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Darkfall Through the Eyes of a VaporTroll
I happily admit that I’m a vaportroll when it comes to Darkfall. Some of my past comments regarding the game illustrate my skepticism at its eventual release to the public. Given the length of time it’s been in development, the lack of information that has been released regarding the game (compared to other MMORPGs) and the ambitious features it has promised, I think my skepticism is only natural.
That being said, I do hope Darkfall is released in a polished, playable condition and containing all the features it has advertised. Not because I plan to play the game, but because I don’t plan to play it. Free for all, full loot PvP has no real attraction for me. I’m comfortable with saying that most gamers have little attraction for this style of play or more games would cater to that taste. Just my opinion and I think I have good reason to believe it.
However, there are those who relish that style of play and given the current saturation of games designed to fulfill those of the mainstream style, Darkfall has an opportunity to draw from the disaffected portion of the gaming populace that is attracted to Darkfall’s Machiavellian PvP theme.
When I say mainstream, it’s just a generic designation for the largely PvE centric, linear, limited PvP style of play. Clearly there are other games that are sandbox worlds or offer some type of PvP or other features that Darkfall promises, but Darkfall’s stands out in its approach to FFA PvP combat (with the exceptions of Eve and AC Darktide).
In any case, Darkfall will serve a need in the market. I believe diversity is good for the market and there is too little of it in the MMORPG genre, at present. I don’t believe there will be another revolutionary game to enter the market, at least not anytime soon. I could be wrong but at this point I think developers are simply going to introduce games that incrementally improve on the features and styles of other games. I think progress in the MMORPG arena will be evolutionary, not revolutionary, for a long time to come.
Lastly, I want Darkfallers to have their game so they’ll stop their bitching and whining about how all the games on the market suck because they aren’t: sandbox, full PvP, full loot, risk vs reward, blah, blah, blah etc. Don’t read it as that as a blanket statement, but you Darkfallers know that a lot (certainly not all) of you are arrogant, elitist pricks blind to the possibility that any other style of game is legitimately fun or valuable. I’m hoping they’ll be too busy killing each other to bother the rest of us mainstream players in our forums and in game chats.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped the Eve players, why should it make any difference for the Darkfallers? I suppose I can have hope.
Anyhow, here’s to you Darkfallers, I sincerely hope the game is everything you want it to be.
Comments
Dunno what not sandbox game you play but what makes you sure it isn't some single player game and bots get loaded onto your screen ?
I mean all the loading, the quest scripting and soloing of missions...You not had a chance to die to another player and got robbed all your belongings afterwards how you know you alive in that game ?
*Instruction sheet for the above said and stated :
please take it with alot of satiric sense and maybe some humor.
No further instructions.
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE--------------------------------------------------
$OE - eternal enemy of online gaming
-We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
Whether Darkfall becomes 'niche' or wildly popular really comes down to how severe the penalties are for killing your own race.
Even though I love PVPing, I don't want PVP to be *all* I do in the game. I think the majority of even the self-labelling "hardcore PVP" crowd feel the same. Most people want to do a little PVEing, exploring, and maybe crafting as well as PVPing, so the last thing I want is to be constantly watching my back for members of supposedly my own faction.
So naturally I hope the alignment system makes it majorly disadvantageous for people to kill their own faction. I think it will just make for a better game. Some people will still choose to kill their own faction, and that's fine, as long as it's not 50% of the player population doing it. For the "realm-v-realm" aspect of Darkfall to work, it needs to be substantially advantageous to go kill the opposing factions rather than grief your own.
If that happens -- if 90-95% of players stick to killing enemy factions, and not their own, i can see Darkfall being quite successful, since there will be player freedom *and* there will be a sense of "purpose" to killing (ie: killing the "bad guys"), instead of just one massive, non-stop clusterfuck where you're gang-banged from the moment you log into the game. There needs to be a balance. If there isn't a balance, people will get the shits with the game and it'll go nowhere.
But the OP is right, MMORPGs as a genre have stagnated badly. WOW may have massively grown the number of people who play MMOs, but it has also been responsible for stifling innovation in the genre. Everyone and their publisher are trying to get their WOW-clones out to capture their own slice of WOW's subs. Darkfall needs to be successful to keep the genre from becoming stale, boring, and repetitive.
