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Darkfall: Tasos Discusses Character Progression, Prestige Classes
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
Aventurine's Tasos Flambouras took the forums yesterday evening to discuss Darkfall's character progression.
Debate over character progression has been a hot topic in the Darkfall community, and so in an attempt to follow through on their newly announced commitment to improve player communications Tasos took some time to provide players with some background information, explain Aventurine's intentions, shed some light on what the team has identified as issues, and discuss what they've been doing and plan to do in the future to address said issues with regards to character progression.
Tasos on "viability":
Let’s define what we mean by “viable” today: Timeframe: Approximately two months of a moderate time invested playing the game. Your character has most of the skills required for basic PvP combat, a decent supply of equipment in your bank, and you have approximately doubled your starting stats.
After launch we identified several problems early on, on the way to becoming “viable” which we addressed by dramatically raising the gains while fighting monsters in both magic and melee, introducing changes in PvE, introducing auto-harvesting, added the Industry skill which reduces crafting time across the board, skill books and scrolls, attribute consumables, and last but not least we added newbie protection. We also added various time-saving measures including bag naming, auto stacking of items, and increasing ship speed. We feel that all these together help significantly improve the transition from starting to viable. There are several other things we’re working on which will help this even further. It made sense to us to focus on this first, it being the starting experience.
We also learned that Prestige Classes will be coming in "Darkfall 2010" which is set to release by Q4 2010, much to the surprise of many players who thought they had been shelved:
A major feature on the way are the Prestige Classes. This is not a minor change, it will actually change the way Darkfall is played. They will take your preferred play-style to a new level and set you apart. These have been a long-term project that we’ve been working on for a while now. They will be a part of Darkfall 2010 launching sometime during Q4 2010.
View the original post here.
Comments
Aventurins "viability" doesnt fit reality not at all. If you ask the community the major amount will say what they say is "viable" isnt enough now days. Maybe a half year ago it was viable but now its not and aswell AV speaks of grind as work which i extremly dislike. There is no intention to change grind into something else which does more fun. They want to maintain it ...
Over all im deeply dissapointed by AV statment.
PS : Prestiges classes are more or less a direction "classical" class system, which i dislike aswell.
So for me its epic disapointment.
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So in a game about pvp, you have to spend six months doing nothing but pve, so you can win at pvp? I've always wanted to spend 6 months grinding pve to be a pvp superstar. Are these guys crazy or something? They are never going to find enough people willing to go through 6 months of boredom before the game starts to keep it afloat.
I wonder if they played a little game called UO. I know throughout the years they always called it their main source of inspiration. UO had a much more reasonable progression rate.
MrBoots before saying something this game is a mmorpg with full loot pvp. like any other mmorpg there is player progression what you say is the exact same thing a noob at wow could cry about is why he cant to an endgame raid.
becouse darkfall has open pvp and full loot doesnt meen its a pvp game the pve in darkfall is awesome!
if you have played the beta and are making conclutions from that expierience darkfall is not the game evri1 saw in beta evrithing changed ALOT got fixed soon new models/animations/ ANOTHER expansion.
DARKFALL IS NOT A PVP GAME CALL OF DUTY IS A PVP GAME DARKFALL IS A MMORPG.
i am not working for aventurine
the skill faster patch was crap many pvpers left because any noob can skill up faster and all the time and resources used to skill up for nothing
any player whit the proper reagents and mind set can skill up a magic school to 75 in 5 days
making skills easyer to get up was not the solution, if skiling up was the solution then many ppl should come back to DF because the grind is lower
BestSigEver :P
Hi, I played 2 months of this horrid crap (on my latest attempt to enjoy it) before I quit. I had hoped to resub if they ever took out the grind. I found the pve to be slow paced and repetitive. My play time (before i quit last time) was spent shooting fireballs into monsters that didn't even pay out enough loot to cover my reagents.
Darkfall has the worst pve I have encountered in any game. The mobs glitch around and the movement isn't smooth at all. They can stop on a dime, and change directions instantly. This makes them insanely annoying to fight. Not to mention they have insanely high hitpoints making them take forever to kill. If DF's pve is entertaining, I would hate to see what you consider boring.
