f13.net

No really (http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/devjournals/darkfalljournals/4883-Darkfall-Dev-Journal-26-Questions-Answered).

/me dives for cover

Numpty alert!

"6. Magic vs. Melee combat.

Pound for pound melee has more power but this is not a pound for pound game. Darkfall is a real-time game requiring player skill, and the attacks are aimed. It is not a reaction game, it is not a turn based game, it's not a game where you sit there button-mashing and trading blows with someone. Nor is this a game where you're pigeonholed into being a magician, or a tank etc.
The spell user could switch at any point to a two handed axe and the melee fighter might switch to a bow or to a staff and cut down the fleeing opponent. The Darkfall answer to this question is that it depends on the circumstance, the player position, player skill, readiness, tactics etc.

"

They tell us a lot of what the game is not... SO WTF IS THE GAME :)

Abandon all hope* ye who enter here (http://www.darkfallonline.com/)

* and logic, and objectivity, and faith, and just about anything... Duke Nukem 3D will launch before this title does (and yes, I saw the trailer, and no, I don't think it proves anything).

Am I the only one who really enjoys "archetypes" or "classes" ? Seems many are fuzzing about "in our game, you are not forced into a class!!" like its a blessing. I really dislike the idea that another class can have the same spell / ability as mine. I guess this is my RPG loving side that determines this.

On Darkfall : I'll believe em when I see it, until then: Vaporware  :drill:

You look like Signe. I'm confused. Hello Kitty. Ah, yours isn't bleeding. Carry on.

Such a great choice of game name.

Durchfall (http://www.dict.cc/german-english/Durchfall.html)

Weeks-long betas are so FoTM.

Hi.  I detest class-based systems.

We can be mortal enemies now. ;D

Only five year delay between the original announcement of open beta and this "final" one. My hopes are high

I actually appreciate classes and skill trees and archetypes, but then again I am a huge fan of hack and slash. I only get uppity though when multiple classes have my class specific spell or ability. I also get grumpy when they make a race specific skill race specific, I'd rather it be a race/one class specific skill/spell. 

As for Darkfall - been waiting for this for a while now.. hopefully it will be released this year. My foot has gotten tired of tapping.

I hate to say it but with no real or consistent progress reports coming from a game, it makes it hard for an organized guild to do forward planning. I know in our case we devoted a lot of manpower to both Warhammer and AOC to prepare for guild launches, and the sudden emergence of a Darkfall release won't change our plans. Instead its sorta like "wow that's nice, but we've moved on to other things".

Maybe some other guilds that have waited around forever will go to it, but our 2008 plans are just too invested in WAR/AOC to get side tracked with this now.

Between WAR and WoW:WotLK later this year, I don't think an actual emergence of a Darkfall release is going to change anything.

(http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews32/a%20lol/ttile%20lol.jpg)

Given the lack of hype outside of the core of rabid fanbois, going head to head with two powerhouse releases like WAR and WoTLK seems like a deeply unwise move. Maybe the mysterious Aventurine finally got tired of bankrolling a project going nowhere and want to recoup some capital? Even if the game was 100% done and super spectaular, I don't see how a beta of a matter of weeks will draw enough attention to the game to draw much attention away from the other two launches.

Also, I feel that the niche market this game is ostensibly pitched at peaked about 8-10 years ago, and cannot be competitive in the current MMO market.

Actually the hype is not small, it is somewhat big. Correction, it was for a while. I constantly see (saw) some threads pop up on forums questioning Darkfall and people being hyped about it. What happened is after tons of promises and nothing to really show for it, no solid facts nor anything the hype has died and people are just "meh" about it. I think their hype hurt them much more than any lack of.

The hype for Darkfall was never big. Not in the sense of the gaming market. Not in the sense of MMOGs. New Cottage Cheese varieties from Kraft probably get more hype. And cottage cheese sucks.

Period.

And of those that remain interested, I imagine most will end up turned off when they realize that the promises of "everything, and the kitchen sink" gameplay from the devs is missing.  I.E. no naval warfare, and so on. 

More will leave when they realize that they're not the ass-kicking machines they thought they were, and they're griefed into oblivion, after having all their gear stripped from them when they get jumped a group while fighting some mob.

Also, df.exe.  :awesome_for_real:

Well, New Cottage Cheese is imba so thats not fair. Darkfall got a lot of attention from the PvP'ers during their glory days where "they would do right where all did wrong, just different". I remember reading they had 100.000 thousand "somethings" (beta applications? Forum members? can't remember) during a period which is a lot for... Nothing.

