The say Darkfall will be the best sandbox MMORPG of all time...

Andromedus1

what do you think?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkfall

Illius

Until it comes out people can think and will think whatever they want.  Many will place their hopes and dreams squarely on Darkfall's shoulders.  Some will be pleasantly surprised, others will have their hopes and dreams crushed.

As it stands now I'm indifferent.  When I have an actual, tangable product that I can play then I'll tell you what I think.

boognish75

there are 2 all time sandboxes atm, one that is sci-fi called eve, and the other is fantasy called darkfall, i dont think it can be called thee greatest as it wont be the greatest of the sci-fi mmo genre, but it will be thee greatest of the fantasy genre

singsofdeath

I think I want to play it before I make such a bold statement.

paulscott

Darkfall will be fun for a lot of people.   but the fanbase that has been growing around it will be UNplesantly surprised by it.

 

Granted who knows the DF team hasn't even decided whether to have local or global banks yet(local is the only thing that makes sense for the features it claims to have).  So I really do doubt they'll even meet a 2010 deadline for a beta.

Vynt

I don't people should really place a lot of faith in Darkfall. It has already been letting down people for years. I'd take a cautious mild interest, that way if it is wonderful, its a pleasant surprise, and if it bombs, well, no big deal and move on to the next.

A lot fo the recent hype is from recent people following the game, like within the last year or so it looks like. I'd like to know where those people stand when the beta hasn't shown up for 2-3 more years. I certainly hope the timetable is sooner than that, but i've become jaded after like 7 years of waiting for a beta.

Anyways, I doubt it will be the best sandbox of all time if it is released, but I hope it is enjoyable. As far as EVE, I know a lot of people like it, and I love scifi, but I just can't get into that game at all, and I've tried. It could be the start of the game for me is just so discombobulated.

link35

Originally posted by paulscott


Darkfall will be fun for a lot of people.   but the fanbase that has been growing around it will be UNplesantly surprised by it.
 
Granted who knows the DF team hasn't even decided whether to have local or global banks yet(local is the only thing that makes sense for the features it claims to have).  So I really do doubt they'll even meet a 2010 deadline for a beta.

 

How can you know whether the fanbase will be unpleasently surprised? I'm sure you haven't played it and it has already been stated that the first part of beta has started, yes I know it is not playtesting yet but it is the first stage of beta which is to test the playability of DF on different computer specs and as I remember they have been doing private testing with hired testers for a while now, also I'm pretty sure they decided on global banks already although don't take my word for that one I might have just read it off a forum post which is not exactly a reliable source.

{Mod. Edit}

Arioc

Wish people wouldn't proclaim a game as the greatest game of all time before they've even played it. It'll be another Age of Conan, Shadowbane or whatnot all over again. And it's usualy the same people who were cheering for the last game, shouting it's the greatest ever before they even played it. Then demonizing it online for weeks before moving onto the next one to proclaim it the greatest before it even came out. See a pattern? Sometimes you people have the memmory of a goldfish. And that makes me a sad panda

seculor

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Originally posted by paulscott
Granted who knows the DF team hasn't even decided whether to have local or global banks yet(local is the only thing that makes sense for the features it claims to have).  So I really do doubt they'll even meet a 2010 deadline for a beta.

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I don't know where you are getting your information from. DF developers have clearly stated that there will be universal banks:

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Tasos; May 23rd Update. Darkfall News Forum.

The universal banking system we’re implementing in Darkfall is because we found it was very tedious not having it. Universal banks have become an industry standard for a reason. We've found that their existence does wonders for the fun factor as opposed to their absence. Darkfall is challenging in every way, you don’t need it to be tedious. We’ll balance universal banks to work as well as possible and we’ll continue balancing them if we have to.

As for caravans, firstly, we never confirmed that they were in the game. They were never in the original design; they weren’t announced as a feature, they were just brought up and have been promoted by some community members. We have looked at them as a possible cool feature but to be honest, I can't say they're that cool in practice. As things stand you can form a caravan using mounts, ships etc. With them you can move large quantities of goods, fairly fast, rather than running small loads back and forth over and over. The world is huge and the distances to travel are great and there will be a need for transport of large amounts of resources such as those intended for city building.

You do have the freedom of forming caravans. You also have the option of universal banks. When we make design decisions like these, we’re thinking of the majority of players and we speak from experience. Few players would initially enjoy the absence of universal banks, but even they would get tired of the wasted time commitment.
 

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altairzq

Originally posted by seculor


 

Originally posted by paulscott

Granted who knows the DF team hasn't even decided whether to have local or global banks yet(local is the only thing that makes sense for the features it claims to have).  So I really do doubt they'll even meet a 2010 deadline for a beta.

 

I don't know where you are getting your information from. DF developers have clearly stated that there will be universal banks:

 

---

Tasos; May 23rd Update. Darkfall News Forum.

