Tobold's Blog
Friday, February 20, 2009
 
Darkfall Preview

So the Darkfall NDA dropped, which allows me to tell you that I've been playing in the beta. No wonder some people think a game is vaporware when the NDA explicitely states that you aren't allowed to mention that you are in the beta! This is my preview, as not to call it a review this early on. Anyway, the first big news is that Darkfall is not vaporware, and I expect it to actually be released on February 25th. The second big news is that from a technical point of view, Darkfall is in a very good state, less buggy than other games on release. And the third point is not news at all: Darkfall is a very hardcore game which is probably not enjoyable for a majority of players of other MMORPGs.

But let's start with general aspects, and speak about game design philosophy later. Here Darkfall surprised me in a positive way. Looking just at technical aspects, my beta experience was great. I didn't play all that much, but the hours I spent in the game happened without any lag, and with no bugs that affected gameplay. There were some graphical clipping errors, but hey, even WoW still has those after 4 years. The beta servers were not always up, and I experienced one server crash, but it is generally very difficult to extrapolate server issues from beta to release. The release version of Darkfall might be perfectly stable, or the servers might crash every 5 minutes, we simply can't say yet.

Graphically Darkfall also was better than I had expected. Yes, the game has been in development for 7 years, and probably didn't have the budget for the latest photo-realistic graphics engine. But Darkfall is using cell-shading graphics that look quite nice. Maybe the polygon count isn't as high as some other games, but in return your framerate doesn't go to pieces when there are more than a few players on your screen. I once stumbled upon a battle between two guilds in the middle of a town with over a dozen people fighting around me, and I didn't notice any lag at all. Can't say how large a battle in Darkfall has to be before it lags, but at least for typical skirmishes the graphics engine holds up nice enough. The world is generally quite beautiful, but it is a bit empty, with monsters being few and far between. Probably by design, because it makes players fight for mob spawns against each other.

So now I'll come to the part where I'll talk about gameplay. Remember that gameplay discussion is always subjective, and I'm not a friend of PvP, nor am I very hardcore. Thus it won't come to anyone's surprise that I didn't like the gameplay of Darkfall, and don't plan on buying the game. Nevertheless I'll try to give an as objective as possible description of gameplay, and let you judge for yourself whether Darkfall might be the game for you. Your preferences might be very different from mine.

The game starts with you creating a character, choosing a race and sex, and modifying your avatar's look. You'll notice that you don't choose a character class, because there aren't any character classes in Darkfall. There also aren't any experience points, or levels, in this game. Instead you have a wide range of skills, active and passive, and whenever you do anything, there is a chance that you are increasing those skills. Especially early in the game that leads to numerous "you skill in running/sprinting/swimming has improved" and similar messages. But more importantly whenever you fight, lets say with a sword, your skill in swords goes up, and your defensive armor skills go up. Thus while there is no "level" displayed anywhere, your character will get better with time, and will be able to tackle harder monsters. The downside of that is that these skills are completely invisible, except to yourself. You don't see how hard another player or even a monster is. The goblins you'll kill close to your starting point are easy enough, but a little further you'll find identical looking goblins having identical names, which are more skilled and thus more dangerous. And the only way to find that out is to attack them.

In consequence one of the main activities you'll do in Darkfall is running. Either running away from harder monsters or players, or running after weaker monsters or players who are trying to escape you. At which point I should probably mention that the artificial intelligence of monsters in Darkfall is high. Don't expect to stand toe to toe with a mob and exchange blows until one of you drops dead. The monster will strafe or run around you, making use of the fact that you can only hit them when they are in front of you. Monsters will also quite often try to run away if they obviously can't win, and they don't run just in a random direction: I never got far with the harder goblins I mentioned, because they kept running back into their fort and coming back with a bunch of their friends. They also often aggroed and attacked from quite far away with ranged weapons. If you are used to the artificially stupid mobs of classical MMORPGs, you might be in for a surprise when fighting the monsters of Darkfall.