However I'd like to see it finished, just so I can

(http://megaline.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/simpsons_nelson_haha2.jpg)

One would assume that a "few weeks" of "beta" will "suffice" for a full PvP "game", right?

Did I "overdo it"?

Notice how Iain's buggered off from this thread!

The only real time I see DF hype is on the Darkfall forums, and the only time I end up on the darkfall forums is when I see the occasional "lol, failfall" thread and get directed so some overly-passionate rant about something most people would consider trivial. The forumfallers seem like they could kick up a shitstorm over anything. Any other information (not hype) I see is the sporadic link to a TTH article where a Dev proudly announces some bit of news, generally along the lines of "we managed to patch trees into the game this month, they are mostly green by the way".

It was never big. All the hype came from a tiny hardcore of forum warriors. Every time anyone mentioned FFA PvP games, they'd pop up and make a lot of noise about Darkfall. It was always the same people though making a disproportionate amount of noise.

When loud morons are making a lot of noise, like Grunk, it does not represent any sort of hype. I think that's where Photek got confused.

What do Darkfall and Peter Pan have in common?  :awesome_for_real:

You people are harsh. We should be cheering and championing each and every attempted MMOG that comes out.

Cause they are gonna die anyway.

One shadowbane launch was enough for me.

Um they will?  Horizons, shadowbane, and a lot of others prove otherwise.

You consider Horizons and Shadowbane to be alive?   :ye_gods:

Shadowbane is still quite alive.  Horizons is still running and probably making money with the very few people they have playing.

Them being dead would mean their official servers were shut off.

I can't imagine that Horizons is making money.  Hardly anyone plays.  I still have a friend who has a sub and he says the game is almost completely dead.  There was a bit of a surge when SB went free but it died, then another when they did the wipe but that'll wear off, too.  I consider them both pretty much almost very nearly dead.  But especially Horizons. 

By making money I don't mean they are bringing barrels of cash to the bank every month, but it really doesn't take that many subs to maintain the servers and a skeleton dev crew. 

Yes, MMOs are never going to evolve on the backs of diku-"but better"-clones that didn't meet their business targets. This genre proves you can guarantee 500 people will like something. But that's not going to pay the bills by itself.

And I'd very much like to see HZ's balance sheet. I doubt they're even out of the hole of initial investment yet, unless the change over in companies somehow dissolved that.

Well, for someone who has followed this MMO for the last four or so years, I am just interested in seeing a release at this point.  The game sounds more and more like EVE in a fantasy setting, but a FPS EVE... so maybe more like Jumpgate part 2?  In any case, my guild still plays that dead Shadowbane game more than any other MMO out.  Perhaps Aoc and/or WAR will change that, but I don't know how you can give those two a bigger chance of success than Darkfall given the last 5-6 years of MMO releases.

(http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Video/050615/nn_potter_schiavo_050615.300w.jpg)

Oi!  You are a sick fuck!   :ye_gods:

 :hello_thar:

That was tacky.  Even for f13.

It's only tacky because its in MMOG. Have you seen politics or serial business lately?

That whole story enrages me.  :uhrr:

Anything I could have responded with doesn't matter now with that previous picture post.

Oi. God even my other statements would have just sounded bad.

So forget it.

Half my posts are there.  As I said, even for f13...

I think the moratorium on Schiavo jokes was lifted like a year ago. I mean really, people, it's offensive? REALLY?

Internet.

Once more:

Internet.

It is, however, a pretty apt comparison to shitty MMOGs.

Well played.

I just keep hearing the teacher from Charlie Brown.

That was d4rkj3di's best post ever.  And I don't even mean that in a left-handed insulting sort of way.  It was well-played indeed.

 :pedobear: All the credit goes to Shaar (http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=64036) for finding this bit of news.

It looks like Darkfall will go into beta in October because they signed a deal with a company by the name of AudioVisual (http://www.capital.gr/news.asp?Details=563580) to release the game in 50 countries and there will be a "pilot program" in October. i believe the devs said they wanted their beta to be brief (but I maybe confusing them with the devs making Mortal Online). If so the game will release in November.


I'm personally itching to play warhammer after learning so much about it this past month but I'll forget about if Aventurine makes an official announcement before the time I expect to purchase the game.

(http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h292/ahoythematey/avatar_walken-1.jpg)

(http://mythicalblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/rickastley007wallpaper1.jpg)

Ok, I laughed.

