Getting Kieron Gillen to review it will make the second bite at the apple that much easier to dismiss by Aventurine, which has apparently already declared Darkfall to only be for those who already like it, New Games Journalism be damned. Plus Kieron’s writing a whole bunch of comic books now, like he has time to be all hardcore n’ shit.

How many of you knew Eurogamer existed? Seriously? It’s one of the largest game publications in Europe. The largest independent one, I believe, and has been around for a decade.

My experience with Darkfall was short and telling. It went like this.

(GreyPawn logs in.)
(Creates character.)
(The world loads.)
(GreyPawn looks around for a tutorial or tooltips on interface/progression/etc and finds none)
(GreyPawn logs out, uninstalls Darkfall)

This is 2009. You don’t get to make games without tutorials anymore. I have neither the time nor the energy to study the arcane assembly of design choices made by your development team as a player, and if I have to fling myself headfirst at a sheer cliff that you call your learning curve, my Trammie carebear butt wants nothing to do with your fancy “hardcore” game.

Yeah. Darkfall is not for everyone.

Aventurine’s posturing made me almost believe they truly were rebel bad guys who didn’t give a crap and wanted us all to go back to WoW. Then they get a 2/10 for their self-professed “not for everyone”" niche title and they go all wobbly and sensitive, bemoaning the lack of truth and dignity on the internet.

If they’re all worried about internet inaccuracies about Darkfall’s features, how’s about they update the features list on their own website? If they’re worried about people being scared off buying their game, how about they stop their army of minions from telling everyone to go back to WoW or — even better — I dunno, actually SELL the game?

Total nonsense. 2/10 seems right for the whole tawdry mess.

SOmebody played their cards right, blogstyle and such. Waiting until the end so you can masterfully wtfrape that shit. GJ Mr. Jennings, and I still love you.

hahah. PvP game is teh Fail. What a suprise.

“Independently-run MMO Darkfall Online is certainly special – special in the way in which it so flagrantly ignores many of the rules of what makes a great, playable game.” (From the Eurogamer review.)

I like this Ed Zitron guy. He neatly encapsulates just what I find so repulsive about non-game spectacles like Darkfall Online or EVE Online without requiring fifty pages to do it. I’m a rather half-baked writer until I figure out a similar flair.

I know the people who enjoy Darkfall Online or EVE Online will take offense to that, but they’re getting offended for the wrong reasons. We’re calling the games crappy because they’re very mediocre examples of what constitutes a good, playable game. People will still enjoy them simply because they might not care about a game being good and playable.

They shouldn’t take that as a personal affront. What other people do with their free time is none of my business as long as they’re not trodding on my lawn.

I don’t go out and yell at the neighbor kids, “Hey you! The 9 year old girl across the street! Stop playing Barbie Horse Adventures – it’s a simple and derivative peddling of a popular franchise that does nothing to improve the state of the art! What you aught to be doing is playing a dynamic immersible online game with mechanic and aesthetics which are both casual friendly while deep enough that the hardcore can enjoy it!”” That would be silly – just because the kind of stuff she does strikes me as boring and hardly innovative doesn’t mean she feels the same way.

A game reviewer, on the other hand, sort of assumes his audience is gamers looking for a better game, and simply did his duty in reporting this product has many aspects of suck to it.

I agree with all 3 reviews Lum posted.

@Goedel: Whoa. Even using “UO” (or EQ) and “grind” in the same sentence as a modern game is a capital hyperbolic offense, much less suggesting that Darkfall is 100+ times worse.

In a similar vein, how can the Eurogamer reviewer complain about “six or eight hours to get good” when they specially re-reviewed WoW to bring its score up to 10/10 for Lich King?

@Coppertopper

I couldn’t tell if you were referring to my past employer angst or somebody else’s. Mine was extremely short-lived to the point where I’m surprised anyone remembers it.

@dartwick

Wow, way to totally misinterpret what I wrote. That you found it fun, and I didn’t, was completely my point.

That’s basically what I’m saying here: Darkfall Online gets lambasted in reviews, but some people will still enjoy it.

I just dragged EVE Online into the picture because it has one powerful similarity with Darkfall: they’re both games which prioritized shifting player content heavily, while not being particularly enjoyable to play on the very game mechanic level (if they were a single player game they’d not have much to recommend them on).

You’re right about not leaving high security space, though. I’m not sure why imperiling my ship to bored gankers would improve my enjoyment of the game. Here, too, is a matter of different strokes.