This is a sandbox mmorpg.
Theres plenty of content and features to do with PvE and you know. If you make a completelly free game there are going to be things some people may not like, in this case its the pvp. If you dont like pvp, dont kill people, dont join a guild who is at war.
Yes some peple may attack you now and then but you dont have heavy losses even if you lose so its not a huge deal. Anyway you might enjoy fighting back, its just a bit of competition.
I doesn't really matter in a game like this because there will always be people like me and many others who will attempt to kill everyone we see; Regardless of faction alliances or not. And if an alliance is really strong for my char that would make me not wanna atk someone of my own faction, then thats fine I will have another character anyways who will kill them.
MMO's I am playing
Ether Saga Online (Closed Beta)
Ultima Online (halted for now)
World of Warcraft (Retired and never going back)
Like I said in another post I hope to God this game comes out and is bad ass for the DF followers. I have my game that ive been searching for, finally. Now they need theirs so maybe they can kill everyone and be happy.
But not sure how long they will be in beta. WAR was in beta for a year and im sure most other games do the same. So sorry guys you might just have to wait another year if you don't get into beta.
I would be very surprised if Darkfall became a game where you are constantly getting ganked.
As shown on a recent poll on the Darkfall official forum not many fans are interested in killing everyone they see, they are mostly interested in the other things that this games brings to the table. If people wanted to do this they would just play CoD4 or Halo and have no monthly fee.
The majority of players in AoC were on FFAPvP servers and getting ganked was rare, you could play all evening and not get killed once by another player, even when the servers were full. I don't see why Darkfall will be any different to this.
To people who assume it will be a gankfest can you explain why you have come to this conclusion?
I appreciate the comments and insight, but my impression of the Darkfall crowd is that there must be the freedom to kill anyone at anytime without system imposed restrictions. Penalties and restrictions must be community imposed. The community governs itself in this regard. To create code and "rules" around PvP is to mitigate the player's risk and the game becomes less than FFA PvP. That is just my opinion of what I understand of the Darkfall player's perspective (in general).
I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that Darkfall will be anything other than a niche game. That's not a bad thing. FFA PvP is an automatic turn off for most players, in my opinion and it doesn't matter how you spin it, they won't play it. And I agree. I think any talk around about it not being a gankfest is smoke and mirrors.
Darkfall have had closed beta going on since late 2007.
This open beta is planned to be a short one and release before the end of 2008.
Have a good one
Last I heard they wanted to release it before new years in Europe, but didn't mention anything about the American version. I would hope it isn't to far off. Wouldn't care if it was though, I would rather have a polished game them a turd whose exterior would a year later become a shining knight.
MMO's I am playing
Ether Saga Online (Closed Beta)
Ultima Online (halted for now)
World of Warcraft (Retired and never going back)
That's fine, you'll just have to pay $30 a month instead of $15, have less well-developed character skills due to splitting playtime between characters, and your evil toon will be farmed for alignment bonuses any time it comes near an NPC or non-evil player city.
Yes it's only one character per server so you would need 2 accounts,
Because of skill decay you might have a hard time doing this.
You can try if you want but you will find yourself on the receiving end of a ganking far more often than a regular player.
Pale_Fire, I was superbly impressed with your post, including your seemingly unbiased and level headed view of MMOs in general, and specifically the positive sentiments with respect to your hope for the game (though you admittedly don't plan to play it). It was a breath of fresh air and I was happy to discover another mature gamer out there.
...until the last couple of paragraphs...
Was it really necessary to call ("a lot of") the Darkfall fans "arrogant, elitist pricks"?
Why, after establishing such a solid foundation of reasonable, topical, maturity in your post did you feel the need to bash folks at the end, using childish vulgarities no less? Just a bit of advice, but your post would have been SO much better had you tried to keep a level head there at the end and tempered your comments. I can appreciate that you specifically noted you weren't talking about all of the Darkfall fans, but nonetheless your final comments simply ruined a lot of the argument you tried to make.
Mind you I'm far from the "forum police" and in fact I try to restrict myself from posting here as a general rule, as I've seen even the most noble of causes and reasonable of threads inevitably spiral downwards into a pit of troll'dom. So feel free to ignore me as I'm just one small voice/opinion and I'm certainly not on a high-horse or anything, despite my ramblings to the contrary...
