For those of you still muttering to this day about something called Trammel, your ship has arrived.
Probably one of my favorite aspects of PvP combat that makes Darkfall unique is the incapacitation of a player when they reach zero life (excluding the rare and freakish decapitation). This starts a 60 second or so window where you get to decide the fate of the fallen player, or have some choice words with them. There are no revive spells in Darkfall, but when someone is in this state, anyone can help them back up without need of any spell or item. If the person lays there for too long, they will bleed to death and expire. The option is also your to deliver the final blow to send the fallen player back to their bind point naked, and ironically this is called the “Gank” skill by the game. Incapacitated players will yell out “HELP ME!” when reaching zero life, which can be heard from quite a distance away.
Insult to injury? Why yes, they *do* understand their target market! (All eight of them.)
There is no kill stealing or tagging system for monsters either. This means anyone can loot anything regardless of who hit it first, last, or did the most damage. While this can sometimes be problematic depending on who is near you, most of the time people seemed to have some degree of respect for who did the dirty work.
I’m sure that will last. No one in Darkfall would EVER grief you. And if you do, I guess you could kill them, then emote over their helpless bleeding corpse for 60 seconds. That seems fair.
#1 by Moorgard on February 18th, 2009
Something tells me I better stock up on popcorn. This is going to be good.
#2 by Jeremy Preacher on February 18th, 2009
Moorgard, that was my precise reaction.
#3 by Nerd Rage on February 18th, 2009
I enjoyed the “sausage fest” poll further down the page.
#4 by Raad on February 18th, 2009
Oh man I was just waiting for someone to say something about that douche’s blog “rant”.
#5 by Pentagony on February 18th, 2009
1. Knock someone down into the 60 second timer.
2. Help them back up.
3. Kick him/her down again.
4. Repeat
#6 by Raad on February 18th, 2009
@Pentagony
I’m sure they have a system to prevent that from happening. Right?
#7 by Pentagony on February 18th, 2009
Maybe, but it probably involves the incapacitated player precasting something before going down.
#8 by VorpalK on February 18th, 2009
Wow. MMO developers that haven’t paid attention to a single thing in the last 10 or so years.
or who somehow think that Dredl0rdz are a target market.
Good luck with that.
#9 by Brian J. on February 18th, 2009
Finally a Fantasy MMO for all those EvE Online players.
#10 by dartwick on February 18th, 2009
If the servers dont blow up and the animations dont make sick and it isnt hack heaven(fat chance) – it could be fun.
#11 by Shiro on February 18th, 2009
I like it already.
#12 by Votan on February 18th, 2009
If they attract the correct customers like EVE has then it may have a chance. I hope they do well with it, would be nice to see a small company have some success.
#13 by coppertopper on February 19th, 2009
yes lets lol at the company trying something daring…an MMO with challenge built in. Did you find a job yet Lum? Or were all the vip coffee runner positions taken?
#14 by Freakazoid on February 19th, 2009
Why don’t you kids like the shadowbane?
#15 by bkmiggs on February 19th, 2009
Staying true to their vision and taking a risk. Pretty cool imo.
#16 by newbis on February 19th, 2009
I give it half the time to fail that AoC took.
#17 by Shannon B on February 19th, 2009
While I won’t be touching this with a ten foot latex covered bargepole, I really hope it does do ok. Firstly because it’s different, and seeing more variety in this industry is a good thing any way you look at it.
Secondly because it will hopefully keep all the ‘leet pownzers’ together where they can frolic with other like-minded sociopaths… far far away from anything I’ll be playing.
#18 by Queso on February 19th, 2009
Even eve isnt this cruel.
#19 by Vetarnias on February 19th, 2009
Who’s ready to bet that if the game fails, before long the finger-pointing will be aimed at the design rather than the premise?
It can’t be the premise — it can never be. People love to be ganked, griefed or otherwise abused. So it must be the fault of the actual design if all those people run away and cancel their subscriptions.