You can't "tag" a monster in Darkfall, if you need to kill a mob for a quest, you have to be the player landing the last blow that kills it. There is no protection at all against kill-stealing. There is no protection either against ninja-looting: When a monster drops dead, the corpse is transformed into a gravestone, and anyone can come and loot that gravestone, completely independant of who fought the monster. At first you'll curse and complain about how hard it is to loot a corpse: You need to sheathe your weapon, target the gravestone with your cursor, press the "use" button on your keyboard, open your inventory, and drag and drop the items from the corpse one by one into your inventory. Takes bloody forever, and you are relatively helpless during that time, as you'll need to unsheathe your weapon again before being able to fight. After a while you realize that this is done on purpose. Yes, somebody can try to loot the goblin you just killed. But he'll have to put his weapon away to do so, which gives you the opportunity to attack him, kill him, and potentially loot both him and the goblin afterwards.

Yes, if a player is killed he can be looted. Completely. Every piece of gear he is wearing, every piece of gold he has, and every item in his inventory, all can be looted. Unless you die to a mob without anyone noticing, you're chance of getting back to your gravestone and getting your stuff back are pretty close to zero. After every death you'll be naked, except for a starter weapon. You can spend gold for more slots for starter weapons, if you want to have the choice between different types. But everything else is probably lost. Even quest items are lost, you'll have to start the quest over. Usually a player doesn't die immediately when his health goes down to zero. He first lies helplessly on the ground for 60 seconds. Every player has two abilities, "revive" and "gank", which do exactly what you think they do; you can either revive a helpless player to help him, or kill him to loot him faster. Thus we are back to our main activity: Running. After every fight with a goblin you will want to move away and rest back to full health. Even if you could take another goblin with less than full health, you'd just risk being killed by another player and robbed of all your stuff if you run around with low health. If you happen to find anything interesting from looting, you'll want to run back to town and put the loot into your bank, so it can't be stolen. You basically should never run around in gear you can't afford to lose, often you'll have several sets of reserve armor in your bank. Darkfall is less a game about gathering gear than a game about not losing it. Attacking another player turns you "rogue", which means you can't visit a friendly city for a while. Unfortunately the combat system has no targets. Thus if you are fighting a goblin and another player wants to kill you and rob you, he'll just run between you and the goblin, making you accidentally hit him, and turning *you* into the rogue, not him. Then he can kill you without penalty. Not a good system, I think.

Besides getting gear from dead monsters or players, you can also craft it. But the crafting system is about as hardcore as the rest of the game. You have only some basic gathering and crafting skills at the start, for anything actually useful to craft gear you first will need to buy the skill, which for a beginner takes many hours of farming goblins. When in the beta I finally had the tailoring skill plus the leather and iron ingots needed to craft some leather armor, it turned out my chance of success was 0%. I probably would first have needed to find or buy lots of cloth and skill up doing cloth armor, but by that time my patience had already run out. Anyway, don't count on a career as a crafter, unless you want to craft for some powerful guild. There is no auction house, nor any other safe system of trading. You need to meet another player in the game to trade with him. And there is always the danger that the player you meet to trade with will attack and kill you, getting the goods you wanted to trade for free instead.

I think you got the picture by now. Darkfall is UO pre-Trammel. It is EVE without empire space. It is a dog eat dog virtual world in which you are never safe. Darkfall makes WAR look like a complete carebear game. And this is exactly what some people have been asking for. Presumably those who still complain about Trammel having "ruined" UO, or those who spend all their time in 0.0 space in EVE, might very well enjoy Darkfall. I'm sure the Goons will play it, and Keen seems very excited too. But here is a lot of evidence that this sort of game is only enjoyable to a small percentage of MMORPG players, and incredibly frustrating to the majority. Syncaine's WoW tourists, players who just try other games because they are for the moment bored with WoW, will probably find Darkfall too hard, too grindy, too backstabbing, and too frustrating.
Comments:
How quickly did large guilds organize? Without the rapid formation of guilds and groups for mutual protection, I see the FFA PvP as being too chaotic for anyone to stick around for long. One can only spend so much time running back after a gank and wondering how to get new gear before they get frustrated to the point of quitting.

