I'll start out by giving you some background on my MMO and gaming, so you have a feel for what I bring to the discussion. I started playing games with Wolf3D, and I'm currently 28 years old (married -- though it's not really relevant maybe it counts towards my attitude or something for you guys).
I started MMOs in high school with Ultima Online, and played that for about 5 years... so say from 1996 to 2001 or 2002. I enjoyed playing Pre-UO:R but stayed after when they put in special hits and things... I left after I sold a bunch of shit I scammed from people through the years, including a placed castle on Ice Isle in Trammel (big pluses on that hehe).
While playing UO I beta tested Everquest, which I played for two weeks and got sick of. The grinding was annoying, and I hated macroing enough with UO so that I wasn't ready to play that game. I saw it for what it was, a level treadmill, and avoided it entirely. To that end, I betaed Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and Asheron's Call, none of which really floated my boat.
World of Warcraft came along early on and as my guild was all big "Blizzard" fans, we all joined and played that. The game wasn't great, but the interface, the design, the fluidity, etc.. of the game was very good. It was easy to figure out, was playable for a few hours, but after about two months it became a grind that nobody really wanted to. The raids were boring, and leveling was slow. We retired from the game after about 6 months.
I started a job in 2006 as a systems admin for a financial firm, where I picked up WOW again with coworkers. This time I used Glider to level up to 70 while I was at work, watching it through remote desktop. I then started in the PvP arenas, raiding content, etc. It was a lot more fun doing it with friends than it was in the past, and the interface and simplicity of the game made it bearable to deal with the mediocre PvP. I looked it more as a graphical IRC than a game, and it was fun to shoot the shit with coworkers after hours from home.
On another note, I continue to heavily play Counterstrike Source (CAL team member and we do okay), Starcraft, and Call of Duty 4. I hope that this introduction is pretty good for us to get started on reviewing Darkfall.
Now, on to the game. I have waited since 2002 for Darkfall to be released, patiently checking forums every few weeks for any updates. As updates in the recent months became more frequent, with hints towards beta, I couldn't wait. It was the game I was waiting for. My forum account also lists me as an "02er", and whether you want to believe that or not is your problem
I got into beta around the 20th of January, 2009. I have been playing an hour or two every day since then to test the game in any way I can. If you read no more, and want to stop here I'll give you the jist of it -- the game just isn't that great yet, but it has potential.
It's a beta game folks, I get it. Things won't work, servers will crash, monsters don't spawn, etc. I have no problem with these things, though it does get annoying I can deal with it in the spirit of it being a 'beta'. In that respect I will differ with MikeAtUTAH, and say that as a beta, the game is pretty stable and the game world isn't too bad.
Let's go through this simply, we'll cover the game in a very IGN manner. This means I'll give you Presentation, Graphics, Sound, Gameplay, Lasting Appeal, and an Overall. Let's start from the top.
Presentation: 3/10
To my eyes, the game is laid out okay. The character builder in the beginning of the game is very rudimentary and feels like something out of a game MUCH older then Darkfall. In that respect, I found WoW's character creater to be better.
The UI of Darkfall is well... just horrible. The mouse isn't very fluid, it's hard to know whether a window is resizable, you can't change transparency of a window with any ease (you have to go through the options menu), there is no HUD to give you any real information, but you can have multiple 'sticky' windows open to see what's going on. Binding keys through the menu is horrendous, instead of it being laid out easily and nicely, it's a LONG scroll list. Additionally, menu options that have only 1 or 2 items and no need for a scroll are ABLE to be scrolled. Think of this, if a webpage had 1 line of text, would the scroll bar become active and able to be used? In Darkfall's menu system, it does, and you can scroll right past the 2 lines of entries there.
Let's add something about finding your way around. You get two quests to start off with by an NPC that is near to the bindstone. When you figure out where the goblins are (cuz you kill goblins for your quest), you come back, there's no indicator that the guy will accept the quest. The map isn't organized, doesn't show you any 'town' info so it's not easy to find your way around. While I can eventually 'learn' the game world, there's no recalling from place to place that I've seen yet so you are going to run everywhere. I'm a big fan of removing tedium from the game, so a AoC/WAR/WOW indicator to show that you can *get* quests from an NPC or GIVE quests to an NPC would be helpful and not take away from the 'hardcoreness' of the game itself.
Let's talk about the chat system too.. it's ridiculously bad. When you are typing in party chat (I won't discuss global chat because it's only for beta), you have *no idea* who is talking on your screen. So if your buddy says "Follow me!", you have no idea who you're following. If it's a party of three or something, you can figure it out fast enough -- but otherwise you have to mouse over every person and figure it out. It makes it difficult to organize. Chat bubbles would be a nice feature here, even though the longtime followers and diehards say it "noobifies" the game. I despise tedium and repetitive tasks, and appreciate simplicity and rather let the game itself be challenging. Throughout Darkfall, you fight the UI in order to play the game and be good at PvP or whatever else. In WoW or other games, the UI is an accompanyment to the game to allow you to easily play the game in a tough environment (end boss, whatever). Additionally, the GUI has no 'hooks' that I can see so far, so you can't mod it like you can in WOW with addons. It makes it even worse.
