In fact the dev team at WolfEye has been one of the most proactive I've seen to date where community feedback and engagement is concerned, with any and all discourse around the game going into the melting pot of updates, tweaks, balances and improvements. The end result, six months on, is a game in as good a shape as ever, which is saying a lot as its initial release was still pretty damn good.

To celebrate the transformative nature of a game like Weird West -- an immersive sim with many, many, many moving parts -- the game's key stakeholders have put together something of a "how it's going" style trailer while also offering it up in respective PC marketplaces 50% off, starting later this week (1AM AEST this Friday).


In addition to the discount, WolfEye has made the entire first journey of the game -- the Bounty Hunter Journey -- *free on Steam right now. So if you haven't played Weird West, now is as good a time as any to invest on one of the year's best releases.

Here's more official talk on everything above:

The untamed wilds of Weird West have witnessed many changes since its release back in March. Developer Wolfeye has been hard at work over the last six months, gradually evolving and polishing the Weird West experience based on community feedback.

The successive transformative updates include enhanced player progression with fully revamped and rebalanced RPG systems and economy, more diverse secondary locations, loot and encounters, new combat tuning options and balancing - including an alternative aiming system and increased non-lethal options, reworked companion AI, completely overhauled UI that includes a new Posse Reputation tracker and a whole new game mode that added permadeath, higher stakes and bigger consequences.

*Save files made playing the free Bounty Hunter Journey will carry over to the full product upon purchase.

There's been a fair amount of hype surrounding WolfEye Studios debut title, Weird West. Partly because the studio is made up of ex-Arkane alum, including co-founder and immersive sim visionary, Raphael Colantonio, and partly because it's taking us somewhere new, yet familiar.

That being the weirder, darker side of the Wild West -- one where arcane magic is as normal and as important as how many bullets you have left in your bandolier.

We've been trekking such plains in the footsteps of five unique individuals, and have come away better because of this journey, praise be Inun.

Here's a snippet from the very same adventure:

The game is full of common sense design principles centred around form and function. And when you start recognising that, you’ll start to play with it in fun and unique ways. WolfEye encourages you in the very early throes of the game to save before big encounters, just so you can experiment with its systems and witness the game’s dynamic nature and figure out how best to use that to your advantage. It has a little bit of Desperados about it in this way, perhaps more so because of the setting, but it’s where my mind has gone a handful of times. And as a game similar to that, it’s never against you. At least, not in the unfair department. Failure in any given instance will fall squarely on you, because it’s not like the game hasn’t given you all you need; all the tools to get the job done. And you’ll die a lot. The enemies are smart, and the systems are harsh when it all aligns against you, but there’s backup here, and it comes in the form of traditional gaming stuff...

Click here for our full Weird West review.

WolfEye Studios' forthcoming Weird West pulls no punches in letting you know what its about. And the titular subgenre in which it resides has been around for eons, but for some reason hasn't ever truly broken through. Which sort of doesn't make sense if you think about it -- cowboys and werewolves just seems like a match made in... well, somewhere cool.



Now, we know Westerns, no bones about it. Men without names, stories of headstones, historical gambling dens, painted wagons and the like... but we don't know it like some. And in particular, the Weird Western. So we asked friend of the site, Christian D. Read (The Secret World, Hand of Fate, Wickerpunk), for his insights as someone who has not only worked in games, but is also a published horror and Weird Western writer.

His The Eldritch Kid graphic novel series is as Weird Western as it gets, while his knowledge of games in both the digital and table-top form make him an authority on how these things work. But more than that, the man loves the history of things, and sharing that history. So getting him to do this was like asking a kid to review lollies. Lots of lollies.

What we finished up with is an incredible roundup of the subgenre's past and minor present through books, film, comics and games. With a teeny eye toward its future.

Click here for our in-depth feature on the Weird Western genre.

And starring WolfEye Studios' co-creator and all-round industry legend, Raphael Colantonio, this new video deep-dive into the basic setup of the world and systems of Weird West is one of those "just scratching the surface" types of dealies.

