Indie studio, The Astronauts, have had quite a remarkable journey so far, and there’s no end in sight. Their latest game, Witchfire, a dark-fantasy RPG shooter, just received a major new content update that includes the addition of the game’s first melee weapons, as well as several other exciting features.
RPG Shooter Witchfire Adds Melee Weapons In Major New Content Update
The Reckoning update introduces the game’s first melee weapons, three new guns, and some exciting features.
I recently had the honor of interviewing Witchfire creator, and Founder of The Astronauts, Adrian Chmielarz, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the latest update, discuss what’s next for Witchfire, and chat about the current state of the industry.
Adrian is a veteran of the video game industry, and is the creator of other popular titles such as Painkiller, Bulletstorm, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and his wisdom made for a very insightful interview.
Witchfire has had a successful early-access so far, which has allowed The Astronauts studio to grow from a 12-person team to 26—and the future is looking very bright.
Interview With Witchfire Creator And Founder Of The Astronauts Adrian Chmielarz
Q: It’s a pleasure to meet you, Adrian, and I’d just like to start off by saying thank you so much for doing this interview. It really is an honor for me, and with The Reckoning update out now, and Witchfire’s full release just around the corner, I’m excited to dive deeper into the game with you and also want to get your thoughts on the current state of the industry. But first, I’d like to introduce our readers to your team. Will you tell us a little bit about The Astronauts and what the journey has been like for you since you founded the studio?
A: Well, the journey has been pretty crazy because my previous studio, People Can Fly, we had it – the three of us, me and my two partners – we had it for 10 years. So, for 10 years, we did a couple of games, like Bulletstorm and a lot of work on Gears of War. Leaving that world, the big studio, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, we went from basically making these big games to making a walking simulator—and that was a pretty big move.
I mean, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is not exactly a walking simulator, you do have that interactivity layer, a gameplay layer in it.
But still, right, it’s this sort of adventure game, basically, at its core. So that was super stressful. There were like eight of us in total, and because we were completely self-funded, no investors other than ourselves, the idea was to make something quickly in a year.
Obviously, it took us two years, so, typically for game developers, we have underestimated the amount of time needed to make that game.
But obviously the scope also grew. Which is another thing developers are guilty of. And so, I think these were the hardest years because we had absolutely no idea how people would react.
This was not the genre any of us were known for, and it was relatively new. And then, two years later it was gone anyway, but we were lucky enough that Ethan sold very well—it was a huge hit for us.
So we were able to fund almost the next ten years. It’s almost impossible to imagine that you can run a studio from a single game that is basically like a four-hour-long adventure, but we sold like two million copies of Ethan, so that was enough for us to fuel the studio.
From there we grew from 8 to 12, and most of Witchfire was done by 12 people. But in the last two years, because of the success of Witchfire, we actually doubled the number of people, and a bit more—there’s 26 of us right now.
That’s The Astronauts, and one other important thing is that the philosophy of the studio is that, there’s the core, right? But we also cooperate and outsource stuff. Like, there’s no point to have composers on board when you can work with great composers who are basically freelancers doing various things.
So, in reality, the game is made by more people than 26. But the idea behind it is that, in terms of our core, we always only hire people that we consider extremely talented. You don’t need to be a veteran, and that’s an important distinction, because everybody I know is saying that, “Oh, okay, you’re doing great because you have veterans in your studio, people who know what they’re doing,” but that’s not true. To an extent it is, because I’ve been in this business for 30 years or more, but we also have people that are 24 years old—so talent is the only thing that matters.
Obviously, the other thing is communication, because we talk to each other every single day. In practical terms, it means we’d rather scale the game to the studio than the studio to the game. We want to know that whatever we’re doing is the highest quality we can imagine, and that’s basically the philosophy of The Astronauts.
Q: Fantastic answer, and on that note, let’s dive into Witchfire. It’s an extremely unique, genre-blending game—for people who haven’t played it yet, how would you describe it to them?
A: That’s another journey that we’ve been on, but the shortest description would be RPG shooter. The shooter part is hopefully pretty obvious. It is, at the end of the day, a first-person shooter, but the RPG part, to me, is super interesting.
Gamers always argue, do you need choice in RPG? Like story branching and, you know, the world is shaped by your decisions? Or is it all about the statistics, your builds, the weapons you’re using, and the gameplay part of it?
In our case, it’s the latter. But the freedom that we offer is extremely huge. And this is why we say with clear conscience that it’s an RPG, because you can actually imagine a role and you will be able to find the necessary sort of gear and attributes in the game that can support your style.
