I also am a big fan of Stalker and it's method of occasional scariness. This game won't be all that scary
most of the time, which hopefully will make the times when it is scary... even more terrifying. (wicked grin) I hope that going into a deep area will have some of the tension from Demon's Souls, merged sometimes with the atmosphere from the underground areas in Stalker.
That said, it's not to be a purely scary game. But I believe that in order to really feel like a brave adventurer, there have to be some legitimately scary and intimidating parts. In Alden Ridge I managed that pretty well for such a low-fi production, but mainly through cheap tricks like darkness and things jumping out at the player unexpectedly (the first time my wife got eaten by an alligator there, she about jumped out of her chair, I recall). With this one, those sort of tricks are of course fair game, and the sparser they are the more effective they'll be. But I also hope to, with Pablo's help, do some more atmospheric areas in parts. He's really good at doing some truly terrifying sounds, actually.
In terms of melee weapons, yes those will definitely be there. In terms of firearms... maybe. Though I think that would be kind of redundant with a lot of the magic, honestly. Well, we'll see. I do plan to have bows and arrows, so I suppose we might as well have firearms of some sort, too. The limited ammo is going to make the projectiles way less attractive in most cases, though, because magic can be recharged with time, whereas those would require finite ammo by nature. Maybe that bit will be skipped for firearms/bows, in a Chrono Trigger / Final Fantasy Tactics sense. So you choose a gun/bow and an arrow/ammo type, for instance, and then you have infinite of that particular type. That forgoes realism a bit in favor of player convenience and fun, but hey. In that case, it would be based on a reload-with-time thing like the magic, and the only difference would be that it's the ranged way to deal physical (as opposed to magical) damage.
(Wow, that was a lot of thinking out loud.)
Anyway, so... yes, sounds like there will be firearms.
There will also be traps. There are five major types of craftable items: weapons, armor, magic gems, consumables (healing, one-off effects, etc), and traps. Incidentally, today we implemented the third spell, and the first trap. The particle effects are coming along, too. And the HUD and first pass at a basic inventory. Things move fast around here, even though Keith and I were both pretty busy with other stuff today and had limited time for AVWW.
This is looking more and more promising for a more feature-packed Alpha than I'd expected. Time will tell, of course, but things are looking very much up.
