We took advantage of the US holiday to load up Darkfall, the curious PvP sandbox that's garnered plenty of attention in the past few months. Is the game as good as the most hardcore players say it is, or as horrifyingly bad as reviewers like Eurogamer describe it as?
We'll offer the initial Ten Ton Hammer take on the game, plus links to STO's Craig Morrison discussing the Star Trek movie and the takeaway value for the upcoming MMO, a new giveaway, and several new guides in today's Loading... Darkfall First Impressions .
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Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle Editor-in-Chief - The Ten Ton Hammer Network
For a LONG time I was one of the biggest supporters of Darkfall. Both because I saw potential, and I truly want to see the small development houses actually succeed.
Darkfall has its charms.
It is HUGE.
It has no classes per say.
It has "good" AI.
It is a massive PvP game.
However these have major drawbacks.
A huge map, with no real travel system is great on paper, but for those of us that have lives taking an hour to travel from one area to another across a lifeless world makes longing in a chore at times.
No classes is great, and frankly my favorite feature of the game. However no restrictions also make it hard to find yourself a niche if you area a crafter, or specialize if you are a Killer.. everyone can do everything. However it must be noted that the Grind to max your skills is by far the worst in any MMO I have ever played.. And I have played 99% of MMOs since UO launched. However,the gain you get shadows in comparison to the time it took to get there. This is the one major factor keeping everyone from actually maxing out everything...
Advanced AI is something I have been waiting for as a feature in a MMO, and although at first it seems to be so in DF, once you get to higher end mobs. It just comes down to expectant patterns, and finding a way to not get hit. I could Duo some of the hardest mobs in the game and never die. I know this is supposed to be a PvP centric game, but without good solid PvE it becomes shallow, and the world seems even more empty then it really is.
The PvP is one area that I haven't been able to come to a solid conclusion on. Sometimes it is fun, sometimes it is boring as hell. But that will come from any PvP as you are dealing with people with varying degrees of skill etc. I will say this though, people exploiting to get their skills up to max etc was during the LIVE game, there was a beta wipe.
All in all, despite my current Signature, Darkfall is not a bad game. It is improving by leaps and bounds with every patch. That being said, I am no longer subing to it though. Times being what they are I found the game, in its current state, to not have enough depth to be "The One" for my $15 a month. I continue to watch it every patch, and will re-sub in 6 months or so to see how it has come along. Had this game launched 6+ years ago the game would of been one of the best in the market (My opinion), but these days, maybe due to me being older, I expect more from a game... A sandbox is only a fun place to play, if there is enough toys to break the monoity.
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The statements in this post are solely the opinion of Kaldor, and do not necessarily express the view of any other devastatingly handsome member of the MMO Community.
Fair assessments of Darkfall, by both Ethec and Kaldor.
My view is that Darkfall is a diamond in the rough that very well could be, once polished, a gem.
Though this MMO is definitely not for everyone, I must say that I was disappointed with Ed Zitron's assessment in Eurogamer. It seems that even if Ed spent 9 hours in the game, his review lacked objectivity.
It was just the opposite for Ethec's "first look," and while I'm thinking Darkfall isn't for me, his was a pleasant and informative read.
It's quite clear that Eurogamer got a black eye for printing this, as they should and at the same time, earned being brought down a peg or two in respect. It's not the first time the player community has pointed out the error of publishing such "shake and bake" first impressions and labeling them as "reviews." I'm curious how Eurogamer's "second review" will pan out.
I also had allot of hope and gave much support following this game for a long time and I have been playing since Launch.
I think all of you make valid points. One of the main reason i got behind this game was the small Indy dev team. However AV lost me a long time ago with how they handle themselves and there community.
But I was determined to give this game a fair shake so I kept playing.
After 3 solid months of game play I have canceled my sub. After the Honeymoon period wore off i started to see that this game was very shallow and very repetitive with hardly any variation. Basically its not for me.
Its not a horrible game many people enjoy it, but not that many. All of my clan and friends have given up on it and I can only guess 24/7 store being open now means they have allot more room on there one and only server now.
I think The Honeymoon period has expired for allot of people and they are moving on.
