Eurogamer reviews Darkfall, gives it a 2/10.
While playing for a few hours of reasonably solid combat only netted me a few increases in sword handling, a kindly fellow informed me that it would only take me “about six or eight hours to get good”. On further questioning, this was revealed to mean “keep banging your head against the same goblins until you can reliably hit something bigger”.
And so hit those bloody things I did, not enjoying one second of it.
Tasos Flambouras reviews Eurogamer, gives it a -15/2.
When we read the hostile review by Ed Zitron, one thing became apparent: he had not played the game at all. Eurogamer readers and Darkfall players are posting bullet lists of factual errors in the story. The reviewer hadn’t even figured out the very basics of the game before he wrote about it. We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator since during almost every one of the logins the reviewer spent the time creating a new character. The rest of the time was apparently spent taking the low-res screenshots that accompanied the article. At no point did this reviewer spend more than a few minutes online at a time.
Darkfall is the largest MMORPG game of its kind and this guy spent a few minutes playing(?) before he tore it apart. How can someone do that responsibly? Ed Zitron didn’t even give Darkfall a chance.
Eurogamer reviews Tasos Flambouras, gives him a 13/20 .
The reviewer in question, Ed Zitron, disputes the server logs that Aventurine presents as fact. According to the logs they supplied, Ed played the game for just over three hours. Ed says the logs miss out two crucial days and understate others, which suggests they are incomplete, and he insists he played the game for at least nine hours.
That said, the passion with which Aventurine has attacked Ed’s review is considerable, and the allegations obviously go a long way beyond arguing the toss. With this in mind, it seems only fair to take another look at Darkfall to supplement the review we’ve already published.
I’ve already contacted another one of our PC writers, Kieron Gillen, who has agreed to review Darkfall. Kieron is a vastly experienced, award-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I’ll publish his review as soon as it’s ready, and we will see whether he agrees with Ed or not.
Lum reviews Darkfall, gives it a 0/10 since despite, according to Tasos, it being “the largest MMORPG game of its kind”, it’s not technically, you know, actually for sale.
{ 183 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
I agree that Darkfall isn’t “broken”. I have complaints, as I alluded to on page 2, #14. (That’s down that dark aisle in the back of the room, around the corner from Lum’s stuffed vulture). But the fact is, I find it far better than games like WoW. Not that I don’t see that many players would like WoW better. But for some of us, who want to get away from “the grind”, not because of the grind itself but because of the railed express you as a player are placed on, this kind of game is just better even with problems. And all games have problems, especially at release.
Darkfall does have some nice ideas. The enchantment system is not only cool, but leaves open all kinds of mysterious possibilities. Briefly, you get a window up where you can place player items in, and it has boxes where you can add other items. Then you see if this combo “enchant” the item. Uses the gear of a player from weapons and armor to clothing and jewelry, and the combination is trial and error. Many have been discovered, many are still to be discovered, and really, there’s no end to what they can do with this.
The openness of the game is appealing. While I’m still pretty much stuck in newbie land, I could go out and explore all I want. It’s just that I don’t want to lose things yet because I don’t have lots of extras, having chosen to spend most of my “worldly wealth” on skill building. But I was in beta, and explored then, and am very anxious to do so. I don’t think the game is even close to complete, and I’m looking forwards to the future. The only thing I’m concerned with is the PKing. I won’t continue to play if it ends up that I’m just a pinata for PKers. We’ll see where this goes, they may make some adjustments there, or maybe the world really is big enough to allow players like me to survive in it (doubtful, but I could be wrong).
Overall, while the game has a learning curve, it is better than what else is out there for me. It’s “worldly” to some degree, and can get much more so as they add to it. Or they could go the wrong way too, for that matter.
@Vetarnias
“As much as Owain might say that it was supposed to be that way, the case of PotBS was never as clear cut as that. Why did so many PvP players of the game go out of their way to point out that PvP in PotBS was entirely consensual? I’m pretty sure you didn’t get that kind of rhetoric about Shadowbane, and I’m sure you don’t have it around Darkfall.”
No, actually this does seem to be the case where PotBS could be said to be broken. PvP Players were playing the game as it was intended, and as designed, but the outcome, the collapse of the PvE demographic, certainly was NOT then intent of the game developers. Here is a very clear instance of a game design element that is non-functional, not operational, or otherwise broken, and that has a far reaching impact on game viability. Perhaps a fatal impact.
Now if I could only get one of the resident poseurs, err, pundits to supply me with an equivalent Darkfall example, I might have a better understanding about what they mean when they say Darkfall is ‘broken’.
@geldonyetich
If I may comment on a few of your posts.
First, I tend to be wary of the word “pundit” because of all the Fox News/talk radio negative connotations the word now has. Because of that, I’m almost considering punditry to have a very low barrier of entry, and Owain seems far too intelligent to be left below the cutoff point.
In the debate about Zitron versus Aventurine, I find neither of them to be without blame. Aventurine can be blamed for going after a bad review by accusing it of a hostility that the Darkfall makers have exhibited in far greater quantities over the recent months, and of almost using the bad review to further their own popularity with the game’s followers. Zitron can be blamed for not so much the content of his review (as I am lacking first-hand experience of the game to safely corroborate it), but for having placed himself in a situation where his credibility can be questioned. In the matter of how long Zitron played the game, however, I am tempted (against my better judgement) to side with Aventurine.
There is always the possibility of Tasos lying (like that didn’t happen before), but let’s assume for a minute that he is telling the truth in this case. Zitron’s excuse (“two days are missing, and others are understated”) sounds hollow; it’s almost as if he’s banking on Aventurine’s reputation for incompetence to make it sound plausible that the company can’t keep track of such a thing as logs. And again, assuming Tasos is telling the truth here, two hours split between 13 sessions isn’t much. This pattern of logging in for just a few minutes at a time, more than anything else, seems to indicate that Zitron might not have been particularly dedicated to reviewing this particular game.
I’m an ordinary player, and despite distractions on the side I don’t log into a game for just a few minutes unless something major and unforeseen happens — or unless I’m bored. Zitron, on the other hand, is writing a professional review of a game, and, assuming his game or his computer didn’t crash (in which case he makes no mention of it in his review) he can’t stay more than a few minutes in the game for each session? Even if you’re bored, you’re supposed to stick it out, because it’s your job. This alone seems to indicate that he wasn’t particularly dedicated to the game in the first place.