Love how you are saying that lessening the grind made people quit while advertising eve in your signature. People quit because they don't want to pay money to be a loser for 6 months.
Be careful with your opinions and suggestions on Darkfalls forums. They will delete/censor them if the mod doesnt agree with it.
I disagree about Darkfall PvE being terrible. I don't know whether you, MrBoots, haven't played the game recently or just have had bad experiences with lag, but I haven't had any of the problems you listed.
I can understand vets being upset that all of the dedication they have shown for the game is being undermined by making it easier to skill up, but in the end I think it will do a lot towards making the game more accessable for new players, and new players will do nothing but good for the game and the company.
I hope that they do some more advertising and perhaps even release a box version. Darkfall is a fun game that has suffered from a poor start and bad press. With time, and enough income, I think the game has the potential to have EvE numbers at least.
I'm all for character progression, but does it have to be vertical progression (like leveling from 1-100 and increasing in the typical stat fashion) or can character progression be horizontal, that is, become more diversified without necesselary(Sp) increasing in overall power?
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"Chemistry: 'We do stuff in lab that would be a felony in your garage.'"
The most awesomest after school special T-shirt:
Front: UNO Chemistry Club
Back: /\OH --> Bad Decisions
because we all born Schwarzenegger
do u get this image ? u want muscle make the warkout take steroids and make the diet steroids whit no workout will get u fat the same thing apply on darkfall even fi u get al stats and skill to 100 you will still lose in pvp because you dont know to aim and you will still be a loser for 6 months
BestSigEver :P
DF will close its doors soon enough, a great example of them being desperate is their attempt at making a class system! sad that they consider viable a 2 month grind! ouch...
Steroids do not provide your body with energy and as far as I know there are no metabolic pathways that convert steroids to energy providing molecules. Correct me if I'm wrong.
--------
"Chemistry: 'We do stuff in lab that would be a felony in your garage.'"
The most awesomest after school special T-shirt:
Front: UNO Chemistry Club
Back: /\OH --> Bad Decisions
Darkfall isn't about vertical progression, it's all about the horizontal. You don't level like in games like WOW or AoC, but instead you gain skills through using them. Killing mobs with a one handed sword raises one handed sword skill, Strength and Vitality, and a skill relating to melee penalties from heavy armor. Getting hit raises defense and resistance. Crafting raises the crafting skill you are using and wisdom. ETC. It's a very good game from this direction. It's a realistic form of progression. It just takes a long time to become capable of competeing with those who have been playing for 6 months to a year, and many of those vets have no compunctions about taking advantage of that skill gap since the things that new players harvest and take from mobs are still useful, albeit not incredibly so.
The majority of the player base in DF is cool. It's just a small amount of the players that make newbie life difficult, but those players are enough to drive many new players away.
The skills for being good at Darkfall aren't much different than the skill for being good at most FPS style games, with some differences granted, but all of the grinding necessary to raise your stats and skills to the point where you are at a competetive level with even an unskilled vet is terrible. Any changes to make the playing field more even from a character standpoint can only be beneficial to the game as a whole.
You just described EXACTLY what I meant by vertical progression. In paranthesis I wrote leveling from 1-100. I didn't specify if it was a character level or a skill level. Vertical progression, in the way I'm using it, isn't dependent on killing monsters and completeing quests to advance. It's about becoming progressively more powerful, with the same abilities, with respect to someone to a character that doesn't have the numbers as high. When I played Darkfall my spells did SIGNIFICANTLY less damage to a character that had higher skill points. That's vertical progression. Horizontal progression, with the way I intended it to be defined, is when a character gains different abilities, has more choices with how to tackle a situation, but a new character isn't, by virtue of being new, completely useless either.
To put this in perspective, in Darkfall my character simply couldn't compete with a character that had much more powerful weapons and armor and higher stats. No matter how well my twitch was, I wouldn't have been able to overcome his regeneration. In Eve, a new player can hop into a frigate and at least contribute to locking down an opponent. Both games have aspects of the progression schemes I was talking about, but I think Darkfall can learn from Eve's approach to character progression.