Moving onto organization... it works like UO. There are no slots in your backpack (fine), and it's all drag and drop to pick stuff up off of corpses (again like UO). The problem is that gold doesn't stack automatically, arrows don't stack, you can't do anything without manually arranging your pack. And to me, that's idiotic. Why should I have to stack gold? Does it make the game *more hardcore*? Or arrows? Why not give me a little ability to organize in my pack? The lack of organization that benefits the player to allow them to play the game seems a big plus to me, yet the purists argue against it. I'll voice my opinion against them, and hope for more organization on your character in general.
I'd like to add that often times when you're running around in the game world, your feet hover slightly above the ground (no shadow), so the final touches to make that world more fluid need to be taken care of. You can climb mountains you should NEVER be able to climb (too steep), just by running at it. These types of problems are common.
Graphics: 6/10
The game world graphics are pretty good, but compared to MMOs of this generation (be it WAR, or even WOW, or AoC or whatever) they are just more of the same, if not worse. The character models are bad frankly, and I'm not really impressed with them. Buildings are good, but the design of towns is bad. I'm not sure if things have been disabled or not, but I found myself going up a staircase in the Alfar starting town, that went -- INTO A WALL. I just jumped off and went on my way, but it gives you an idea. Honestly though, graphics are something I care little about (I still love Starcraft and UO, so what does that say?).
Sound: 2/10
It's the same sound over and over again. You can hear combat from a distance, but even with directional sound (I have EAX, and a 5.1 setup) you cannot understand where it comes from at ALL. You'd think the north sound would give you some detail from your center speaker or front speakers, and south sound in your rears, but no... it's all over. The music plays over and over and I don't even know how to disable it. Sound effects are mediocre and I found Starcraft to have better and more entertaining ones. The sounds for shooting a mana missle (haven't done much magic testing) seem like they have been stolen from other games, as they are not very unique.
Gameplay: 5.5/10
I give it a 5.5 to nudge the game into a 'positive' light over just 50%. It has potential, but right now, it's a spamfest or gankfest. First and foremost, there is *no* amount of skill in this game like UO.
All things equal, it's a 50/50 shot for you to win a fight. I can circle strafe to little affect because the swings of a weapon are so wide that you usually connect anyway. Combat is a spamfest (we have a thread on this in the beta forums now). Think of melee combat as 'knife fighting' in Counterstrike. Since most people are poor FPSers, it makes it easy for a guy like me to win fights. I charge in (fake) let them swing then back off and let them miss, and then I'll swipe them. Rinse and repeat. There's little to no strategy involved here, no "combos" like in UO, and disarming/rearming is an annoyance at best because you *need* a staff to do magic.
The way magic works is that you equip your staff, select a spell, and hit your left mouse button (LMB). This engages the current spell (and casts it immediately, stupidly). Now you can cast *ONE* spell, and one spell only. You have to select another spell (hot bar menu is easiest), engage it (LMB), then cast. The idea of swapping spells with any ease is difficult at best, though I'm sure it can get faster with practice. There will be no "Explo-Ebolt-hally" combo in DF the way it's set up now -- it's just too slow, and melee is pretty stupid. There are no real hitboxes either, so if you wap a guy in the head or in the back, it's pretty much the same damage.
The shield blocking pretty much doesn't work for shit. I hit my V key (I remapped so it might be wrong for the default), and the shield goes up and takes a significant amount of my stamina with it -- *even if I don't block anything*. The logic of that I don't really understand, since it costs 0 stamina to sit there with your weapon out. Blocking becomes stupid because stamina is a key element in this game, as every swing takes some away. That's why it's smarter to bait the other guy into wasting his stamina, because once he depletes all you have to do is whack him a bunch and he'll die. He can't sprint (no stamina) and you just kill him. Wins every time.
Splash damage is there as well, so if you're engaging a mob people will bait you and run into your shots so that you go 'rogue'. Then they will proceed to gank you. Alternatively the other big tactic being used is one guy goes rogue, you attack him, and then he runs off (you chase) and run into 5 of his friends. Nothing really to note here, just passing off some of my experiences
The rogue system is really stupid, it's equivalent to flagging 'grey' in UO. The problem is if you do it accidentally and kill the guy attacking you, you take an alignment hit. I imagine there will be a fix in for this soon.
Combat is however, pretty fun if not a bit repetitive. Most of it is based on conserving your stamina. Mana, not so much because once you get in close it's difficult to land magic shots on somebody circle strafing you. You have to go to the melee, and that's where stamina conservation comes into play. The unfortunate part though, is that's about all the skill there is in combat. Getting a two handed weapon is kind of key, since they swing at the same speed as a one handed, but do more damage -- it's worth the upgrade.