And that’s what I’m reading between the lines of his review, “not my stuff”. In which case it’s fine. But it’s not so much punditry (as you would define it) as opinion. That’s why Darkfall is so difficult to assess from a design standpoint. It’s niche, undoubtedly, and it preaches to the converted, offensively so. At the same time, Zitron is clearly not someone who would have been converted in the first place, so on that charge, I have to agree with Tasos: Zitron strikes me as a guy unable to like this type of game. It doesn’t matter if the design itself is good or bad — he won’t like the game in either case. Like a food critic who isn’t interested in finding out whether this is a good or bad pizza, since he doesn’t like pizza anyway.
It doesn’t help that some of Darkfall’s converts are vindictive pricks who seek to tar Zitron on every two-month-old blog entry that mentions his name (see here: http://thereticule.com/2009/03/ed-zitron-talks-on-reviews/ ), but Zitron’s comments linked to in that link (http://www.blog.edzitron.com/?p=14) also tell us a lot about Zitron as a game critic. Coming from reading that, and then his review of Warhammer Online (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=198952&site=pcz), and finally his review of Darkfall, I’m thinking the guy is quite apt at practicing what he denounces. But if his guidelines for reviewing are to be believed — that game critics these days are guilty of “treating every game like a bloody sonnet” — his entire approach to reviewing takes place on a Fun/Not Fun axis.
So, based on that, we can surmise that Darkfall got a bad review from Zitron because it was Not Fun. Fair enough. But how does Not Fun lead to an objective assessment of the game as is proposed? The only way I can think of is by saying that having enough Not Funs means a game can’t succeed — in other words, some crass commercial consideration that he would probably quickly denounce. Seen in that perspective, why should Zitron’s Not Fun be inherently superior to Owain’s Fun? Because Zitron is paid to do it? Neither of them is interested in anything beyond their own enjoyment, but Owain is the one being honest enough to admit it.
That’s why I’m saying Zitron can’t be cast as a martyr. Because in his case game reviewing isn’t about design, it’s about Fun. Fun equals good design, while he despises what is Impressive. And he seems to have nothing but contempt for people who disagree with him (see that link, “it’s not enough that the PC industry is getting murdered by piracy, or that people like Braid”). The Braid reference should speak volumes; I never played Braid, but all I hear about it is that while it is pretentious, it has an extremely solid design. Maybe, just maybe, Tasos was correct on this count.
Ultimately, I think that whether Zitron played two or nine hours is irrelevant, because I think both numbers would be below what I would expect a critic to play before reviewing a game. Zitron didn’t even need two hours to find out where Darkfall ranged on the Fun meter; if he did play nine hours, unless he had some nagging doubts about whether the game could have been Fun later on, he was just wasting his time. For a serious discussion of a game, nine hours is still inadequate, but it’s a debate involving the entire game reviewing field, not just one critic.
But I think a discussion of his credentials would have been more vital in the case of a game he did support (such as Warhammer or any other) than one he did not. As much as Darkfall has a right to a fair trial (which I believe it did not have with Judge Zitron sitting on the bench), a negative review doesn’t encourage you to part with your money.
@Amaranthar
Amaranthar. You sir, are no pundit. Congratulations!
The game is very much better once you are in a clan. This should not be seen as a bad thing. This is an MMORPG, not a single player game, so many of the issues you desribed on your post on page 2 are addressed by simply getting grouped, and being in a clan is the most reliable way to find group members you can trust.
I’m sure the Darkfall Forums guild page has plenty of clans who are actively recruiting. If you’ve been following my posts on this thread and others, you may want to consider the KGB (Knights of Glory and Beer) http://oracle.the-kgb.com. If that is the case, go to our web site, and check us out. Review our requirements for citizenship. If your goals and playing style coincide with ours, submit an application (the sidebar has a link to the application server), and list Owain ab Arawn as a sponsor. You would enter the KGB with the probationary rank of Recruit. All very complicated, I know, but this process has served the KGB well for the last decade, so that is how it’s done.
Sorry for the spam, but I don’t see a Private Message capability here. But here we have yet another person actively playing Darkfall. Perhaps the game is not quite so broken as some would have us believe.
@Vetarnias
Now this is about the best analysis I have read lately, and certainly more to the point with respect to Lum’s original post than many, most certainly including my contributions. I can’t read his Warhammer review at the moment, but I look forward to comparing his impressions with my own, since that is another game that I have played, and for my part, found wanting.
Thanks for your observations. These are the posts that keep me coming back (other than opportunities to vent my own spleen, of course.)
Owain, a game is not broken when it is completely non-functional. A broken game can still be played. But a broken game typically has problematic mechanics (typically game imbalance, exploits, etc.) that compromise the intent or enjoyability of a game. That is what is meant by a broken game.
Typically, a broken game often still attracts followers until the players recognize the broken aspects and leave. There can be reasons for staying even after this though (for example, if you enjoy exploiting the exploits, for social reasons, interesting in the setting, etc.).
You guys are an odd bunch, and sweet jesus are you wordy.
Darkfall is full pvp, so from jump you’ve already pigeonholed yourself into a subset of gamers and ostracized yourself from the majority (see also: Shadowbane, etc) Furthermore you’ve artifically limited your playerbase by not actually selling your product with any regularity (This certainly created a buzz, good or bad).
Now that is out of the way, ask the following two questions of Darkfall the game:
1. What new “things” does it bring to the table?
2. Of the common elements to any MMO, what does it do better (drawn from lessons learned) than of it’s predecessors?
I think for most people who don’t like the game, the answer to both questions is nothing. We find that a bad thing, obviously. The people who do like the game also tend to find the answer to these questions to be nothing, but see it as irrelevant.
In a full pvp game the actual game itself has always seemed to be far less important than the ability to, well, full pvp. So a review coming from a standard reviewer that doesn’t find him/herself in this pvp fanatic camp is going to be along the lines of what the average gamer would probably agree with, while the review of someone driven by the pvp aspect of the game will more or less praise it’s ability to meet their one criteria.
