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State of The Game?
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kDeviL
Member UncommonPosts: 215
After watching a first look video on this game I gotta say it looked boring as hell and I didn't really give it another glance until now. I hate the kind of people that give a quick glance at a game and immediately write it off and it turns out I was one of them xD I know this game has received a ton of flack and horrible attitudes about it which I guess I allowed to keep me from looking further into it.
I then heard more about the kinds of systems the game had in place and decided to research further. My idea of this game COMPLETELY changed after watching a few PvP videos and some huge boss fights still with the danger of PvP all around you. I think I kind of get what the whole idea of this game is now and honestly it's pretty refreshing. However the $40 + $15 a month for a game that has such a gamble factor is severely holding me back. I'd like to ask a few questions before deciding to purchase it.
1.) Population? This is definitely the most important thing I want to know, without a stable player-base I feel like no matter how good the game itself or it's systems may be, it's useless if there aren't a large number of players to enjoy it with. This is a hard question to determine from videos, especially after seeing so much hate for the game. Does it feel really populated or more deserted? Does the amount of players seem to be increasing or decreasing?
2.) Content/Things to Do? In a sandbox game you should almost never be bored, whether content is there for you or not you should be able to basically create your own content and always be doing something, not just something but have a variety of things to choose from. Is this so in DF:UH? Has anybody that's played longer than a week found themselves bored with the game?
3.) PvP/Combat? In the video these two things look AMAZING!!!! Though I understand looks can be deceiving. Can anybody tell me from first hand experience if it's really as fun as it looks? Be detailed.
4.) In your opinion how does this game stack up to other MMOs? Compared to both themeparks and sandboxes is fine.
Thanks in advanced!
If WoW was released today even in its' entirety it would be f2p in 3 months.
Why is it still such a big deal?
Comments
I can't help you, but i'm also very curious about these things!
I played darkfall 1 casually and i really liked it, i'm just waiting for a trial for unholy wars to see
if its worth it
like you, i think the features look awesome and am curious about it.
but i don't think it is worth the money, considering the stability problems i have read about, which seem consistent with even the die-hards.
i hear it's jumpy, stalls, and crashes very often, even on high-end systems.
sure it just launched, but with an indie company, how can you spend all that money and be confident that the small company is even going to address the issue. that is what stops me.
save your money. read a book.
i just discovered Steven Erikson's 'Gardens of the Moon'. it's way better than any mmo experience i've had in years.
Yea I really Can't believe they don't have a free trial for the game. All that tells me is that they aren't confident with it because it really can't be that hard to make it happen.
I also wonder how long they plan to stay with their current payment model with how much of an issue it already seems to be for alot of people.
If WoW was released today even in its' entirety it would be f2p in 3 months.
Why is it still such a big deal?
Current payment model is the best payment model. No need for Trials as you can watch youtube videos. A trial would ruin people buying multiple harvesting accounts. The only way it would work to have a trial is by having an island with no bank access or contact with paid accounts, but then you really wouldnt be experiencing darkfall.
There is good population, the cities and safe areas are always crowded and you dont have to go far to find a fight.
Ample things to do and accomplish but you will probably end up doing activities that yield the most prowess.
Don't let the videos fool you, your first, second and third encounter will look nothing like the videos you've seen. Darkfall is unforgiving to the "unaware" and first death you will probably have 5 people standing on your corpse. Adapt, adjust and be aware... remember smart people learn from their mistakes and really smart people learn from the mistakes of others.
Currently nothing out like Darkfall... paying the 40 dollars is a good investment assuming your bills are current, the fridge is stocked and the wife/GF has some new spiffy shoes.
Woah this is probably the most love I've seen for the game so far xD
But then again forums are generally a place for whiners. One more question if you guys don't mind:
How long will it take a new player to be able to get into some of these amazing pvp fights I keep seeing in videos?
If WoW was released today even in its' entirety it would be f2p in 3 months.
Why is it still such a big deal?
Im sure badaboom will disgree but I say 25k prowess
All boosters and 110 in a (viable) stat
and all viable Skills/Spells
With a little leftover.
