Hello fellow cultists!
A few days has passed since the early access launch and we already received an impressive amount of feedback from players. A lot of players were pretty vocal about their appreciation of the player fantasy, the originality of the game and its various mechanics. Although we’re truly grateful for the positive feedback the community has given us so far, we are also aware that there are parts of the game that need more support and that are not reaching both players’ and our own expectations.
An important thing to consider while we are talking about the main issues surrounding the early access launch is that Chasing Rats Games is a small team. We have to prioritize our work towards the most important issues but we can’t tackle them all at the same time and some issues are more time consuming to address than others. Considering this, we want to be as transparent as possible with our players, since we consider this key to a successful Early Access development. So it’s time to dive into those specific subjects and share our thoughts and plan of actions with the community.
A lot of players have been vocal of their dissatisfaction regarding the save system in Worship. We’ve read every comment on Steam and Discord and we’ve noticed a misunderstanding regarding how the game saves.
The most common complaint we’ve received is the absence of a save system. To clarify things, there is a save system in Worship, auto-saving your progression at the beginning of every gameplay phase. Every time you reach the Test of Faith (boss fight) or get to a new zone to explore, your progress is saved. This means if you need to take a break during a play session of Worship, you can quit and get back to where you left off when you want. The source of the misunderstanding is probably due to the fact that you lose the progress you’ve made in a run when you die, as it’s commonly the case in roguelites.
Despite the presence or absence of the Save System, it is clear to us that the way saves and permadeath are handled in Worship in its current form is not meeting players expectations. For these reasons, we’ll take a step back to develop something closer to what players are asking us. We’ll make sure to update you on the subject as soon as we have a better idea of what we can implement and add to the updates planned on the roadmap.
We’ve been working day and night to make the online multiplayer functional for the early access release but, as a lot of players stated in the past 24 hours, the state of Worship’s multiplayer is unplayable. It is not up to the players, the Kickstarter backers and our own standards. For these reasons, we made the difficult decision to remove the multiplayer from the main game until we take the time to refactor our code base properly. As stated above, we cannot put our development effort everywhere at once, so in order to simultaneously bring new content updates planned on the roadmap as well as other improvements that you are asking for, we have to put some other things aside. We apologize for the inconvenience of this decision. The Multiplayer Support has been added to the backlog of the roadmap. The Steam page has also been updated for the time being to make sure we are not misleading players looking to join the cult.
For those of you who still want to play multiplayer, even in its broken state, a Steam beta branch is available to everybody. The branch is called “beta-multiplayer” and should automatically be included in the Properties section of your game on Steam.
To access the Steam beta branches, follow these steps:
Go to your Steam Library
Right click on Worship and then click “Properties”
In the Properties window, find the tab called “Betas”
In this section, you will find a rolldown menu which includes the “beta-multiplayer” branch.
By selecting the beta branch, your game will automatically update in your Steam library with the multiplayer available for you to play
To go back to the main version of Worship, select the “None” option in the rolldown menu
We’ll try to update the beta branch as often as we update the game, but keep in mind that some updates might be skipped for this version of the game and we will not be trying to fix the multiplayer issues in the branch until we’ve finished the refactors in the work for the main version of the game.
We are aware of the frustration some of the players will have towards this decision, we hear you and we feel you. We’re the first to be disappointed when it comes to this, but it is important for us to create a good experience for our players and the multiplayer is just simply not there at the moment. It would not be respectful for players not to act on it and this was the only solution we could make in the short term. We’ll make sure to update the community when we have news regarding multiplayer, but consider this might take months to get there.
We know these aren’t the only issues Worship has at the moment. Some players voiced inconsistencies with the symbol recognition and several annoying bugs still remain. Please bear with us as we continue pushing hotfix patches while moving towards the updates planned on the roadmap. We are still on track for those, so we hope you are looking forward to the upcoming content and features!
Thank you for your understanding and your enthusiasm towards Worship. Your feedback is valuable and our main and only priority is to make sure Worship develops into a positive experience for as many people as possible.
Expect news from us shortly and until then, godspeed everybody,
Alexis and the Chasing Rats team