It’s a polarizing topic, because you are dealing with two seperate camps of players and to be fair the review should’ve been written by someone from within that pvp camp — because the rest of us wouldn’t give two shits what that review said, as we already knew we weren’t interested.
It also extends to the hardcore pve camp as well — anyone seen the crazies that lament the halycon days of EQ and corpse runs, exp/leve loss, and the like? Dear god, it’s like talking to a crazy person!
@Guy
Fair enough. We may have a terminology issue with respect to the word ‘broken’.
Now give me an example where Darkfall has problematic mechanics (typically game imbalance, exploits, etc.) that compromise the intent or enjoyability of a game. Not just a feature you don’t particularly care for, but something like the issue described by Vetarnius, where an entire demographic in the game abandons it because the game as implemented is unplayable.
Otherwise, you are using the term ‘broken’ to describe cosmetic problems.
Remember when I posted the links to Keen’s article? You already have my response about potential flaws in the game. Just because you blew it off doesn’t mean it ceased to exist.
As for broken, I never claimed Darkfall was broken. Go ahead and look at all my previous comments. I don’t think I even wrote the word broken until I decided to correct your ridiculous “broken arm” analogy.
If this results in a duplicate post, I apologize. My first two attempts didn’t appear to take, probably due to trying to embed multiple links to previous posts. That didn’t work, so you’ll just have to scroll up.
@Guy
I followed the links. I didn’t blow off either his remarks or yours. I commented on them at length (do I comment any other way?) above.
His argument are unconvincing. He played the game, and initially was very excited, but over time found that he didn’t enjoy it as much as he did at first. If I remember correctly, he remains a Darkfall fan, but hopes that the devs can tweak it a bit, and change some elements so that he will find it more fun than it currently is.
I had exactly the same experience with WoW. EXACTLY! I played it to level 60, and dropped it because I could no longer take the grind. By that logic, does that make WoW a flawed game? No. It’s a game that I don’t prefer, just like Darkfall is a game that Keen currently does not prefer. Currently, I do prefer Darkfall. Does that mean Darkfall is perfect. No. It is a game designed for a particular demographic that I belong to.
And as for ‘broken’, I was responding to different posts. ‘Broken’ is a term loosly thrown about by poseurs/pundits like geldonyetic and JuJutsu, above. I’ve asked for specific examples where Darkfall’s design is broken, but for some reason, they get very vague when you try to pin them down. In that context, I don’t think by ‘broken arm’ analogy is quite so ridiculous as you might thing, but your milage may vary.
“His argument are unconvincing.”
You’re not going to allow yourself to be convinced though. So everyone makes their argument, you say “not good enough!” and then go on to say we haven’t raised any examples. Victory is yours! Don’t bother asking for more arguments, just take your glorious victory like a man. But don’t deny that people have given you plenty of examples.
Did you *really* have the exact same experience with WoW as Keen did with Darkfall? You levelled all the way to 60. Was this when 60 was the max? So WoW was good enough to keep you playing all the way to the max level? Given that levelling was its strength, that doesn’t seem much like Keen’s experience at all, of being disappointed quite quickly.
Unless… did you feel WoW was flawed, but *kept playing anyways*? Hmmmmmmm…..
@Guy
“You’re not going to allow yourself to be convinced though.”
I remain unconvinced because, logically, the argument is unconvincing. You say that Keen’s posts are evidence that Darkfall is flawed. By that argument, WoW is flawed as well, is it not?
Your basic premise is faulty. The only thing Keens blog demonstrates, as well as similar posts in this thread and elsewhere, is that for whatever reason, Keen no longer cares for Darkfall. By that token, I suppose you could say that for Keen, Darkfall is flawed, but Keen is not the ultimate repository of Truth, the last time I checked.
The only specific I recall being raised was that someone mentioned that corpse looting on Darkfall was excessively controlled by the client rather than being governed by the server, and possibly subject to exploitation. I did request an explanation about why this was so awful, since to my knowlege, it has no significant impact either on PvE or PvP, but if an answer was provided, I must have missed it.
I played WoW until shortly after the expansion that raised the cap to 80, if I recall correctly. I obviously played Wow longer than Keen played Darkfall, but my reasons for leaving were much the same, and followed the same pattern. It was initially entertaining. Over time, it became less interesting. Ultimately, I left the game because I could face the continued grind necessary to reach the newly moved goal posts to lvl 80.
So no, my experience, other than in broad strokes, was not exactly like Keens. Congratulations. You caught me. Here’s a cookie.
Logically, the situation is equivalent, however. I left WoW because I no longer found it to be entertaining. Does that make WoW flawed? That is the question I’m trying to get answered, because as near as I can tell, everyone here who says Darkfall is flawed uses that basic argument: “I don’t like this feature, Darkfall is flawed, so I won’t play it”, or “this guy quit Darkfall, ergo Darkfall is flawed.”
By that criteria, every game developed by humans, from tic-tac-toe to the latest release of ‘whatever’ is flawed.
Vetarnias gave a description of what I think most people would agree is a flaw.
@Vetarnias According to him, “Sad to say, the PvE demographic in PotBS seems to have vanished completely.” Since this resulted from players playing the game as designed and implemented, I’d say that’s a pretty serious flaw that isn’t just the result of some guy saying, “this game sucks!”
I’m not claiming victory, because there is no victory to be claimed. The theory has been advanced that Darkfall is fundamentally flawed. Broken, according to some. I think that theory remains unproven. Darkfall is not perfect. No game is, but it is not fundamentally flawed in the manner that PotBS is flawed. That game is truly broken, according to Vetarnias.
I maintain that the best case you can make with respect to Darkfall is that it is a game many do not care for, no more, no less. At the same time, it is a game that many gamers to car for. It is a game that is being played at capacity, where demand exceeds supply, and it is being played as designed and implemented. No major game features are currently unplayable, to my knowledge.
A game for a niche audience. Yes, of course. Fundamentally flawed or ‘broken’? I’m not seeing it, regardless of how broken hearted Keen or others may be at this time.
This is about what I was going to say next. So, thanks for that, you saved some wear and tear on my fingers.