 

The universal banking system we’re implementing in Darkfall is because we found it was very tedious not having it. Universal banks have become an industry standard for a reason. We've found that their existence does wonders for the fun factor as opposed to their absence. Darkfall is challenging in every way, you don’t need it to be tedious. We’ll balance universal banks to work as well as possible and we’ll continue balancing them if we have to.

As for caravans, firstly, we never confirmed that they were in the game. They were never in the original design; they weren’t announced as a feature, they were just brought up and have been promoted by some community members. We have looked at them as a possible cool feature but to be honest, I can't say they're that cool in practice. As things stand you can form a caravan using mounts, ships etc. With them you can move large quantities of goods, fairly fast, rather than running small loads back and forth over and over. The world is huge and the distances to travel are great and there will be a need for transport of large amounts of resources such as those intended for city building.

You do have the freedom of forming caravans. You also have the option of universal banks. When we make design decisions like these, we’re thinking of the majority of players and we speak from experience. Few players would initially enjoy the absence of universal banks, but even they would get tired of the wasted time commitment.

 

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LOL they are already going the easy route. Reminds me of Vanguard when SOE entered the scene. How long before we have a minimap and radar? gettng lost can be fun at first but very tedious in the end. And teleports, that will be needed too, that's become an industry standard for a reason. Lots of industry standard you can adopt really... Just think of the majority of players lol.

EbenEmael

Originally posted by Illius


Until it comes out people can think and will think whatever they want.  Many will place their hopes and dreams squarely on Darkfall's shoulders.  Some will be pleasantly surprised, others will have their hopes and dreams crushed.
As it stands now I'm indifferent.  When I have an actual, tangable product that I can play then I'll tell you what I think.

Yup. Many people had high hopes for AoC also. What the development company says will be in and what actually is in the game are not always the same. The only thing to do is wait and see.

Ozmodan

Pretty hard to annoint a game that no one has seen yet.  Yes it has quite a feature set and if everyone of those features are in game at release and working it has great potential.  

Then again you have to look at the company producing it.  Adventurine has only had about 25 people working on the game.   With such a large feature set, it seems to be a bit unreasonable to expect that small a team to produce a working game containing all of them.

So better to take a wait and see attitude towards this game rather than be very disappointed when it is not the game you thought it would be at release.

And just for your edification, UO was the first sandbox game and was a very good one until EA made changes to it.  Star Wars Galaxy was also a very good sandbox game until SOE messed it up with the NGE patch.  Asheron's call was not a bad sandbox game either.   So there has been a lot more sandbox games than you have experienced and all of them have been good.

paulscott

Originally posted by zymurgeist

Originally posted by altairzq


LOL they are already going the easy route. Reminds me of Vanguard when SOE entered the scene. How long before we have a minimap and radar? gettng lost can be fun at first but very tedious in the end. And teleports, that will be needed too, that's become an industry standard for a reason. Lots of industry standard you can adopt really... Just think of the majority of players lol.

 

It may be the easy route but for a game with full loot it only makes sense from a design standpoint. Losing everthing you have because you're forced to carry it with you when moving from place to place would be beyond stupid. I'm less interested in people's knee jerk reactions of what features define hardcore than I am in how game mechanics work together as a whole. Unless the draw distance is really long lack of a minimap or track skills is going to make finding people in the open field to PvP problematic to say the least.

 

 

Anyform of fast travel and a global bank will be abused by reasonless-PvPers far worse than it would hurt those that would want to avoid PvP to some extent or another.

 

One of Darkfall's primary designs is to support player made factioning.  If a player proves to be a problem take your town and void him of using it's resources get your allies to do the same.   The person will have no choice to move on and maybe end up having to Death-Teleport out of the valley/island your faction controls.  The land is also supposed to be more than large enough to support this as well.

 

People seem to completely ignore the aspects outside of looting.  The design is in theory set up to fully support looting which means you're bringing in a lot more mechanics than just looting.

 

paulscott

Also if darkfall fails in even the remotest sense.  It will set the sandbox genre back YEARS in new developement..

Developers look at other people sucess and failures, so do the people who write the checks.  They're more than willing to look at every reason for why something could have possibly failed instead of the real major reasons.   Investment risk paper work is almost skewed towards counting smaller reasons(like different mechanics) for more than they're really worth, and it's a topic that gets covered off and on in any Systems class.

Sharajat

Originally posted by paulscott


Also if darkfall fails in even the remotest sense.  It will set the sandbox genre back YEARS in new developement..
Developers look at other people sucess and failures, so do the people who write the checks.  They're more than willing to look at every reason for why something could have possibly failed instead of the real major reasons.   Investment risk paper work is almost skewed towards counting smaller reasons(like different mechanics) for more than they're really worth, and it's a topic that gets covered off and on in any Systems class.

