Broken Toys

All I heard was “Mouselook LOL”, “Short > Tall”, something about ninjas in heavy plate armor, and “Real is Brown!”

Yeah, and that whole hiding behind a tree thing, I bet that will work great…because nobody has ever written an external program showing the location of other players/mobs in a client/server game before. Nope, never happened.

Also, nobody has ever figured out how to exceed the game-specified maximum distance a third-person camera can be from your character, giving you a view of what’s behind you. It’s a mystery to us all.

why such angry responses?

these sound like a few pretty cool things, and I’ve never even really heard of this game. when I first played wow, and my name was a big red neon sign, it seemed a little silly. this actually sounds pretty cool.

FYI: This game’s intended demographic are fatties like me and I don’t think I’m ever going to play it (unless the dumber fatties like me are still playing after a month).
Would I have played it 12 years ago (you know, when it was announced)? Oh hells yeah.

Moral of the story? Don’t announce your game 50 friggin years before it is released and get your target audience frothing at the mouth. Mouths unfroth with time, my friend.

Its not a game unless it has a 32 button bars worth of icons. Icons over every actionable game item. Icons over people. Icons, and more icons. Everywhere icons.

The hunt-and-peck mind wins.

Wouldnt it be cool if it was fun for a bunch of people and moderately successful so future MMOs werent all click to attack clones of WOW?

OMG precasting is in beta!

it looks pretty good to me, and i’d prolly of never found this without your update.. i signed up for beta right away…(not that ill get in heh)

I actually think those are cool ideas for a hardcore pvp game. You can find some of those features in most FPS games.

But as we’ve seen, hardcore pvp just never caught on well in an MMORPG. Better they attempt to appeal to that small market then to let hardcore pvpers ragepost in a non-hardcore MMO.

Why all the mocking? How do you know these aren’t true design choices rather than excuses to explain away perceived shortcommings in the interface? This is the first I’ve heard of Darkfall as an actual playable game and not some vaporware joke, but the interface as explained makes a lot of sense to me from a PvP perspective.*

And why is the interface automatically bad? Is it because of the assumption that PvPers will hack to get around those limitations and give themselves an advantage? Instead of just snarking on these folks, even if they deserve it, I’d rather hear some views on whether it will ever be feasible to have strategic PvP in MMOs that isn’t susceptible to client-side cheating, and that doesn’t come down to twitch, lag, and collision detection issues.

* (Except that apparently circle-strafing is still the main tactic, which is lame. Silly that PvP battles in MMOs always seem to come down to who can cause the most line-of-sight errors.)

Moorgard you’re probably right. I could see my self getting re-frothed near release.

ugh darkfall

I don’t know, I just can’t picture a “hardcore combat PvP MMO” going anywhere but down. Somehow I don’t think people quite appreciate just how hardcore Darkfall is going to get, provided it does succeed. It’s going to get ugly when people realize that “hardcore” means “play to win”. But maybe I’m wrong? After all, Eve is pretty hardcore, and it seems to be going strong.

Ah, more of Darkfall’s “we’re not vaporware yet!” cries dost fall upon my ears. Plenty of games have made it this far and then fallen apart.

From this review, however, it appears that Darkfall is going to continue to the time-honored “not learn from anyone else!”. Leaving out the mouselook option, meh, not important, so long as you can turn with the mouse, but aiming down? With lag as the ever eternal enemy to bith PvE and PvP combat, I wonder who make the hell makes that decision and then justifies it to himself.

that dwarf instantly reminded me of hannibal lector!

oh and the web site changed again, argghh!! thats like what, 5 times in the last 2 months? haw

I’ll be happy to see the game succeed if it means fewer of those people in other MMO’s.

“I’d rather hear some views on whether it will ever be feasible to have strategic PvP in MMOs that isn’t susceptible to client-side cheating, and that doesn’t come down to twitch, lag, and collision detection issues.”

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Not anytime soon. Essentially you have to do a FPS-style world simulation (i.e. high level of detail and verification) with hundreds of players (instead of the tens of players that current FPS games support). This just isn’t economically feasible – the per-client CPU and bandwidth required makes this horrendously expensive.

The client, as it has been said, is in the hands of the enemy, so it cannot be trusted. And the Internet (not to mention the speed of light) guarantees that you will experience lag and unpredictable latency.

So yeah, the snarkiness is entirely well-deserved, IMO.

“Longer answer: Not anytime soon. Essentially you have to do a FPS-style world simulation (i.e. high level of detail and verification) with hundreds of players (instead of the tens of players that current FPS games support). This just isn’t economically feasible – the per-client CPU and bandwidth required makes this horrendously expensive.”

What if you 1) limited the population density to x number of players per y number of square feet of virtual real estate, instead of the infinite number that can pile in with no collision detection, and 2) slowed down movement and combat to alleiviate the number of checks and updates that have to be made? The systems in place now seem to be essentially turn-based systems anyway, except that the turns pass so quickly that the game often has to assume what the character is doing because it hasn’t processed an update from the client (and vice versa), leading to discrepancies between what two characters see at the same time. The fact that character movement is an action completely decoupled from combat doesn’t help matters, either.

Innovation must be pretty scary to the carebear bootlick brigade.

Darkfall will be the Vanguard for hardcore PvPers

The true challenge to making a good PvP based game is to give players a good reason to fight, and a real effect within the game world. Darkfall may fall short of that, but nobody else even seems to be trying.

Omalawd, it’s not a WoW-clone. KILL IT QUICK!

Red Morgan:

You are absolutely right. In all seriousness, these responses are sort of despicable. I think these are the people who thought SWG was better after NGE, and that

“The true challenge to making a good PvP based game is to give players a good reason to fight, and a real effect within the game world. Darkfall may fall short of that, but nobody else even seems to be trying.”

I know a good reason to fight: That guys has a shiny sword that I want. OR: He was eyeballin’ me funny. OR: That idiot was on the forums talkin crap about me. OR: He was there and I was angry; it was a match made in heaven. In short, whatever reason we want to fight is reason enough to fight.

And people, read the list of features it has. This isn’t about PvP and FPS-style fighting; it is about the freedom to not only PvP, but to do whatever the hell you want whenever the hell you want for whatver reason you want.