Polish developer The Astronauts was founded nearly eleven years ago and only released the horror adventure game The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (in 2014), though that’s about to change with the upcoming early access debut of Witchfire.
The dark fantasy roguelite first-person shooter was revealed a long time ago at Geoff Keighley’s 2017 The Game Awards. The small team went silent for over four years, announcing in January 2022 that Witchfire would launch in early access in late 2022. However, there was another delay to 2023, with the developers explaining that they would add open world-like areas to improve the game’s exploration.
With mere days separating us from the September 20th launch of Witchfire on early access, we discussed with The Astronauts founder and CEO Adrian Chmielarz (also known as the project leader on 2004’s Painkiller and the creative director on Bulletstorm) the reason for the long development phase and one-year Epic Games Store exclusivity, and the exciting performance results obtained with the implementation of NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 3.
We also confirmed with him that AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) will still be in the game on day one and received a preview of Witchfire’s system specifications. Read on for the full chat.
Witchfire took seven years to make, and the full version won’t be out until 2024. Can you talk about the development phase for this game?
To us, after our first game, it was either significantly grow the team and make Witchfire relatively quickly or keep it small and make it quite slowly. With the fiscal discipline and risks in mind, we opted for the latter.
The downside is obvious. What should take us four years will take us, in the end, eight or so. The upside is that we were able to really think through the structure and mechanics of the game, and just give it time to properly cook through.
For Witchfire, you’ve opted to release the game only on the Epic Games Store for a year. Why did you make this choice? Did you get a lot of backlash from the community?
Our first game was a story-driven weird fiction game. Yes, it sold well. Very well. But I hope nobody expects a game like that to carry a studio, even a small one, for a decade.
The deal with Epic allowed us to keep our independence. We could have sold some of the studio to investors, but thanks to Epic, we didn’t have to. Also, Epic helps us promote the game. A store’s front page is worth more than all of your trailers and social media posts combined.
How much content is in the early access version that launches on September 20th? Will the price change for the final release?
We juggled many options but settled on the simplest possible solution: one price for both the Early Access period and the final release.
The amount of content at the Early Access launch is all over the place, in a way. It’s hard to say “it’s a bit over one-third of the game” or whatever simply because some things are there at 75% and some at 20%. But we’ve done all we could to make sure there’s more than enough content to justify a release.
Witchfire is based on Unreal Engine 4. Do you have any plans to upgrade to Unreal Engine 5? If so, will you take advantage of features like Nanite and Lumen?
We will be evaluating that as an option for sure. When we remade The Vanishing of Ethan Carter in UE4 from UE3, we basically had to make the game from scratch. The versions were that incompatible. That’s not the case with UE5, luckily. We’ll see.
In early 2022, you said you were considering RTX support. Does the game support any ray tracing effects? If not, will you add them later?
Not at the moment, but to be honest, our game is not one to beg for it. There’s a lot of natural surfaces in Witchfire, and trees and castle walls and rusty gates are not that phenomenal for ray tracing. And our mix of baked and real-time lights makes sure the radiosity is good already out of the box.
You did confirm DLSS 3 support a while back. What do you think about Frame Generation, and what kind of performance uplift are you seeing with it?
I think this is fantastic. But I also think we need to explain it better to the players. For example, with only 67% of sharpness, let’s call it that, the image upscaled to 100% is maybe 1% worse than if it was directly rendered to 100%. It sounds weird, it sounds impossible, but that’s the truth. And the framerate boost is phenomenal. So, for the low price of 1% of image degradation, which is basically nothing, you get a much better experience.
I love it.
Will Witchfire also support AMD FSR and Intel XeSS at the early access debut?
Yes. Nvidia is our official partner, and they are of great help both tech-wise and marketing-wise. I am very happy with our choice. But we support all players, so the competitors’ tech will also be supported by our game.
Can you share the system specifications?
Sure thing. For 30-40 fps on Medium settings, we recommend NVIDIA GTX1050 Ti + Intel Core i5-6600K CPU @ 3.50GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.5GHz.
Recommended specs to play on Medium settings in 60+ FPS are NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB + Intel Core i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz (6 CPUs), ~2.8GHz.
And, obviously, AMD and Intel video card equivalents.
Thank you for your time.