Actually, I agree with you there. Darkfall’s level of failure is significantly higher than EVE’s.

EVE Online is a much better production all around, and at least what they’re trying to accomplish is a whole lot more innovative, what with a whole free-floating market and all that.

Darkfall, on the other hand, mostly just goes through the same paces with a few rarely-seen concessions: building your own villages, twitch-based combat, open PvP with full looting.

These differences would earn Darkfall more recognition if a lot of them weren’t just plain lazy. Twitch-based combat and open-PvP with full looting isn’t innovative, it’s a “default state” before you add something more complicated to the mix.

The village building is unusual – it joins Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Shadowbane in being one of the few games to offer that – but the player economy is not that far removed from other commonly seen “default states.” The simple auction interface, simple harvesting system, and simple trade skill system.

Darkfall does have the “huuuge world,” but I’ve often found that feature rather ill conceived. It spreads out the players too much and results in a bunch of empty meaningless cut/paste content.

I probably would have enjoyed EVE Online a lot better if I got in the game a lot earlier and had some strong corporate connections so I actually could participate in events other than mining, minor production, minor market speculation, missions, and PvP.

@Geldonyetich

A game reviewer’s job is not to assume that their audience is gamers looking for a better game. It’s to play a game and provide their opinion of it.

You are effectively going out and yelling at the neighbor kids that they shouldn’t play a game they enjoy when you tell us that “He neatly encapsulates just what I find so repulsive about non-game spectacles like Darkfall Online or EVE Online…” and “…reporting this product has many aspects of suck to it”. The neighbor kids are those who read the comments here. You’re telling us we shouldn’t play games we enjoy.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with expressing your opinion, but, deriding telling one’s neighbor that the games they play “suck” and are “non-games” while saying, yourself, that the games your neighbor plays “suck” and are “non-games” is hypocritical.

If what people do with their free time is none of your business; why are you commenting on it? You’re making it your business by continuing to tell the neighbor kid that they’re playing terrible games.

You’re an attention seeking troll. Please stop posting here since you, by your own admission, aren’t interested in telling people that the games they play suck; yet it’s all you seem to do. I won’t be responding to any reply you make. I think I’ve clearly pointed out your own contradictions and fallacies. I tend not to feed trolls (after seeing you pull the same garbage in a couple comment threads, I had to).

Full disclosure: I have never played EVE or Darkfall.

Let me try to put this a little more fairly.

I will go so far as to say that clearly there’s a provocative level to just about anything a person can say that may be of value. So, along those lines, that I would say things that people may severely disagree with, yes, I suppose you could say I’m just an attention-seeking troll.

I’m making assertions about what constitutes a higher level of game quality, as well as observations as to why Darkfall and EVE Online do not support my assertions. This may conflict with other people’s ideas. Maybe they’ll even let this hurt their feelings.

However, the bottom line is, I can’t be held accountable by the opinions of people. Especially those who don’t even understand what I’m trying to say. Really, where do you even get off coming over here and acting like you’re the regulating body of the comment threads? Who died and made you the supreme overlord of Shut Up And Discuss Things The Way I Deem Is Intelligent?

Well, you’ve successfully trolled me by demanding I must be a troll. Well done. Maybe I’ve overstayed my welcome on this public forum. Right or wrong, you’re just sick of hearing from me, am I right? Maybe I’d best retreat to my ivory tower.

In truth, I don’t really like it when topics become about me. For awhile I did blame myself. However, in retrospect, I think I just argue at such a high level and so quickly that it’s just overwhelming for the vast majority of those I come into contact with.

It’s a rather lonely existence.

That timeline misses the final stage: Morricone’s tune plays in the background as Aventurine blinks first. Tasos announces “we’ll take our 2/10 and like it, thankyouverymuch”.

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=185733

Best post ever Lum.

You forgot the part where DF fanboys took nerdrage to a whole new level and declared war on EG http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/1433/wardec.jpg

Highly entertaining.

And then there’s this little gem from Keen: http://www.keenandgraev.com/?p=2303

This entire dramafest has been un-freaking-believable… and yet like a train wreck I just can’t look away!!

More and more I realize that Darkfall is like a DOGMA film (google it) that people bash for not having Hollywood production values.

But I’m having fun in it and that’s all that matters.

Nice post though. Really

Maybe instead of sounding like I’m dumping on a game and all its players the time, I should try a different approach. Instead, I’ll describe some existing alternatives to mechanics I take exceptions to.

