Witchfire needs a little more time in development before Early Access begins. Developer The Astronauts had originally set Early Access for late this year, but now it won’t roll out until early 2023.
One major reason for the delay is the team’s decision to redesign the game’s rogue-lite combat encounters, with them taking place with barriers and arenas, to make it fit more into the rest of Witchfire’s more open world. In terms of barriers, these were some way to gate the players into the arena where monsters and other enemies would spawn. This is a system lots of players are familiar with. Step into a room, wait for spawns, and know that until those monsters have been slain–or you have been–that it won’t be over. Once it is over, pick a reward, and head in a chosen direction. These barriers are one of the reasons they’ve redesigned the core of these encounters.
This decision has delayed Early Access, since in deciding to remove the barriers and leave player decisions more open, just like the world, they encountered a lot of questions on how to make it work.
“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?”
The feature is about “95% implemented” and we’ll eventually get to see how these questions have been answered, though it will be a little later than we expected.
Witchfire is still set for an early 2023 release on PC via The Epic Games Store.
