Witchfire’s world isn’t closed or open; the steampunk shooter is right in the middle

techradar.com:

Filled with furious dark knights, vibrant magic, and a truckload of guns, Witchfire looks like a frenetic, fun time, especially if you like your shooters steampunk flavored. But, if you’ve been following its development, you may wonder why it’s taken the team so long to finish making the game. We finally have an answer. 

Originally announced way back in 2017, developer The Astronauts has explained what’s caused the significant delays: they made Witchfire semi-open world.

At first, Witchfire was going to be a strictly closed-world experience. “Witchfire offered you these vast regions to play through in a specific, very rogue-lite way,” creative director Adrian Chmielarz said in a new blog post(opens in new tab). “You enter an area, fight some monsters, and then have a choice: take this reward and go left, or take that reward and go right.” Hades is a good example of this choice-based storytelling that The Astronauts was trying to emulate. 

However, the Witchfire devs decided to ramp up a gear and test their limits by implementing a semi-open world. “I realized I hated the barriers,” Chmielarz said, and so the magical barriers that were meant to keep the player locked in certain locations were scrapped. 

We see this in some gaming websites as well… #Witchfire did NOT become an open world game. Levels are big and now you can explore them freely unlike in the old design but that's it. That's why we called it «semi-open world» in today's blog post… Hub-based? Closed world? https://t.co/fq9MOmZX9kOctober 12, 2022

It may sound simple in theory, but the change in direction created a huge amount of work for the team. With the original barriers, when you had picked a direction, all the enemies and environments down the path you didn’t