But to be honest, regardless of the excuse they give, I can’t wait to see what will happen on the Darkfall forums at the turn of the tide.
#20 by Mallika on February 19th, 2009
“Secondly because it will hopefully keep all the ‘leet pownzers’ together where they can frolic with other like-minded sociopaths… far far away from anything I’ll be playing.”
True, although too many wolves and not enough sheep will see the wolves dying off, so…
#21 by D-0ne on February 19th, 2009
“Let’s have a psychopaths only D&D game!”
#22 by Swordchucks on February 19th, 2009
Wow… this game looks like it’ll be FUN!
If fun has suddenly been redefined as an experience equivalent to getting rectal cancer, at least.
What is up with all of the PVP centric games? Is it because there is a huge perceived PVP playerbase out there that everyone has so far failed to capture? Don’t we have plenty of FPS games to fill this niche? Do we need to try to fill it with MMOs, too?
#23 by Bonedead on February 19th, 2009
Man you PvE buttheads just can’t let us PvPers have any friggin fun can you? Some things never change, especially when you’re still butthurt about getting raped and looted 8 years ago.
#24 by DaveN on February 19th, 2009
I don’t think anyone wants you to not have fun. But I think market realities aren’t going to let you play this game with more than a handful of other azzrap0rz. If you dig that, enjoy. I’ve seen weirder market segments than that succeed.
#25 by Delmania on February 19th, 2009
@Bonehead:
It’s because this isn’t PvP. Whenever I hear people reminiscence about UO, the only think I really ever hear is about the ways they found to gank and a grief other players, and then call them carebears when they logged off and/or quit. I never hear about the fun and challenging fights they had over something, nor the epic sieges they waged to take down another group’s city.
#26 by taodon on February 19th, 2009
Honestly, what does it say about the type of individual that would find this sort of thing appealing? They psychological profile would have to be of sociopathic narcissist. They would salivate at the thought of performing this sort of hateful behavior on another, without regard to the notion it could possibly happen to them. These people are actively seeking emotional and virtual physical abuse. It’s not the game mechanics, but the caliber of person this game would attract. Why would any mentally healthy individual play a game where they knew they had to experience this horrific abuse? Perhaps it would be more appropriate to name this game Abu Ghraib Online instead.
#27 by Jason on February 19th, 2009
With the looting, its not respect… in Darkfall, when you loot, you put your weapons away and your UI is locked, allowing you to only loot, dragging one item at a time from the corpse to your bag, until you finish. Looting when other people are around is likely to get you dead…
#28 by Mercury on February 19th, 2009
This is an excellent business idea to scoop up all those people who don’t play WoW because the system is not harsh enough in penalizing players for consequences to events they do not control. I’m sure all 25,000 such “hardcore” folks will sign right up for some suffering.
Brilliant!
#29 by Flimgoblin on February 19th, 2009
where’s the permadeath then? such a casual game…
#30 by Brask Mumei on February 19th, 2009
If they are wise, they *know* they are niche and have planned accordingly. 25,000 people paying $15/month is plenty to keep a server warm.
I like the idea of this game. I am not, to my knowledge, a sociopathic narcissist. I certainly never went around ganking people in UO. The problem with the ‘gank-free’ worlds is that they are flat solo experiences. Just as you can’t do evil, you can’t do good. I want to be able to help people out and not have them start swearing at me because I’m “kill stealing” or what not.
I presume they are smart enough that when in the 60 second count down you have a suicide button on the screen, so you are in no way forced to stay around for trash talk.
The looting mechanic seems clever, but I can’t imagine how they are going to prevent client side hacks from making the drag & drop component an instant process. Think UOAssist. I’m not sure I agree with Jason about looting. They seem to have a Red Flag system, which suggests killing looters might make you a murderer. Consider a ninja-looter that follows your party around looting the monsters – you can’t out-loot them because you (being foolishly engaged in battle) have to put away your weapons, while they (wisely keeping their hands free and out of aggro range) can scoot in and hit the Auto-Loot macro. Since there is no ownership of the corpse, this means they aren’t flagged as an aggressor, so thus you can’t attack them without potentially going red… I think UO did a rather good job of showing that no matter how many layers of red/blue/grey/orange/puce you add, the scum will always find a way to be “correct” in the eyes of the code, but “needs killing” in the eyes of players.