To an extent, an existentialist like myself cannot help but agree: a pundit is just a label.
We can, via the dictionary, determine that a pundit is a critic who writes for pass media. However, strictly speaking, what does that prove?
Only that the people who ran the magazine reasoned, to the best of their abilities, that this person should be paid to practice being a critic professionally. There’s a lot of ambiguity in there – you’re questioning not only Zitron’s qualifications, but the qualifications of those who hired them, and we don’t really know any of them personally.
So lets forget that label. Instead, lets put it this way:
Anyone can be entertained by a given instance of entertainment media, whether it be games, movies, radio, the stage, ect. However, it takes someone who has partaken so many instances that they’ve developed a sort of detachment to understand that any given instance of entertainment is a sum of its parts.
Is Darkfall Online *completely* broken? No. Are some of its parts “broken”? Well, under the definition of “broken” being, not just a little, but *significantly* less than ideal circumstances behind their conception and/or implementation? Yes, parts of Darkfall Online are broken, especially compared to better examples that have long been in the field.
Would a person who is experienced with the wide range of the gaming entertainment medium of games judge Darkfall very negatively based off of the number of mechanics which fall under this definition of “broken?” Yes.
Do you require 6 months of gameplay to recognize that what your playing has these flaws? No.
Boom: 2/10 review. Completely justified, and in no way indicating that your opinion doesn’t matter if you enjoy this game.
For the vast majority of people, virtually all games lose their appeal given enough time. The velocity with which this happens is an indicator of how well the game was constructed and presented. Just because you quit eventually doesn’t mean the game must be flawed. If you quit after a very long time, then the game must have been a pretty good experience. If you quit after a very short amount of time, it must not have appealed to you for some reason.
These times, of course, are affected by how fast you can get through the content. Playing a single-player adventure for two weeks would mean far more good about that game than it would for a MMORPG, where quitting after two weeks means the game failed for you.
With a PvP MMORPG, I would add that there are significant social/competitive factors inherent in group play that are always present and always draw in people *regardless* of the game’s mechanics.
You’ve spent a lot of time pointing at the fact that there are X amount of people playing right now as proof that the game *cannot* be broken or flawed. This is an extremely unconvincing argument, although you’re using it less now. As you said, time will tell whether Darkfall can sustain interest.
Again, this may be a duplicate post. My firewall is pwning me today.
@geldonyetich
“…it takes someone who has partaken so many instances that they’ve developed a sort of detachment to understand that any given instance of entertainment is a sum of its parts.”
I can accept that. How about this. If you are a professional game journalist, hired to write a game review, should you do more in your 3 hours playing the game than spend 2 hours generating your character, and maybe get out of the tutorial newbie area in order for you to make proper use of your ‘wide range of experience in the gaming entertainment media?” It sounds more like he made ample use of a vast experience in slacking off, to me.
“you’re questioning not only Zitron’s qualifications, but the qualifications of those who hired them, and we don’t really know any of them personally.”
I don’t need to know them personally. Zitron for one, is incompetent. His employers have failed to recognize that. Draw your own conclusions.
This is what I know about Zitron:
He hates whacking goblins. Yeah, me too. Maybe if you got out of the tutorial noob area you’d learn that Darkfall != goblin whacking. More on this later.
Zitron thinks “The difference in feedback between a sword hitting or missing is negligible.” He must have missed the audible “THUNK” cue that is played with each hit, the groans and screams (yes, screams) from mobs and players upon each hit, and blood spatter that covers your target, the ground, and yourself on every hit, but yeah, other than that, feedback is negligible.
Zitron also thinks “You have a crosshair, and your hits are dependent on whether or not this crosses the enemy at any given time – like an FPS, except with little to no reference point.” This is so beyond wrong, I can only suspect Zitron started playing Second Life, rather than Darkfall, and couldn’t tell the difference. Let’s move on…
Zitron doesn’t like mob AI. Dude. It’s a PvP game. Mobs are a resource, like the trees I chop for wood, only they move, hit back, and drop gold and minor loot instead of lumber. If you came here for the PvE, you are in the wrong game and your vast experience “with the wide range of the gaming entertainment medium of games”, or something, just isn’t working for you. Try telemarketeering instead.
Zitron thinks this is true: “Using spells or arrows is somewhat less exhausting, but usually ends messily when an enemy decides to run at you, leaving you with the choice of changing weapon (a ten-second operation – five if you’re particularly nimble) or running backwards in the vain hope of not dying.” Anyone who has GOTTEN BEYOND THE FRICKIN’ NEWBIE TUTORIAL ZONE knows you can define a hot key to change weapons at a moments notice, so you can blast your target at range, and immediately switch out and finish them off when they stagger up to you, since you are unhurt, and you have been shooting the CRAP out of them. Obviously, no one has EVER figured out how to do THAT in any other game.
I could go on, but you get the idea, I hope.
I sure am glad Zitron “is experienced with the wide range of the gaming entertainment medium of games” that qualifies him to write incompetent reviews without the use of a functional brain. That settles it then.
Man, this pundit shit is HARD!
This is the statement that irritates me about Ed Zitron rewiew. “I genuinely wish that this was a case of me not getting what Darkfall is trying to do. Sadly, it’s all too obvious.”
Darkfall is a game were people get together in guilds and kill each other for fun and profit. I think Aventurine has been pretty clear that this is the main feature of the game.
Yet in this review the only reference to pvp comes as a complaint about getting ganked by “cyber-bullies”. Sounds to me like he does not get it, or thinks the pvp aspect of a pvp game is irrelevant. Either way Ed Zitron looks like a jerk. Someone above put out the opinion that Ed Zitron gave a fair assessment of the features of the game, and rated it 2/10. I would have to argue that 2/3rds of the features he mentioned are not important to the game. It is like rating a mmo by its music or a motorcycle by its switchgear. And of the features he rated that are important, he does not give enough information for me to tell why he is upset. Like I said earlier, his review is useless to me.