I'm curious of how their game lingo will turn out. If ganking is a specifically defined action (the kill after beating someone), then what will they call the attack itself? Maybe they'll just use the simple method and say attack, gank, and revive. Still, simple isn't always the result to expect.
 
Gamers from Greece - like me - await Darkfall quite eagerly as its publisher is a Greek company - Aventurine, getting the devs from the Norwegian Razorwax. The game is quite highly anticipated among the hardcore of the genre. I have not had the chance to see it `live' but from the report from forums, www etc it looks like its worth a look. But indeed it looks like its not a game for the masses, rather than a specific type of MMOers. Which makes it more promision in my opinion as its not set to be `the next wow killer' crap.

You can see some of the work of the Art Director in http://www.henningludvigsen.com/
 
I definitely won't be stopping by for a visit.

And this will REALLY sound like a douche of me, but I anticipate this game with perhaps dangerous levels of schadenfreude. I've had to sit and listen for too long as people complained about carebear syndrome and hardcoreness. I want people who think they are hardcore to play Darkfall and be ground into a pulp. I want them to be mercilessly ganked, I want them to succeed, only so that their defeat will be so much more brutal. I want them to love the game at first, consider it revolutionary, what they have been wanting for so long, only to watch the enjoyment turn to dust in their hands. I hope that somewhere there is that guy, the guy who spends 24 hours getting strong, and then camps new players relentlessly, not even stopping to loot them, just constantly preventing them from doing anything.

I feel terrible for saying all that, as hell, I can't o gank in any MMO. If I see someone weaker than me and they don't outright attack me, I can never actually bring myself to kill them. But darkfall has just set off some sort of horrible malicious feeling in me for some reason.
 
At this point, any game that is wildly different from the MMO norm is a great thing. This will be an interesting test to see how much the MMO playerbase has grown and matured recently. We need successful niche games badly.

Also, the fact that they're purposely alienating certain players is a sign of design maturity and honest marketing in my book. Bad designers want to put in a little something for every conceivable type of player, and end up pleasing nobody. And the last thing you want is a game that's marketed one to a group of people its gameplay doesn't actually support (AoC?)

Mike

mikedarga.blogspot.com
 
I dont understand how this game can become successful. Alls it will take is one player to get sufficiently high and have a bad day, camp the starter zone and kill everyone repeatedly. How many hours will the new player give to logging in, being ganked before they've moved, ressing, being ganked and so on? How long will the average player last before they are sick of 9/10 kills with the loot going to someone else?

There has to be a way to get to a sufficient level of achivement to make it worth the effort to continue playing. That's why single player games have bosses at the end of the level - you've fought to get there, so you want to get further. Imagine if Doom had stuck the last boss in the first room!

There is a *reason* Eve has Empire Space.
 
You've obviously never played UO.
 
UO was a product of a time gone past. You can't return to that, is my point. Once upon a time we thought we didn't need seatbelts and that smoking was not dangerous.
 
A friend of mine will foam at that comment. He still plays UO and thinks other games don't exist ;)


In any case, there will be a market for it, because people are weird. Not a large market perhaps, but a market.
I have no clue if they actually can have a profit with it (with their 7 year development) but that's another point.
 
There is NO chance I am going to play this game, but for my curiosity, how is guild / group support in Darkfall? Even though I don't play Eve, I love reading about the elaborate corp subterfuge that comes out of it - I hope Darkfall can provide those stories also. It seems the more players lose when they die, the more real life time they are willing to spend to protect themselves. Not for me, but interesting to read about!
 
"UO Pre-Trammel" can only be compared to Darkfall in terms of "clean looting" a corpse. It has also shown that totally unrestricted PvP does not fly!!! EVE has Empire Space, and it still houses 90% of the players, believe it or not, just take a look at the galaxy map and check activity.

UO was a WORLD. You could interact with it, drop items, have houses, ride horses, chop wood, create items. It was not all about monster bashing and combat, some that modern "combat simulators with fantasy setting" totally forget and ignore.

I hope some people pick up the UO world formula in future. There is more future in it than in uninspired PvP or LevelQuest games.
 
