Deathfire Items and Weapons Blog

The latest Deathfire development blog from Guido Henkel focuses on items and weapons in particular, and is a solid read throughout if you’re interested in old school item design concepts. There’s apparently a meaty list of them already:

It started when I decided to make a weapons list for the game. We have been working on parts of the user interface for the past two weeks or so, and it got to the point that I wanted to see some weapon icons in the respective slots. In order for Marian to begin drawing some icons, we began making a weapons list. It started out quite innocuously, but once I got into it, the list grew very rapidly, and at the end of the day we had a list of over 150 weapons for the game. And that is just the first go at it, not including any quest items and not including any unique, named weapons, which we plan to feature prominently in the game.

Adding all those will easily double the number of weapons in Deathfire, and I have no doubt that on top of that I probably forgot a good number of cool weapons that we will want to include in the game as we go along. All things said, in the end, I would estimate that we will have somewhere between 300 and 400 weapons. Just to give you a comparison, Shadows over Riva, the third of the Realms of Arkania games had less that 100 weapons. In fact, looking over the game’s source code showed me that the entire game contained a mere 480 items. So, in essence, it looks as if we will have nearly as many weapons as Shadows over Riva had items. Nice!