8,818
wut
dear esther / amnesia a machine for pigs devs are working on vtmb2. This one is being developed by polaks who previously made Painkiller, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
Oh wait i am wrong. The devs made everybody gone to rapture not ethan carter. They look so similar it just blend together. Sorry
Ivan
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2015
- Messages
- 4,524
Wait, what? How did I miss that?
Anyway, Painkiller is a competent shooter, at least the installments I played. So this might be worth a look.
tritosine2k
Erudite
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2010
- Messages
- 1,492
Could be good with mods.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,504
Early Access on September 20th:
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/n...oming-grimdark-roguelite-witchfire?lang=en-US
Inside the mysteries of upcoming grimdark roguelite Witchfire
6.8.2023
By Brian Crecente
“I genuinely don’t think anyone outside the studio understands what Witchfire really is. That’s expected, we’re not really showing a lot, are we? But that will change soon and I think people might be surprised with what they’ll see.”
Adrian Chmielarz, creative director at and co-founder of The Astronauts, hopes that the new trailer for Witchfire that hit tonight during the Summer Game Fest will be part of that journey of discovery.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s still a dark fantasy first-person shooter with guns and magic. But I think the way we went about it is relatively unique. Hopefully, we chose wisely, and players will like it. We’ll see soon enough, September 20 is not that far away.”
Where the last few trailers for Witchfire were very combat focused, the Summer Game Fest trailer shown tonight starts off a bit slower in a bid to underscore some of the more explorative moments of the game.
“I think (the last few trailers) gave the wrong impression that Witchfire is a non-stop action fest,” Chmielarz said. “It is not. Sure, some fights will be incredibly intense, but there are also periods of quiet exploration, planning, thinking. It is much closer to Souls in that regard rather than, say, Doom.”
In the trailer’s opening seconds, we see more of the landscape and settings for the game then enemies or battle. But that changes halfway in, with the trailer showing off a mix of enemies and frenetic combat as “the witch hunt begins.” The trailer wraps up with news that the game launches in Early Access on Sept. 20.
It’s been a nearly seven-year journey for the team of ten developers at The Astronauts. Witchfire started life as a sci-fi survival title before evolving into the title it is today: a dark fantasy roguelite first-person shooter. In it, players take on the role of a Preyer, an immortal witch hunter crafted by the Church using pagan magic to hunt and kill an infamous witch with the help of a gun and spell.
That journey from sci-fi survival to grimdark shooter brought with it changes just as significant as its shift in setting, tone, and genre.
Most recently, the team decided to shift the title from arena-style to open-world combat. While Witchfire is not a fully open world game, it does now feature what the studio calls open world levels. That means it will be up to the player to decide how and in what order to explore a given area. The change to this new approach from one that was more akin to something like Killing Floor led to significant work and the decision to push the date for Early Access to this year.
“It was the right choice for the game, but it is a pain, oops, I mean, a challenge to design around,” Chmielarz said. “Not just a technological challenge like how to handle the extra number of enemies, but also purely a gameplay challenge like pacing or the highly increased number of opportunities to cheese encounters.”
But Chmielarz said that the decision didn’t just make the game better, it “made it a different, much better game.”
“I strongly agree with (psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s) self-determination theory that puts emphasis on intrinsic motivation driven by the need of autonomy, competence and relatedness,” he said. “As you can imagine, opening up the world heavily improved the feeling of autonomy, and now also offers more avenues towards competence. I could not be happier with our decision, even if it did delay the game by, like, a year or so.”
Some of the motivations that the work Chmielarz and the team at The Astronauts are doing on Witchfire tap into a surprisingly eclectic mix of inspirations and design concepts.
For instance, Chmielarz told Unreal Engine last year that the game was being designed as a roguelite for people who hate roguelites.
In our more recent interview, he noted that to him, roguelikes and roguelites are about the emotions heightened due to the fear of losing what you worked hard for.
“That is definitely present in Witchfire,” he said. “Many other typical elements are present, too, like randomized encounters. But on the other hand, we did come up with a couple of pretty fresh things in our designs. We’re not ready to reveal them yet but to give you an idea, we attempted to solve the unsolvable: a game with RNG for variety but also one that allows the players to master encounters.”
He added that Soulsborne games are easily the most inspirational creations for the team and Witchfire.
“The games of FromSoftware are one of the best things that happened to gaming in the last few decades, and obviously, we are not entirely free of their charm,” he said. “Everything else inspires us on a smaller scale. We studied the gunplay of Destiny because Bungie has that one thing nailed. We read Berserk to understand how fearless a story can be. We returned to Painkiller to see if there’s still something to its Black Tarot. And so on and so forth, there’s always something we discuss and learn from, be it what to take and evolve or what to avoid.”