Isn't one point of FFA PvP that the players are supposed to "regulate" themselves? So a newbie ganker should rapidly get a very bad reputation and be put to justice repeatably by other strong "good" players and guilds.
 
You've obviously never played UO.

I did. That is why I have an idea of the percentage of players who prefer being safe vs. those who prefer free-for-all PvP. I played UO after the introduction of Trammel, and over 90% of players were in that safe part, with less than 10% of players being in free PvP part Felucca.

In fact UO *had* to introduce Trammel, because they were bleeding customers and would have died long ago if they had kept the game completely PvP.

I've had to sit and listen for too long as people complained about carebear syndrome and hardcoreness. I want people who think they are hardcore to play Darkfall and be ground into a pulp. I want them to be mercilessly ganked, I want them to succeed, only so that their defeat will be so much more brutal. I want them to love the game at first, consider it revolutionary, what they have been wanting for so long, only to watch the enjoyment turn to dust in their hands. I hope that somewhere there is that guy, the guy who spends 24 hours getting strong, and then camps new players relentlessly, not even stopping to loot them, just constantly preventing them from doing anything.

Lum the Mad just posted about that, and said that more far people *think* they are hardcore than actually are. But the "failed hardcore" will not admit that they weren't tough enough for Darkfall, they will just quit and blame bugs, lag, or other things. And these people will continue to pester various game forums and blogs claiming that if only a good PvP game came along it would beat all the carebear games.
 
One could easily argue trammel is just a reflection of the masses seeking the path of least resistance, whether or not it leads to more fun (see Keep swapping in WAR). The whole 'customer bleed' argument is also easy to make when you ignore that EQ1 launched, and that UO itself was in a great state of flux after launch (living eco system being completely scrapped for example), so to pinpoint one factor and say "ha, that did it" is a tough call. End of the day it's all opinion anyway, unless someone from Origins wants to pop in and tell us otherwise.

Old arguments aside, it's actually very encouraging to hear from you that DF is technically sound. Perhaps now a more hardcore PvP game will get a decent shot at success without the tech crippling it on day one, and being abandoned shortly after (SB). I also agree with Lum on the general perception of hardcore, and that far more players think they are when in fact they are not. Perhaps with its limited release, DF is seeking to minimize the effect that population (along with the general tourists) will have on the games overall health? Allowing more people in once the first wave of quitters moves out, and repeating the process until you have established a solid base (which assumes that base exists, which is again opinion).

I just hope their business plan revolves around being profitable with 50k+ players, because as long as they remained realistic about their market, they should be fine and the actual fans of the game should continue to see it supported.
 
It will be interesting to see how this works out. I won't be playing it (The descriptions of having to skill up a bunch of abilities is the main factor in this) but hopefully it will be fun for people who play it.

The main issue with darkfall does seem to be how well players control themselves. If a bunch of gank type players show up and other players do nothing about it, darkfall will probably fall apart, but if players organize more, it seems like it could be more successful.
 
Darkfall sounds tempting to me but at the same time it also sounds very unattractive too. The skill system for an example is something that I'd like to see more in MMO games. I doubt that I'm hardcore enough to actually buy Darkfall because there really is only so much ganking you can take before it breaks you(could ofc try a trial when they are available). I'm kind of like Caleb when it comes to ganking. I pretty much never attack anyone if they don't attack me first even if they are clearly a lot weaker than I am.
 
I'm sure this game will have it's player base but it sounds absolutely horrifying to me. I don't have the kind of time to invest in having to deal with the inevitable ganking and camping that will occur. I like how the skills work in the game, maybe that will translate into a game that would be more up my ally one day. I think the game has a chance of doing well by it's own expectations, people keep forgetting not every company is expecting 12 million subs for their game. This game is very niche oriented so I would hope the company and investors have realistic expectations going into it.
 
It's difficult not to criticise Darkfall because it's the type of MMO and game design I really dislike. I loathe the concept of rewarding time over skill and that's exactly what it (and many of the old and some current MMOs do). Maybe I'm too competitive at heart but I don't like being beaten by someone who simple has more time on their hands than I do.

And I almost laughed when I saw that Darkfall actively promotes grinding. Doesn't anyone realise that grinding is just a by-product of poor game design not a mechanic in itself.
 