PvP Balance

There’s been talk of having to spend days macroing to have a chance to compete in PvP in Darkfall Online. The core problem, fairly obviously, is that persistence-based power accumulation provides an insurmountable challenge to new players.

A good example of an alternative mechanic can be found in Chronicles of Spellborn, where a level 25 character can harm and potentially defeat a level 50 character. (Or so I’ve been told – I haven’t witnessed this firsthand.) Guild Wars has been mentioned as another example, but it sounds like they might have screwed that up with epic loot — well, it did have a fairly good skill:persistence balance at release, at least.

It’s a bit of a catch22, of course. If you don’t reward players with a noticeable advantage for grinding, they’ll complain that grinding has no point. If you reward players too much, new players may be put off with being tortured by being ganked with impunity until they torture themselves with repetitive action.

The GUI

The awkward GUI that halts all movement and leads to slow clicking and dragging of all inventory: well, you can see better solutions in nearly every RPG. I don’t know if it’s simply a great omission of the Eurogamer reviewer, but it seems there’s not even a simple “loot all” button.

Here, again, is a place where I think The Chronicles Of Spellborn provides a better example: loot is never on corpses, it just pops up in the lower right of the user screen along with “need” or “greed” buttons. Very quick, no hassle loot handling. (Granted, Chronicles of Spellborn does have a sticking point here: if somebody in your group doesn’t push one of those buttons, the queued loot will sit there for several minutes.)

In this case, the Darkfall Online admins claim that these were deliberate design decisions. They wanted players to be vulnerable while looting, so they made looting take time to do. They wanted players to be able to steal eachother’s kills, so they didn’t add kill looting restriction facility.

If this is true, then it opens up many cans of worms related to just how viable that idea is. But, well, Mr. Jennings pretty much already had separate blog entries about that. Heck, he’s also covered the things I just got done talking about, the GUI and the PvP curve.

Adventurine can’t even afford to sell their own game, and you’re telling them to hire a pr firm?

Well, as the resident DarkFall promoter, I’ll give you the rundown of the KGB activities for one day, yesterday, Saturday, 5/9/09. For the full story, go to oracle.the-kgb.com.

Following days of planning and negotiations with allies, both large and small. 8 am Pacific time signals the beginning of the KGB mustering of forces in preparation for the siege the city of Andruk, which lies in the northeast corner of the main continent. Initially, we organize our forces into two main groups and set off across country to another city, where we will rendezvous with out allies.

The land mass is vast, and it takes nearly 30 minutes on mounts to traverse the distance from our city, Khosgar, to the objective of the siege, the city of Andruk. The final approach to the city is brutal, but the attackers make it across the ground that is being hammered by enemy siege guns, and begin the assault on the walls. On one side of the city, the gates are under attack by our allies, while on the other side of the city, KGB scales the walls and pour into the city. There is a steady rain of fire from all sides from both archers, mages, and a defensive lightning tower, but the attackers succeed in taking the central keep, and now the defenders must split their forces to try to repel the attack on the gate and expel our forces from within the city.

Andruk defenders attempt a frontal assault on the keep, but every attempt is repelled with great losses. The fighting intensifies inside the keep, but when the main gates finally fall, we are reinforced by our allies and together, we sweep the defenders from the city. The fighting is not yet over, however, because the automated lighting tower is still blasting our troops in the city, and defenders and their allies are resurrecting, and returning to the fight.

Part of the attackers now equip siege hammers to try to take down the lightning tower. The rest of us defend them from the re-attack being mounted by the defenders, and the fighting remains heavy for a long time, but by this time, the defenders have depleted their supplies and are returning to the fight unarmored in a desperate attempt to stop the destruction of their lighting tower. When it falls, all our arms now turn to the defenders, and fighting within the city ceases abruptly. Now we must hold the city for two hours against all counter attacks.

About 30 minutes later, we get word that an allied city is under strong attack, and their main gates are being battered by cannon fire. Under Darkfall siege rules, this city had been wagered against Andruk. While we were fighting our way into Andruk, enemy forces were besieging our ally, but had been unable to breach their defenses. If they are able to take and hold that city and successfully expel us from their city, the wager will be lost, and the alliance will lose a city. Reinforcements are desperately needed.

Our ally is too far distant from Andruk to be able to be reinforced over land, but their city is close to the KGB city of Khosgar, so the command is given, all KGB forces are to perform a bindstone recall to teleport back to Khosgar. After the recall, we mount up and ride for the beleaguered city. Their situation is getting desperate.