Yes it's only one character per server so you would need 2 accounts,
Because of skill decay you might have a hard time doing this.
You can try if you want but you will find yourself on the receiving end of a ganking far more often than a regular player.
Skill decay?
I know what armor decay is. Does this mean your skills will corrode over time leaving you skill-less unless you retrain?
Thanks for the input, and I respect your opinion and perspective on my comments that were less than flattering to some within the Darkfall community. I did intend it to be somewhat tongue in cheek, but as objective as I am trying to be, I have a very negative opinion on those players within any game community that elevate their opinions to the level of fact, that consider their own styles and tastes as superior to that of others and have no respect for other preferences contrary to their own. I have found that those opinions are often most found within the "hardcore" community. I recognize that not everyone holds that attitude and it is most likely a minority of the players of that community that do.
But, understand that I believe my sharp criticism is a perspective shared by many of us in the mainstream gaming community toward those who are intolerant of our gaming preferences. For that perspective to change, the outlaws in the hardcore community will have to learn to respect other gaming styles or accept that the fact that many of us view them as arrogant elitists.
Yes, I could have left those comments out but I would not have been truthful in my opinions and perspective if I had.
BTW, there's nothing wrong with being the forum police. Even MMORPG.com needs it's moral center.
Yes it's only one character per server so you would need 2 accounts,
Because of skill decay you might have a hard time doing this.
You can try if you want but you will find yourself on the receiving end of a ganking far more often than a regular player.
Skill decay?
I know what armor decay is. Does this mean your skills will corrode over time leaving you skill-less unless you retrain?
Yes, your skills will decay if you don't use them.
First of all I want to thank you for a thoughful post. I appreciate formulated opinions from all sides, as opposed to mindless bashing. I have a few comments.
I want to say that I have been following Darkfall for a very long time, for some reason and I really dont know why, I have always really believed in it. It may have something to do with the fact that when we did get updates they had good and bad in them. "Development is going good, but we had to remove hitboxes because it creates to much lag" Why would a fake development team take features away, a vaporwear game can have any features the false devs want" anyway this is not the point of my post.
I dont know where the fight started, its like isreal and palestine, but I think much of the heat given to this website by the darkfall community is because of the heat given by people who for some reason go out of their way on a daily basis to flame the DF forums.
I would also like to point out a misconception about a Full loot, PvP environment. I would play Darkfall even if I had to focus only on PvE and could not attack anyone and only defend myself. In a game like darkfall which is influenced by Ultima Onlien among others, the ammount of freedom is hard do understand for people who havent experienced it. PvEing is at all times extremely engaging simply because nothing is pradictable. Crafting is also engaging, and being part of an old wast capitalistic economy where the swords you forge litterally shape the hisotry of the world as opposed to being placeholders till someone can get the epic in the raid,, so they can hit a harder raid...
Its not wierd than anyone who played Ultima Online for long enough to get past getting killed a few times while skilling up loved it and hasnt been able to find anything since.. There is a reason for it... but most players have no idea, they started with WoW and it is what they know.. I hope that you and others will be willing to give Darkfall a chance.. you have no idea how much fun you can have in a world that has a ruleset you arent interested in
Remember Old School Ultima Online
I appreciate the comments and insight, but my impression of the Darkfall crowd is that there must be the freedom to kill anyone at anytime without system imposed restrictions. Penalties and restrictions must be community imposed. The community governs itself in this regard. To create code and "rules" around PvP is to mitigate the player's risk and the game becomes less than FFA PvP. That is just my opinion of what I understand of the Darkfall player's perspective (in general).
I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that Darkfall will be anything other than a niche game. That's not a bad thing. FFA PvP is an automatic turn off for most players, in my opinion and it doesn't matter how you spin it, they won't play it. And I agree. I think any talk around about it not being a gankfest is smoke and mirrors.
It gets tiring explaining this to people. Ok yes it's FFA PvP, will it be a gankfest? more than likely no.
This is why.
Humans, Dwarfs and Mirdain (Elves) are allied races. They can kill each other but will recieve a penatly for doing so in the following ways.
1) Will be flagged as a criminal and can be free killed by anyone without recieving a penatly.