They announced that AudioVisual thingy some time ago.  I just reckoned it was a ruse to get some money out of some brain dead investor with more dollars than sense. 

Oh, and:

(http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/08_02/VapourTrailsAP_468x306.jpg)

Looks like they just opened beta sign ups for the 100th time.

http://beta.darkfallonline.com

Along with a new video:

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=64217

150mb h.264 version:

http://files.filefront.com/df+gameplaymp4/;11651620;/fileinfo.html

Damn you LC you beat me to it. Now I have to edit my post by saying McCain just picked Palin as his VP.  :ye_gods:

I've never seen a calculated move so stupid and brilliant at the same time.

I got all you fuckers beat.


Oh, I got a private message 4 years ago? What was it?


Hmmm. Moron? That doesn't sound like me. I'm more creative.

Forums must've been wiped. Can't find the post. Unless I only made one post and it was only "Moron."


Holy crap. You can sell anything in this industry. Wow. The lead guys on this project are some cool cats though, so best of luck to them.

If you saw their last video you can skip ahead to 12:30 in this one. Some of the stuff after 12:30 looks pretty cool.

The archers at around 1:50 look like members of the Village People.

Everything about Darkfall looks good, and sounds good.  I'm not worried about that, but I am terrified at how it will play out when it goes live.  I don't want another Shadowbane, I want a PvP+ MMO to succeed.

I'm not gonna lie, those floating battle tank things are pretty rad.

I think it's cute how when the wall or building disappears due to damage, the people standing on it just kind of fall out of the air.

Is it just me, or does it look like a spanking paddle is an official weapon in Darkfall?

Good trailer.

And yet, I'm fairly certain there will be an altogether different kind of butthurt when this is all said and done. 

Zing?

You guys should start a fanzine.  Really.  Except for Schildy.  He is the anti-fan.

We shall call it Darkfallen, because we have fallen in love with Darkfall. We'll spend months talking about how Darkfall will revolutionise the MMO genre, is finally PvP done right, on how it will avoid all of the pitfalls of earlier MMOs based solely on information provided by the devs and justify how spending 8 years on the title was necessary in order for it to achieve true greatness.

Then, when Darkfall launches and isn't raptor-riding robot jesus, we will at first deny that Darkfall isn't what we dreamed it to be in our heads, then turn in a feeding frenzy on everything associated with Darkfall and its developers. How dare they deny us what they promised! How the lying lies those liars told us scarred us! How dare they sacrifice the vision of Darkfall to the altar of WoW in order to make something grubby like money when they could have been making pure gaming heaven! We will then spend the next five years talking about what Darkfall could have been, if only they'd got it right like they promised us ...

Truly, it would be a wild and crazy ride.

But, you know, I'm already stalking Cryptic's past and future output. Someone else will have to take up the challenge.

I have to say it. Graphics aside. That combat looks fun. And boats, and land boats, and castles that go "boomb".

I'm sorry, didn't you get your fill of the Vanguard forum edition? You should be able to spot a steaming pile of shit from a mile away now.

Apparently I needed to add more green.

What Castle? Something from that video or another one?

I ask because the video from above looks like more of the same, like WAR2 or something, or WAR if it began development last year. I swear, it's probably my age, but all these videos look the same to me these days. The only thing I learned from the one above is that it appears there's some sort of collision detection in the game. That would be cool except like other MMOs, the world is so Unreal-like oversized that blocking anything matters for nothing.

It looked pretty green to me!

Y - M - C - A - A - ARROOOOWS!

Video looks nice and all, and while it did appear to be in-game, I don't think it was an indication of actual gameplay.  They seemed to have some sort of god mode going during a lot of the scenes, except the melee parts, where it was 2 to 3 hits, and splat.

The biggest concern I had after watching the video was whether or not the last scene was scripted, or not.  I'm pretty sure it was, but I've learned never to underestimate the stupidity of MMO developers.  If they did include 1 hit kills, in a game with full loot, then they're just doomed.

Did you even watch it? It's Shadowbane with vehicles.

The guy was running away. It could be if your back is to the enemy you take a lot more damage (makes sense). I'm pretty sure they take into account things like momentum (jumping off a wall etc.) or if you attack from a higher position than your enemy you do more damage, it's not too far of a stretch to think if you run like a pussy you will get your head lopped off.

Overall the trailer looked good to me. All I care about is the gameplay and while the animations sucked they won't detract from the game if it is fun. Everyone I showed the trailer to so far has been impressed with the gameplay.