I guess I'm in the minority here, but I think it sounds very intriguing. I've always thought WoW-like games that allow you to take advantage of "known" AI patterns in the mobs is just ridiculous. For example, you know that you can stand a mere 20 yards from an enemy staring straight at you and know that you won't aggro them - although you can plainly see them as clear as day. And when you engage them at melee range, they sit there and swing, swing, swing away, and you can dance around, stun, etc. however much you want to. So, I am a fan of any type of "intelligent" AI.

As for the no safe zones idea, there are a number of solutions that could be available. For example, the game mechanics could be such that a player can evade another player much easier than in a simple WoW style - or for one minute after resurrection, having increased strength (and even more increased strength each successive time you are ganked - could be on a timer, perhaps) - or (similar to warrior stances in WoW, for example) have an "evade" mode you can switch on where it would take 2, 3, or even 4 other players to take you down in that mode - or one minute of invulnerability - or any host of other possibilities.

The skill leveling idea is intriguing, too - There really appears to be no point to leveling sword skill in WoW, for example. You autoswing on a mob until you cap your skill level.

Anyway, I would love to try this out for myself - would love to hear others' thoughts since I've not played UO or spent much time in 0.0 space in EVE.
 
I am reminded of R. Bartle's famous paper "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS". According to Bartle if you want to attract "Killers" then you also need to attract "Achievers" and "Socialisers" for the killers to feed on. Dark-fall may be the ultimate hardcore pvp game but if there is no way to safeguard your stuff and minimise your exposure to risk then I cannot see it holding on to achievers or socialisers. If Bartle is right this could prove to be a kiss of death for the game because even the killers will leave if there are no achievers or socialisers for them to prey on.

I think Bartle's hypothesis is borne out by EVE online. Despite its reputation as a hardcore pvp game EVE has a massive population of care-bears who only do PVE or industry. I think the devs of EVE are very aware of how important this population is to the game as evidenced by numerous updates which allow players to reduce their exposure to risk if they want to.
 
I've been playing the beta for about a month and there are a couple things to mention:
1) There is an alignment system in place to prevent too much newbies ganking. It's not ideal at the moment, but I expect it to get better. On a practical level, though, there is is no REASON to gank newbies since, at best, they'll be carrying around goblin loot. Farming NPCs is way less dangerous. Not that that'll stop people, but there are other barriers to regular ganking.

2) The world is HUGE. Like, way bigger than you think. 12 hours from end to end. If you really intend to travel to another race's newbie zone, we're talking a 20-30 minute run and you can't bind closer than about 15 mins away. So, yeah, you may gank a few, but as soon as you get killed (which, by the way, is not impossible or even particularly difficult for 3-4 newbies to do), you have a long run back . . naked.

3) The clan support is at least as good as anything I've seen in other MMOs at release, in some regards better. For example, there is a built-in, in-game web based forum system for each clan. Ultimately, the core of this game will be about the clans and clan warfare. There are something like 100 claimable clan built city spots. holding and controlling those areas will create a lot of action.

4) There are semi-safe-spots. The cities have guard towers which kill people who attack others. Most of the areas near the starter towns are within a couple mins run of a safe spot. So long as you are aware of your surroundings, it's pretty trivial to get to a "safe zone".

As others have said, though, this game is HARDCORE in a way we really have not seen since MMOs started. It remains to be seen how explitable it is, the hard the griefers grief, and how responsive Advernurine is to issues raised. From what I've seen in Beta, they are quite responsive and I think that game has a lot of potential.
 
@xertheevil: Thanks for the comment! It sounds like the game has some structure to prevent ganking from going out of control, and impressive clan support. I'll be interested to see what happens =).
 
I think I would like to experience this game just because I missed out on Everquest. I'm not a PVP fan, but it would be nice to have that experience. Sure, I play Combat Arms from time to time and I also have level 58 alt on WOW PVP server, but I'm very certain that my current PVP experiences are nothing like what Darkfall might have waiting for me.
 