You learn things like, if it looks interactive in the world, it probably is. Or, "I don't want to follow the game's prompts" and so just don't, according to Raf.

Here's some more from WolfEye buddies, Devolver Digital:

Newly opened pre-orders on Steam will furnish players with a horse named Calamity; a dependable mule that provides leg up at the beginning of their adventures by doubling their inventory size, allowing them to escape locations even if enemies are chasing them, and faster travel to avoid missing out on timed objectives. Calamity’s saddle bags will also be stocked up with essential items, including lockpicks, bandages, tools and a Golden Ace of Spades upgrade token.

Oh, and that release date? January 11, 2022. Across all revealed platforms -- PC, PlayStation and Xbox.

Check out the new video embedded below, which is the first in a series detailing the game in more in-depth ways. Also, check out our very own developer interview feature with Raph.

WolfEye Studios' Raphael Colantonio recently spoke to us in-depth about the studio's inaugural title, Weird West which is now incredibly high on our 2021 "Most Wanted" list.

Among lengthy topics covered, was the studio's sense of freedom after having lived the AAA development life for more than a decade.

“I’m lucky that I could recruit a lot of people that I’ve been working with for… two decades, really," Colantonio told us. "So it’s not like I’ve had to convince them. And so [Weird West is] more than a ‘Raf game’, it’s really all of this team. And also the main difference, frankly, between Prey, Dishonored and Weird West is the budget -- that’s really where the difference is. We had four people making the entire art of this game, which is remarkable. If you have four people versus a 100 people… that just allows us to go as deep as any of the games we’ve done before. If not deeper.

"Surprisingly, [Weird West] might be our biggest game. Our hardest game to make for sure. There’s just so much content, there’s so [many things to] interact with and so there are so many ways the game can break… it’s been really, really scary.

“[But] to me there’s no trade off in the sense that I don’t feel like we’ve [gone] smaller, we’ve actually been going bigger. You know, it doesn’t take a month and a half to make a character, in this case it’s all done by the same person and it takes a week. That’s the main difference, really. And so that allows us to be more flexible, take more risks, try more things and iterate and change our minds and it’s actually more fun, frankly.”

Click here for more from Raf and the team, and for our full thoughts on what we've seen of Weird West so far.

As far as elevator pitches go, being asked by an aspiring young dev team -- if we were the money-crunchers who also just loved 'out there' ideas or, you know, were Devolver Digital -- "what if it was like Monkey Magic -- you know, The Journey to the West story. But we embraced the 'West' and added cowboys!?!?".

We'd have to reply pretty quickly, and wide-eyed "yes! Make it so!!". (I mean, cowboys are still so hot right now.)

That's Weird West in as basic a nutshell as needed, and this OP is proof of the craziness a lockdown can bring to your sensibilities.

But seriously, after watching this trailer and ingesting that concept, we're pretty well on board with this unique game, but don't just take our word for it, here's some official scripture from a drunk-on-whiskey-Buddha:

Developer WolfEye Studios and publisher Devolver Digital have announced that Weird West, their upcoming action RPG experience set within a surreal vision of the developing frontier, is coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One alongside PC in [Spring AU] 2021. To coincide with the news, the peculiar posse have released a brand new gameplay trailer, unveiling the mysteries of Weird West through the intertwined destinies of its unusual heroes. These are the Five Journeys.

Discover a dark fantasy reimagining of the Wild West where lawmen and gunslingers share the frontier with fantastical creatures. Journey through the origin stories of a group of atypical heroes, written into legend by the decisions you make in an unforgiving land. Each journey is unique and tailored to the actions taken - a series of high stakes stories where everything counts and the world reacts to the choices you make. Form a posse or venture forth alone into the otherworldly confines of the Weird West and make each legend your own.

Watch a newly-released gameplay trailer for the game embedded below. And stay tuned for more from us as whispers of the game's journey makes their way to our saloon.