We’ll also be featuring a big story in the game and the world has a lot of lore. We have a Bible for Witchfire written, so I think that layer of storytelling is going to be deep, but most of all, it’s going to be about your freedom in how to kill the witch.
And you are right about the genre-blending, because there are elements of various genres in it—but nothing is done on purpose. We’re not looking at the market and saying, “Hey, look, extraction shooters are popular, let’s do something about this.”
Things like extraction are inspired actually by something completely different, like, for example, BioShock 2. So, the only thing that matters to us and why these other genres might appear in Witchfire is because we are thinking of this from the following perspective: The witch is immortal, but so are you. So how do you make a game about two immortals fighting each other? How can you win in a game like that? And ultimately, you can kill each other, there are ways to do that—but it’s not particularly easy.
That means perseverance is super important, right? But then there’s this whole chain of thought, that if you’re knocking at the same door over and over again, it wouldn’t be very fun for the players, so let’s have the world change a little bit each time.
For example, the elements of the world are re-rolled as you grow in power, and there is your roguelite element, right?
And then we think, okay, but the way you become stronger to actually even be able to think about killing the witch is that you are gathering Witchfire—but wouldn’t it be really tense and cool if you could lose it all while you try to go back to your base of operations?
There is your extraction fragment, and this gives you an idea of how these elements find their way into Witchfire.
Q: These extraction elements are incorporated in a very interesting way. Could you give us some more insight into calamities and world corruption?
A: Witchfire, in a way, is a heist game. Like there’s the witch, and she set up all these defenses. It’s sort of like if you think about trying to rob a bank, there would be patrols, patrolmen, and infrared cameras. So imagine all of that just in a dark fantasy theme.
You have these creatures that patrol the area and look for any intruders, and this is how the world is set up—you need to break through these defenses.
So that’s the first layer of the Witch not wanting you there. She set up all the parameters; troops and patrolmen, and you need to deal with that. But if you’re too good, then she’s informed, and she is like, “OK, so I need to sort of intervene myself.”
So what she does is she casts a special curse, known as Calamities, which is basically like a super powerful curse. You have this sort of super intense gameplay fragment where you have to fight, for example, Hordes of Undead that she’s raising to attack you, and you have to survive that, but that’s not the end, and it’s only now we get to the world corruption.
The thing is, you’re stealing Witchfire from the witch, so when you kill the monsters, the Witchfire she created them from, instead of going back to her, it goes to you, so you’re literally robbing her of Witchfire, and that actually has the side effect of the world becoming unstable.
The world has an immune reaction, if you will, to you. And that’s the world corruption. So, the longer you are in the expedition, the more chaotic the world becomes as it tries to throw you out. For example, you’ll see rifts in time and space, and if triggered, they will release more enemies onto the battlefield.
I don’t want to spoil all the surprises, but this is what’s going to happen, and the idea wasn’t to make the game harder, actually, as weird as this sounds—the idea was to make the game more engaging by being slightly less predictable.
Q: What are some of the biggest hurdles your team has overcome throughout the development process?
A: The biggest one is very simple. I mean, no matter how talented your team is, it’s challenging when there’s only a dozen of you. There’s only so many hours in the day.
I remember at People Can Fly, when we were working on Bulletstorm, I could ask for a feature, and the next day, we could test it because you had so many people working in parallel on the same feature. Like graphic artists could start right away, and the programmers. I’m exaggerating slightly, but it was very fast.
When you have a dozen people or even two dozen people, then basically it’s like, next month I will start working on this and let’s see what happens, right?
So, I think it’s a fun challenge, and I wouldn’t say it’s frustrating, because it’s still all good, but this is sort of the only thing I am missing from my AAA times. When you have a big team, that machine can sometimes be very fast—at least the way People Can Fly was.
When I’m talking to my colleagues from much bigger studios, they say it’s the other way around, and now they have to go through 10 managers before the idea even gets accepted to be planned, so, you know, your mileage may vary.
Q: Speaking of mileage, you’ve added a lot of new content, quality of life improvements, and community requested changes to Witchfire. How has the game evolved over the years?
A: I’m not sure if there is a thing that is more important in game making than playtesting, and it really doesn’t matter if it’s, you know, your wife or a friend or two, or 500 testers—playtesting is incredibly important and really opens up your eyes.
It’s always like, you think you have the best game ever, and you give it to somebody to play, and then you will be shocked, you know, what happens in the first five minutes, like, they’re doing not what you thought they would be doing.