@Hound: You can't have missed out on Everquest, it's still going :) Just got go get a subscription and give it a shot! :)
 
Thank you for that link Tobold. Lum's views seem to sum up my own in a less antisocial manner.
 
To speak with Lum, Darkfall will fail because of the "Mordred-Syndrome". All the cool pvp overlords will turn from a cool kid to a whiny kid once they get killed as much as they kill others and the easy prey went away to other games.
 
It sounds like a dreary, soul-crushing drag. Any of the individual elements might be intriguing (corpse runs/issues, strength based on skill and not obvious levels, pvp-oriented environment) on their own, but the combination of everything sounds horrifying. I don't see any way that this game can succeed in its current state. Making the game bearable would require strong guild support right from the very start. If you don't have guild protection, I can easily see being endlessly ganked as a newbie and quickly giving up on it.

To say "there's no reason to gank newbies" is laughable. Stronger players who are oriented towards griefing (and there are way too many of them) will ALWAYS gank newbies for no reason at all except that's what they do. Ironically, in this game it will lead to the game either changing or dying that much faster.
 
@mbp

Thats an interesting theory. Anyone remember Shadowbane? I suspect this game will go down the same line, having huge popularity at first as randoms are attracted to it, then it slowly dies, gets hacked and whacked up as the "randoms" get turned off and all they're left with are other diehard gankers.

Having said that, while I fear it'll go that way I sure hope it wont. Anything daring to strike out in a different direction than the typical instant gratification trend I've seen lately is a welcome addition, to me.
 
"I just hope their business plan revolves around being profitable with 50k+ players, because as long as they remained realistic about their market, they should be fine and the actual fans of the game should continue to see it supported."

Syncaine, you're right on the money. The fact that DF was in development for so long probably makes it difficult for this to be the case, but any game can be successful as long as they properly define their requirements for success.

WAR is the perfect example of this, with a 300k subscriber base that's actually quite high, but still very low compared to what they were banking on.

Mike

mikedarga.blogspot.com
 
Have look at
http://www.gameolosophy.com/Games/Online/Darkfall-Online-Beta.541609
for a good review.
 
I know people are constantly begging for this style of game. But didn't we learn this lesson from UO, that the vast majority of folks out there don't want this in a game?

Ah well, I give it 6 months before it folds, and that's being generous IMO.
 
Lum is an idiot. always was. No one liked the dude and the fact that he was blogging before anyone else gave him some sort of elite status. you want to know the real story of Ultima Online, go look up Battlevortex and Sir Adrick who played on my server, napa valley.

I was not a dread lord. I was a RPer. Still am in many ways. I love thees and thous and I love crafting for 10 hours straight and I LOVE the concept of Darkfall. With our guild, we had a real "Evil" to fight and that was these other bastard PK , Red, players. Those that Lum talks about. See, instead of Lum, we decided we weren't going to take it anymore and fought back. We lost 9 out of 10 times, but let me tell you, when we took down a Dread Lord, it was an epic scene out of Lord of the Rings. It was huge, momentus. The feeling we had, the screams of joy, were real and those feelings, that REAL feeling is why you do this type of game. You will be unhappy a lot, a real lot, and you gotta stick together, but its something you will never get in WoW type games and thats why my entire Role Playing guild will be playing Darkfall
 
Sounds good. I can't wait to try out the game.
 
I just wanted to clear one thing.

No Safe Zones - There are safe zones, just not many. People brand new to the game start in a safeish area. Yes they can be ganked the moment they spawn, but the person who does it will be killed by a guard tower. The person who was ganked can res and loot the corpse of the ganker as he will be forced to spawn some distance away.

My hope is that the Guild and Guild Alliance system will work well. Yes to start with things will be crazy, but as guilds form and cities are build (with guard towers to kill those who you choose to flag by name, guild or race) consequences for ganking will force people to behave a little better. As you can only have one Character per account you can't hide behind alts (unless you pay for a second account) when your being a jerk. Finding yourself on a KOS list for all the big guilds will also make your life VERY hard out in the wild. I don't know if it will work out well or not, but I hope that the systems put in place make it more rewarding to do the right thing than to gank. If my life is made much harder and chance to progress is made worse because I am ganking, maybe I will go easy on the ganking.
 