The same goes for item progression too. In my opinion Darkfall needs more give and take, instead of having just the top tier weaponry being useful, because a system like Darkfall has/had, also messes up a player driven economy, but that is a topic for a different post.
--------
"Chemistry: 'We do stuff in lab that would be a felony in your garage.'"
The most awesomest after school special T-shirt:
Front: UNO Chemistry Club
Back: /\OH --> Bad Decisions
In my opinion there has to be some amount of vertical progression, by your definition, in order to make the game classified as a RPG. Though I agree that in order to be a successful PvP oriented game there should be less difference in the physical 'stats' and simply more options availible to a more advanced player.
In WoW if your goal is to do endgame PVE instances you can level your character by doing PVE instances.
Mr. Boots is saying if you are joining Darkfall to do PVP you have to do 6 months of PVE to level you character before you can do PVP.
(By the way it sounds like Darkfall may really be coming around, I mayhave to give it another try)
I really cannot understand why AV continues making such bad decisions. I've been saying this time and time again; it's as if they're purposefully trying to turn people off and drive this train wreck of a game into the ground. If so, the plan is working extraordinarily well.
The skill/stat grind was incomparably worse back in beta. They softened it a little bit around release, but even then the only way to develop a character in a reasonable amount of time was through bugs, exploits, and excessive 24/7 macroing. Then they introduced a few patches that were supposed to soften the grind even further. And they did, but still, to this day, the character development process in DFO is more grindy than anything else I've encountered in my 12-year MMO gaming "career".
The clueless pro-grind fanbois can bullshit each other all they want, but the fact of the matter is, it's only a matter of time 'till they're going to be left with two empty servers. Going through a few months of grindy PVE hell with the prospect of finally becoming competitive does not appeal to anybody, and it has nothing to do with how "hardcore" they are, whatever that means. It's painstakingly obvious that the only people in favor of leaving the grind intact are the ones who rely solely on their character's skills, and not their own. If newbies were able to get their skills up in a matter of weeks, not months, these wannabe PVPers wouldn't be so special anymore. It's all a facade, the game's overrun by people who couldn't PVP their way out of a wet paper bag if it wasn't for their skill/stat advantage. Contrary to what they're saying, the game doesn't require months to master. If someone's naturally decent at FPS/action games and they've got a developed character, they're automatically in the top tier of DFO PVPers.
Oh well, grind or no grind, watching this retarded dev team kill their own game is a lot more entertaining.
You forgot to include that the grind for each Stat takes the time of leveling 2 80's in wow?
6 month's of none stop every waking moment server up to down play youll be "Viable" in 6 month's in one year continueing the same eat shit and sleep DF, you will be VET Yay You can keep it no thanks.....
bacause on a FPS u get double jump aoe spells casting time buff debuffs penalty based on armour
i will like to see any FPS pro how he deal whit the timing and ablities on darkfall
BestSigEver :P
Grenades are like AOE spells. Double jump and bunny hopping aren't so far apart and casting time debuffs are like reload times based on what weapon you are using. There are indeed parallels to be drawn whether you are choosing to see them or not.
haha, this is hilarious. Darkfall will not be closing it's doors anytime soon. There are too many players who are enjoying what it is with so many more coming in every day. The "grind" isn't bad for some, is tolerable for other, and the ones who think it's so bad just don't like RPG games, period, go play something else.
PRESTIGE CLASSES were a part of discussion and in developements YEARS before the game was even in closed beta, So in NO way is this an attempt to keep players, hahahaha, the people who take the time to trash stuff they know nothing about amuse me so much.
Good luck with life, it's apparent that nothing will ever satisfy you trolls. Darkfall is a niche game, if you don't like it move on, otherwise leave us alone so we can enjoy our game. The dev's have done nothing but continue with the image they've had all along making adjustments as necessary. I love the direction it's going and hope they stick to their guns.
Playing since NA release, 4 hrs a night and 0 grinding, been loving every minute of it.
Keep it up AV.
Relax nerds, its only a shitty game.
This
so...they're adding....classes?