Lets face it, developers are already looking at games like EVE when they consider sandboxes.  Seeing Darkfall fail would be no more surprise than Dark and Light failing, and make about as much impact.  The people writing the checks tend to be people from big companies with lots of money - when a 25 man team fails, they just assume its SOP, because they don't run with those sorts of teams.

Venger

Piss and wind.

DF isn't even in the same league as UO.

Kyleran

Doesn't matter what people say about DFO, only matters what sort of game Aventurine delivers.

Perhaps soon we'll have our answer.

altairzq

Originally posted by paulscott


Also if darkfall fails in even the remotest sense.  It will set the sandbox genre back YEARS in new developement..
Developers look at other people sucess and failures, so do the people who write the checks.  They're more than willing to look at every reason for why something could have possibly failed instead of the real major reasons.   Investment risk paper work is almost skewed towards counting smaller reasons(like different mechanics) for more than they're really worth, and it's a topic that gets covered off and on in any Systems class.

You mean like Mark Jacobs said that if WAR failed the whole MMO genre would suffer a major step back? Come on...

paulscott

Originally posted by zymurgeist

Originally posted by paulscott


 
 
People seem to completely ignore the aspects outside of looting.  The design is in theory set up to fully support looting which means you're bringing in a lot more mechanics than just looting.
 

 

Which wouild be the reason global banks make sense.  To prevent looting from invalidating those other mechanics. It also greatly reduces the database requirements of tracking player banks resulting in more server resources for other mechanics. There are game economy benefits as well. Goods will be more widely distributed as the time requirements and risk of doing so are reduced. It's a matter of the mechanics fitting the game rather than creating a static list of features to be true to some ideal that never existed. 

Now if for some reason they decided to allow people to instantaneously transport themselves to a safe zone at the first sign of danger that would be a mechanic that clashed greatly with the focus of the game.

 All games are compromises. The trick is to only make the compromises that make since for the game.

 

Global banks would actually increase database useage.  It costs pennies to keep massive amounts of data on a hard disk, the expensive part is accessing and distributing it.   By accessing local banks(in a well designed database) you're accessing and distributing a much smaller amount of data(and requiring to cache less if you have such a system, every MMO does) when they use the bank.

Also by killing local banks you take out a whole bunch of mechanics like needing to maintain supply lines to outposts(making it almost impossible to starve out an outpost), taking out entire  play styles that people would love(delievery services is the most basic), and come on you really don't global banks in the first place(you aren't traveling a massive world to get to the next leveling-area as your core gameplay, instead you're maintaining/defending the core settlement you live in and just generally sticking around in one area occasionally venturing for various reasons).

Unknown

Why does unrestricted pvp make it good as a sandbox?

This game has been in the works since 2001, and it is just now going into closed beta?

Don't hold your breath on this one.

ianubisi

I can say with 100% confidence that anyone who thinks this is going to be disappointed.

Andromedus1

Originally posted by Venger


Piss and wind.
DF isn't even in the same league as UO.

 

I'm not going to weigh in on the OP since I posted it, but:

 

UO was a glorified MUD with bad, 3rd person, zoomed out scrolling 2D graphics.  I played a lot of great pvp MUDs, and UO was, above all, a PvP MUD.  Don't compare it to any pvp FPS MMO RPG's.  It's a non sequitor.  It's like saying "the novel I'm reading is better than your x-box game."

firefly2003

I know people are exicted about this game as am I , but do we really need 100 threads about saying Darkfall will be the greatest game when noone has even played it yet so please stop with these pointless threads when beta hits we will decide if it even deserves all this recognition  you are trying to crown it with when you havent played it yet.

firefly2003

Originally posted by Laiina


Why does unrestricted pvp make it good as a sandbox?
This game has been in the works since 2001, and it is just now going into closed beta?
Don't hold your breath on this one

Cause it give people true freedom to do what they want. And it goes into open beta this month genius ...read more about it...

Gdemami

Statement should be chnaged to:
'...will be the best grindfest MMORPG of all time'.

Dakfall is no sandbox, stop this stupid hype already...

Ozmodan

Originally posted by Andromedus1

Originally posted by Venger


Piss and wind.
DF isn't even in the same league as UO.

 

I'm not going to weigh in on the OP since I posted it, but:

 

UO was a glorified MUD with bad, 3rd person, zoomed out scrolling 2D graphics.  I played a lot of great pvp MUDs, and UO was, above all, a PvP MUD.  Don't compare it to any pvp FPS MMO RPG's.  It's a non sequitor.  It's like saying "the novel I'm reading is better than your x-box game."

Needless to say that is strictly your opinion.  Just saying that pretty much indicates you have no idea what a MUD is to start with. 

Try explaining all the indy UO servers out there these days, lots of activity on them.  UO was a darn good game despite the graphics. Whether Darkfall comes close to what it offered we will just have to wait and see.