On a side note, there is a reason the complaints about the lack of pve content and quests in this game are ignored. People are drawn to a game like this simply because its focus is not a long pve grind. They do not want to have to reach maximum level before they can start doing the things they started playing for in the first place. There is a big misconception I think in the mmo industry that states that if a lot of people are doing something it must be fun. This is BS. I leveled an armsmen to level 50 in DAoC just so I could pvp. Maybe 5 minutes of the 3 months of /played time was fun. The pve content in the best mmo’s is pretty uninspiring overall. If you don’t believe me ask Richard Bartle.
On top of that, if this game launched with the most mouth watering mmo pve content imaginable it would have to be done in a way that keeps the pve rewards viable to the players, but completely separate from the pvp. Otherwise it would be forcing the pvp players to pve witch is not what they want to do. Also the pve players would be annoyed about constantly getting ganked trying to get to their raid or complete there quest. That sort of content has to be done very carefully in a game like this and it ultimately is a secondary focus.
Yeah, it looks like Zitron took too many liberties with his prose and lost his objectiveness.
Was the difference between sword hitting and missing “neglegable” – no, but perhaps it wasn’t quite as jarring as he was expecting if he had played games such as Oblivion or Dark Messiah. (Okay, that later one was so well done it’s hardly fair because few, if any, games met that.)
Being completely wrong about how hitting and missing worked is bad. On the other hand, why didn’t the game make this clear? It’s bad sign when an experienced game player has to make guesses about how hitting and missing works. It was a good assumption based on the idea that this was supposedly a “twitch” game, though. The same goes with spells.
Zitron wants better mob AI – irrational desire in a PvP game? Not really. Just because it’s a PvP game doesn’t mean you have absolved responsibility for making a decent AI. Here, at least, is a fair description of a broken mechanic. Never can you really say, “well, we forgive you for that part of the game completely sucking because…” no, if you’re going to do it, it’s worth doing right.
If Zitron had cut down on his flair a bit, being less the scathing critic and more the patient one, perhaps he’d have been able to avoid a bad interpretation. Instead, he left himself open as non-objective.
If I may add: I think that what bothers me about the reaction to Zitron’s Darkfall review here is that there seems to be a foregone conclusion that because the review is negative, and because Aventurine went nuts over it in a typical fashion, that it’s necessarily a good review. So even though I’m no fan of Darkfall, I’m glad to see that Zitron’s review is finally being addressed.
If I reviewed Darkfall, chances are I would give it a negative review as well, especially with all I have heard about it so far. But I would be open-minded enough to see for myself before committing myself to one position or another. But I don’t think Zitron’s review, in this specific case, even tries that.
It’s one of those reviews where you can almost see the writer’s agenda running in the background, which can affect any critic, even professional ones who would remind you of their status, as though that immediately justified their agenda — and the cloak of objectivity always comes in handy, too. My skepticism comes from seeing too many instances of criticism done by a seemingly invisible checklist which inevitably leads to the same intended conclusions.
I like to compare that to some less-than-honest calls for tenders in government contracting processes. Assuming every company is invited to bid on them, you inevitably come across cases where all the criteria deemed necessary ensure that only one firm could ever meet them all: the one intended to win the contract from the beginning. The better schemes will make every criterion, taken individually, seem reasonable enough, but the result is rigged nonetheless.
To return to gaming, there’s an example I always like to bring up; it doesn’t involve a professional game critic but a WoW fanatic. Said WoW fanatic was discussing the various ways in which WoW was great and made much of flying mounts and such, while dismissing EVE for “not allowing you to leave your cockpit”. Whether EVE’s design was successful for what that game attempted to be didn’t matter. This wasn’t even meant to kick-start a discussion on how much EVE would find itself improved if the player were provided with such an option. No, the only purpose of that comparison was to bury EVE, not praise it, regardless of its overall success as a niche game, and the easiest way to dismiss a successful niche game was to blame it for not having a definite set of features which… erm… World of Warcraft happens to have. And the more expensive the required features, the better; that way, the list of good games would be whittled down to pretty much WoW by its lonesome.
And that’s what I can’t shake off while reading the Zitron review: That there is a general aversion to this type of game present in the background, and that Zitron chose instead to camouflage it under the guise of bad design choices. I’m sure that Darkfall is chock-full of such bad design choices, but the problem with Zitron’s review is the old chicken-and-egg dilemma: It seems, while reading the review, that Darkfall is not a bad game because it has deficient design choices, but that it has deficient design choices *because it is a bad game*. The critical reasoning, in Zitron’s case, is reversed, because you can see the Fun Factor, the most subjective criterion imaginable, coming first; if he can’t enjoy a game, it’s a bad game, and it must be because of bad features. Considering the subject matter, it’s not a bad approach, if design were left outside of the equation when it is clear that the enjoyment of the game, or lack thereof, does not hinge on the design.
This explains Zitron’s dismissal of both Darkfall (which I will concede has bad design choices, just for the sake of the argument) and Braid, about which I heard only good things as far as the design was concerned (if someone can point otherwise, by all means do so).
In Darkfall’s case, I can quote the following passages as suspect (and I’m sure an actual player of the game could come up with many more):
“Worse still, the entire economy is player-driven – meaning that anybody wanting to get involved in crafting has literally hours of harvesting wood, or rock, or any of the other generic resources.” Assuming he does not talk specifically in terms of the cumbersome inventory management, what is wrong with having a player-driven economy? From what I read, it ended up being nothing like Aventurine advertised, and I have no doubt it’s a genuine grindfest. Compare that, however, to Warhammer Online, where the economy was a sick joke, which made the auction houses of Age of Conan and WoW look like worthy of Wall Street Journal coverage. But not a line in Zitron’s 9.2 review about the WAR economy, which I’m tempted to think is a clear demonstration, unless he was just whitewashing the weak points, that in-game economies don’t matter to him.
“The developers have taken the classic stance when faced with the echoing cries of “you barely have any content”, and claim that the “core” of Darkfall is clan warfare. Players can build “camps” and “towns”, and fight each other in “epic” wars. This is, as you can probably imagine from the screenshots, rather more underwhelming and frustrating than the hyperbole would have you believe.” Since I’m coming from PotBS, I’m quite glad (for reasons listed in a previous post) that Darkfall tries to be without ambiguity as to what type of game it wants to be (though I’d gladly do without the bad manners and grandstanding surrounding the game). And for one, I would welcome building camps and towns, as the problem isn’t with the feature itself; the problem is when the usual-suspect large guilds (yes, I know, it’s one bias of my own) start planting flags on the map in advance, leaving little opportunity for the rest of players to achieve anything. But the feature, in itself, sounds appealing, and if the result of Zitron’s position is more WoW glossy instanced crap that has no bearing on the game world, no thanks.
