(I know this was mentioned briefly in a dead thread, but I thought it deserved its own thread. It's big news.)

Guido Henkel, the mastermind that brought us Planescape: Torment and who worked extensively on Realms of Arkania, is hard at work on a new first-person RPG, codenamed Deathfire. The beautiful artwork by Thu-Lieu Pham is reminiscent of Baldur's Gate. "“We decided early on to try and capture the look of Golden Era role-playing games. The covers by Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, Brom, and Jeff Easley come to mind, right away. Call me old-school, but to me this kind of vivid imagery and paintbrush work is much more inspirational and engaging than a rendered 3D character.”"

And a bit about the gameplay, in Henkel's own words: "The vision I had seen in my mind’s eye was a role-playing game game that was electric and right in your face with action. Instantly, I knew that the only way to make this happen was with a first-person view, where the player is right in the thick of things…Like reading a good thriller, my idea is to create a real-time game in which the player is fully invested, where (s)he feels the environment, where (s)he feels the pressure, the suspense and the menace. It may not give the player the opportunity to strategize and analyze a situation in too much detail before on ogre’s spiked club comes smashing down on [their] head. Instead, it replaces the moment with an incredibly visceral experience that can range from startling the player all the way to downright frightening [them] when foreshadowed properly."

And see those "disadvantages"? It's straight out of Arkania! So far, the Unity Engine game is shaping up to be colorful and ambitious, and I personally can't wait to see more.

Want more info?

Guido Henkel's project blog about Deathfire
PC Gamer's Article
Polygon's Article
My own lengthy Tumblr post about the game

Eh yes.. well...
I don't see any screenshots or actual information except for the usual excited babble so I'll just put this in the occasionally check pile.

vapourware most probably...

The uploaded pics look kinda lord of the ringsy, but not in an appealing way to me, I didnt lke Grimrock at all.

Hopefully it gets made though, alot of people like Grimrock, so it will be a nice alternative for them maybe.

It looks like a mod for Baldur's Gate or something

I think Henkel lost some credibility with his fans after his botched Kickstarter "Thorvalla", which was so terribly pitched that it managed to turn-off even the "hardcore" Realms of Arkania fans, I know many (myself included) didn't pledge simply because of his idea of the "Collectible Card Game" combat system mentioned on the Kickstarter page.

Glad to see though he seems to have abandoned that idea and gone back to dice-rolls, good to see the good old d20 on that character generation picture. Also the character picture has weakness stats very similar to RoA, which is promising too.

It's not that the game doesn't have any ingame screenshots, Wasteland 2, Project Eternity, didn't have any screenshots and yet they really managed to generate hype, but Thorvalla failed to excite anyone, the whole thing looked like he wasn't excited for the project and thought it up very quickly and without much thought.

Hopefully this "Deathfire" game is a step in the right direction, but the fact that Henkel only has 4 team members so far basically means without a successful Kickstarter it won't happen, it needs money to hire a bigger team of artists and programmers.

But most importantly, Henkel needs to evoke nostalgia if he wants cash from RPG fans, and like it or not "new and revolutionary" or "innovative" ideas are not possible on Kickstarter, the biggest donators are people to want old-style games like they remember.

No shit the Halfling looks almost eactly like Bilbo Baggins.

Crosmando: I agree. I wasn't aware of it till it had already failed, but with the Kickstarter rewards he offered, I'm surprised anyone backed it at all. It could have been promising, but a designer would need to take notes from Project Eternity or Divinity Original Sin on how to run a successful campaign. Those rewards really made me want to back those games...

But you're right about the nostalgia. I think it was when Henkel invoked Realms of Arkania that I got really excited for this game. My guess is that he's trying hard to signal boost right now and get a lot of notice before he launches another Kickstarter campaign. It's what I'd do, at least. ^.^ And for my part, I hope the project gets more hype and that it ends up really successful. It sounds really promising. ^.^

well if they showed engine it would be really cool. These character creation screens can be made in photoshop in less than 15 minutes :(
They seem more like concept art to me than actual gameplay screen

True, very true. On his blog, he did show shots of some of the design elements he was working on, some of the coding, and some of the early graphics renders and stuff. It looked - to me at least - like the beginnings of some serious work, but I agree with what some others have said about needing a Kickstarter to get into the truly serious work of making the game...

Necromancing thread for great justice!

First screenshots of this game have been released.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/deathfire-ruins-of-nethermore-new-screenshots-and-feature-list.86913/

Necromancing and linking to "that codex" without explicit notification. You are true evil !

Edit : thanks for the heads up though

The game title makes me wonder at what age I stopped giving my RPG characters cool not-really-names like Deathfire.

How does people name their characters? If it is single player, I just tend to give them names such as "Warrior", "Mage" or "Rogue" - or "A", "B" and "C"....

+1 for the linkage, cheers :)