Also on the plus side, Darkfall also has a fairly innovative "auto-optimization" feature which turns off graphics features when FPS drops below 30. While a number of online games probably have something like this, DF marks the first time I've seen a checkbox for it. As a result, client-side lag wasn't an issue for me, nor was my ping (despite playing on a European server), or overall game stability. That's a very good thing, since any interruption to this game could be particularly disastrous.
A bit of a warning on this one...many PvPers turn auto-optimization off as it sometimes makes your opponents disappear.
One thing I hated about the interface was the sheathing and unsheathing system. A weapon must first be equipped before it can be unsheathed. The icon which shows if you have a weapon equipped and unsheathed is extremely unreliable. If you are sprinting, you can't tell if you have a weapon unsheathed. If you suddenly encounter an enemy it's very easy to accidentally unequip your weapon with the action bar. When that happens, you sometimes have to stop, open your backpack, and double click on the weapon - selecting the weapon in the action bar won't work.
A major problem with Darkfall is that a majority of players use exploits in PvE as the AI tends to fail around walls and water. While Aventurine discourages people from AFK Macroing, it is still done by most players. Due to the skillup system, alot of player cities have "walls of pain" where players beat on afkers to up their weapon skill. This is extremely boring but necessary. People use to spend all day in acid baths to improve their rigor skills until it got nerfed. When city towers were first introduced in the game, players would exploit them to improve their reflex skill. When people got Earth Magic, players would pile into pyramids and use the earthquake exploit to skill-up their rigor and ignore pain. The skillup system is a horrible grind that no one really wants to do, so the player base is always looking for ways to exploit the system. I really think this system detracts from the game's fun and makes the game less accessible for casual players. The players who have high skills have a significant advantage in this game. Unfortunately Aventurine has been making the game more and more difficult for new players...the harvesting nerf, the invulnerability skill-up nerf, the starter weapon nerf.
Hackers are still abundant in this game. I use to see at least one teleporter/speed hacker per day when I was playing. Aventurine is still fairly poor at dealing with them and if you lose a major item to a hacker (eg. a boat), Aventurine usually doesn't replace it.
There are no mezzes in this game - some people want it, some people hate it. A player with high-skills, quality armor and alot of potions, and plenty of mounts in their backpack is nearly impossible to kill and the lack of mezzes makes it easier for them to run. There is no ranged combat on mounts.
Another thing, I'm not fond of the endless-sprint-circling combat. It's all about trying to hit your opponent in the back by sprinting past them and turning around. It makes you kinda dizzy. Combat is not very intelligent...you just aimlessly spam left-click most of the time.
The only good thing about this game is the politics and seiging. Unfortunately the server has a tendency to crash during large seiges. Due to the 24/7 nature of this game, most of the successful seiges are done during off-hours. Don't expect to hold a hamlet unless you have a large alliance with neighboring cities/hamlets holders.
The fanboys get an adrenaline rush from the full-loot system and tend to forget how bad the rest of the game is. That's why you see such a wide range of opinions.
I played this game for two months and would give it no better than 5/10.
BTW...the Darkfall community is trash. It's like all the idiots of the world found a single place to gather. Worst MMO community ever.
Being my first post in these forums,I can hear it allready..HE MADE A NEW ACCOUNT TO HIDE blah blah blah...Wrong...Ive dwelled in here for awhile,while also perusing MMORPG.COM and some other mmo sites...
Now,while looking at MMORPGs site,I was lead to this FIRST IMPRESSION..And the forum members there just laid into the author of this title..And imo,rightly so..I can list all the reasons why,but im too lazy..Lets just have the readers of this thread go to mmorpg.com and look at the thread themselves..
Basically,the jist is this is another FLUFF REVIEW and the site author is in the devs pocket...And having played the game,its an atrocity..Just unmitigated garbage,and most mmo players agree....Eighty to ninety percent of gamers who played the game surveyed thought it flat out sucked..EIGHTY TO NINETY PERCENT....Thats an epic number...reference is gameinformer mag..
So,once again,TENTONHAMMER puts up a fluff article and is justly and rightly called out on it.....CMON TTH,GET WITH THE PROGRAM...