2) Can no longer access NPC's or other things in any town friendly towards that group (Human, Mirdain and Dwarfs)
To bring your alignment back up you MUST kill those of an enemy race. For the above that would be Orc's, Mahirim and Alfar.
Now Orc and Mahirim are allied. So while they can kill each other they will recieve penalties for doing so. They can however be rewarded for killing Alfar, Human, Dwarf or Mirdains.
Alfar. These guys stand on there own, no allies. Alfar can kill any other race without penalty and can be killed by any other race without them recieving any penalty.
Its a sophisticated RvR system that allows people to play how they want. Will there be pk's , more than definetly. Will it be a gank fest? No most certainly not lol.
Why would the majority go out of there way to kill an allied race when they could kill an enemy race and get reward's for it beyond loot? Some will but many won't.
To me it is pretty much the perfect FFA PVP system. It's by far the best to come out. If you want to be safer play a human , dwarf or Mirdain. This will allow you the maximum saftey. Next is Orc and Mihirm, less safety but more than the Alfar.
Also the world is so large you will can be alone when you want. Theres a chance someone may run into you but not a very large chance if your going out of your way to be alone. There are no levels and no full proof way for someone to tell if they can defeat you or not and without radar and names floating above your head there's no way to honestly be sure your alone. So this is going to make alot of people cautious when picking victims.
So throw away your misconceptions about FFA PvP especialy pertaining to DarkFall. It's a whole nother ball game with a very sophisticated system compaired to other MMO's. UO was a bit rough for some becuase everyone was the same you were either red or blue or grey that was the only difference. There was no reason to kill specific people over anyone else because it resulted in the same thing unless you were in factions and that didn't last very long in UO for some reason.
DarkFall isn't just PvP or FFA PvP. It is an intricate RvR FFA PvP system. I encourage you to play the free trial once it is available and give it a shot. DarkFall unlike any other pay to play MMO to date wants you to try the game free of charge before ever paying anything. So there isn't any reason to try it out. What have you got to lose honestly? I'm pretty sure most people have payed 50 or so bucks for a non returnable game that they weren't sure they would like or not only to find out they didn't.
First of all I want to thank you for a thoughful post. I appreciate formulated opinions from all sides, as opposed to mindless bashing. I have a few comments.
I want to say that I have been following Darkfall for a very long time, for some reason and I really dont know why, I have always really believed in it. It may have something to do with the fact that when we did get updates they had good and bad in them. "Development is going good, but we had to remove hitboxes because it creates to much lag" Why would a fake development team take features away, a vaporwear game can have any features the false devs want" anyway this is not the point of my post.
I dont know where the fight started, its like isreal and palestine, but I think much of the heat given to this website by the darkfall community is because of the heat given by people who for some reason go out of their way on a daily basis to flame the DF forums.
I would also like to point out a misconception about a Full loot, PvP environment. I would play Darkfall even if I had to focus only on PvE and could not attack anyone and only defend myself. In a game like darkfall which is influenced by Ultima Onlien among others, the ammount of freedom is hard do understand for people who havent experienced it. PvEing is at all times extremely engaging simply because nothing is pradictable. Crafting is also engaging, and being part of an old wast capitalistic economy where the swords you forge litterally shape the hisotry of the world as opposed to being placeholders till someone can get the epic in the raid,, so they can hit a harder raid...
Its not wierd than anyone who played Ultima Online for long enough to get past getting killed a few times while skilling up loved it and hasnt been able to find anything since.. There is a reason for it... but most players have no idea, they started with WoW and it is what they know.. I hope that you and others will be willing to give Darkfall a chance.. you have no idea how much fun you can have in a world that has a ruleset you arent interested in
I have respect for the game and what the developer it is trying to do. If they pull it off as they describe, I'll certainly give them kudos. Like you, I come from an old school experience in MMORPGs. My first was Asheron's Call and I it will probably always be the best game I ever played, probably because it was my first. I think I probably build it up to be more than it really was, but man I loved that game. It's PvE style would be considered hardcore by today's standards with item drop and skill damage (vitae sucked).