The game’s story – a topic of much interest for fans of the team that also created the narrative-driven game The Vanishing of Ethan Carter – is another point of fascinating discussion.
The Astronauts was originally formed so that Chmielarz and the rest of the team could focus on creating narrative-driven games, like The Vanishing. But it was that 2014 horror adventure game – winner of a BAFTA and still highly regarded among fans – that also opened Chmielarz eyes to the fact that the studio’s efforts may need to be a bit more broad.
“I was happy with how The Vanishing of Ethan Carter turned out but I realized that despite our best efforts, this was not a template,” he said. “You couldn’t just take this game’s structure and tell a different story. I knew what the next step could be and how to evolve the narrative genre but it was and still is a super costly and super risky vision. So we started to look in a different direction.
“Or maybe it was just the beginning of a new cycle for us. Because previously, after I designed an adventure game, the next project was always an action one. After Teenagent it was Katharsis, after The Prince and the Coward it was Painkiller, after Come Midnight it was Bulletstorm … So maybe it was always inevitable that after the story-driven experience like Ethan, the next project would be another first-person shooter.”
Ultimately, he said, the directive of the studio is also tied to the inspiration for its name: The Astronauts.
“Any world we want to visit, we can. Actually, that’s why we named ourselves The Astronauts. To emphasize the journey into the unknown, the adventure of discovering new worlds.”
So the work of story-telling in Witchfire seems to be taking a page or two from authors like J.R.R. Tolkein and Ernest Hemingway. It will also expand during Early Access, which is initially more focused on gameplay and general atmosphere rather than lore and story.
“I can’t quite say it yet that I like the way we’re selling this world to the players,” said Chmielarz. “I can tell you, though, the two pillars of our approach to the world design. The first one is taken from Hemingway, particularly his Iceberg theory. Basically, the idea is that while we don’t reveal it all to the player, we have to know everything there is to know about this world. No shortcuts, no questions unanswered. So, for example, while the players might not learn why is it that only witches can use magic, we, the creators, need to know this and have the entire backstory ready.
“The second pillar is Tolkien’s ‘distant mountains’ approach. Let me quote him directly. In one of his letters, he said, ‘Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.’
“As you can see, there’s a bit of that Hemingway’s Iceberg in his approach, with the conviction that some mystery needs to remain as such. But it’s also clear he believed having a ‘history in the background’ makes the world that much more believable and interesting.”
While we don’t yet know what that history in the background will be, we have gotten a few tantalizing tastes of it in the form of a short story written by Chmielarz and some excellent art prints created by different Polish artists. Both can be found on the game’s website.
“The thing that excites me the most in video games is the idea of experiencing different worlds,” Chmielarz said. “To be a space pirate, a detective with supernatural powers, or a Church’s witch hunter. It doesn’t matter to me if the game is focused on the story or on the mechanics – I need its world to feel like a real place.
“So even though Witchfire is obviously a shooter first, we invest a lot in its world and lore. I believe this enhances the experience even for the people who claim they don’t care about the stories in games at all.”
With just a few months to go before the Witchfire hits Epic Games Store in Early Access, Chmielarz and the team are focusing their efforts – in part – on something he has often said is incredibly important to a game: The beginning.
I asked him if the opening for Witchfire lives up to his own expectations and if it touches on some of or all of the four key elements of a well-designed game: autonomy, mastery, competence, and relatedness. A perfect opening, he’s written, is like what can be found in Return to Monkey Island.
“Good question, but I just started the work on the onboarding, so I cannot answer that yet,” he said. “One thing is for sure, it is absolutely crucial for us that we nail the opening. It’s funny because I believe that tutorials are overrated and can be distracting and irritating, but I also believe in proper onboarding.
“One of the authors I respect a lot is Celia Hodent. Let me quote from her book, The Gamer’s Brain. ‘And even if some hardcore players complain about tutorials and tell you that they don’t need them, UX tests usually reveal that they misunderstand or completely omit important elements of a game when it lacks proper tutorials, and they can view a game negatively because of this.’
“Witchfire is a gamer’s game, so our onboarding is going to assume you have already played some shooters before. But we will still curate those opening minutes a bit, to make sure the cognitive buffer is not overloaded when you learn more about the world and the game’s mechanics.”
Roguelite?
Doomsoulsroguelite.
A first.
A first.
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