So, when we released Early Access, we used all our knowledge so far, right, all the games that we’ve made before, to make something that we considered good, and we were quickly explained that there’s something there, there’s potential there, but it’s not good yet.
For example, the calamities that I mentioned, which are, you know, these really hard moments. They were unclear to the players.
They happened way too often, and the people didn’t really get why they were happening in the first place. They were clear to us, the developers, because we had lived with them for the last couple of years, but not to the players. So most of these things we fixed very quickly.
It took us about two weeks to fix most of the issues, and then people agreed and said, “Okay, this is a good game now, but, we want more content, we want more features,” and that’s what we’ve been doing.
When I think about how to give a good example of why this matters, I always think about Hades, because Hades was an early access game, right? These guys were extremely experienced developers, they made a lot of titles that people loved, but they still decided to go with early access. You could argue that maybe they needed funding, right? So sometimes you do that, because you have a game, but you need some extra cash to finish it.
But they’ve repeated that. Hades sold millions of copies, like a seriously insane number of copies. They can afford not one, but two or three games to be done without any other extra funding. And yet, they went for the early access because it’s that valuable.
Now, you know, it’s not needed for every single game because other games, the way they deal with it, like AAA games, they hire 500 testers.
Witchfire has evolved a lot, and we’re very lucky because I don’t think the players ever demanded anything that would be against what we wanted to do ourselves. Sometimes it would be like, we think, okay, this would be cool, and this would be cool. And the players tell us, “No, no, no, this.”
Then we say, “No problem, we love both solutions, but let’s go with this one and align with the players,” but we’ve never done anything that was sort of against our intuition or even our knowledge of design. On the contrary, actually, there was a short-lived moment, maybe a couple of weeks, when we started to drift towards sort of being a looter-shooter and the game got a little bit more colorful and people were immediately angry with us.
They said, “No, this is not why we fell in love with Witchfire. The teaser was very dark fantasy, very sort of Dark Souls with guns. Don’t do this, we hate this.” And we looked at each other and were like, “Why are we doing this?” We weren’t feeling it anyway, we were just testing to see if this would be a direction that we would continue with, but that feedback was an instant reset of any feature that could make Witchfire into a game that is clearly a looter-shooter.
Q: I recently read an article that you wrote about what the players take away from early access and what the developers take away as well. There was an interesting part where you mentioned players having an emotional reaction to your game, and sometimes the feedback you get is very useful and other times not so much. Can you give us more insight into what it’s been like collaborating with the Witchfire community?
A: I have actually evolved, and I think that it’s all useful now. I think that it is very often that, on the surface level, some feedback will not look useful because it will be an angry player who will be basically insulting you and insulting the game because of a little issue.
For example, they give you a negative review on Steam saying that 99% of this game is fantastic, but this one little thing bothers them so much that they’re going to give you a negative review, right?
Your first reaction might be, you know, your blood may boil, and you might be really angry at the person because it’s like, dude, we worked so hard on this, and you’re enjoying 99% of it.
So this feels unfair. But then you sit down and think about that feedback, and you realize that it’s actually because they love the game so much, that they want to grab your attention this way, and now you’re judging, okay, is this problem big? And that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is, is this hard to implement? Because it doesn’t matter if it’s big or small, but if it’s relatively easy to implement, you just do it.
Even if you don’t quite understand why it’s such a big deal for someone to have this option, there will be others like them, right, and you are making this game for people, and I’m sure there will be others feeling the same way, but they just haven’t written about it.
It’s very easy to listen to feedback when it’s well articulated, but when the feedback feels emotional and unfair, I’ve learned that on the surface level, you need to listen to it just as well.
I don’t like when players use reviews as a sort of communication tool, that’s what our Discord is for and our forum is for. So luckily, that’s not happening very often. But when we were reading some comments on the forum or on Discord, we implemented things from the community without being really truly 100% convinced that they were such a big deal, but we weren’t against it.
We were like, okay, this makes sense. And then we sometimes realized that, yeah, it was a bigger deal than we thought, and suddenly, how did we live without it before? So, sometimes there’s some great feedback, and sometimes one person tells you enemies need to be red, and another person says they need to be blue, so we make them purple and then everybody’s happy—you can’t please everyone, but you need to listen.
Q: Great answer, and on the topic of community feedback, Witchfire’s Steam reviews are very positive, which is a huge accomplishment, so congratulations to your whole team. Some of the most common things I noticed being praised in the reviews are the art style, which is very dark and gory, and the audio design, but most common of all is how good it feels to use the guns in the game. With these compliments in mind, can you share some insight into your team’s design choices?