Well, we can be fairly sure that this will launch and quietly sink to obscurity within months.

But I think we do have to give them credit for trying something different. We all piss and moan about the WoW-clone rut other games have gotten into. Here they've clearly put their budget into systems - castles, construction, ships and ship-based combat, mounted combat, flying beasts. So I'll be following this if only to get the details of the design.

And ya, the graphics are a bit unfortunate. The animations look just a bit off. It shows how far things have come in the last few years.

I totally believe that all they do is fake videos to get investor money and if I'm wrong I don't care.

It took one hit to kill that guy, but there's no indication what his health level was at that point. If i took enough damage that one further hit meant death, in the game with full loot, i'd be running away like a bitch too.

edit: videos are clearly fake btw, there's no single person bunnyhopping.

If Darkfall actually becomes available in america I will take one for the team and sub to it, because I am absolutely certain that comedy will ensue.

Estimated time for Bat Country to stay in this game.

One fucking month like every other game.

Some of you baby killers here will love it though. I'm sure.

Looking forward to ganking your asses

Be sure to use the spanking paddle.

You think there's going to be a Bat Country in Darkfall, Rake? What? Are you retarded?

(Well, there might be, but I'm not endorsing that shit.)

It would help if you were baiting people into a game that they'd actually want to play.

No, I can't imagine Bat Country being in this game, either.  I'm sure, if this game actually comes out in any playable form - which I seriously doubt- some people might play, but probably not F13 as a group.  I'm not sure I see a game on the horizon that would inspire a decent sized Bat Country again.  Hopefully, there'll be one out there before I get my Holodeck.

And Rake, Dude.  What the fuck is up with that sig?  Dude.  Srsly.

They said no US servers at release because they lack a US publisher. So all Americans can expect to see their head flying off their shoulders before the enemy even appears on screen.


Someone should tell them about Acclaim.

Sorry for the baiting, but I am holding on to some hope that there could be a game to end the drudgery of the MMO as we've known it.

I'm getting too jaded as a game player. So, I've kept Darkfall as my great white hope.

If it sucks balls and fails miserably I'm gonna be pissed.

Maybe dreams are best never reached and they should string it out another 8 years or so. Reality never quite matches up I suppose.



Sig removed

Yes, it confuses me when people talk about this game as one that's going to be released or at even the outside chance released and playable.

All of this praise and hope (and discussion of mechanics) for something that really doesn't exist...   :awesome_for_real:

You're confused because you're jaded and biased.

What happened with the clan beta sucked but the devs said the game is feature complete, their publisher announces expectations for beta in October and they release a video with many visual flaws but does manage to show off many of their features.

If you are really itching to prove Darkfall is a scam you can fly out to Greece on your own dime and find their offices. They don't turn away visitors.

I think it will surpass shadowbane in unplayability if it ever makes it to beta. I love a good train wreck, and this one is hauling a load of dynamite.

Don't do anything naughty!  (without telling me first so I can watch)

That's the point though, nobody would ever care enough about Darkfall to do this, except for the odd diehard fanboi, and they have a whole other agenda :p

On another note, I ran into a Gnome mage called Signe in AV earlier.

It wasn't me.  I am not a gnome.  I don't know where AV is.

I'll admit it; I like the video.

Rough spots? Scores. Questions about gameplay? I have dozens, at least.

But the mechanics they displayed rekindled my flagging interest. Presumably, that was the intent. So mission accomplished in my case.

No, I'm not convinced it will work. But I like that they're trying, and I hope they keep trying.

Damned if you do/don't paradox. In July we got a report from someone who visited their offices because it coincided with a vacation his friends planned and he has been ragging on the game before hand because of the waiting. Not everyone visiting the devs has to be a fanboy.

The graphics are too shytty in this game for it to fail.  :oh_i_see:
Seeing as how no one here cares about graphics right?  Odds are in our favor for a game that concentrates on gameplay rather than visual bling.  To this end, I'm optimistic... but the wacked out graphics and animations will be a turnoff to most of the world (especially america, which is probably the real reason there's no US pubby).

The only way you can have a game like Darkfall is with crappy graphics unless you want AoCish whiners complaining that their rig breaks down.  I'll be impressed if their world is even slightly prettier than WW2O's, which still breaks rigs even though it's like playing tank command on an atari.  And Darkfall's world is supposed to be larger, but I'm pretty positive it isnt.  The largest fantasy world yes.  The largest world, no.

