Firewatch is a narrative driven adventure game, or walking simulator as some would say, and despite the genre receiving undue amounts of criticism from the gaming community I am glad that so many were willing to look past that in order to experience the touching, and very human story Firewatch wanted to tell.

According to Panic, the publisher behind Firewatch, around 500,000 people donned the fire lookout shorts and set out in to the wilderness, an impressive number even for some AAA studios, let alone an indie one. Here's a few more tidbits of info from the announcement, and what exactly the team is working on right now:

During the first few days after Firewatch released, many that played on the PS4 or Mac versions of the game encountered some rather annoying performance issues that could tank the FPS all the way to single digits, which as you can imagine is a less than ideal situation. The problem was quickly patched away, but unfortunately some players continued to have issues.

If you're among the unlucky few I have some good news as Campo Santo, the developers behind Firewatch, are currently working on improving performance across the board, but specifically for the PS4 and Mac versions.

Firewatch has some of the best banter around

One of the more unique features found in Firewatch is the ability to take photos with an in-game camera, photos that you could have physically printed and mailed to you for $15. I'm not really the sentimental type so I didn't bother getting myself a copy, but well over 1000 people took Campo Santo up on their offer and got themselves a small token to remember their travels with.

Finally, the developers spoke a bit about the somewhat anticlimactic ending they chose to go with. Its hard to explain why without spoiling, but lets just say it was a very "real" ending to a very "real" story, which resulted in a sizable part of the playerbase being disappointed with it. Neither side is right or wrong in this debate, but I'm glad the devs decided to weigh in with a few of their thoughts as well:

"As a side note, there was one big post-launch mental difference for us at Panic: when you make a game, you’re telling a story, and there’s no “patch” in the world that will make a story perfect for everyone. We were fully prepared for this, but: some people really loved Firewatch’s ending, others didn’t.

Both opinions are completely valid. But we wanted to tell a ‘real-life’ story, and those often end quietly and sadly. We’re just grateful people played enough to have an opinion!"

If you haven't already, give Firewatch a try, even if that means waiting until its on sale. The reason I say that is because its not a very long game, totaling around 5-6 hours for me, but it was an experience well worth going through, and one that I don't mind recommending.