“You see, anyone can kill anyone. For the most part, your first ten or so hours in Darkfall are spent dying, repeatedly, at the hands of either the AI or a cyber-bully in a wolf-suit. In fact, past that mark, it feels impossible to avoid the clammy hands and bloodied sword of somebody who has specially allocated part of their day to griefing.” By his own admission, he spent nine hours playing Darkfall, yet he feels confident that he can comment on “your first ten or so hours” and even “past that mark”, a stage he didn’t even reach himself regardless of whose version you choose to believe on how long Zitron played the game.
“It’s the emperor’s new clothes of 2009: such a marvellous game that only an idiot wouldn’t realise the beauty of the gaping holes in its content, its wonky control system, and its seemingly decade-old engine.” There we go, “only an idiot”. There might be several idiots playing Darkfall, but that is because Darkfall offers them an opportunity to behave like the idiots they want to be, an opportunity which they are denied in WoW and similar games. Remember: Complete freedom, including that of behaving like a jerk. It’s too bad that Aventurine just exploited that instead of just proposing a standard PvP/RvR world where the stakes were high to appeal to the competitive guild demographic. They actually *went looking* for the jerks with all their antics and proposed game features, and it’s why many here are highly skeptical about the game.
As I said, in the first case, with a group of serious and mature players, I’m sure I would enjoy Darkfall, but the developers want the jerks, and couldn’t have prevented them from showing up anyway. Pirates of the Burning Sea, if I may return to that subject for a moment, made a few contradictory decisions early on about this. Just look up the remark of Isildur (PotBS’s lead designer) about gankers waiting for the “next big failure to come along, to let them grief noobs for a few months before it shrivels up and dies” and saying how his game would attract the competitive PvPers. That was six months before release. At release time, the developers went all “no crying in the red circle” and “make it not fair in your favor”, until they dropped those a few months later shortly after a devlog entry called “Ambush gameplay” (http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=10831 ). I’m sure they were expecting the competitive PvPers but Pirates of the Burning Sea got the asshats and the six-ship ganksquads whether it wanted them of not (which, I think, can be attributed to poor design rather than intent). Darkfall, on the other hand, welcomes the asshats with open arms and doesn’t seem to have second doubts about what it means for their game. However, I don’t think that the mere act of enjoying Darkfall makes you an idiot — which seems to be what Zitron thinks.
I’m sure I must have missed something, but it’s all I can think of for now.
How is Darkfall broken? From the MMORPG.COM forums….
“Ok so people throughout Darkfall have been using a great way to train rigor by encouraging mass participation within major alliances. Basically we have 15-30 spell casters with the earth magic called earthquake and then we form a pyramid with non-casters surrounding the casters. Everyone donates reagents for the casters to use.
Then they click and release the AOE spell which trains our rigor skill while we don’t get hurt since they don’t hold onto the spell. Earthquake is a spell that does DOT around the caster and hurts everyone in range. But we don’t take damage which lets us train rigor 100X faster than normal. This was suppose to be a smart way to train a skill but the GM’s recently declared it an exploit.
Yesterday, while we just formed our pyramid after over an hour of organizing 200+ people a GM talked on public chat while we were taking advantage of game mechanics. I later found out that they destroyed another ‘rigor party’ in another major clan/alliance by kicking people. First our alliance leader tried to persuade the GM that it isn’t an exploit but it failed since the GM said that the devs considered it an exploit. Then he started talking bs with some sarcasm which was hilarious.
Soon the GM began kicking people but there were too many people so I barely noticed people disappearing. Our casters just logged back in after being kicked so the GM couldn’t beat us. He kept trying and trying but for some reason he couldn’t kick us fast enough. Then we spammed public chat with stuff like “MORTAL ONLINE” and “MO” and the chat was flooded like crazy and it became more laggier.
Eventually the GM gave up and we used the rigor pyramid all last night into the morning when the servers went down for daily restart. We did it the whole day also today and the GM isn’t interfering anymore because we kicked his ass. We are going to do it until they patch it in about 7 hours which is the patch tomorrow morning. It was the first time that I saw a GM back down from the biggest alliance in the game.
Fun.”
I’d heard of earthquake for rigor, but hadn’t made use of it myself. I figured it was no different than casting fire field or any other direct damage spell on yourself in UO to raise the Resist Magic spell. It’s an oversight that will be corrected, no doubt, with the next patch.
Perhaps it will be corrected, but will the guilds who exploited this have their characters rolled back? Clearly, this isn’t the only exploit which will have set a certain subset of players leaps and bounds ahead of the others – and that, to me, is a huge problem.
In my opinion, everyone involved here who didn’t break off and leave should have had their accounts banned without question. Not only were they intentionally exploiting the game, they basically outright ignored the GM’s demands and harassed and spammed public chat. The fact that, for whatever reason, the GM couldn’t/didn’t start laying out bans is a pretty damn concrete example of the powers that be pandering to asshats.
I expect someone overrode the GM on the issue, not wanting to piss of the largest alliance – or perhaps wanting to make sure it could get another leg up.
@ Wendelius
That is an excellent example of what asshats will do when left to their own devices. All mmo’s face this problem though. Eve had lag ambushes and Wow has pvp baiting just to name a few examples. It would be funny if they rolled back these players skills after they patch the problem.
It’s already corrected. Here are the latest patch notes. http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?p=3386715#post3386715
It’s a minor one line entry in 7 pages of update notes.
In one month, no one will now the difference. Rolling things back would probably create more problems than they solved.
Perhaps. Since they didn’t, I think this reflects the assessment that the problem is not that significant. Summary executions for jaywalking, so to speak.
Check the fit on your tin-foil hat. I think it might be restricting blood flow.
@Wendelius
It’s a very good example of the Darkfall “community” and how they act, and I hope the Mortal Online guys are rightly getting worried that their game is where this rabble will be headed next. It doesn’t have the luxury, like, say, Conan had (and which saw its share of that same demographic when it launched), of PvE servers where those who bow before such hardcore maturity can be invited to go instead.
