Worship full release, state of multiplayer and early access development

Hello everyone!

After 8 months of development on the early access for Worship, we are now ready to talk about the full release of Worship later this year! For the occasion, we will go over what to expect for the 1.0 version of the game and give you an update on the console ports, the multiplayer support and the future of development following the full release.

The goal of this communication is to get you all in the loop for what to expect for Worship full release while being transparent regarding our thought process and the reality of Worship’s production.

Condensed summary

Let’s keep it real, we know most people won’t bother reading through this monster of an update. That’s why we start things off with a convenient bullet point summary of all the important information contained in this update. If you want more information on some of the points, feel free to head to the associated sections below!

Worship 1.0

• Coming as the next major update, by far the biggest we’ve done!

• Release window: Fall 2026

• Account Progression - Eldritch Prophecies

  • Tackle a growing list of challenges and objectives called prophecies, each unlocking a different reward:

    • Gods unlocks

    • Permanent upgrades

    • New content for your next runs

    • Lore and Bestiary entries

    • Skins for cultist, followers and blood

• Final Area - Cabal Marshlands

• Final Test of Faith - Mortals’ Last Stand

• Follower cap

  • The amount of followers you can command at once is now capped.

  • Follower cap grows as your cult progresses in a run.

    • Progress at a certain devotion threshold in each area.

    • Can be increased through upgrades.

    • Can be permanently increased through eldritch prophecies

    • Excess followers are stowed in the cult base.

      • They can be summoned at any time to replace lost followers.

    • Each god and aspect now has its own follower cap.

• Gods Aspects

  • Basically new gods with their own upgrades, mechanics and playstyle.

  • Instead of being different gods, they explore different facets of An-Ansgaidh, Hubryus and Kessessa

    • Sneak peak: An-Ansgaidh, Weeping Calamity vs An-Ansgaidh, Shepherd of Martyrs.

• More gameplay improvements are being considered at the moment.

• Fast Travel

  • Finishing major encounters creates a portal to your cult base

  • Town portal ritual can be unlocked through prophecy reward

• Several new encounters

• New upgrades

• New rituals

• New enemies

Multiplayer, consoles and post-launch support

• Our top priority is and always has been to shape Worship into the best game we can

• We are eternally grateful to our backers for making this project possible

• Multiplayer won’t be part of Worship 1.0

  • We had to decide on completing the game or re-write the netcode of the game

• Early Access performances

• We are confident that Worship 1.0 will be a fun game with quality

• Console ports are happening, we are working on them right now.

• Post-launch updates is something we really want to do, but we cannot make promises

  • If the game’s launch goes well, the team will continue working on content and feature for post-launch updates

In our (admittedly biased) opinion, reading the full update is worth your time if you like Worship and would like to know more about what's to come. It also shines some light on the trials and tribulations of game development if you are curious about it or want more context regarding our decisions.

Worship 1.0 and what to expect

We are eager to share more about the occult content coming to Worship in our next major update. This major update will wrap-up the early access development of Worship. Let’s start with an overview of the upcoming content and features coming to Worship!

Account progression - Eldritch prophecies

If you’ve been following the Chasing Rats Games discord server, you may have seen the various gifs and screenshots we’ve shared regarding the account progression feature that we’ve been working on. Timed with the full release of the game, players will now be able to interpret the whims and whispers of a new eldritch being tearing down time and space. Concretely, this means you’ll be able to consult a growing list of challenges and objectives called prophecies, each promising a different reward.

By completing Eldritch prophecies, you will unlock a variety of permanent upgrades, ranging from additional building sockets in your cult base to the number followers you start each run with. Alongside upgrades to make your cult stronger, you will be able to unlock cosmetics, new content to appear in your next runs, lore entries and fill up a bestiary giving you access to more information regarding the enemies in Worship.