How fast you obtain 25k prowess is totally up to you but it can be done in a week.
I agree.
At 15k you can start pvping, and you can kill people. But at 25-30k, your toon starts to feel more fleshed out.
It took me 30 days of casual play to get to 30k, but it could be done much quicker.
I dont have much time to reply in detail so I will only say this much: As someone who despised the df1 community and hated the "every1 is everything" class system in df1, dfuw is a welcomed change.
Population is healthy, actually more healthier than I originally thought, sometimes I wish it wasn't so healthy so I can harvest in the safezone in peace.
Combat is fun, PVP is fun. Group dynamics is important. For example people whine & complain about how squishy Elementalist are, so two nights ago we all changed roles to elementalists, 3 of us and 1 primalist healer, we then ran around destroying every group we saw. We even changed the minds of a couple of people who swore ele's were garbage.
Small group pvp is really exciting! Large scale sieges are fun but there are some people still experiencing crashes. AV has released a new patch today to address some of those crashes, and they are showing immediate signs of working on more fixes. Last night we had a huge 100+ vs 80+ siege. exactly 12% of the people involved experienced pings of 50k+ and out of those 12% 8% crashed and had to relog. After the siege we reported performance to the GMs directly, as they were collecting data in real time during the battle and we didn't even know about it. As someone who made fun of AV for the lack of responsiveness I must admit I was impressed they are actively trying and pumping out fixes way faster than df1.
There is no trial, there are no quests, there are just mobs to kill, places to explore, excellent crafting, treasure hunting, and fun combat. It doesn't take 8 months to become pvp viable, there is no hardcore grind, eventhough sometimes I wish they made it a little more harder. All in all I am having fun right now. Will it hold my attention for years? Who knows, i hope it does as long as they keep the content coming.
I'd like to see more dungeons, meaningful objectives, resource monoliths, all the schools placed in game, faster battle mounts, and more nava ship varieties.
AV is working on all of that in time.
If you're a good PvPer and playing an elementalist like me, you can compete 1v1 against 50k-80k prowess people at 4k-7k prowess. I think the other classes might be more gear dependant however.
Just get a bunch into the primary stat, intelligence in this case, boost your spells to 50 and you're good to fight. Still waiting to get some more advanced spells myself, I'm certain they'll help even more.
POPULATION: You will not even come close to comparing the game to a AAA themepark with 50 servers containing 1k-10k players. This game is by far the largest game of its type (considering its horrible(understatement) competition) and with the full knowledge that this game survived for years with a population that would make anyone laugh, its current population state is quite good, healthy, and for a non instanced open world game...it feels populated where it needs to be and when deep into the wilderness...empty enough to feel like wilderness but enough traffic to make you lose your mind with paranoida (oh shit I hear footsteps!)
The EU server is cursed in population, the NA server is blessed in population, as was the case for DF1. So much so that the NA server has LOTS of EU players who are willing to sacrifice ping for a booming population.
CONTENT: Its a sandbox. You have the option to stand there and grind feats, which are general achievements (kill 200 mobs farm 150 rare mats, visit 400 map tiles, craft 500 banded armor pieces ect) and hate every moment of it. You can also use them as a back burner guide and reward and play to self sustain, build a bank up for war, replace what you lose (gear breaks fast when its not being looted no way to recover it, crafting is the lifeblood of the game for this reason)
Meta game is alive and well. Clans fight clans for holdings (cities and hamlets which are small unprotected bank outposts and bind stones) The beauty of an open world game is that when one clan decides to try to take another clans city...well all sorts of interesting allies, mercenaries, backstabbery occurs...on top of the 3rd party "yo were just here to loot peoples graves but one of your guys attacked us so now were gonna fight agasint you" type of chaos. One of the most common voice com siege questions is: "hey are these guys friendly or do I kill them?"
Other than that, its really low on the sand box sand index. Limited and static player housing which a deed is acquired though sheer luck or paying a crapload of in game money to someone who got lucky. Theres stuff for your house but you probably wont get one but may find a friend with a house who will let you bind there and live out of it too.