And some guy on the MO forums was writing a while ago that the community looked much better there… Enjoy it while it lasts.
It’s an example of the MMO community. Be honest.
I’ve seen this kind of stuff in every MMO I’ve ever been in. Boys will be boys.
Amen. But lets face it, theres need to be a way to stop macroers without having to ban them. Jeez, just a simple check of the spells/skills/whatever actually doing something to somebody its that hard to code???. Ive said before and i say it again: without a check system its just macro land.
Who’s ruling the game anyways? If a show of asshatery like that its allowed to win, well the GMs in there are weak.
Ive said that Tasos and Co. are a bunch of guys that talk a lot but they are being manhandled to their players.
I was wrong. I couldnt expect that a bunch of first timers behave better that that. Lets see an example in another PvP game: EVE Online. The GMs in there TODAY are cold, proffesionals, fair and merciless. They are that TODAY (im resalting that for disallowing whines of the past).
But heaven knows that those qualities were forged with experience and pain (i mean they live with a outpost of Something Awful) and they learned the consequences of the lack of said qualities the hard way **cough*t20*cough**. Its my impression for their handling of the recent major crisis.
It its fair to expect Adventurine to act like them today? No. But i wonder, will DarkFall live enough to they can learn those skills? I dont know.
BTW, a free tip: The fix for macroers is in the C compiler, not in the BanHammer.
For the unlearned: The outpost of Something Awful its called GoonSwarm.
@Owain
True, but in this case the boys happen to be in “the biggest alliance in the game”. What happens when your guild city gets wiped out by “the biggest alliance in the game” precisely because they used such tactics while they could and you didn’t?
Based on what I am reading here, it’s not some minor renegade guild that is doing it, it’s the major guys, and based on experience those guys are so competitive that if one side starts doing it, all the others will. Those who won’t will simply be left behind.
It’s an instance of the one rotten apple spoiling the entire barrel. The only people to remain competitive will be those who have used such tricks; the others will have fallen by the wayside. And then what?
And the pattern of pretending it’s not an exploit, even after being informed by a GM that it is one, and then boldly assert that “we’ll keep on doing it right until the patch comes in, so there”… I’ve seen that before: Pirates of the Burning Sea, Blackbeard server, February 2008. The British nation on the server was notorious for all the underhanded tricks it used, while being demographically dominant, and seemed to have dedicated its entire efforts to pissing off the French, the smallest or second smallest nation.
At the time, you could push an entirely peaceful town (zero unrest points) to a port battle (10,000 unrest points) just by dropping unrest supplies at the rebel agent in the town. (And the port battle itself took place x hours later, always beginning on the hour.) Normally, the cutoff was at 5,000 points, when the red circle appeared; after that, the rebel agent stopped accepting supplies, and you had to grind the remaining 5,000 points on the open sea, where players of the defending faction could show up and attack you. The problem was that it took a few seconds for the game to check when to turn off the rebel agent’s demand. So what the British did was gather all their numbers at the port they wanted to attack, and turn in their supplies simultaneously before the game checked whether to turn off the rebel agent. So the port went from zero to 10,000 instantaneously without having to grind on the open sea for the 5,000-to-10,000 part.
I remember that the Blackbeard British didn’t invent the trend, as the Spanish on another server had done it before, but the Brits turned it into an art form. Then there was a case, after the developers had acknowledged that it was contrary to intended game mechanics (without, however, calling it an exploit) with a patch on the way to solve it, where the British attacked three French ports at once using that “ecobomb” technique, which meant three simultaneous port battles. How many battles could the French fight, given their population? One. Which the British knew all too well. France won the one port battle it showed up for, and lost the other two by default.
Finally, the developers acknowledge it’s an exploit, and say they’re working on it. As for the ports France lost as a result? Oh, but the port battles were won honestly, so we won’t do a rollback, nor will we do a full map reset. It’s all right here: http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?p=161224 . Never mind that the ports were lost because there were three battles at once, which was a direct result of the exploit, the port battle results were entirely legitimate in themselves, and therefore we couldn’t dispute them. (I always compare this to calling an election legitimate because the ballot boxes weren’t tampered with, never mind one candidate’s thugs guarding the entrance to the polling station with baseball bats.)
Then the natural thing happened. Why should anyone want to win a map that automatically resets, with only marginal rewards, when your sole purpose is to grief? So the French (those who didn’t leave after the developers’ disappointing response, that is) just told the British, take your damn map win, we’ll go after the Spanish instead. And the British, needless to say, dragged their feet for as long as they could, and at one point there were even rumours of extortion. They didn’t want to play the game as intended; they just wanted to grief the French.
So you see, you don’t need a server full of exploiting pricks to wreck a game. You just need a server where the exploiting pricks are organized and provided with the opportunity to do so. That is what happened with PotBS on the Blackbeard server; it took months for France to recover, long after the original faction had more or less quit the game or transferred to the Rackham server after the April mergers (followed, the next day, by the British exploiters) even though Blackbeard was one of the four servers to survive. And this probably will happen in Darkfall if this particular alliance comes to dominate the game, not to mention that there seems to be the same developer ambivalence towards the course of action to be taken.
And if I may add, regarding the PotBS exploit I mentioned in my previous post: There had even been a developer log entry that had been posted almost a week before that forum thread: http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=10638 . While it avoided the word “exploit”, it clearly made known that it was not to be regarded as not intended by the gaming mechanics: “The problem is that we clearly never intended for players to be able to take a port from 0 to 5k or even 10k unrest instantly. While were biased towards attackers (we like PvP!) this goes well beyond bias and into the realm of insanity. Defenders should be able to draw a line in the sand, declare a port off-limits, and enforce that with doubloons. Thats not currently possible. Worst of all, this tactic can be used on new player ports just as easily as on ports in the Antilles. New player ports are intended to be harder to attack, and this process circumvents all the tuning we did to make that the case.”
So clearly, things were not meant to happen that way, but they did. And I realized I made a small mistake in my previous post: the game checked at the time of taking the unrest-supplies mission, which was even simpler to coordinate as long as people didn’t complete them, which they finally did together, hence the “ecobomb” exploit.