As we approach the city, we can hear the enemy cannons pounding the main gate. We approach unobserved from the southwest, under cover of a large stone outcropping that forms one flank of the city’s defenses. Rounding the hill, we see the massed formations of the enemy surrounding and defending their siege cannons. The KGB executes a cavalry charge directly through their position while the defenders from the city emerge to join the battle. It is a slaughter.

Part of the KGB forces remain while 30 or so of us start the long ride back up to Andruk. We no sooner start off when our lead riders spot a mounted force of 60 or more headed right for us. The counter attack has begun.

We wheel about and head back to the city with the attackers at our heals. We sweep into the city, dismount, and immediately join the defenders to repel the renewed attack. The attackers are getting desperate. If they do not take this city soon and then expel the besiegers of Andruk, Andruk will fall to our alliance.

The fight continues for over an hour, but the attackers are not able to make any headway, so they fall back. Their only hope now is to break the siege at Andruk so that the war will end in a tie. The KGB mounts up again and races back to Andruk, for everything will be decided there.

After a long ride, the KGB rides into the city to find the fight still in progress, but our allies have successfully held the city, and with new reinforcements, the end is inevitable. At the expiration of the two hour waiting period, the main city bindstone is now subject to attack and once it falls, the city is ours.

So, what can we conclude from this? Well, you can accept the Eurogamer review, written by a guy who had played the game for a few minutes, and from that, concluded that DarkFall is not a very good game. Or, you can read a report from a player who has only been playing the game for a few weeks, who is still very much a beginner in terms of skills developed so far, and yet who has now participated in some of the most amazing, enthralling online role playing combat that dwarfs anything I have taken part in over the last 10 years playing in multiple other games.

Darkfall still is not for everyone. It is still very difficult to get into the game for US players. It helps to consider that your first game related quest. Over time, that will improve, and once a North American server opens up, things will rapidly get better. They are a small company, and I sympathize with them regarding the distribution problems they currently have.

But with respect to game play, DarkFall has nothing to apologize for. There is nothing that can compare with it, in my opinion.

That is MY review. Take if for what it is worth.

This is why I don’t place much stock in game reviews. By necessity, game reviews deal with superficial things, like interface, graphics, and so forth, but they typically don’t have the time to play a game in depth to see how it holds up over the long haul, particularly with respect to entertainment value.

Interface is important, but I don’t play games in order to experience the niftiest interface. If the game isn’t fun, who cares if it offers a really good interface not to have fun with? Darkfall isn’t the prettiest game around, but offers game play that is head and shoulders above a very much prettier game like Vanguard, which was nearly unplayable, in my opinion.

You can learn a new interface, and you can overlook cosmetic blemishes. Further, interfaces can be refined, sometimes with 2nd party tools, and graphics/environment can be refined, but if the game doesn’t have fundamental entertaining game play, what is the point of even starting it?

So the point of my admittedly lengthy post was to provide stark contrast with the faulty Eurogamer review, which apparently concentrated on environment, controls, and cosmetic details, and probably covered their distribution problems as well. Instead, I concentrated on details of game play from a point of view that I think is more helpful to an average user. Should they care about the details of the character customization screens that they will use once for 10 minutes one time, and never again, or should they be interested in the meat of what is a central feature of the game that should they buy the game, they will take part in that activity time and time again?

That’s like buying a plasma or LCD large screen TV, and determining if it is any good or not by how well the setup instructions are written. If the setup description is so bad that you can never get to watching it, that is one thing. If they could, admittedly, be worded better, yet still let you get set up reasonably quickly, will that matter to you as you spend the next 5 or 6 years enjoying your new TV, which is why you bought the thing in the first place?

@Owain

You’ve mostly missed my point. For example, you say:

“but if the game doesn’t have fundamental entertaining game play, what is the point of even starting it”

Perhaps that’s exactly what the Eurogamer reviewer felt (and probably many others do as well). He felt Darkfall wasn’t a fundamentally entertaining game to play, and all your talk about the emergent guild-organized parts of the game are a step beyond the fundamentals.

FPS’s aren’t superficial because it’s immediately obvious what makes the game fun. Many games are deep and yet are immediately entertaining as well (RTS’s for example). Wanting a game to nail the basics upfront isn’t superficial; games are supposed to be fun, so they’ll be approached as entertainment products.

