Deathfire - Guido Henkel's New Baby

Myrthos

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After the cancelled Thorvalla kickstarter Guido Henkel started working on something else; a RPG going with the temporary title Deathfire. The game is being designed in Unity and besides Guido two other persons are working on this game. One of them is Marian Arnold who worked on Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity and also did the artwork on the extensive strategy guide for Beyond Divinity of which I was one of the authors. The other is Thu-Lieu Pham who did the artwork for Thorvalla.
There is not much info on the game, but we will likely see more in the near future.
I’ve decided from the outset that I will be using Unity3D for the game. As you can tell from previous posts and some of my tweets, I have become a big Unity fan, as it puts all the right development tools at my disposal at a price point and level of quality that is unbeatable. The package has not let me down once so far – though I would like to say that 3D object import could be improved quite a bit.
Deathfire is using a first-person 3D role-playing environment, and I am glad that we can rely on the muscle of Unity to make sure that we do not have to limit ourselves because the technology can’t keep up. Unity may not be a bleeding edge engine, but it can sure play ball with the best of them, and the fact that it is so incredibly well thought-through, makes developing with Unity a lot of fun. More importantly, we can focus on creating the game, instead of the technology to run it on.
I know, you may have a lot of questions now, about the game. What, when, where, how… I’ll get to all that some time later down the line. For now, however, I simply want you to let the info sink in, and hopefully you’ll be as excited as we are. Visit this blog regularly. I plan on sharing more of Deathfire with you as time goes on. In fact, after some deliberation, I’ve decided that I will cover the development process like a production diary of sorts, right here on my blog. And also, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter (@GuidoHenkel) for a constant vibe-meter as to what I am up to.
More information.
 
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"first-person 3D role-playing environment".... I'm hoping that means a first person *party* game with turn based (or pausable real time or whatever, but strategic) combat not another single character action RPG or twitcher (like Grimrock). An old school party game with the depth of ROA on Unity3D - Yes please!

Not sure about the name, but I hope Robin Williams won't be involved (Mrs Deathfire !?).
 
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You read first-person 3D and think of party and turn-based? I would say that's a highly unlikely combination.

Edit-- Ah I get it, you are thinking of a Wiz8 style game? Yeah, i guess that's at least a possibility.
 
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I hope it is Might and Magic style but with who it is it is more likely Realms of Arkania style.
 
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Combat was isometric in RoA, though, wasn't it?
 
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UU comes to mind but if they try to pull something similar to Arx Fatalis I will be glad. And would be wishful as mm or roa with 6 players and first-person.
The first RoA that I only played so far, was isometric indeed.
 
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Edit— Ah I get it, you are thinking of a Wiz8 style game? Yeah, i guess that's at least a possibility.

Yes - Not sure how realistic that is to hope for, but I don't imagine either that he would be trying to make something that plays just like an Elder Scrolls game or similar.
 
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Why are people always looking back? We have seen a gazillion old school RPG projects lately. If you have an experienced designer like Henkel, who has smelled blood again, why not let him innovate ? ;)
 
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cautiously enthusiastic about this. Although
Deathfire is using a first-person 3D role-playing environment

might be a step back from Thorvalla IMO. I also take that to mean first person throughout, so no overland travel map.
 
Why are people always looking back? We have seen a gazillion old school RPG projects lately. If you have an experienced designer like Henkel, who has smelled blood again, why not let him innovate ? ;)

No one is asking Henkel not to innovate - quite the opposite. But how much room is there in first person single character games for innovation (and strategy)? Certainly there are very many of these games and innovation is thin on the ground. OTOH when you get to play with a party there are very many ways to go and few of them have been explored in recent years.

I suppose it comes down to why Henkel felt that the Thorvalla KS failed. My feeling was that it didn't get very much publicity and probably also wasn't too well fleshed out for such an ambitious target sum. Just hoping he didn't get the message that noone wants to play deep RPGs with strategic gameplay (for which GH is famous of course) - And surely InExile, Obsidian among others have shown that not to be the case.
 
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You read first-person 3D and think of party and turn-based? I would say that's a highly unlikely combination.

Edit— Ah I get it, you are thinking of a Wiz8 style game? Yeah, i guess that's at least a possibility.

It could always switch to an isometric view for turn-based combat. But yeah, that approach seems unlikely, alas.
 
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Why are people always looking back? We have seen a gazillion old school RPG projects lately. If you have an experienced designer like Henkel, who has smelled blood again, why not let him innovate ? ;)

Making use of experience is the very definition of looking back. And if we are asking for "old school" games, it's just that: looking back at our own RPG experiences, we know that there was something that worked really well that was lost and build onto that as a base, adding the lessons learnt since and implemented new ideas long fostered and grown.
 
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*looks sidelong, furtively*
 
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They could always base it around something like VATS from the newer Fallout games but not have the real time combat at all and add movement to it for during combat. You would enter combat when you near an enemy and you would switch views between your party and control where they move to and what actions they make directly. You would have an area of movement where the character you are controlling can move within and then you have points which the character spends on actions. So that changing between characters isn't disorienting they could have a transition where the camera moves to the next character.
 
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You read first-person 3D and think of party and turn-based? I would say that's a highly unlikely combination.

Edit— Ah I get it, you are thinking of a Wiz8 style game? Yeah, i guess that's at least a possibility.

Looks like I was pretty close, see his latest blog: http://guidohenkel.com/. Deathfire is going to be a first person step based party RPG. The only slight surprise is that it will be real time. However, Guido Henkel makes it pretty clear that it will be a strategic and story based game with lots of detailed stats and not a click fest like Grimrock.
 
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Step based. That is... bold. Especially if you aren't going ultra-retro deliberately.
 
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