Featured Image Credit: The Astronauts
Topics: PC, Indie Games, Steam, Interview
Witchfire’s latest update, The Reckoning, proved to be rather unpopular with players when it launched last month.
Among other things, the update’s biggest feature is the World Corruption system, which intends to make the game a little more difficult for experienced players by making each session more unstable, with harder enemies and events occurring to keep you on your toes.
In theory, this means that Witchfire's difficulty becomes more dynamic, adding an additional layer of unpredictability to enemy patterns and spawning behaviour. It encourages forward planning and smart preparation, something that is present throughout most of the game.
In practice, however, the update proved to be unpopular with the community on the day it launched. The game became unintentionally difficult, and even made it change genres from something that relied on the player learning from making their own mistakes, to the game interfering and making them fail without their input. This prompted The Astronauts to closely monitor what had gone wrong, and issue some fixes to make it feel more fair.
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“The core release of the patch was way too oppressive,” The Astronauts' Adrian Chmielarz told me last month, just as the company started releasing fixes to tone down the difficulty of the World Corruption feature. “It’s a good example of why Early Access works, because only at that scale are we able to understand what doesn’t work. Like, it works for us [The Astronauts]. We have 26 people on the team, we played it, it was fun. But then you give it to hundreds of thousands of people, and suddenly you’re seeing things in a completely different light.”
Chmielarz added that “It is very, very hard for the players to accept that the game got harder. If you really understand that the game needs it, then you need to be really, really good at communicating that and expect the sort of pushback anyway.
“I'm not saying that we did the right thing with the version that we delivered, you know, the World Corruption that we delivered with the patch. But in general, I'm saying that people are sort of, they mastered the game, they invested their time in the game, and suddenly you're telling them that, you know, that that's not it. That's not it.
“You know, it's not the end. It's not over. You need to reinvent yourself, in a way, because the game just got harder.”
Since The Reckoning update was released, The Astronauts has added a few hotfixes which tone down the difficulty of the World Corruption feature. Most notably, the unpredictability of the feature has remained, but it’s also been rebalanced to give players a higher sense of control. As the developer moves forward with tweaking this even further, it’ll retain the feature as a way to maintain the flow of each session and keep them interesting.
Regarding the negative feedback Witchfire received as a result of that initial first version of World Corruption, Chmielarz says that “I don't mind. Actually, I understand. I'm happy that these reactions are so emotional because that means that people care about our game, that they have some feelings towards it.”
Witchfire is available now on Steam via Early Access.