Like I said, I do hope the game is released with the features it promises and in a playable state, unlike several MMORPGs that have hit the streets in the past couple of years. From the messages I've read on these forums and on the Darkfall forums, I think this game is going to be much harsher world than what you are expecting. I don't believe this game is going to allow you the option of staying clear of conflict with other players and that is the crux of the problem for most gamers. We want to decide when we engage ourselves in conflct. We don't want it decided for us.
Guess I'm a vaportroll too. If the game comes out and it's playable, I will be one of the first to get a copy. Sadly... it will be a horrible game with half the features and mostly broken.
At first glance, I can see how someone might think this to be true. However, I think you are operating under the assumption that the only MMO gamers in existance are the once who are currently subscribing to MMOs as of 09/26/2008. However, I think there are another 30 million potential MMO gamers out there that have never tried an MMO because most have been boring as hell. But as a soon as a full loot, free PvP, sandbox HL2 MMO comes out, you can bet your ass that a few million are going to merrily jump on that bandwagon.
That same notion applies in the case of DF. It is not an MMO that is catering to your current crop of MMO gamers. It's an MMO that is cater towards the more hardcore crowd--regardless of whether or not they have an MMO background.
And if you measure the number of FPS gamers to the number of MMO gamers, you all of a sudden realize that the number of people who like themepark games pales in comparison with the number of people who like a more hardcore approach to gaming.
Hm dont know if i think darkfall is more hardcore.
For me it will be less hardcore, because being a casual player wont give me a huge disadvantage like in wow, where i can never keep up, because i dont have time to grind battleground 3 month 10 hours per day, every time a new season comes out.
Khael[SUN]
SUN - peekayin since pong
Webdeveloper on:
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http://www.bloodmonarchy.com
That is a good point about skill based games. WI go to college, and when I tried wow a few years ago it was becauseI had a friend whow ould not shut up about how awesome it was, so i tried it when I logged on I found out I had to gain 60 levels before being able to play with my friend... I didnt make it, at level 45 I got tired of soloing and quit.. i didnt enjoy the game at all...
But in a game liek darkfall, I could have been playing for 3 years, but a friend i convince will be able to hang out with me from day one.. we can experience a world together.. being a newbie is alot less restrictive... but that dosent mean having the skills wont mean something, its the beautiy of a skill based game..
when you add in the fact that the ability to be better than other people in reality, instead of hours invested is how success is manifested and you have a truely great game.. like Ultima Online was
Remember Old School Ultima Online
I am surprised that the OP having played the games he has seems to have totally missed the point of DFO. When less than 1% of the landscape will be city structures and potential conflict points.
The problem with the current MMO Market is minset DFO will hopefullly reset that, it's aim is to target all player aspects and I fully expext it to draw in more PvE oriented players by far. you just have to look at the context of the DFO world landmass and size.
The mouths that spout how hard they are are generic gankers who will fail in DFO, because their ability to target non PvP oriented players will not exist unless these players play ball.
DFO is for everyone and a sandbox to boot and for anyone who played AC including myself, this game will excel, if the devs deliver to their vision. I expect the rewards for PvE to far outweigh a PvP kill for minimal loot combined with the world size a lot of people will not bother with PvP in the open but just in the context of Clan Warfare/Empire building, which can be played as another part of DFO with little if no loss.
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Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel
Well... I'm really not going to add too much to what was said.
I'm going to post, this is my first post after years of just reading in these boards, because i wanted to thank the OP and almost all the posters the maturity and good sense of your words. Unfortunately Is not that frequent to read a thread full of respect in these and other boards about MMOs.
I have been playing MMOs since longe time ago and have tried very different ones, some i liked some other no. But i never thought a game play style is better than another, just it fits better my way of play and give me more fun, but of course i can understand that others will feel the opposite. It's just a question of tastes. We cant talk about quality on games, of course, but no on styles of play.
Again thanks to all the people in this threat to keep it in this wanderful tone.
I had read a post outlining some of the things they planned to do to keep players from killing there own faction one of which I believe was that if you kill a player of a certain faction in his own city you will be set on by all the guards instantly wether you are of that faction or not also once you do that you will be pretty much unable to return to the city without getting set on by the guards unless you work twice as hard to reverse alignment effects(or something like that) which does sound like a good deterrent but I can already see some guilds that basically function as "self service" communities where they have all crafting etc covered and don't need to go into the cities anymore, that is going to be something to see.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....