Bows used to do decent damage, but I hear they've tweaked them since the last patch so I'm not really sure. The aiming mechanism is exactly like a first person shooter, except the fluidity you'd get from playing CS, COD4, or ANY shooter simply isn't there. It doesn't feel accurate, and I don't mean when you actually loose the arrow, but rather when you're aiming your crosshair at the thing you're trying to hit. It's just not fluid to me, and this is coming from a LOT of FPS experience. It seems laggy, or shaky, or something... I can't quite put my finger on it, but I feel far more accurate in a typical FPS than in DF.
This game is *not* UO by any means in combat. You can't be smart and move carefully against two players and kill them both without them either being borderline retarded or 4 years old. The run speed in the game is atrocious, and given there is no 'recall' (that I know of), its BORING as hell to get from place to place. I don't know what the future of that holds. The run speed being slow, means you can't run around your opponent and get away, run behind a building because the whole game pretty much is 'open' area. There are some trees and stuff, but mostly if you are being pursued you will be found out. It's kind of annoying.
Lasting Appeal: 6/10
I know that the hardest of hardcore players are going to stick with Darkfall for the length of it... but a lot of people are going to play for a while, find it annoying to do so many things because the game mechanics are designed to be annoying or tedious, and they will leave. BETA PLAYERS have already started macroing skills like magic, because it's too boring to raise with normal gameplay. The end game of this is really just PvP, and the benefit of Darkfall's design is that the races are 'against' each other, so if you go out and see an Alfar, you can attack him without penalty. It keeps the game exciting in that respect, and keeps PvP active as well.
I will be buying the game on launch, for a few reasons. First, my guild is going to play, and when I play with friends on Vent even a crappy game like WOW can become more fun than it is. People do stupid things that give you a chuckle, you are having fun joking around, and working together when the time comes for it (as a game should be). I however do not see this game in its current state, lasting very long. I understand it's a beta, but the problems in the game outweigh its fun factor by a bit. It's tedious (macroing plans are already in effect for a beta game), it's not intuitive (take OFF your weapon, then loot, then put ON your weapon does *not* make a game more hardcore, sorry), the idea that your names don't show up only benefits you if there's a world that lets you hide in its atmosphere. As long as you can chase a person, you will find it hard to hide. Zerging is going to be *big* in this game, the bigger the guild the easier it's going to be to take over massive swaths of land or dungeons, or whatever. And I think many players that start out alone (as many will) will find it annoying and frustrating. The lone wolf playstyle *will* work, but as long as you stay to the outskirts of anything popular. Any place popular that can maintain a 'presence' will destroy the lone player. So for UO terms, you can't as a solo player go into Deceit and pick off a few guys anywhere in the game, at least not easily. Fighting two on one is difficult enough... imagine if you have another one on top of that, it's almost impossible. And in UO, I was able to do 5 on 1 (not winning, but not dying either) enough to the point where I could maybe kill one guy, do a slight retreat and pick them all off one by one.
Overall: 5/10 (not an average)
While I give points on graphics, the whole of the game just isn't ready. I find myself strangely drawn to it, and I think part of this is because I waited for so long to play, that I can't just give up on it now. I put my suggestions in writing to Aventurine and on the forums where they get debated, however I've noticed that a lot of things I say are buried quickly by the 'hardcore' purists and fanboys, and the people who think of the game in terms of 'openness' for people to get into the game and play for the long term just isn't there. I'm married folks. I don't have time to 'level up', and that's why I was so drawn to the idea of Darkfall based on a UO like skill system. The idea that if you start out, you are competitive and increasing skills just makes it better. I'm still playing the beta hard, and trying to make the best of it. But the poor interface and UI, the poor character control, the lack of any real skill in combat, the rogue system exploits, the lack of fluidity and simplicity where it could be used well... it makes it hard to love.
I have some optimism yet, because the patches being rolled out thus far have addressed some things (like adding a hotkey for the map, backpack, etc). They've addressed arrow damage and other things. I just don't know how they are going to make it *more fun*. I think in the beginning everybody is excited to play the game, and it's fun having open world PvP which has not existed for sometime in ANY game. It's fun to see that you can PvP and even PK people, gank people, bait people, etc. That is all the allure of what UO brought. But what made UO lasting, is that it was a constant vying for #1. Guilds would do duels internally in order to get their skills better. In Darkfall, I don't see that happening. I think people will get better at using the interface, so that their speed on using a shitty UI will improve their game performance. But it's going to cut off at some point, and that's when it's going to get stale. I feel it already. There is just no 'fun' in the combat. Sure you watch your health and stam, back off and run in... but mostly it's a spamfest of people clicking buttons and hitting the other guy. Some are smart enough to learn the CS knife fighting tactics and do better, but that will filter down fast. And then what? You'll have a game that is not much different than playing a knife only round in CS.
And that just isn't that fun to me.
I'm hoping for the best. I will take your questions now as well. Thanks for reading this long, long post.
30/01/2009, 21h05
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