Carebears roll over... Darkfall is coming

Memnoch

This is it,
the MMO i've been waiting for. God I haven't been THIS hyped about a game for a LONG time.

I've been following the development of this little gem for almost 4-5 years now. There were times then and again when it looked like it would be vapourware, but it was not to be. Now the game is practically ready for beta and the first game play video has been released and it looks FUGGING AWSOME if i DO say so myself.

So what is this?
Well darkfall online is an OPEN PvP game that is skill based and has full loot.
At this point all the wow item farming carebears will probably start crying, and for good measure. Luckily items in this game don't mean jack **** compared to player skill, and being able to mass produce items as a guild will probably be more important than the items themselves.

The game featuers..
Mounted combat
Skill based system
No restriction on charecter development
Siege warefare
Player built and controlled cities that can be taken over and captured
Naval warfare.
Swim around in your ship and attack other peoples ships, not only does it feature ship to ship battles but you can actually board other people's ships and fight on them as well.
Focus on player economy and crafted items more than gathering phat lewt.
I could go on and on and on and on.. but there is no need to.

I've played most style of MMO and frankly i'm sick of being fed the same regurgitated crap. I don't want to farm an instance 40 hours a week or grind reputation by afking at the end of a battle ground.

Darkfall promises to be truley unique and ground breaking in many respects and I personally can't wait to jump in and play it.

Maybe I will be dissapointed, but hey, that's happened before. I hope this game can give me the WAR that was missing from the world of warcraft.

www.darkfallonline.com

Drakar

This does indeed sound quite enticing. It will be interesting to see how it works out, and in particular how it will be received by a market where players aren't used to this sort of thing. It would be great to see a game like this become a success, but there must be fears that it will just appeal to a niche market which may stifle it's funding and development. We'll have to see I guess ...

Hobbes

Sounds like a medevil version of PlanetSide tbh. More MMO3PS.

abccormac

Honestly, it's been in development for so long that anything short of "best game ever" will be a huge letdown.

D

Sounds like shadowbane tbh.

Memnoch

Hobbes wrote:

Sounds like a medevil version of PlanetSide tbh. More MMO3PS.

no not really.. there is a huge difference between this and planetside..

for one, there was no continuity in planet side. You could spend all day taking over a continent and it would be gone the next day. There was no persistance to the world. Also planetside was about pure faction based conflict, and there was actually very little freedom involved.

Just because darkfall requires more skill to play than the usual "click once and auto-attack till victory based on items" games doesn't turn it into an MMOFPS.

There is a persistance to the world, with all the including politics that go with it. There is depth in charecter development. There is a point to control of territory and building of cities and producing weapons and items for your soldiers, not to mention barter/trade/etc. You can attack your own faction if you chose, but at a price that you will be disliked by your own NPC's.

I could go on endlessly once again listing the differences between the two games, but to say that they are the same is perhaps the most superficial overview one can make about the game.

Memnoch

D wrote:

Sounds like shadowbane tbh.

in some respects it is similar to shadowbane in that they are both hardcore PvP mmorpgs. Shadowbane's main downfall was a lack of stability and the horrible lag experienced in the smallest of fights, not to mention the fact that one's entire city could be burnt to the ground while they slept.

It's not the same in darkfall afaik, you can capture another guild's city but not completely destroy it, they can take it back.

I don't know shadowbane all that well as i haven't played it so I can't really make a better comparison than that. (though i have played planetside ;P )

jaggeh

have you played it yet on beta?

admitedly it looks pretty.... and any game that lets me be extremely antisocial to people and get away with it (ref: neocron, adventures therein) is high on my list of must play.

Hobbes

Yea Neocron is very PvP centric. The only other game that was hard core PvP was DarkTide on Asherons Call, oh and Eve.

the problem with pure PvP based games is that they only attract the killer genre of the Bartle types. This for the most part is a niche.

Memnoch

yes it's a niche game, that's fine by me. I'm sick of pve grindfests because that's they all are and all can ever be....

Show me one single PvE MMORPG that is out now or is coming out any time soon that isn't a pure grind fest. The "best" PvE and most popular PvE game on the market right now is WoW, and even that is a complete and utter grind fest.

I UNDERSTAND that you have to have SOME degree of grinding as it were, in an MMORPG, but if that becomes the sole point of the game, then it's not worth playing. Which is what games like WoW end up being. Grind items to get more items to get more items to get more items.

At least in PvP you play to pit your wits against other players and over come them. A victory worth savouring.

Hobbes

Memnoch wrote:

yes it's a niche game, that's fine by me. I'm sick of pve grindfests because that's they all are and all can ever be....

The problem with Killer type games is that lets take CS:Source as an example. A round lasts 5 minutes or so, if you are getting knocked around you can log off and onto another server.

This is not the case in MMORPGs. In those instances you can if you are not as PvP as you thought be put into a situation where your only choice is to log off. DarkTide was a great example where the tip given by the developers was as soon as you log into the server for the first you hit the ground running and don't stop until there is no one near you for miles (and to stay out of towns until you hit level 20).

As with all PvP based servers you have winners and loosers. The problem is that lower levels prefer to win occasionally. Most cases this is not possible.

I belive bartle mentioned that in a game with a large killer population will eventually kill off other players (in that they will just leave).

Memnoch

yes you make a good point.

No one likes to lose. Especially in an MMORPG where what you may be losing is the time that you have invested when someone "griefs" you.

The question of death penalties is an interesting and different debate all together however, because I believe that while it IS necessary to have SOME SORT of death penalty, it shouldn't be so harsh such has to discourage PvP entirely.

Now that being said while darkfall online has full loot, the concept behind this is that items will not be as important. That the person kitted out in the best gear possible will not have a huge advantage over someone that spend 10-15 minutes farming up a new basic set of equipment. Now off course it remains to be seen how the darkfall devs implement this, and if they don't have a system that allows people the survive than off course many ppl will quit.

But i wouldn't write off such a system without even seeing it in action. I think the first thing to consider is that the fact that the game is full loot by it's own declaration will at least initially limit the player base to those who aren't affraid of such things, which by proxy therefore reduces the chance of ppl quitting. Because most players join the game know exactly what they are getting into.

I also believe that this harsher penalty will encourage community and politics. As for newbies it's already been said that you CAN kill your own faction but won't gain anything from it. First of all remember darkfall is NOT a level based game.

The idea is that a group of newbies can still take down a more experienced charecter. So the more experienced charecter has more to lose when they do die if they are carrying around "good" equipment. I guess the point i'm making is that while griefing is certainly POSSIBLE it may not necessarily be PROFITABLE. Most ppl will have nothing to gain by ganking newbies, and possible to lose, as in losing rep with their own race to the point where they may get attacked in their own races' cities and stuff. And unless you are part of a powerful guild that is fully independent for all it's needs and has it's own well worked city then killing your own race's newbies will not achieve anything.

As for another race's player coming and griefing newbies I would say that it's highly unlikely. Because newbie territory will be hard to reach as it would probably be at the heart land of the enemy race not to mention you'd probably get ganked long before you reached the newbie area.

I also wager that there will be zerg guilds out there and the easiest protection for a lowbie would be to join one of them. They may not have the most skilled groups of players around but ganking one of them would not be productive as you don't necessarily want to make 100+ players your enemy etc.

So I could and perhaps will later elaborate further on the game dynamics that make this kind of thing possible to survive and progress for those with some degree of determination and seeking a challenge. But I think it's fair to reserve judgement until we see just HOW it is implemented.

One of my BIGGEST issues with griefing is how carebears are paradoxically stupid about it. I find griefing can be MUCH worse in "Protectionist" games than in games that offer more freedom. Because in games where there is TRUE freedom, then there are also consequences. One has to in light of that consider their actions.

Yes you can go and grief newbies...
BUT
a group of them can probably kill you can take your items which are probably worth more than their's.
your own race will probably hate you making your race's capital inaccessable to you.
There will be roleplayer guilds that are anti-pk and will hunt you down for being a traitor to the race
Those same newbies you grief might be part of a powerful guild some day and will remember you and will serve to make your life hell in return.

The problem with carebear games is that one can grief without consequences.. take world of warcraft for example.

My guild used to dominate on Bladefist, first to kill every boss mob and pretty much own everyone in PvP. But there was this open boss mob called kazzak that required a LOT of coordination and timing to kill and a single level 1 player could foil your attempt by suiciding on it. Other guilds were so jealous of our domination that they resorted to inform the enemy faction in IRC whenever we were doing Kazzak. So as to prevent us from killing him. This was the worst kind of griefing I could possibly imagine, with absolutely zero recourse left to those being griefed.

We had no way to stop the enemy faction from suiciding on kazzak.
We had no way to prove to in game GM's that our own faction was "informing" on us.
We had no way to hide our attack on Kazzak from our own faction.
All they had to do was type /who blasted and the moment they see 40 players from a single guild they know what is going on. At least in other games you can chose to have an /invisible mode (DAOC had this) and it was completely and utterly retarded of WoW to not include a similar feature in the game to take oneself OFF of the /who list.

So here we are in a completely CAREBEAR game being griefed to kingdom come with no action of recourse in the most cowardly way imaginable. Had it been an open PvP game like darkfall we would have hunted down the offending guild, taken their city, destroyed as much of it as possible and chain killed every last one of their players until they quit the game. Such consequences make people think twice about griefing.

IMO PvE games have a much greater potentional for griefing than PvP games. because in PvE games you can often grief without consequence.

Hobbes

btw Carebear refers to a player that is the opposite side of the spectrum of a PK'er. In that they will do all that is required to stop people killing others in game (including up to cheating).

The point is if loot is worthless. Then why bother getting it?

If loot is worth something then If a group of newbies can take down an experienced player with loot then why bother bringing your main out? Just grab a few newbies and gank others, take loot and pass back to main character. You also have the cases where for example in Diablo hard core servers some players would log on, kill fast, loot and log out. If they thought they were going to loose they would log out.

You mention there is nothing to win killing newbies. It would not matter. DarkTide on AC for example the newbie entry spawn and the newbie training dungeon are normally all camped by people who just kill newbies. One guy I know even levelled up to level 10 in the newbie training dungeon and then just slaughtered anyone coming into train (untl GMs kicked him out).

Some of what you are saying appears to be speculation. Here is what I have found out playing PvP type servers.

1. You will always be killed if a chance arises to kill you.
2. You will be killed over and over if a chance arrives to do that too.
3. Not having a reason to kill someone doesn't mean anything. They will invent a reason.
4. At the end of the day revenue will beat any fun derived from PvP.

Take Neocron for example (Twitch based with skills+items). When I started and you died you lost everything in a backpack that anyone could loot. They changed it to items only in your quickbelt, then changed it to items in quickbelt except in slot 1 and then the belt you dropped had to be hacked to steal the items. Then changed it that in certain zones if you died you didn't loose anything.