We are a small independent game developer located in Warsaw, Poland. Before The Astronauts, some of us worked on games like Painkiller and Bulletstorm.
Our latest project is Witchfire, a dark fantasy first person shooter set in an alternative world in which witches are real and very dangerous – but so are you, witchhunter.
Our first game was a weird fiction mystery titled The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The game has won many awards, including BAFTA, and we sold over one million copies. It’s available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Click here for more details.
We’re currently laying down plans for future updates and finalizing the roadmap. It won’t be long before we know exactly what and when we can deliver. In the meantime, Adrian has one more thing to say about Webgrave…
To All Early Access Indies
As Spajk just mentioned, we’re still working on the road map update, so meanwhile allow me one more reflection on the Webgrave update — and on game-changing updates in general.
If I could turn back time, there’s one thing I’d change about Webgrave: how we communicated some of the changes. I thought we did a pretty good job with blog posts and all, but it clearly wasn’t enough. Take a look at this, Witchfire Steam reviews since the Webgrave release:
What’s happening here is that we saw an abnormal percentage of negative reviews during the first few days of the update. Most of these reviews came from veteran players, people who had already spent some time with the game and enjoyed it. However, some of them did not like the changes we made to the core experience. From their point of view, the way they had made the game their own no longer worked. They had invested in certain builds or strategies — and felt we took that away.
We didn’t, really. But we did make them feel like this for a few hours.
I think this post nails it:
Nothing to add, really.
Ultimately, most people do like Stats 2.0 and the Rosary. As I mentioned in the interview with Rogueliker, we’ve never seen so many players discussing builds before. You can now be more powerful than ever.
But the transition was a bit rough for some.
To be clear, there’s no perfectly smooth way to handle major transitions. But we definitely could have prepared everyone better. Usually, we keep things intentionally vague to leave room for discovery and surprise once an update launches. However, in this particular case, we should have clearly explained what was changing and how to deal with it. Maybe with a detailed explainer video, a Twitch or YouTube preview stream — something along those lines.
Someone might say, “What’s the problem? Once players get used to the changes or after you address the issues, they’ll update their reviews.” Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Sure, some people do update their reviews. But many don’t. They forget to update them, or even forget they wrote a review in the first place. Sometimes they don’t return to the game at all and thus never reconsider their feedback. There are numerous reasons why reviews remain unchanged.
The best strategy to avoid negative reviews after major updates isn’t to hope players will adjust once the dust settles. It’s to properly prepare them ahead of release.
There’s another interesting aspect to all this. Consider this quote from Evil Empire’s studio marketing manager, Matthew Houghton:
I don’t entirely agree with him, but there’s certainly truth in the idea that many players view Early Access titles as merely content-incomplete, rather than something that might be fundamentally reshaped midway through development. From their perspective, the game should simply keep improving and expanding. But from a developer’s standpoint, sometimes it’s necessary to step back and redesign core elements to benefit the final experience. This is guaranteed to happen at some point.
And when it does, make sure your communication is loud and clear.
And now for something completely different…
Hermitorium Archives
Since the Webgrave update dropped, the community has exploded with activity. Thank you for all the posts and threads – we’re over the moon seeing so many of you gravitate back to Witchfire. The sheer number of discussions and hours you’ve poured into the game is astounding. We’re working hard to give you even more reasons to stay and to welcome more players into the preyer ranks.
Let me tell you a story…
We’ve already featured one radio play a while back, and now another joins the pack. This one is not an original creation, but an awesome audio rendition of a short story written by Adrian a few years ago – hearing it in Daniel’s voice brings new layers to the experience.
Jolly good show.
The other kind of Velmorne experience
Last week I featured a Reddit post in which Key-Post-9750 recounted his moment of realising how mighty his Preyer was. You reacted by upvoting this image to the weekly top of our subreddit, giving many internet points to zbeasley111, so reposting it in the Hermitorium Archives only seemed fair.
Escape velocity has been achieved
Listen, we’re called The Astronauts, but that doesn’t mean you need to break orbit in our games. Still, hats off to redditor FilthmasterRich for pulling off yet another exploit and setting what may be the final Preyer Top Speed Record – the game simply can’t go faster. And so, it seems that Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing still holds the all-time speed crown in unmodded video games.
We’ve seen you melt the toughest bosses in no time, and while those feats are impressive, this is something else entirely. An enemy designed to respawn endlessly was somehow bullied into giving up.
How and why – no idea. A moment of silence for the fallen Revenant, affectionately nicknamed Ron. And a slow-clap for Hypnosis Goblin, who somehow sent Ron into the no-respawn zone.
Peak Internet has been achieved
Thanks to the magic of mods, we recently saw a Haaaaaaangfire appear in-game – you know, a Hangfire which really wanted to be a musket:
And I am not gonna lie, it made me smile, it even sparked the classic “oh you guys” head tilt. But that was just a warm-up, a mere prelude to something much, much greater.
A submeowchine gun – the Catweaver – made an unofficial appearance in the game.
No notes.
Post-webgrave talk with the Rogueliker.
Before we go, there’s one more thing I wanted to share: we recently did a written interview with The Rogueliker, where Adrian talked about some of the design ideas behind Witchfire. He touched on the challenges, the uniqueness of Velmorne, Stats 2.0, Rosary builds, and what’s next on the road to 1.0. If you’d like to dive deeper, you can read the full interview here:
