Darkfall! AT LAST!

[zanthor]

I heard of this game years ago but since I never heard another word about it, I thought it was just another failed project. I don't pvp anymore in WOW, but the thought of pvping with anybody and everybody, including your own faction, sounds pretty cool! Imagine no safe zones.

"What? Did you say that guy over there just mined that node you were working your way to? I say he's gonna be dead sumbitch, no matter what faction he is."

Unlimited PVP... oh you really have no clue what you are in for if you think this is a good thing in any way shape or form. Ultima Online had near unlimited PVP and the first thing I learned about it was that the life expectancy of a newb outside the town guards protection was nearly 5 seconds.

I did the PVP thing in UO, did it quite well, and loved every minute of it. There were times it was frustrating and it drove a LOT of my friends away. Once they introduced Trammel it went down hill because the PK's got worse with fewer targets to hunt... and the bluebies hid away on the safe side.

[Yamio]

Oh I definitely have a clue about world pvp. Right out of the gate, as soon as you create a character, you're fighting another person that just created their character too. Ten minutes into the game you'll probably have died twice, but there's also the possibility that you've killed a couple of guys yourself. That would turn away just about everybody who can't stomach serious in-your-face pvp, but that's not the crowd this game is going for. It's not designed to be a WoW killer since wow wasn't around when they first started creating Darkfall back the 1940's....

The only problem I see with this game so far is.....there's not a lot of info like videos of gameplay, or a lot of info about the game itself. Yes I know, they say it'll have this and it'll have that, but honestly that's not enough. I've been looking around and all the stuff that is missing is what is the most glaring. It's almost like it really is vaporware.

Not a lot of hype which is good, but there's not a lot of info about it either, which is bad. idk....we'll see

[Catamer]

they are probably having credit problems ( like everyone else these days )
I have to admit that has to be the weakest come play our game I've ever seen.... It was almost a please don't overload our single sever... since we can't afford two of them... please don't get p/o when you can't get on.

[Marious]

Aion looks visually stunning, the question is what will the rest of it be like, the fighting engine and everything else, the questing. I look at some of the video's and I am reminded of FFXI and some of the japanese animation cartoons as well as some of the RPG's. I like the look it has, Darkfall in the other hand the land and all that is very nice, not the case with the characters which seems a bit out of place and for an MMO that has been in production for a while I would think that the characters would be more part of the game than what they look like now, they just do not mesh with the rest of the world around them from what I can see. Maybe it will be good but I am not counting on it.

[Rin]

Its been designed to be a more difficult class of game.

You know, every time I've heard this before, the thing invariably flopped because the design seems to eliminate a bottom percentage of its own playerbase. Just an observation.

I would agree with this. Darkfall seems like a great concept, but it will likely only serve a small niche population. (Small player bases tend to either be a hit or miss when it comes to revenues). Looking over the Darkfall news, there are some huge glaring pitfalls that the game will need to address if it plans on maintaining sustainability. One of these elements that needs to be addressed is the "kill anyone, anywhere" -- this is awesome for everyone who plays the game from launch day on forward, but it would be terrible for a new player (would you play a game where you couldn't even stay logged in for more than 2-3 mins without getting griefed)? Given the fact that you can lose all of your gear - I don't know who would stick around in a game like this on a long-term basis (yes I know, UO was like this in the beginning, but don't you remember what happened?).
Sure, the developers have stated that gear can be easily replaced - but if it's that easy to replace, where's the "progression" (or at least character building)? For me personally it comes down to building a character that I can be proud of (whether it be through gear, achievements, AA points (everquest), or whatever); levels are something that are given to anyone with enough time invested, and since Darkfall has no levels (just skills), inevitably skills are the only measurement of character building that can be accomplished.

[Redbeard]

Rin,

Not sure if you played UO or not from your post.

In a game like UO "full looting" of corpses worked because, as you stated, gear was easily replaced. In the beginning, GM stuff was the best stuff out there. There were some magical weapons but they were few and most people were wearing crafted gear. It was not what you would call a "loot progression game" like EQ / WOW is.. it wasnt like. Get gear 1 to kill boss 1 so you can get gear 2 to kill boss 2. You just got your gear and went and adventured. Thats why full looting works and why it would never work in a game like WoW (gear takes too much time / effort to get).

As far as getting griefed... thats really a subjective classification up to the game designers. If they think full scale PVP is fun and want people battling in the towns and stuff then its not really griefing. Kind of a question of semantics so ill let it drop there.

A previous poster was right though, most people are NOT prepared and would not enjoy a unrestricted pvp game.

[succulent]

From their FAQ:

What happens when my character dies?
When your character dies he drops his items that remain on his corpse until looted, but the good news is that he?s resurrected at a spot you?ve previously selected.

...if I'm reading this right, it's like some other MMOs where you rez with no equipment and have to go find your body. I think this alone (and the PvP-only aspect) make me not interested; there's enough tedious crap in my life as it is.

[glo]

First wave of Invites - Thursday January 22 2009
Posted by Darkfall News on January 22, 2009 20:36

This is an update about what is happening today:
We have sent out the first wave of invites to clans and individual testers. We will send more waves of invites within a few hours. Invited players will be able to download the Darkfall installer.
We are applying the latest patch, and players will be able to start patching soon, and entering the game.
We are spacing out the invites in order to facilitate the download of the client and patching. We will continue sending out more invites every day until we reach our capacity.
Since this first phase has to do with stress testing the servers, and doing final testing on features, we are not lifting the NDA until this testing is concluded.
We apologize for the problems with the forums and the website today, we have been experiencing denial of service attacks, and we are working to resolve them.

They can't even keep their forums up I have to wonder how they are going to do with a server farm and a live MMO.

[Hachoo]

Yeah I think full pvp and full looting is fine in an MMO. It worked for UO, in fact it worked quite well. "Remembering" what happened to UO had nothing to do with how the PvP was and everything to do with how they completely removed involuntary pvp from the game. It wasn't a loot progression game - this was the first real MMO after all, there were no "loot progression" MMOs. I personally like that method better where the concept of the game is far more social (honestly UO had a LOT of player run things). I still remember my first time logging in to UO in 1997 - I was in a town somewhere, I ran west slightly and saw a guy in a pair of pants and no shirt swinging a pickaxe at a mountain. Asked him what he was doing and he explained mining ore to me and told me how to do it. It felt so crazy being able to talk to someone in a game about something like Mining and it was all so mysterious back then. Most of my time in the game consisted of just traveling the world and finding people to hang out with, fight, etc. Everything was so much more dynamic it was a blast.

I attribute the initial awesomeness of UO to the lack of a leveling system - this is what made the game so dynamic and mysterious. Since there were no levels, there were no "zones" with levels, you could walk 10 feet out of a major town and a lich COULD just happen to be wandering through the forest. You didn't have to "level" to PvP because if you had some decent gear and "ok" skills you could kill people if you were decent. There was no "I can't wait to go here" - you just went, because you could whenever you wanted. It was just awesome. I've been waiting for another PvP oriented non-level-based MMO ever since I stopped playing UO - honestly levels are stupid and unrealistic and IMO only hinder the playability of a game. Ok that was quite the tangent...

That being said, I'm still almost 100% sure Darkfall will never see the light of day, or if it does it will flop very fast.

[pjdell]

Yeah that game looks pretty good... the thing i think it has going for it is they are taking a different approach.

UP till now if you try to take wow head on you are just going to get pummeled down to the ground... its made me realize what a great game wow is even after all the complaints people have...

Darkfall however has a completely different combat style (sure AoC tried, but it was quite tedius and lame IMO) which sets it wayyyy apart from other games, and that is only one thing of many that they approach differently.

I think what you are going to see really in the end if darkfall is succesful are two completely different games,
Wow, where you have heroes and you really try to build on one character to make them the better and better... which is fun and will not lose too much even if darkfall does well and
Darkfall, where you play more of a disposable soldier as opposed to a "hero" where it will be more realistic...

Will be interesting to see the outcome