Deathfire - The Conception

Myrthos

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Guido Henkel shares a bit more information on the recently announced game Deathfire especially on the very young history of the game and why some choices were made.
Running in a first-person view, it is a party-based real-time role-playing game with a focus on the story. It is not an open world design. Instead, it is very focussed to create maximum impact for the player. Therefore, we will very tightly control the environment the player moves through so that we can manipulate it as best as possible. This also means that it is a stepped role-playing game, by which I mean that there will be no free roaming the 3D environment. The player will take one step at a time as he explores the world. Not only does this help us to maintain a high level of quality in the overall experience, but it is in many ways also more reminiscent of many traditional pen&paper games where you’d use graph paper to map out the game.

When we think of first-person stepped role-playing games, two candidates come to mind, immediately, I think. The first one is Dungeon Master, the granddaddy of all real-time first-person roleplaying games, and the second one would be the games in the Wizardry series. Deathfire will be like neither of them. It will be so much more. It will be as gripping as Dungeon Master – or Grimrock if you’re not old enough to have played the original Dungeon Master upon which it was based – but it will have the depth of a real role-playing game, putting it more in line with the Wizardy games, perhaps. It will be a completely amped up affair. It will be more intense and deeper than either of these games. We have completed the character system design at this point and I can tell you that there are enough character attributes and stats to rival the Realms of Arkania games. Well, not exactly, but we’re not too far away from its depth. Our intentions are to push the envelope on what has been done with stepped role-playing games in the past. I feel that there is a huge untapped potential how that gaming experience can be enhanced.
More information.
 
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Just what I was hoping he was going to do, after his last post. I suppose a concern is that the game will be real time (no mention of whether it will be pausable or have some systems like VATS), but the post does make it clear that it's intended to be an in depth strategic game, so I very much doubt that it will be designed to depend on mouse dexterity for challenging gameplay.
 
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Well hopefully he succeeds this time. His last kickstarter didn't go so well.
 
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I would have preferred if it wasn't step-based or real-time. Grimrock already filled that niche for me.

A new first-person party-based game with turn-based or phase-based combat could have been great.
 
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Sounds very intriguing. I would have preferred turn-based as well, but I'll wait and see what exactly he has in mind.

Seems like he already has a much clearer vision for this than he had for Thorvalla - so that bodes well.
 
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I'm playing the older Wizardry's right now and this makes me a bit giddy.
 
I loved Wizardry 8 (not to mention 6&7), but the combat in 8, whilst interesting, can become repetitive and can drag at times. OTOH there are real time games like Grimrock, where your options are restricted and so they have to use timing and motor coordination to create a challenge.

As GH hints in his post though, it may be possible to come up with a system, which takes something from both approaches and moves the genre forward. One obvious idea, for instance, is to have magic/actions that affect movement and time - anything from casting a tar spell to cripples/stuns/slows etc on weapons, to having a chronomancer that directly manipulates time.

In addition there's no necessity to make the gameplay consist of having magic spells that take many mouse clicks to cast and require the memorisation of complex sequences of runes. In a more strategic game what would matter is which skills you choose and in which order along with the placement of your party. And looking at this kind of game there is a lot of room for improving the responsiveness of the UI (one click formations, no secondary spell pages etc.).

Anyway will be interesting to see the development of GH's take on this in his blogs.
 
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