A: With the visuals, it’s actually simple. Our sort of internal tagline for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was, come for the visuals and stay for the story, and I think we achieved that. People were drawn to the game because we were one of the first in the world to use photogrammetry techniques to bring these environments to life.
And people were like, “I want to just take a walk in that world because it looks so cool,” but then they were engaged in the story. With Witchfire, it’s kind of similar, but it has shifted to the gameplay—come for the visual, but stay for the gameplay.
I think it’s working, because we spent a serious amount of time polishing these worlds and making sure that they look really, really good and immersive, and that immersion is super important to me.
With the sound, it’s an interesting evolution because I wanted initially, I mean, I still want this, but I asked our sound engineer for the sound to be actually kind of mundane in a way, like very realistic.
Don’t give me that fantasy sauce. Like, don’t color them. Do that for a very small amount of sounds so they stand out more.
And that’s how we started. And I think that kind of evolved a little bit. There’s a little bit more magic in those sounds today.
Some of the sounds are still very grounded, and I think this works towards the same thing that the visuals are working towards, which is immersion—the world is believable.
The gunplay, I wish I could take credit for that, but we can’t, and players know this. The gunplay itself is clearly inspired by Destiny, and the reason is not that I have 14,000 hours in Destiny. I do, but that’s not the reason. The reason is I am a shooter fan. Again, I made Painkiller and Bulletstorm, so I am clearly a fan of shooters, right? So I’ve played them all, and no shooter, to me, feels as good as Destiny.
Now, you can dislike a lot of things about Destiny. We know there are lovers and haters of this game, right? But even the haters admit that the gunplay as such is phenomenal.
So we basically said, “OK, this is what they do with guns. Now, do we reinvent the wheel and try something that’s ours, or do we use this?”
And I said, “No, we are using this.” I mean, we’re not stealing the idea of Destiny, we’re stealing some sort of vibe of using the weapon, and my conscience is clear because Destiny, on the other hand, was inspired by many other games, as many of their gameplay elements are taken from Guild Wars, and so on and so forth. I mean, that’s how it works in our business. Everybody inspires everybody else.
Q: Speaking of how the business works, I want to get your thoughts about artificial intelligence being used in game development. The video game industry has been going through a strange time in the last few years especially. A lot of companies are beginning to use generative AI tools. How do you feel about this?
A: So, yeah, you know, we are absolutely in the middle of it, right? It’s absolutely crazy because it’s now too good to be ignored, but still too lame and weak to actually be used as people think it’s used.
It’s not that good yet, trust me. But it’s certainly something you can’t ignore. On top of that, we have the public sentiment, which is, “We absolutely hate it, and we don’t want your game to use any AI.” Now, players have started to warm up a little bit to the idea of AI, like ARC Raiders is successful, like super successful, despite the fact that they are using AI to generate some voiceovers in the game.
I think another example is Broken Sword. The remaster of Broken Sword was done using AI. The upscaling was done using AI. They trained the model using their own graphics only. So that model wasn’t trained by any other artist, they used AI for that purpose, and nobody has any issue with that. So I think that our position is to wait and see what happens.
I think it’s going to be more and more accepted that it’s a tool, basically, that you use, and just as it’s accepted that when somebody asks you to multiply a big number with another big number. You’re not doing this in your head or on paper, you just use a calculator.
It’s normal for us to use a machine to help us, and so I think this is going to be accepted as a tool, but as something that really truly creates entire worlds and characters and everything? I have absolutely no idea.
For Witchfire, the rule at The Astronauts is absolutely simple: zero AI.
It actually costs us time and money. Like, with this update, we are adding portraits of witches you can collect, and so we talked to the artist, and we asked him, how much time is it going to take him to make all the sketches that we need?
He said, with AI about a week, and I said, that’s out of the question, and it took him a month, but not a single pixel was created using AI.
People believe that in two years we will be playing games made by AI, like the real-time generation of worlds—No, we’re not. Even if algorithms were there, even if they really existed, which that’s not going to happen, we don’t have the power. We don’t have enough machines to support that.
I think that for the next few years, we have nothing to worry about, but my guess is as good as yours, nobody knows anything, and the progress is insane—It’s absolutely, brutally fast.
Q: It really is a fascinating time, and it will be interesting to see what happens with AI in the next few years. Thank you for your insight. Let’s get into Witchfire’s latest major content update, The Reckoning, which was released today. What has been introduced in this update?