One of the most requested features from players was a better sense of permanent progression, including additional objectives to complete, content to unlock and more reasons to interact with Worship’s content. The Eldritch prophecies are our answer to this feedback. We’ve put a lot of love into this and we think it’ll be a game changer that will give players a lot more playtime and enjoyment out of their experience. The Eldritch Prophecies will come along with Steam achievements on the release of Worship 1.0.

Final area and Test of Faith

Steam post image

We can’t have a 1.0 release without a final area followed by a boss powerful enough to stop your apocalyptic goals, can we? Your cult will now have to desecrate the Cabal Marshlands once you are done with the Untamed Borderlands (the game’s second area). As we mentioned in a previous post, this zone is the temporary home of the coven caravan. As such, abundant signs of Coven activity and occupation can be seen there. Caravan paths and camps are established in the scarce safe zones scattered about. Some of their members decided to settle there, studying the taint and its effects on the Marshlands, uncovering different relics of the past in their research.

Additionally, the growing threat of the cult looms heavier than ever before. The factions will temporarily set aside their feud and mount an alliance against the enemy that seeks to end their world, you. That’s all we’re willing to say, since we want to keep the area mostly under wraps for players to discover by themselves once it arrives.

As you well know, each new area comes with its own Test of Faith and this one is no different. Expect an epic encounter in which the remaining forces of the mortal realm make a last stand against your cult. Will you be able to extinguish the last hopes of an entire world that refuses to die?

We are giving our all to make the final encounter a memorable experience and a worthy challenge for cults that make it all the way to their final goal.

Main gameplay changes and additions

The early access of Worship had multiple purposes, including having early adopters of the game to give us feedback and data regarding the distinctive gameplay of the game. Based on our observations and feedback from players, we’re introducing a couple of changes and additions to how the game plays.

Follower Cap

The first and most impactful changes we are putting in Worship is a cap on the Followers in your flock at a given time. Now we know this might sound like a downgrade, but bear with us while we explain why this can make the game more enjoyable!

Depending on which God you worship, the amount of followers you can command simultaneously will change. The way it works is pretty straight forward. Let’s say you serve An-Ansgaidh. At the start of a run you will have access to a maximum of 20 followers. Once you convert enough followers to go above the cap, the excess followers are warped away, your total follower count goes up, but the number of followers physically present is restricted by the cap. This means you will still be able to add more and more members to your cult even if you reach the limit of followers you can command at once. Excess followers are safely stowed inside a dedicated building in your cult base. As soon as you lose some followers bringing you below the cap, you can summon the stowed one from anywhere simply by casting the conversion ritual.

An important part of this feature is that this cap is meant to grow! We know and we believe that having a huge army of Followers swarming through your enemies is fun and satisfying. Don’t worry, this will still be part of Worship, but your cult will have to work for it. The main way to raise your follower cap is by expanding the influence of your cult during a run. Once per area, reaching a certain devotion threshold will substantially increase your follower limit. That means you can still end up controlling a big mob of devout maniacs, but later in your runs. You can also increase that cap through different catalyst upgrades that raise the limit, making you able to reach unexpected highs in lucky runs. Lastly, you can also permanently obtain a higher cap through account progression. Some of the Eldritch prophecies will conservatively increase the amount of followers at your command at once, across all of your runs.

We’ve implemented this change to Worship for many reasons, the main one being game balance. What we’ve observed through our playtests is that having a high amount of followers (80+) makes most of the content trivial. This is especially true because we had no way of knowing how many followers the player will have at a given moment in a run. Because of this, followers were difficult to balance with the rest of the game. Another reason is tied to the player fantasy and pacing of runs. Players will be much more likely to feel the cult’s influence expanding in relation with their progress through each area and test of faith if the amount of faithful they command matches this progression.

The last reason is to make the game less punitive. When you walked around with the entirety of your followers, one bad fight was enough to make you the cult sole survivor. With this change, even if you lose everyone under your command, you most likely have many more in reserve that you can swiftly bring back in the action.