Was that dwarf side-stepping cannonballs on the docks?

I like what they're trying to do, I just know they can't do it.

The video I saw seemed to showcase all of the features they said were in the game. They may not be polished, but they are there and they seem to be working as intended. I don't see how that sets the game up for failure. If it fails it will be due to some other issue, but it won't be the gameplay and it won't be the graphics. All that remains to be seen is if their servers/client can handle large scale combat. If DF pulls that off it will succeed, if it doesn't then it will fail. Hopefully the beta will give a good indication of that.

Personally I hope it succeeds. When I first started getting into MMOs I thought games like DF would be the future and instead we got WoW. I am glad it satisfies the needs of 10 million+ people, but for me if DF fails I am done with online gaming and most likely gaming in general. Single player games for me haven't been fun since the SNES.

Well, you're certainly krazy.

I'm debating whether this will equal or exceed the cluster fuck that was Dark and Light.

No-one remembers Dark and Light. Let's hope Darkfall is spectacularly memorable, one way or the other.

I'd like to see something worthwhile, honestly. It seems every iteration of fail to date has tried to reinvent the wheel.

I'm expecting another Wish, personally.

Yea, they have not done enough publicity about how revolutionary and genre-defining their game is going to be... for the last year or more... for it to be a D&L.  Their fans have been pushing it for a while, but Aventurine has been nice and quite until recently.  Time will tell of course, but if it is just a slightly polished, skill-based Shadowbane then I will expect my guild to be spending some time there, especially once it goes free to play like SB!

Mention of Wish always makes me sad.  I miss my chicken, Feathers.  She always had an egg for me.  Probably because threatening to harvest her with a sickle would scare anything enough to lay an egg.

:sad_red_panda:

I do, actually. As an engine without a game.

I still have a bunch of the "sightseeing" videos on my hard drive. I had crazy dreams of it being the next AC1.

I use the same description for AC2.

Dark and Light was powered by the BigWorld engine, so it really WAS an engine looking for a game.

I think 38 Studios and some others have picked up BigWorld (a former BigWorld dev set up InterZone and is making a soccer MMO using BigWorld, for instance) so perhaps it will actually create a game. One day.

Incorrect. Dark and light used the Vworld  (http://www.vworldpowered.com/Gb/GB.htm)Rendering engine, and the big world server tech. Everything that was in Dark and light was already in the vWorld Engine.

Ahh, okay - I knew BigWorld was involved somehow.

Here's a list of BigWorld projects (http://www.bigworldtech.com/games/index.php) that I'm linking just to show that someone has named a title Twinity.  :uhrr:

To all those people who say the devs haven't made a damn thing in 7 years aside from videos (looking at you  Signe) want to retract that statement before playtesting begins?

Via MArketwatch (http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/aventurine-launch-new-game-gnis/story.aspx?guid={9362A09A-FF00-44CA-9148-877B0773E910}&dist=hppr)

I'll stop beating this dead horse now.

Maybe when playtesting actually begins.

Who's going to publish them for their 50-country launch? Or is this a website from which everyone downloads a Latin-language installer?

excoquo ab contundo!   :awesome_for_real:

I know the translation's probably way off, but I'll be arsed if I care enough to make it perfect.

Err, "to honor counting from to pound"?  :oh_i_see:

Why is he looking at me?  I didn't say nutthin.  (http://www.invision.smileyville.net/smilies/girl%20(25).gif)

Nobody calls out our Signe! Get em boys!

 :angryfist:
 :tantrum:
:mob:

You should. A company nobody cares about signs and releases a press release from another company nobody cares about. Hurrah.... :why_so_serious:

There's not all that much of 2008 left!

chop chop, I want some fail.

No. Fuck off.

winnar

I know.  K9 is a cutie.  I would scratch his tummy but he seems to have bolts and bugs.

They now claim that external beta began on Monday. (http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=70992) I hope this means we are closer to those fanboy tears.

They must be seconds away from investor money and international waters!

Signe, your new avatar is scary. :(

I like it.

Reading that it says they are testing different hardware configs and they are NOT playtesting, so what they are testing internet checkers on their servers?

I would imagine it's something like this:

(http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/7207/dfbza6.jpg)

Oh, come on. That's just being unfair, now. It's probably something more like this:

(http://www.thenonentity.com/dfo.jpg)

You can now watch actual gameplay in the worst possible quality.

http://darkfallworld.com/node/125

That UI looks awful.