One of the strange benefits of UOs loot system was it acted to clean out your backpack. You wouldn’t bother picking up all the crud that was left there, so you could almost tell how long it was since your last death by the amount of cruft you were carrying.
#31 by JuJutsu on February 19th, 2009
@Vetarnias
“Who’s ready to bet that if the game fails, before long the finger-pointing will be aimed at the design rather than the premise?
It can’t be the premise — it can never be. People love to be ganked, griefed or otherwise abused. So it must be the fault of the actual design if all those people run away and cancel their subscriptions.”
That’s not really a sporting proposition
Actual betting has to involve what aspect of the design gets the blame. My money is on the towerz that make it a carebear game.
#32 by David Castellani on February 19th, 2009
Mr. Scott Jennings,
Could you post further about your thoughts on Darkfall. Maybe on its pro/con relationship to other MMOs? I am really interested in what someone likes you thinks of a game like Darkfall.
Regards,
Dave
#33 by Vivianne Draper on February 19th, 2009
@Bonedead
I can’t imagine why anyone would be upset about being raped and looted at ALL.
#34 by Vivianne Draper on February 19th, 2009
Be interesting to see how this does. After all, Eve has managed to stay afloat and its a pretty cruel world in there.
#35 by Amaranthar on February 19th, 2009
When a player is down, they can hit the space bar and “die”. So this isn’t a problem. And there’s no emotes in for players to “teabag” or other such immature actions (at least yet, I’d rather see them added despite the immature players who abuse them).
After testing the game for several weeks, I was PKed 3 times, and I’ve gone almost entirely solo. Most of the players are pretty decent. I wonder how it will go after release though, when masses add to the newbie zones and spread out.
Turning gray can be a problem. I have found that you can avoid it most of the time by targeting low, and simply being just a little bit careful. But that’s not foolproof. Remember however, that Darkfall has blocking, so if you have no space between you and the MOB, and if you are accurate, another player can’t run into your attack (although it’s not quite that easy). Ranged attacks are trickier, of course, and best left off of when other players jump into the combat.
Reds are going to have it tougher than it first appears. They can’t go into most cities because the guard towers will waste them. Even in a player built city, if they build guard towers for defense, reds to their race still get the same treatment. A player city can’t turn this off. Red players can still work around this by muling. That’s also an added complication, the mules may be victims to someone else, who knows.
There are a few, very few, banks in the world where reds can go because they lack guard towers. So they have a place to go to bank, but these areas no doubt will become hunting grounds. And there’s no teleporting easily like most games, no “recall runes” or the like. They supposedly will have these at higher skills, and they are supposed to be expensive. Reds will have to run everywhere just like everyone else, making them open targets for bands of blues.
Also, reds are always going to be targets in dungeons, or anytime they run across other players. They’ll resort to running in large bands. I think the reds will get the worst of that, though, in the end. Reds becoming known in an area will most likely be hunted down. To get good factions back, reds have to kill either racial enemies or other reds (hehehehe). It seems to me, with a great deal of satisfaction, that reds will not have it all that easy in this game.
Overall, this stuff isn’t a big concern to me. It seems to be something that will work better as the game goes along and blue players figure out defenses against them, and Darkfall may make some minor changes too.
Another thing is, if you go gray, just run away and wait for it to time out. The other players mostly don’t know you went gray. There’s no indication to them unless they happen to run their cursor over you and see your name gray. There are no “all names” or names above heads unless they look at you with the target cursor, which is like a FPS in the middle of the screen. Mostly, they are busy fighting the MOB. You, on the other hand, get a huge notice on the screen, “You Are Now Considered Rogue!”.