More content to come though, don't expect speedy development they have like 20 guys working on the game ect.
COMBAT: This is where the game shines. Don't let DF1 vets who hate the new adjustments to combat turn you off, it took a special person to like 1.0's combat which is why no one played. New combat has roles (swappable your not locked in and thers no alts in the game other than second accounts) add balance. Multiple threads on the forum declaring every class to be OP which means balance.
Combat is quick, but not FPS style. You have Stamina and Mana that must be tended to using food potions and transfer skills that suck one stat and replaces another. Top it off with skills that sap stats it becomes very important to know when to duck behind a tree and stat up.
Also there is a need to swap from range to melee, or active block (don't confuse with active dodge in themeparks, you have a shield equipped, you press the parry button, if someone attack you block it, end of story, can use it as much as you want but drains stamina) All this happens mid fight as seen in videos. Coordination is key within groups. There is absolutely NOTHING else out there like Darkfall combat, nothing.
You can be uber pro at FPS games, or other mmorpg games, and walk into DF thinking you are a boss and get your ass handed to you. Conversely if you are good at DF combat you can drop someone with many times better gear and prowress than you. It really is skill based combat in every way. Prowress gives you more tools and an edge, better gear gives you another edge...a few missed shots and a flawless from your opponent and that edge is gone.
It takes a LOT of practice to get decent, and further to get good. A lot of practice, duel often.
My opinion: You cant really compare DF to any themepark or sandbox. You cant compare it to any FPS or TPS game. Its bits and pieces from a lot, and has evolved via a small indy dev team in Greece who obviously do not have access to silicon valley groupthink or any other similar tech savvy population center... which often produce better iterations of the same old shit.
Its a rough around the edges game, it takes patience, its not really casual friendly (many do play casual though), the developers are slow with stuff, go silent sometimes, and often wrestle with bugs that shouldn't be there to begin with. They guess on ETA dates, miss them, go silent, then come back and push it back to a new ETA. If this is a problem don't bother with the game.
It has its problems, but the core of the game is there and playable, and fun. That's all that really matters, the rest is icing on the cake.
In that case, I need to get $180 ($60 X 3) back for each badies (Guild Wars2, Tera, SWTOR)!
Now Playing: DARKFALL Unholy Wars "Return to Open World, Full Loot PvP, Conquest in a Sandbox MMO with player driven economy! Just like classic MMOs!"
The population is okay - can still ride around for an hour and never see anyone because they are all packed into the safezone... Even blatant fanboys like Screw Loose have posted after this patch the game is just getting stale VERY fast and they are bored due to the lack of content in the game.
Game is built around sieging but you cannot siege due to crashes - so back to kill 180 of said mob....
I agree with you. Maybe even 20K will suffice. I'm at just over 30K prowess (primalist) and with 120 boosted wisdom. I can hold my own in any fight. I have stopped "grinding" for prowess. Now I just look for pvp or contribute in pve groups and the feat completions are now just a bonus.
I had a "eureka" moment when I got killed at the same spawn from this damn warrior three times in a row because I was trying to farm the arctic bears (still not finished them) as an elementalist. Remember, I'm normally a primalist. This 60K prowess warrior was just destroying me everytime and showed no mercy. So I switch roles to my primalist, grab my best gear and go out to see if I could find that bastard. Well found him I did. We both see each other at the same time (so no one had the upper hand) and he got in a few shots but I started whittling him away. He ended up sprinting away and mounting and I gave up chase. So while I did not kill him, I felt vindicated and swore I would never farm as a nonprimary role again.
One of the best summaries of DF:UW I have read. Very well done, BrownAle!
This summary is very fair, and touches on a lot of both the pros and cons without going overboard on either.
Nice job!
On another side note: A lot of people think there's people with 90k+ prowess running around killing newbs. The truth is that those "hardcore" players have basically burnt themselves out (playing for 5 days straight regularly of anything will get boring no matter what it is). So this is a great time to get started as you'll see a strong increase of moderately progressed players who are making their claim in the world.
