Witchfire Delayed To 2023 For Major Gameplay Shift

Video game development team known as The Astronauts has been working on a first-person shooter with a fantasy setting called Witchfire since 2017. The game dropped off the radar for a while, but re-emerged recently with the promise that we’d be playing it in some form by the end of this year. …But apparently not.

The Astronauts have had a last-minute revelation. They’ve decided the game works a lot better as an open-world, pick-your-direction type of game than a closed-corridor, Doom-style level runner. So they’re changing the game around to fit that new style, and consequently, the promise that Witchfire would enter Early Access by late 2022 has now been broken. Instead the game will go into testing sometime in 2023. If you’ve been waiting patiently to shoot at witches, you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

The news may be a bit disappointing, but it’s good overall that the team wants to take the extra time to produce as good of a game as they can. “The feature is now 95% implemented,” says said creative director and co-founder Adrian Chmielarz. “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.”

The Astronauts now estimate they can get Witchfire to you sometime early next year.