Dark FPS Witchfire Delayed to 2023; Change Announced
The Astronauts has decided to postpone the release of the dark fantasy FPS Witchfire until 2023. The reason? Enabling open-world combat.
I bring you two pieces of news - one bad and one good. The bad is that The Astronauts (creators of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter) has announced that the dark fantasy FPS Witchfire will not debut in 2022 in early access, as previously planned. The developers have decided to postpone the game's release to early 2023, but they have a good reason for this - and this is the good news.
"This is because the team has decided to extend the combat to the entire open world offered by Witchfire. The initial concept was that clashes would be fought in arenas designed for this purpose - similar to this year's Shadow Warrior 3 from Flying Wild Hog.
Creative director of Witchfire and co-founder of The Astronauts, Adrian Chmielarz, commented on this development as follows:
"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."
Chmielarz summed up his statement with an assurance about the game's release in 2023, as well as a statement that for his team, the game's quality is more important than releasing it as soon as possible. Here it is worth recalling that the team revealed Witchfire in 2017. In the following years we received a handful of fresh information, as well as some gameplay videos. However, the developer treated the trailer presented at Summer Game Fest 2022 (above) as a kind of second announcement of the game - which explains a lot, especially given today's announcement.
More information on Witchfire can be found in our Encyclopedia of Games. We will get more in the second half of October, specifically around Halloween. This is because The Astronauts has announced a "Halloween Witchfire week". At the same time, the developer warned not to expect gameplay, but information about the game's plot and world, as well as new graphics.
Witchfire is heading exclusively for PC. The title will first be released on Epic Games Store.
