Witchfire progress report.
The game has taken a dive.
Unfortunately i have seen this .. so many times. Devs start with a great concept, put out a working alpha, and then when they go to expand it they have written themselves in a corner.
Brief overview of the timeline.
There's this FPS where you are a witch-hunter. You got 2 weapons + 1 third "special" with limited ammo, e.g. a shotgun, a sniper, and a bigass cannon.
You can dash, you can heal a limited number of times, you can double jump and have air-control.
There's 3 maps of increasing difficulty. Mobs are kinda dumb, but they hit hard. You are not supposed to get hit, because it's not uncommon that 1 hit means game over.
You find XP on the map and you extract like Tarkov, and then you level up; this means more Health, more Dashing, better Healing, etc.
On the maps there's a ton of secrets. the weapons have secrets. The spells have secrets. The game is a ton of mechanics that are not explained to you on purpose, so that you need to figure them out.
It's a sort of Horror game, because once you know stuff, it becomes a lot easier, but that's why all these things are not explained to you. You don't know what spells do, you don't know how to open that hidden door, you don't know what happens if you pick up that cross or open that chest. And generally you get thrown into a world of hurt, so not only do you have to survive the spam of monsters, but you also have to figure out what kind of "rule" you have broken, or how to get out of that trap.
..
I did the first map. Took me a ton of time to be able to run it through and extract without dying. had to figure out a ton of stuff. Loved this bit.
on to the second map, you start to find stuff that makes you stronger - better spells, your weapons become stronger, etc.
third map, completed it in a day.
fourth map, it's a joke, just spam my overpowered-ness.
Because you NEVER lose more than you started with. At most you can lose a small quantity of XP, and you probably can even recover it on the next run, but essentially you are on a linear track to become invincible.
For example, there is a mechanic called Calamities. When you "make a mistake", i.e. you get hit, you step on a trap, you pick up a cursed item, you risk triggering a Calamity, which means a whole bunch of monsters spawn and try to kill you .. and also you may get some debuff, maybe everything goes really dark, or maybe your healthbar gets shrunk to 1/4 of normal, something like that.
Now, in a game where you get hit hard and you have limited ammo and healing, this would be "bad", but you are easily so overpowered that you completely rekkk these calamities, and not only, but once done they drop a ton of extra ammo, extra healing, and also unique object that increase your power in a way that nothing else can. So, while in theory you're supposed to try to avoid these, experienced players actually seek them out, jumping into traps on purpose, etc.
...
The game is still probably a good buy for the amount of content you do get, the visuals and atmosphere are superb, and it's a decently fun shooter .. AND the dev team might maybe pull it out from the situation where they are now. Who knows.
still stutters all the time on my B580, unless i do a PC reboot. no idea why.