Fans of the game on the DarkFall forums are hailing Ethec's article as a 'hardcore gamers review (not carebears)' and I feel are getting ready to welcome him as the messiah of the game (although there are some heretics in the mix ). It appears that his 'first impressions' piece has been embraced by some as gospel and as a well deserved, positive review, and evidence that DarkFall is the greatest game in the world.
The response over at MMORPG.com has been a little different.
But I am sure that Ethec knew that anything to do with DarkFall was going to bring all sorts of comments and opinions out of the the virtual soapbox that is the intarwebs. I just never realised that Ethec was so hardcore!
It seems that no matter what you say about this game it going to start a flame fest which just shows you the nature of the player base.
Like Kaldor I played this game from beta to launch and a couple months after.
This game is my opinion is a pay-fore beta, or a real horrible release. Once you get over the initial shock value of having a hardcore PVP UO style game you realize that there is so many things missing that make a game whole.
There is so many things that I feel are either missing, or that were never added to the game that makes it feel like your still playing a beta. Here are just a couple of things that I find that this game has issue's with.
First thing you will notice once you enter the starter zone city is the lack of NPC, or interaction with the environment ,or your surroundings. Unless a buildings has an open door way you can't enter them at all. The only NPC's are a handful of Vendors, or trainers, other than that is seems like a ghost town with no where to go but the bank which is a large vault out in the middle of town.
Second thing you notice once you get out of the starter area's is nothing. Miles and miles of beautiful rendered landscape with nothing in it no mobs, no wildlife nothing. The only thing I saw was some type of dragon fly like bug around the deserted ruins that are in the game. Large beautiful cities with nothing in them no mobs, no NPC. Than you have some other cities or ruins that seem like nothing are there until your in the middle of them and the Dynamic spawn triggers the entire town, and now your knee deep in mobs that 9 out 10 are going to own you. Now I understand that this lack of mob is there dynamic spawn system but the way it's implemented makes the game seem like a big dead world.
The biggest issue with this game is the lack of real PVE content. Now I first wanna say that the pvp in this game is great no real issue with it at all. The city sieges are good the large combat is great the mix between magic, arrows, and mêlée is great and if that all you want than DF is a great PVP game.
As for an MMO I feel it needs PVE content and that were this game lacks. As the PVE is pretty much stale, your quest if you can figure out who as them are basic standard MMO quest kill this, kill that, bring back this. The AI makes the mobs so hard that you pretty much have to exploit them to kill them (Now I heard that recent patches have made some mobs easier) The dungeons are nice but there seems so few and the mobs are usually on level that you need to bring an armada, or somebody who is good at exploiting to kill them.
Last but not least the skill systems in this game is a endless grind that once you start you never seem to notice any improvements. Unless you exploited, or macro'd your skills from the beginning of launch when you could, they seem to take for ever, and ever to gain with no real achievements besides at level 25, 50, 75, 100 you get some added abilities that a first seems nice but than really seem more like gimmicks. The knock back skill seems the only real one worth while, and these skills also have there own grind.
There is so many other things that this game has that seem unpolished or just not finished, but I don't feel like sitting here forever and writing a novel. But I do have to say at first the game seems great and I believe that it has potential to be a good game when they actually finish it. But alas I think that might just be to late for this game.
Long before darkfall released i set my hopes on Earthrise to be a good balanced PvP game with dept and well based fundations looking at the great lengths the developer team and community manager go to explain every feature in great detail.
Darkfall was underfunded, Ignored obvious macro bot issues, limited release and some interesting ideas but not really worked out completely either this can be due to lack of funds or time or something else.
All in all, the game was hyped up by the community beyond what it was suppose to be mainly based on the impressive list of promises you could find on the mainpage, but that's about it.
I am more or less disappointed as this was another mmo release that didn't put sandbox and pvp mmo's in good daylight and having a negative effect already on upcoming mmo's aiming at that corner of the market.
This post lasted all of 2 minutes before it was nuked.
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Originally Posted by Hellmoob
IF YOU'RE GOING TO LOCK THIS THREAD (AND YOU PROBABLY ARE) TELL ME SO WE CAN AT LEAST DISCUSS IT.