You can hide easily in this game. Just sit down in a low spot or behind bushes. If someone is actively looking for you, or just happens to run into you while looking in that direction, they can see you. They need a clear line of sight, and to be looking in that direction. When the masses enter at release, it may be harder to hide in active areas than what I’ve found in beta, I’m sure.
Overall, the game is terribly incomplete. But the newbie experience is pretty good, and there’s enough to keep players busy even into higher skills. It’s obvious the growing pains will be there. But it’s an interesting game with a huge world to explore, and the potential is through the roof. Whether they reach that potential is yet to be seen.
#36 by tsweatt on February 19th, 2009
As Darkfall moves closer to release, I find it more and more likely I am going to owe several of my friends varying sums of money and that they will actually ship a game.
That said, I think a previous commenter nailed it. This is not a game that is going to attempt to be a WoW-killer, a WAR-killer, or anything like that. This is a game that should be considered a success if it can hold 25k subs at $15/month. And why shouldn’t it? There’s nothing wrong with unrestricted, balls in your face PvP (I liked Shadowbane
). I loved Asheron’s Call PvP, as terribly unbalanced as it was, it was *fun*.
Darkfall will probably be *fun*. Will it save the world? Cure cancer? Let you throw dead babies? Likely not. But is that so bad?
#37 by Amaranthar on February 19th, 2009
Thought I’d add an experience in here.
There were two racial enemies who had been beta testing for quite a while and were far superior to most of us other testers, running around in our area killing semi-newbs. There were 3 of us that ran across one of them after just killing a player.
Keep in mind that this can work the same way as for reds.
You have to understand here, that when a player runs out of stamina, and every action takes stamina, they are dead meat. You have to manage your stamina.
So this Orc, we being mostly humans, took off because while he probably would have beaten us, he would be in very bad shape should any others come along. Darkfall is not a extreme level=power game. We gave chase. We were tenacious about it. And within half a minute we picked up 3 more chasers all after this one uber Orc. He was using every tactic he could to maintain stamina from going flat, magic, potions, eating food. But he must have contacted his buddy, a Mahirim dog man, and worked his way to meet up with him. This chase went on for several minutes, which seemed like a very long time as we kept unleashing ranged attacks at him, mostly missing. In the end, the two did meet up, and ended up killing one guy. It was just outside of range of the guard towers, so the rest of us found safety. But you have to look around to see what’s going on and I at first didn’t grasp that the Mahirim was there, and had stopped to check who died and who was standing around (like me, checking things out). Being sort of a newb, you know. Then I realized that the two guys standing near the fallen guy were an Orc and a Mahirim. Heh, sort of an “Oh!” moment.
So, with one arrow left in my possession I plunked it it the back of the Mahirim just to let him know they missed one guy, and ran for the safety of the guard towers and city.
It was fun, sort of anti-climactic, but fun all the same. They got away as far as I know, but so did most of us. And it’s clear that there won’t be the sort of grief running rampant that most of us feared there would be.
#38 by Paks on February 19th, 2009
They still have to actually release this game… meaning can those well tested servers and code stay up and not implode within a hour or so of opening or will Tasos(sp?) declare another delay even though *the game is in better shape then any other MMO at this stage of development*, or whatever he proclaimed a month or so ago.
Honestly, I see another Shadowbane in the making here and not just speaking of a bug/hackfest. Lotta people say they like this type of MMO but when it comes down to it they just like doing all those nasty things to others and cry like little girls when bigger, meanie griefers do it to them-then they quit.
So, yeah, I’m excitedly awaiting the upcoming trainwreck that will be Darkfall so I can watch the drama unfold.
#39 by Micah S on February 19th, 2009
Can we please have the option to banish people to this game from other, less ‘hardcore’ games?
#40 by Scott Jennings on February 19th, 2009
I wonder how long it will take someone to upload “DF Extreme”, where you instantly hoover a backpack in 30 microseconds.
Not that that ever happens.
#41 by Ashendarei on February 19th, 2009
We can only hope.