God Aspects

It’s an important goal for us to add more gods into Worship, but creating new ones is a particularly costly process. They not only require a gameplay kit that makes them feel differently but also a completely new set of hand-drawn animations for god communion, different visuals for the cult base, alternative music tracks and more. All of this meant we had to make difficult decisions for the gods-related content that we could fit into the 1.0 launch.

Now the good news: we are actually able to efficiently create interesting gameplay kits for gods that lean into their own unique playstyle. Focusing on that without all the other god’s related implications listed above would enable the development team to fit more of them into the 1.0 release. This is how we came up with god aspects. Instead of barely making a 4th playable god for the 1.0, we are able to instead make 3 new fully-fledged god aspects, one for each god currently in the game.

Gods aspects are new gods to worship, but instead of being a different deity entirely, they explore alternate facets of existing gods. They each feature their own playstyle, with different upgrades, starting building, follower cap and more.

To give you an example, here’s a sneak-peak of An-Ansgaidh aspects:

An-Ansgaidh, Weeping Calamity

Its title changed for the occasion, but this is the aspect of the god that you already know and probably served for a couple of runs. It’s the first available god when you begin your journey in Worship. As such, the powers he gives to your cult (such as Mercy Killing) are both beginner friendly and a good window into An’s convoluted concept of mercy.

As we established when discussing the follower cap feature, choosing the god you Worship will have an impact on the amount of followers you can bring into battle. It will also influence how much that amount goes up as your cult grows during a run. This aspect of An-Ansgaidh will let you lead a moderate amount of followers, with a steady growth during a run.

An-Ansgaidh, Shepherd of Martyrs

Shepherd of Martyr is the new An-Ansgaidh aspect to worship. This one explores the god’s warlord-like facet, commanding an army of unrelenting faithful in his crusade against mortality.

Serving the Shepherd of Martyrs will let you lead the biggest follower mob out of all the other gods and it will provide you with tools to make use of them. A new cantrip will let you whip your followers, applying an increasing enrage buff while wounding them in the process. As for the starting utility building of this aspect, the war smith dedicated to your cause will sculpt any undesired upgrade crystal into war instruments that can be carried into battle. The rest of his powers are for you to discover when the 1.0 update launches!

All the gods and aspects will be unlockable through Eldritch Prophecies. Themed prophecies will lead you to gradually expand your available pantheon. We hope you look forward to unlocking and worshiping the 3 new god aspects when they arrive into the game!

Fast Travel

Navigating and discovering the map in a run of Worship is an important aspect of the gameplay loop, but it is also far from perfect in the current state of the game. Going back to your base can be tedious, especially if you are planning to immediately bring rewards from an encounter to your cult base. Considering this, we’re adding portals to fast travel back to your base once you’ve completed a major encounter. So if you’ve defeated the Goopacabra and its offspring in the Desecrated Lair, you’ll have an easier time to bring back the loot from the encounter and cash it in.

Through eldritch prophecy you’ll even be able to permanently get access to a ritual able to make your frequent pit stops at the cult base more efficient!

Rituals, healing and other core systems

We don’t have specific changes and additions to showcase about blood and rituals at the moment, but we still wanted to mention we are actively looking at those features for iterations. Considering the impact the follower cap has on the game’s balance, we want to make sure rituals are accessible and fun to use. The main aspect we are aiming to improve is the amount of time and resources required to do a ritual in combat. We’ve observed players setting up their rituals before combat, but once the fight has started, followers and cantrips tend to be solely relied upon.

We’re exploring ways to cast rituals faster but also considering alternate ways of healing your cultist, things like quick-cast rituals and blood absorbing held followers. These are examples and have yet to be tested by our team and during our playtests, but this gives you an idea on the aspect of the game we’re actively working on.

The full release of Worship is aimed for Fall 2026.

Multiplayer and post-launch support

The Multiplayer experience will not be available at 1.0 launch. We know this is a hard pill for you to swallow because it's hard for us too. Here's our honest thought process and the added context that brought us to make this decision.

