The Astronauts has only released The Vanishing of Ethan Carter so far, but it was founded by ex People Can Fly developers who worked on Bulletstorm and Painkiller, so they’re more than proficient with first-person shooter games. Witchfire, first announced over four years ago at The Game Awards 2017, does come with a brand new roguelite formula. According to the developers, this convinced them to go with an early access release. Elsewhere in the blog post, the developers answered a few more questions about the game. Witchfire will be playable offline. Support for technologies like NVIDIA’s RTX/DLSS and others from AMD and Intel is under evaluation. Ultrawide monitor support is already working. A transition to UE5 is not planned, as The Astronauts do not consider the new version of the Unreal Engine to be production-ready yet. But it makes total sense for Witchfire. A game with world-building and lore, but heavily focused on the roguelite gameplay loop. We’re looking to how Hades or Dead Cells or Risk of Rain 2 or other notable roguelites did it, and will most likely combine elements of these paths to reach the full release. The write-up does mention some game mechanics of Witchfire as well. Lastly, the developers of Witchfire shared some new brief gameplay clips. Check them out below. But we’re testing some ideas to see if we can raise the stakes. If not, it’s not a big deal, we have other mechanics in place to keep the tension and immersion. Never say never and we do bring up co-op every now and then in internal meetings. But for now, we’re 100% focusing on the single player experience. Weapons will be upgradeable, and that process will require some dedication and skill. And there are some new mechanics connected to weapons that we’re not ready to talk about yet. But that’s it, no RNG. Also, we’re trying to make sure Witchfire is long enough and replayable enough to satisfy the modern gamer.