#42 by Caya on February 19th, 2009
Dunno, this actually sounds like a game I’d try for a week or two, just for fun and for old times’ sake (M59 not UO in my case, but still). Maybe even log on every now and then for a change of pace.
Actually *pay* for the privilege of being ganked? Not so much.
And I suppose that I’m not the only one there. Still, I wish this game the very best. Isolation ward principle and whatnot.
#43 by Gx1080 on February 19th, 2009
Well this is a niche game, duh and all the hate isnt needed. I like the idea but the thing that irks me is that i need to be able kill the guy that stole my loot in peace like the “yellow cans” or something. And the quest system we got plenty of games with that quest system and it works because they arent the center.
Lets see:
*I want to be able to kill the guy that stole my loot. No excuses.
*People are going to hack the loot system. Make an grab all button first.
*From what ive heard since a few months 2 lowbies can kill a high level and items arent that important (yeah is shocking for all the WoW guys but that can work). So full loot isnt that big deal. Specially if you keep stuff in banks.
I believe that this game can work. I believe that this game can compete with EVE. And ive believe that all the gankers vs carebears dillema is dumb. (aka im goint to try it a little after release)
#44 by Amaranthar on February 19th, 2009
It’s already made it into beta, Scott. Probably every other script too.
I know you’ve fallen into the corporate developer “it can’t be done” syndrome. I guess we’ll all see how it works out in this case.
#45 by Robin Kestrel on February 19th, 2009
There’s nothing wrong or essentially grief-tastic with a “hardcore” PvP game in theory. I’m glad to see them try and I wish them success. However, I doubt I’ll be playing because of 1) the potential to exploit the game mechanics to grief other players and 2) the circle-strafing combat system, which annoys me to no end. Maybe if they end up fixing the worst of this I’ll give the game a try, but the fact that the things in the review exist at this point is a giant red flag to me that perhaps other aspects of how players will actually play the game haven’t been well thought out in the design phase.
#46 by Hojo the Carebear on February 19th, 2009
I hope this game does well. It’ll suck the griefing retards out of my favorite games and give them all a Lord of the Flies wasteland to eat each other in.
Yes, I’m butthurt about being OMGWTFPWND over and over by a 12 year old…
#47 by Scott Jennings on February 19th, 2009
What am I saying ‘can’t be done’? Hardcore PvP games? They have been done. One was even pretty successful (Eve). Get out of the MMO field and the most popular online games are “hardcore PvP” (Counterstrike, COD4).
I’m just pointing out that relying on client-side solutions for pretty key gameplay decisions (like disabling the UI during looting) is something that (a) will be hacked, (b) players who don’t have the hack will resent that people who do have a competitive advantage, and (c) eventually everyone will have that hack because ‘it’s necessary to compete on a level playing field’.
The more humorous/sad aspect is that for all the swagger and boasting of Darkfall’s developers publically, decisions like this betray a fairly fundamental lack of knowledge of PvP MMO history.
#48 by markalot on February 19th, 2009
Do we know if it’s all client side? It would be easy enough to disable UI command acceptance on the server while the looting process is ongoing.
If they actually trust the client … well, lots of problems incoming.
#49 by Gx1080 on February 19th, 2009
If this devs want to do the mistakes that others PvP games have done before (aka not doing their homework) fine let them. But its gonna be bad when your homework was use the EVE system, put it in a fantasy game and make the combat system more intuitive.
#50 by Arrakiv on February 19th, 2009
I am somewhat intrigued by this game, I have to admit. The only thing like it that I’ve played with consequences of death like this was EVE. However, given that you lose all your items on you, I’ve also been hearing that gear is actually not terribly important in the game. That would be… useful, I’d think. Still, given the actual situation mentioned in Lum’s original post, I’d hope there’s some sort of a ’suicide’ button when you’re KO’d, or it’ll just be a pain. The game already sounds like it has a number of exploits for griefers, which is a shame, though hard to get around.