Polish indie developer The Astronauts (The Vanishing of Ethan Carter) announced that its upcoming dark fantasy roguelite first-person shooter Witchfire has been delayed to 2023 from its previous late 2022 early access launch window. Creative Director and Co-Founder Adrien Chmielarz explained that the delay is largely owed to the late decision to introduce a semi-open world experience instead of the previous arena-style environments.

　　The feature is now 95% implemented. 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.

　　It’s funny, but the whole thing made this fantasy game more …realistic.

　　But yeah, the cost of this is we are not ready with the game just yet. We have “lost” a few months with the redesign and are only now back on track with the regular development. The good news: a great programmer and designer joined us recently, so the team got a bit bigger and that should help keep the development nice and steady.

　　As our long-time readers may recall, Witchfire was first announced at the 2017 The Game Awards. In 2023, over five years will have passed since that reveal. Let's hope the very long wait will be worth it.

　　Chmielarz also confirmed that the Unreal Engine powered game will launch only on the Epic Games Store for its early access but should later launch on Steam and even console platforms.