The Astronauts launched the first major feature update for their dark fantasy first-person shooter, Witchfire.
The Ghost Galleon Update includes new content, including player classes, fearsome foes, new events, weapons and spells for the player’s arsenal, as well as a shop vendor offering novel items.
The update’s name refers to a newly minted Calamity event: a spectral ship infested with demonic minions of the Witch. The Witchfire update is available now on the Epic Games Store; curious witch hunters should check out the latest gameplay trailer for a preview of the game’s fresh new content.
Alongside the new features available in today’s patch, The Astronauts team has implemented careful redesigns of Witchfire’s level progression and Calamity systems, based on Early Access feedback.
Players will begin the game with souls-style classes, granting boosts to certain stats and unique gear. Classes include Slayer, Berserker, Hunter, Shadow, Saint and Penitent— this final class is for Witchfire veterans seeking an extra challenge.
A new feature, called Gnosis, will allow players to “over-level” (slightly) without a corresponding uptick in enemy difficulty. Gnosis is the understanding of dark magic. As this occult knowledge expands, players gain power and uncover hidden paths and events in the game. The update also adds a Calamity Meter on the HUD, which calls attention to player actions (and missteps) that make Calamities more likely.
“I like when gameplay matches lore,” said Adrian Chmielarz, creative director The Astronauts, in a statement. “The Witch launches Calamities at preyers as they venture further and further into her realm. The threat of a Calamity is immense, but so is the reward. The witch tends to launch these assaults when players are wounded, at their weakest— which hasn’t always been well-received by players— but this design still feels exciting to me.”
Chmielarz added, “So we’ve kept the soul of it, but redesigned it to feel more fair. It’s a feature that both teaches you how to play by pointing out mistakes and motivates you to do better. Yet it’s also an element great players can abuse: trick the Witch into thinking you’re losing, then strike back and reap the rewards. This supports two main pillars of our design philosophy: Competence and Autonomy.”
The redesigns in the Ghost Galleon Update aim to ensure players have agency and understanding of gameplay mechanisms, while still maintaining the intense challenge at Witchfire’s core.
In 2012, the original founders of People Can Fly and the creative leads behind Painkiller and Bulletstorm started a new independent studio. They named it The Astronauts to emphasize the idea of visiting unknown worlds and taking risky but exciting new directions— which explains why their first game, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, was a weird fiction horror, and the second, Witchfire, is a dark fantasy first-person shooter.