Excellent overview, well written and objective.
 
It does sound an interesting game, though some of the mechanics as described here seem like they need some tweaks. That rogue system on the face of it sounds good, but if it can be abused in the way tobold described, then it's useless. Also, it sounds a bit like a cop out, it's an olive branch to the "care bears". Why have it at all, remove it and let the players and guilds/clans police?

For me, I doubt I'll be playing it, I don't have the time. This type of game needs commitment to get the best out of, and a very good guild. There's one point that I find interesting; EVE and Darkfall are both hard core PvP games, both will feature high levels of intrigue and political manipulations as well as PvP combat. Guilds in these games have far more importance than in games such as WoW. In these hardcore games, you need your guild, you need to rely on those people to help you progress, and come to your aid when needed. In more casual modern MMO's the guild is less of an importance in the mechanics of the game, and less of your characters identity. They are social groups bound together by a common ethic, or hardcore groups dedicated to raiding/PvP etc. Of course there are WoW guilds famous for reaching raiding milestones first (both globally, and locally on servers), but they don't have much impact on the actual playing experiance of other players. IMHO, I'd like more MMO's to give more power to influence the game world back to the players and their guilds (hopefully without more "griefing" :P ).
 
I been playing Darkfall since release for almost a week, ALL bashing =P should stop cause u guys dont know what ur missing or it just not ur style...... THE feeling of a Risk in this kind of PVP style is as addictive as GAMBLING... when you kill someone and loot their body as ur bodyshakes and feeling of adreline rush still in ur VIENS....Stand over corpses of ur enemies especially when out geared and out numbered IS A GREAT feeling...

The Safe Zones are Capital towns and Starter Zones. Later on it the Clan cities build with defensive but other than that IT ALL OUT PVP!!! something WoW or any MMO to this moment Gave this good feeling since...... Asheron's Call PVP server/UO

Currently we are HARVESTING enough to buiid up are city, and when u have bunch of clan mates rush to bank put away harvested material/work tools and get their Armor/Weapon to get ready for a fight and defending are city from upcoming spoted Raid from enemy clans/races YOU TRULLY FEEL Unified as a CLAN which is NOT compared to Other MMos.

Not to mention if someone just keeps killing players and eventually their aligment goes red... well they are just screwed because NOW TEHY CANT enter ANY NPC CITIES without gettting attacked by Towers with VERY LONG RANGE. Not to mention people who are RED spawn in far distant stone called "Chaosstone" even if u bind urself in a different one. that like 10-25min runing at least

THE WORLD IS HUGE..... some people in Clan that PLAYED in Beta dont even know 40% of the world it that big and we keep finding more and more cool AREAS as we explore farther and farther into enemy race's terrotries and other places casually/sneaking around

BECAUSE even CASTING MAGIc/or loud noises can get you in huge trouble of being attacked by a passing group.

THE EXCITMENT/THE CHAOS/THE Blood/THE CORPSES and the LOOT make this GAME give you the FEELING of Accomplishment unline any other..... not to mention a GOAL to go back and revisit some spawns to farm gear that IS VERY EASIALY replacable. I currently have 20 sets of armor just from NPC/Players

Not to mention helping ur clan build a CITY is a great enjoyable seen especially when looking the structures getting build up.

Their are Safe Zones in Towns but 95% of REST of the WORLD not including Clan Cities is OPEN Game.

NOT TO MENTION u will NEVER EVER FEEL LEFT out.... NO one will ever tell you HEY ur too LOW LEVEL u cant come along, HEY ur gear sucks u cant come.... because their no levels, This is skill based, but even skill based IF the player behand the character is NOT GOOD... than O.o Dam even maxed out SKILL/BEST gear wont save him and it be easy pickings even for a person without gear if they know what they doing.

THIS GAME IS ALL ABOUT TRICKERY/Sneakiness/Teamwork/ and base on player's skill

This is FAST PACED PVP that Will have ur BLOOD Boiling under ur SKIN and WANTING to MURDER or Protect more and more as Clans Vs Clans Battles start
 
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