Also, one of the three ports mentioned in my previous post was in fact a newbie port, the only one which the French defended. But the key point of the devlog entry is that, incomprehensibly, it gave extensive details of what the exploit was and how it was done, even though it had been practically verboten for players to post any information about it on the game forums, on the grounds that it would urge people to use it. With the devlog, anyone who didn’t know about it by then now knew exactly what they needed to do. Since that came out on a Tuesday with the patch next Monday, they had another week to do it! And since the word “exploit” wasn’t used, the less scrupulous players could raise points of semantics until then.
Why am I mentioning this example? Because I saw it first-hand. Because it occurred early in the history of the game, and had long-lasting repercussions. Because I think it’s a clear example of failure in the face of exploiting at all levels, and I believe it deserves to be studied. Developer failure to make the game mechanics exploit-proof. Developer failure in the initial treatment of the problem, still marked by ambivalence (i.e., publishing a devlog entry detailing the problem before it was solved, while refusing to explicitly call it an exploit). Developer failure to act accordingly at a later stage, by refusing to act upon the exploiting done between the devlog entry and the patch (such as those three ports flipped at once), demonstrated by the refusal to reset the map on the one server clearly affected by this.
And I could mention failure at a later stage, when it led (directly or indirectly) to a desire to otherwise encourage the creation of red circles, so the developers came up with the idea to turn off the decay of unrest points. That way, you could start a red circle, leave it there, and continue grinding later on to bring it to a port battle — if you could risk the enemy countergrinding in the circle to bring unrest down; unrest just wouldn’t decay on its own.
But there were two problems with that. First, the only way for the defender to reduce unrest was to attack NPC ships (or players) of the attacking nation. So that would mean: If the British put a red circle around New Orleans, the only way for the French to bring the unrest down (and get rid of the red circle) would be to attack British NPC ships or British players. But what NPC ships did you get in greater numbers near a French port? What a surprise, French ships. British ships were a rarity, which meant the defender couldn’t effectively countergrind. So in many cases, with the defenders lacking the means to reduce unrest, the circles wouldn’t vanish until the conclusion of a port battle.
But then again, and this was problem #2, like those Blackbeard British who made no effort to win the map once they got to sit on every French (and Spanish) port of importance, what would be the incentive for an attacker in search of griefing (and nothing else) to hurry in bringing the unrest up to 10,000 (and a port battle), when you could just leave the circle there as a quasi-permanent PvP zone? So that’s what happened. Zones were put up, with no intent to ever bring the town to a port battle. Pirates (almost a ganker class in the way their RvR was designed to be meaningless) did the rest. What prevented the entire map from turning red was, if I remember, that only a certain number of ports from each nation could be put in the red simultaneously.
Unrest decay, the turning off of which some people had warned against, was soon put back into the game.
Ganking was another problem in the game, and the developers, as I mentioned above, once said in a devlog that they would make ganking go away. As an open-sea instance was limited to 6 players on each side, it was usually a 6-on-1 or something of that sort, and methods were used to make the attacker believe that there was only one ship. So a player would enter a fight thinking it would be a challenging 1v1 battle, only to realize after entering the instance that the opponent’s five buddies had been waiting in the closest port, ready to join the battle at any moment. This was a typical PotBS gank, and some players prided themselves on it. So the developers came up with the idea of allowing the defenders to have up to 9 ships enter the battle in progress as opposed to the maximum 6 for the attackers. It became known as the “Supergank”. Same tactics as before, but with more gankers. The attacking group of, say, 3 ships, would attack a defending group of 4, and then 5 buddies of the defenders would jump in from the closest port. I was not playing at that time, but I heard that a climate of sheer terror swept through the Burning Sea, with everyone afraid of attacking everyone else out of fear that it would turn into a 6v9.
Nobody asked for a 6v9 system because it was all too predictable, and everybody objected when it was first suggested. They brought it in anyway, until the next build, when they realized that their players had been right after all and pulled it out.
That’s the problem many fear with Darkfall: Bad design decisions with players ready to take advantage of them. But the difference between PotBS and Darkfall is that at no instant, not even during “No Crying in the Red Circle”‘s heyday, did FLS hide behind a mask of arrogance and hostility as Aventurine seems to be doing.
That’s why, despite all the awkward design decisions (and even the developers’ withdrawing from their own forums), I still care for Pirates of the Burning Sea, whereas many people here, myself included, are just indulging in schadenfreude about Darkfall.
@Wendelius
That’s hilarious.
It wasn’t just the one big guild doing it. The alliance the KGB was in was doing it as well, as were many KGB members. As I said, our initial take on it was that it was like casting a fire field, or a poison field in Ultima Online, and then running through the field to build the Resist skill. Initially, there wasn’t any guidance from the GMs or the devs that the practice was considered an exploit. Gamers are inventive, and I don’t think the devs were even aware that that this game behavior existed.
I didn’t do it myself, because I didn’t have the 750 sulpher required to buy in, nor the gold to acquire the sulpher, but if I had had either, I would have been in the middle of the rigor pyramid as well. As it was, from what I’ve heard, the devs announced that it was an exploit one day, and within only a day or so, the problem was fixed. As I mentioned, it was a one line fix out of 7 pages of changes listed in the most recent update noted.
If the near riot that was reported earlier is anywhere near true (don’t know, didn’t see it), yeah, that was poor form. Game impact, I think is negligible. Yes, some of my KGB mates have rigor attributes that are higer than mine. Do I see a big difference in performance between their characters and mine? Not really. It was a problem, it was caught, it was quickly fixed. I think the dev’s did a good job once they were aware of the issue.
Another thing that the latest update did was speed up the rate of skill gain, so I suspect my rigor values will catch up to those who spent thousands of gold on sulpher, so in a way, I came out with the better part of the bargain. It will take a little longer, but I will catch up, and I didn’t have to waste a pile of gold in the process.
Speaking of exploits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPwI-Kq0EVw
Even the Bermuda Triangle wasn’t that effective.
And we need THIS week’s Darkfall post….
@Vetarnias
LMAO
← Previous Comments
{ 3 trackbacks }