They've also really gone to great lengths in banning hacking, which is a staggering improvement from DF1, which took like years to get a hold of.
This is what baffles me.
Why does everybody feel the need to say that you can win with a low level char. Why defend an unnecessary and boring grind? Would it hurt the game if a casual player could get 60 k PP in a month? Why would it hurt the game if the basement-dwellers can get 400k PP? Would it hurt anything else than the ego of the grinders?
I was hoping AV would make players get one fully-fledged role pretty easy in DFUW. I`m close to 40k PP, and I would say 60-80k PP is one role. I have also stopped grinding for prowess, but I don`t look for pvp, I stopped playing. The reason is simple. I didn`t get Darkfall to kill boring NPCs for months and the population has plummet on the EU server. Why waste my time doing boring things in an empty game.
Some of you might like to play with a low level char in a full-loot mmo, but most of us don`t. I was hoping AV did learn from the failure of DF1, but clearly they didn`t. You want to play a fun pvp mmo you say? Then kill stupid NPCs naked with a blessed weapon for a few months.
Sometimes i want to log into the game, but then i remember the thousands of NPCs I have to kill, so I watch TV instead. It is sad most player don`t get to see the Darkfall hidden behind the chore of the grind. We can only hope things will change in the next months. If they do, I`ll be back.
When it`s more fun to iron my skirt than play the game, the game will fail.
Pretty much this.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
This is also a thing that makes me pretty mad.
We know some of you like to play a game where you can kill 30 scripted rats of different levels, but Darkfall players chose this game because of the PVP. What you are saying in this sentence is, my biggest issue is that there is not much boring stuff, just awesome large scale wars.
And no, the battles in Darkfall isn`t like doing Alterac valley a thousand times, Darkfall sieges is a sandbox in its own.
The politics you need to consider before you chose to siege. Who is the enemies, what clans will help them, how many players can they field, who will help us, number of roamer clans...
The gathering of siege equipments, gear, consumables, assembling players, notifying allies, attack plan, placement of siegestone, retreat plan, marking runes....
Getting the army ready, making right partys, how to comunicate with allies, how to get to the siege
All this even before the battles start.
We want the wars you so cleverly label deathmatch, but sadly we have to do the things some of you consider fun.
Kill x rats level 1, kill x rats level 2, kill x rats level 3, kill x rats level 4, kill x rats level 5....gain pvp level
Kill x rats level 6, kill x rats level 7, kill x rats level 8, kill x rats level 9, kill x rats level 10....gain pvp level
kill x rats level 11................................................
Months later you are pvp ready and people wonder why the game is empty and dead.
If Tasos didn`t lift, he would probably get bitch-slapped. My only joy for AV to totaly destroy a fun game with a pointless level grind, is they will be unemploid in Greece.
Darkfall vets would need up to a year to be able to compete on top in the old UO game, you know the one we knew before Age of Shadows destroyed it february 2003.
Old UO was way more player skill demanding then both DF1 and DFUW, both 1vs1, 5vs5 and in large teamfights, way more demanding.
Isnt it kinda odd that a old game like UO still tops a new game like DFUW when it comes to player skill demand?
In old UO, you could afk macro your stats in two-three nights by trapping a bunny in a house. Sword and bandage was done in one night at the boneknights in Deciet. Magic resist to 50 in 10 minutes running through a firefield. Magic I did afk in a house casting elements. The only hard thing to get in skills, was the last points in magic resist.
So I got a pvp ready char in two weeks, and still played that game for almost six years. I left when they made Age of Shadows. the pvp was what kept me in that game all those years, but I never became one of the top pvpers.
My point is that you don`t need a boring grind to keep players, as long as the game is fun. A game like darkfall would have more pvp. more players and more fun if we didn`t have to go through the chore of naked PVE for months. Grinding NPC should be an options if we wanted more than one role or drops, not a straitjacket. Give players one role fast, and make the other roles a long term option.