Development, as of late, has been difficult for multiple reasons, ranging from: learning how to manage a team double the size of our first game, having to change technical director midway through development, all while using a now deprecated network solution for the multiplayer support of Worship. No tech director and a network solution that is no longer reliable is the worst problem to have while working to release a multiplayer game. But beyond shitty timing, the recurring challenge we've been trying to learn from is our difficulties to properly scope certain things, and our discomfort with adjusting said scope during development, especially regarding the Kickstarter promises we’ve made years ago.

With a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2021 (which literally saved our studio and made this project possible), an incredibly understanding private investor and a (in hindsight naive) confidence to deliver on all our promises, we bit off more than we could chew and we kept chewing.

From a technical standpoint, Worship presents a lot of challenges, especially considering the size of our team. The follower system, symbol recognition for rituals, real-time combat tied with unit management, procedural generation, etc - there's a lot on our plate. But we never backed down from these challenges. We're indie, after all.

From an artistic standpoint, all of the content in Worship is made through traditional animation, which means hand-drawn, frame by frame. This gives the game a lot of personality at the cost of taking more time to develop than other animation methods. This also affects how flexible we can be with our assets. Making a skin for the Followers means we have to redraw every frame of every animation by hand. It’s definitely worth it when we look at the end result, but it definitely has a significant impact on development time.

From a game design perspective, Worship meshes various weird concepts; either uncommon on their own or a combination of mechanics that aren’t always intuitive from a design perspective. .

From the moment the Kickstarter campaign was successful, the objective was to bring the game we promised to life. Ironically enough, this objective was probably the main reason why we haven’t always steered development in the right direction.

The reality is that we should have taken more time to scope out the feasibility of what we were pitching. In hindsight, that would have meant making drastic changes to some of the core features of Worship. We'll say it again: our naive commitment to stay true to the Kickstarter pitch prevented us from pulling the plug earlier rather than later on some time-sinking features. When you’ve spent four years developing a network solution with mixed results throughout development, it becomes increasingly more difficult to just put it all in the trash and move on. This is one of the many lessons we've learned. We were crunching in overtime to try to solve the synchronization issues until the very last minute before early access launch. There’s a lot we could’ve done better here, but one thing’s for sure: we did everything in our power to make it work.

Once the early access launched and the multiplayer was in a practically unplayable state, we decided to temporarily remove it from the game. The game launched with a user rate of 65% on Steam which, most of the complaints were about the save system and amount of content in the game, followed by multiplayer instability. Based on feedback and bug reports, the save system was clearly the biggest issue at the time so we decided to prioritize this bug and fix it as soon as possible. Since then, we launched 14 hotfix patches, two content updates and one quality of life improvement update for the game. This brought our user score to 81%. We are happy to see improvements in the players’ experience and we have high hopes for what’s to come. While all of this was happening we were also working hard on content and features for the 1.0 release intending to shape the game into a more complete experience.

From there, we evaluated the state of Multiplayer with the help of consultants and that's where we arrived at a crossroads. We had to either assign all of our tech team to rewrite the net code of Worship which would've taken between 6 to 8 months to, theoretically, make it work. Or, we could instead just focus on completing the game as a single player experience with more content, features and polish to finish the early access development. With the scale and resources of our small indie studio, unfortunately, choosing one meant sacrificing the other.

The budget we have left on Worship can only go so far. As you probably guessed from this post, we decided to prioritize shipping a complete game. Our objective now is to complete the game, with crucial content included: a final boss, a third zone in the game, a sense of progression and replayability with the Eldritch prophecies, while also making sure we develop as much as possible the rewards and features Kickstarter backers paid for in 2021. By that we mean the exclusive skin, the “design your own content in Worship” with backers and console ports. We’re also figuring things out regarding physical rewards for the Kickstarter backers. We have not forgotten about them and we’re working to make sure everyone gets the rewards they paid for as soon as possible following the 1.0 launch

Worship early access launch

We had multiple scenarios for success (or failure) for Worship before launch. We knew that if the game didn’t sell well, we would have some difficult decisions to make regarding the length of the early access period, the game and our team.