Darkfall is awful. I knew it, I know it, and you know it. You can stop reading here if in your head you’re saying:
“IT’S NOT FOR EVERYONE! IT’S HARDCORE AND NOT CAREBEAR LIKE SHITTY GAMES WITH MILLIONS OF SUBS!”
Now that 95% of Forumfall are furiously drafting their 4-word rage replies, I’ll elaborate a little on my Darkfall game experience, since the default response to these threads (rather than a rational retort), is “lol nub got pwned” or “gtfo Darkfall isn’t for carebears”. Up to quitting about 2 weeks ago, I clocked 786 hours of Darkfall gameplay. That doesn’t include my 3 weeks in Beta, during which I played 12+ hours every day. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t log in, and only a handful where I wasn’t out PvP’ing for a large portion my playtime. I didn’t get “zomg facerolled”, I won the vast majority of fights I was in (50+ elemental, sharpshooter and weapon mastery is a handy combination). Yawn, nobody cares about my e-peen, yeah, I know, but the point is I’m not some random who played for 4 hours, got raped in the newbzone, and quit in a flurry of tears.
But I did stop playing. Why? Darkfall is a passable FPS mod with a few bare-bones RPG features tacked on in the grindiest incarnations I’ve ever seen. Without full loot, I’m reasonably sure nobody at all would play. Gathering is all the challenge of having the time to find somewhere quiet and click every now and then, and doesn’t create any sort of contested territories for rare resources. Crafting is an unintuitive time/resource sink, totally devoid of any semblance of player skill, individuality or genuinely worthwhile outputs. I don’t know if you’ve ever added up the materials for a Full Plate set, but it’s not pretty at all. PvE is either exploiting or bringing an enormous quantity of people to box/focus fire something (with the possible exception of the Fire Dragon, but I doubt it). Siege warfare is lag-rape, and the political landscape is a handful of giant unskilled conglomerates plus Afghanistan. City building is a joke (cannons that shoot at nothing, glaring defensive faults in some major cities), and honestly boats and warhulks are so prohibitively expensive for the value they deliver that only the most wealthy (read: heaviest exploiters) will ever bother with them. I can almost hear the cries of everyone that wanted to be in a pirate clan.
PvP is fun… When you’re not raiding cities overpopulated with attended macroers (or getting zerged 8v1 by an alliance because every time they send one or two guys to kill you, they have to cry in clan chat about how they got slammed). It’s particularly fun if you have the time to invest in Aventurine’s grotesque treadmill skill system, which primarily rewards having a lot of time to jerk off to furry erotica while your character macros (not that I would know, I manual clicked like a chump because I’m too lazy to download AutoIt). The best times I had in Darkfall were small group PvP fights with clanmates where we faced 2v1 or worse odds and ended up with more loot than we could comfortably carry. The problem was, those times were very sparse. If you’re going to have a huge, intricate world, you either have to have enough people to fill it and make it vibrant (you don’t) or you need to have areas worth fighting over other than player cities to concentrate the PvPers in those areas (none of those, either). The only places you were almost guaranteed to find other players were easily exploitable high profit spawns, camped out by nakeds with surefire escape routes, or else cities filled with yet more naked people itching to go 5v1 with an Ork in robes. The incentive to go out and look for great fights is substantially diminished when you realise it’s almost certainly going to take a few hours to get a good scrap, and some roll patrol is probably going to waste an inordinate amount of that time chasing you.
I can hear a lot of people thinking “Darkfall is a sandbox, you fool! You’re just not creative or imaginative enough to enjoy its potential!”
No. No, no, no.