I think Angelworks has an excellent point: Adventurine should perhaps have done more to lend a hand to the reviewer, in order to be able to “fast forward” to what Darkfall enthusiasts feel are the strengths of the game. After all, reviewing a game is work, you can’t expect a reviewer to persist with the same amount of energy as a Darkfall fan.

geldonyetich’s post makes no sense to me at all. A civil war reenactment, except that you have swords, bows, magic, orcs, elves, and a ton of other stuff utterly unconnected with the civil war, and I can do it from home, on my computer, in a virtual world. No, that sounds nothing like a computer game to me. And the hundreds of people taking part in that activity should not have been having fun, because geldonyetich has already proclaimed that Darkfall is not a good game. Or something…

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard what you consider to be a good game. If you list one, will I start bleeding from the ears again like I did the other day when a poster mentioned that she had been trying without success to complete her WoW cooking achievement, in spite of trying the quest daily for a month, but dammit, the Kibbles and Bits recipe just WILL NOT DROP!!!11!1

I would cut my guts our with a rusty butter knife before subjecting myself to THAT…

Owain :
geldonyetich’s post makes no sense to me at all. A civil war reenactment, except that you have swords, bows, magic, orcs, elves, and a ton of other stuff utterly unconnected with the civil war

If you get past the first sentence and into to the second and third paragraphs of what I wrote, I thoughtfully provided a description of what part of that analogy was supposed to apply and why it pertains to me.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard what you consider to be a good game.

Chronicles of Spellborn received a couple mentions from me yesterday.

If you list one, will I start bleeding from the ears again like I did the other day when a poster mentioned that she had been trying without success to complete her WoW cooking achievement, in spite of trying the quest daily for a month, but dammit, the Kibbles and Bits recipe just WILL NOT DROP!!!11!1

We all hate the grind, but considering we’re all in agreement that Darkfall Online has a massive brickwall macro-happy grind only alleviated by exploits that the earlier players were able to partake of, this is not a point in your favor.

Guy, it depends what you mean by fundamental entertaining play.

If the reviewer logs in, runs the first few quests and gives up because he isn’t instantly in gaming bliss, he’s too stupid to be reviewing games for Eurogamer. Those quest make up the tutorial he complained was non existant. They hold your hand, telling you how to fight things, where to go to fight things, and where to sell stuff when you get back from fighting things. They go on to introduce crafting, harvesting, magery, and other game features.

A tutorial isn’t the game. It’s used to teach the interface, lay the groundwork for later game play. As it it, in essence, the reviewer was reading “Dick and Jane”, and complaining that it wasn’t “Macbeth”, even though, if he ad stuck around for more than 10 minutes, maybe the game playing Macbeth equivalent would have eventually been available to him.

A fundamental part of all RPG games involves starting weak, and working yourself up over time as your character develops. An FPS is structured differently because you don’t have that development over time, and the game isn’t persistant.

The other part of MMORPG involves the community aspects. Again, an FPS typically doesn’t support that in game directly, although many players form their own ‘guilds’ and play together exclusively in order to dominate other players. But guilds and clans are a fundamental part of MMORPGs, and if you ignore that, you are screwing up. As such, when Dartwick complains about his friends experence, saying, “And every time they try to solo they get radared,” my immediate response is, “no shit – did they learn anything from that, or are they still trying to play Darkfall like Diablo?”

Would any of the WoW fans consider a review of that game fair if it only cover character generation, and the first newbie quests, but never gets into the team quests or the level 80 content? The guy never broke the level 1 equivalent, and he wants to talk about fundamental gameplay aspects of Darkfall?

Pfffft!!

@Owain

So your saying an mmo reviewer should spend the next 6 months to a year reviewing every mmo that crosses their desk? Because that’s how long it takes for some of these games to really get going sadly. I think honestly what you are looking for is for the reviewer to be an experienced veteran of the game. Face it – these are hard games to review. I don’t think Eurogamer gave Darkfall a fair shake, but what else do you expect when the publisher/developer drops them into the starting zone without a lick of guidance – Adveturine should have known better.

I also disagree with the interface statement. I spent a long time (about a year) fighting the Lineage 2 interface – great game, but the most horrid controls and ui ever conceived. So much so – it was very high on my list of things to persuade me to leave. So yeah, kinda being able to log in, cast spells on stuff and move about is something that is very very very important to an mmo. If you can’t get past the UI to start with – you can’t play the game as intended.