We’ve launched in early access with a little bit more than 100 000 wishlists on Steam. Considering that it’s hard to stand out among the vast amount of games out there, this was not an amount to be shy about. Due to the high amount of bugs, the unclear and unsatisfying save system and the unstable state of the network, the early access launch unfortunately was not as successful as we would have hoped to. If we’re being honest, with the state the game was in at launch, we understand why most players decided to wait a bit before giving the game a shot. Since then we worked hard to improve things and with well-received hotfixes and content updates, we were able to significantly improve the game. The reviews were much more positive and better sales followed. We are confident that 1.0 will be another big leap in the right direction and that more players will be willing to play a complete version of Worship.

As a canadian company, based on the sales performance of your game, we can be eligible for a funding program with the government. This program funds additional content from released games and would have been a decent amount of money to have a dedicated team to work on the network solutions for several months. Unfortunately, we were short of 10 000 units sold to be eligible to apply on the yearly program in October last year. Depending on how well the sales of Worship with the 1.0 version and console releases goes, we might be able to apply for 2026 and reconsider developing the features we’ve cut from the project until now.

As we mentioned, we are the first to be disappointed about missing features and systems. We are trying to make the best decisions we can with the resources we have so that you end up with the best game possible. We’ve seen through reviews and feedback that our work since early access has an impact and is appreciated. We are honestly excited about the newer content currently in development and working in a singleplayer environment has been lifting a lot of pressure and hurdles for our developers. We understand the frustration and we aren’t trying to dismiss it. This might be a big ask, but we believe Worship is shaping out to be a really fun game and it would mean a lot to us if you’d look at Worship for what it will be instead of what it didn’t end up offering.

We have not dug deep into all the content and other smaller features we’re currently working on for launch but hopefully we gave a good overview on what to expect for Worship’s launch. We’ll be adding new enemies, encounters, rituals and upgrades alongside Eldritch Prophecies, God aspects and gameplay iterations.

Console for Worship

Another big project is the console ports to accompany the 1.0 version of Worship. This has been a popular topic for years with reason. Kickstarter backers and interested players have been asking about our intentions for platforms and the release window of Worship on console. We have yet to confirm the platforms, mainly for marketing reasons.

What we can confirm:

• Worship has been approved by multiple first parties for a console port, which enabled us to start developing console versions for the game

• We’re aiming to ship a console version of Worship 1.0 in 2026

• We’re aiming to include at least one console release with 1.0 release, maybe more

• We’re going to announce which console will Worship be ported on this summer with other marketing material such as new trailers and announcements

• We’re currently in discussion with Limited Run to update the target platforms for the physical copies

We know a lot of you are waiting for a platform announcement. We can't answer this today but it’s in the works - it's moving forward.

“Is this the end?”

Even if some of these news can throw a bit of shade on all of the good stuff coming with the 1.0 launch, it doesn’t mean that we are done with Worship.

While we currently don't have the resources to develop all of the previously promised content, this does not mean that we’ve given up and that it won’t happen. If the 1.0 release goes well, we will definitely be looking at multiplayer and additional content. If we’re able to get access to the funding program we’ve mentioned and get a decent momentum from wishlist conversions, you will be the first ones to know and we’ll communicate our plans going forward.

Until then we’ll make sure to promote our trailers, contact streamers and media to promote the next update as much as we can.

Worship has been quite the journey for our studio, from a successful Kickstarter to the full release of the game coming up in a few months. We’ve learned a lot in those five years and even if the game evolved a lot during development, we’re still proud of how it is turning out and how we grew as developers throughout the project. We’re not done making games, this is just the beginning. Enough talk, time for us to get back to work and make Worship 1.0 a banger game.

Once again, thank you everyone for your support, passion and patience. We can’t wait for you to try out what we’re currently cooking for you.

• Alexis and Remi from Chasing Rats Games