Darkfall? Sandbox? Ultima Online is a sandbox, SW:G is a sandbox. Darkfall is dirt. If you go and read the FAQ for the game that Aventurine said they would be releasing (I believe the entire thing is still on the official site), you’ll read about a sandbox game. A game with features for all kinds of players, a game where opportunities to be successful according to your own goals are virtually limitless, a game that allows both small individualistic clans and larger forces that sway the political landscape to coexist within a vibrant fantasy world. A game with a crafting system that actually rewards those who dedicate themselves to it in terms of their skill as a player, rather than simply the character skill treadmill. Where PvE battles are as enthralling and challenging as their PvP counterparts, and where the environment is as deadly and foreboding as the villainous PKers who inhabit it. A game with racial warfare and unique racial traits, as well as (finally!) a meaningful alignment system. Unique characters developed by an individual’s preference, able to be adapted to changing needs and desires, rather than the homogenous master-of-all-styles that every competitive player now uses, and is encouraged to use by the limitless skill system. A game with minimal grind, where ‘learning by doing’ would be just as effective in the long run as ultra-grinding skills. That may be true in Darkfall, but “the long run” measures in years rather than a few weeks. Can you even imagine getting weapon mastery without hours and hours of unproductive swinging? I really don’t like to think about it.
The fact is that Darkfall made grand promises and delivered hollow stand-ins for those promises. It is, in essence, an FPS in an open world setting, and with lootable items. The primary difference between Darkfall and the standard shooter, aside from the obvious full-loot mechanic, is that there’s no team balancing, no real objective other than “find some other guys and rape ‘em”, and a lot more downtime between bouts of combat. Everything else is ancillary and shoddily created.
This is all stuff we’ve known since Beta.
Back in beta, a lot of people voiced the same concerns, a lot of people pushed for the game to be delayed. I was among them. The typical defence back then was “Ah, they have a totally awesome version of <shitty system>, it’s just not enabled!” No, folks. When they “turned on” weapon speed in beta, I suspect that was around about the time they actually coded it. The difference between beta and now is that back in beta I thought the Dev team would still be able to deliver - if they worked their asses off to bring us content updates and ameliorations for things like crafting. I made a post back then called “Even WoW has better craft/gathering than Darkfall”, and regrettably I must stand by that post to this day. You’re still playing beta, and you’re paying to do it. One might argue that an MMO is never finished, but Darkfall was never even release-ready.
The Dev team is, honestly, a group of people with good ideas and shitty execution of those ideas, headed up by a man who is frankly a reprehensible liar. Tasos stated shortly before release that “Mahirim four-legged running is the only feature that didn’t make release”. Nobody here can say that was anything but a bare-faced lie. The first indication that they would not only fail to provide but continue their failure for months after release came with the great pre-order fiasco and AV’s horrible handling of sales for the first 3 weeks after what we’ll tentatively call “launch”. I posted on page 2 of the now ancient account problems thread, and sent numerous e-mails and support requests to Aventurine, Brannoc, and anybody who seemed like they even might listen. I still have not received a response. Fortunately for them, I decided to just get Darkfall on a new account by playing “refreshfall” for several nights running. My rage thread (long since locked) can be found here.
I still held out hope that maybe it was just their terrible management of billing that would be a problem, and that their actual talents as developers would shine through once the game was populated and the servers were stabilized. Well, no. Aventurine have given us a few patches (that were padded out with a great deal of “we made this spell and this spell and this spell and this spell work!” never mind that they didn’t anyway, eh?) and most of them were relatively inconsequential. No overhauls of crappy systems, not a great deal actually added to the gameplay experience, and there are still a few totally glaring opportunities for players to exploit the shit out of faulty coding. The vast majority of the changes that have been lauded by witless brown-nosers are things that should never have even made it into the release client. Today’s update, particularly the “things to look forward to” section, is a prime example of the sort of exaggerated vagueness that AV have consistently failed to make good on thusfar, and it provides me with very little hope indeed for the future of this already sinking ship.
To surmise, Darkfall is neither a sandbox nor a true RPG. It is a full loot alternative to the standard FPS, but with a less accomplished combat system and an abysmal grind to go along with it, as well as far less ‘action’. It had, and still has, enormous potential, but the developers have shown themselves to be incapable of building upon that potential to bring to us the game that they sold to us for years before Darkfall’s actual release. In effect, they took a very grandiose dream and forged a borderline nightmare out of its image. Take this opportunity to deny these incompetent shysters your money. Use it instead to play a finished game, or else to drown your sorrows that such a great idea became such a shoddy product.
Loading... Darkfall First Impressions
). It appears that his 'first impressions' piece has been embraced by some as gospel and as a well deserved, positive review, and evidence that DarkFall is the greatest game in the world.
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