A: This is basically the update that you will be able to taste almost every single sort of mechanic and game feature from the gameplay perspective that’s going to be in Witchfire. We will keep a thing or two for 1.0. Obviously, you need to have some surprises up your sleeve.
World corruption is one example of the stuff that we are adding. But we are also adding hard challenges because some people demand them. They like Witchfire enough to demand a bigger challenge. So we have something for them. And these challenges are called Torments.
So I guess that gives you an idea of how difficult they are. So Torments are going to be a pretty big thing, I think, for people who want more. You don’t need to do any of them if you want to finish the game, but you will be rewarded if you do it.
We obviously always give new gear to the players to have fun with. Our idea is that every single item, be it a weapon or a spell, needs to be completely different.
So that was actually, I lifted this from my own design for Painkiller because the idea was, in some games like you can have three shotguns, and they will be the same, but one will have a slower reload, and one will shoot faster, maybe one is more powerful, stuff like that.
In our case, if one shotgun is shooting thunderbolts and freezing enemies, it cannot be repeated with another shotgun, and you need to think about some other cool thing that the shotgun can do.
But despite that, we will still have well over 30 weapons in the game, and we’ve just added a few new weapons. We also added Witch Vaults, which is basically an extension of an existing level. It’s more to play, and unlike the rest of the game, the challenge for everybody is exactly the same. There is no RNG involved in Witch Vaults, so you can sort of approach the problem in a completely different way than you approach what’s happening in the rest of Witchfire.
We are also adding melee weapons. So, Witchfire is a shooter, but, you know, because you’re fighting these undead knights and ghouls and other creatures of the dark, people were like, “Can we just smash their faces in with a hammer or something?” And so we don’t want to compete with games in which melee is the core gameplay element, like Dying Light, which has mostly melee weapons, plus a couple of guns—in our case, it’s the other way around.
Guns are still the king, this is still a shooter. But now you can replace your basic fist melee with something completely different, like a Morningstar, claws, or an exotic knife called a Katar.
We are also adding a buckler in this update, so you will be able to parry attacks, and block some damage if you’re good enough, so it’s about to be much more complicated than we thought. It’s in there, and it’s working, and it’s super fun.
Q: Now that The Reckoning update is live, what can you tell me about 1.0?
A: With this update, we are sort of wrapping up the gameplay part of the game. It’s not going to be finished yet, it’s not going to be properly balanced yet, but we’ve added a lot of analytics to the game, so this will help us in the future for the next update and 1.0—It’s still early access, but we are wrapping most of the gameplay side of things.
The next update will introduce storytelling. We have a lot of lore in the game, but we will be introducing proper quests, if you will.
So that’s going to be a test of, are we going in the right direction with these quests?
Hopefully, yes, because I would like the next update to be 1.0. I’m kidding, of course, we will test that first with some sort of internal QA, and only then show this to the players. But that’s the focus of the next update. We’ll be finishing up some things and add a lot of storytelling.
With 1.0, we’ll introduce the ending to the story, how it all wraps up, and something that is going to be a surprise—It’s story-related.
I don’t want anybody to have the wrong idea, it’s nothing too crazy, but I think it’s going to be super fun.
Now, as for what happens then, we genuinely don’t know, because we are still debating this approach, because there are two completely opposite roads that we can take. One is the approach that Dead Cells took, which is, we’re going to be supporting this game for the next five years, and keep adding updates and expanding and making it bigger.
The other road is like Hades. I remember a gamer on X asking what’s next for Hades? And the answer was, nothing. This is it. This is the game. This is 1.0. We worked the last couple of years to get to this point.
So, personally, I do think I like this approach a bit more, because this tells me the game is done, the game is finished, and the story they wanted to tell with the game is there for you to enjoy. But I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s what’s going to happen—It’s still up in the air.
Q: Well, I can’t wait to play The Reckoning update and try out some melee weapons and new guns, and whatever you decide to do in the future, I’ll be rooting for you, and I wish your entire team all the best. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. And last, but definitely not least, I’d like to just give you the chance to speak directly to your fans. Is there anything you’d like to say to your supporters ahead of 1.0?
A: We owe you everything, we exist because of you, and the game is so much better because of you. So we are very thankful that you have trusted us. It takes trust to pay for a game that is unfinished, and I hope we deliver it, and we’ll keep delivering, so—thank you.
- Released
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September 20, 2023
- ESRB
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r
- Developer(s)
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The Astronauts
- Publisher(s)
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The Astronauts
- Engine
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unreal engine 4