Some interesting things to be seen in that bottom video.

There's a skill that is named s_Launch.

Skill level 74.0
Skill advancement rate 0.0
Skill importance 0.0


Also, "You injured something the something for 8.4000001 points of Health"


Yeah this game is real close to release quality. Not to mention the awesome headbanging animations as you ride around on a mount. That won't get old fast!

Oh, this is going to be so much fun.  Not to play, just to watch.

If this ever releases, I'm going to buy it.  It's going to be fucking awful, and I might not ever subscribe, but theres no way I can miss this piece of history.

I bought Mourning and then sent it to Schildy for his collection of WTF items.  I'm sure he keeps it in a special place under his Margarita glass. 

(http://www.gottwinz.net/forums/images/smilies/margarita.gif)

They announced that open beta would end before December. That gives them 6 weeks of beta if it starts next week. If I remember correctly Shadowbane was in beta for a over a year, and still wasn't playable at launch. It's a shame that you can't purchase life insurance for a mmorpg.

(http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb151/racofer/riso4ielt5.gif)

I propose that we henceforth refer to this game as "darkfail".

I see your Darkfail and raise you Failfall.

edit: that video is like a showcase of how not to do walking animations. Also I noticed the 3-4s "Cluster Load" as the character entered a city.... on an empty server. I guess that's representative of how a real darkfall server would be, but it seems like their seamless world isn't actually so seamless.

Or maybe I just don't understand how these things are supposed to work.

Everyone skipped over the presenter calling Darkfall the first online game to have links to Lord of the Rings then?

No, I heard that but then he said something like "made in Greece by Norwegians".  So, yeah, he might win that point amongst much eyeball rolling.

I see that and raise you Failfail. 

When did you all start being such haters.

Trammel.

I like how you didn't post that in green. 

 :grin:

Or even through in a question mark. Like he already knew the answer!

(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/changewecanbelieve1224806942.png)

 :uhrr:

The only change I believe in is the kind that jingles in my pocket.

Darkfall, Ready to go in December :ye_gods:


Link (http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=77544)

Huh?  They went to a show and didn't do or say anything new.  They will end the beta that hasn't started yet at the start of next month?  I would be confused if I thought this was even going to happen. 

The way they handle things I'm guessing this means they are now hiring people to handle marketing tasks. :|

You've been proven wrong ALREADY by the announcement of a beta at all, Signe.

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/201105/300px-Train_wreck_at_Montparnasse_1895.jpg)

Uh oh.  I feel confusion lurking!

So. Want to retract that statement before playtesting begins?

I've never heard of Athens Digital Week. Also, to what extent are Q3 and WC3 seriously competitive? I thought both of those died off years ago for competitive multiplayer?

Anyhow, failwreck ahoy!

Not until the Easter Bunny slides down my chimney and leaves me a pot of gold!

Signe! Come PVP with me when Darkfall comes out.

We'll kill rabbits.

oooo.  Wabbits!

(http://www.democraticwarrior.com/forum/images/smilies/hunter.gif)                   (http://www.democraticwarrior.com/forum/images/smilies/bunnydance.gif)

Some beta reports are coming in through official channels. (http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?p=1967927#post1967927)

So awesome.

Heavily censored fanboy report from testing starts with the phrase.

:grin:

If the reports were only coming from fanboys it wouldn't be censorship...come on you can do better than that.

Where else are they coming from?  Tasos?  He is his own fanboi and he tells porkie pies, no?  There isn't anyone in this beta.  There is a cramped, smelly room somewhere with a bunch of fat stoners eating feta cheese and Lutefisk and seeing who they can fool into giving them some developer money so they buy the latest Gogoroth album.

Careful.  You're already showing you aren't hardcore enough to deserve the privilege of buying Darkfall.  I wish the Devs were going to personally interview and sign off on every potential customer before that customer could play.  You know, to ensure that everyone is totally hardcore.

The devs want carebears in the game as well. They are hoping that the the variety of gaming options draws them in while the alignment system adds to the societal building elements of open ffa servers to the point they aren't discouraged by the bullies.

After what I saw with Eve's factional warfare I think what the devs should do next if their initial plans flop is to make a mechanism that makes grouping a natural process from the beginning sort of like public quests or facebook.


Signe - If the devs were interested in scamming us they wouldn't put up an advisory not to buy beta accounts. (http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=81010)

wat?

This is wierd.

Yes!  It's brilliant!   :grin:

Signe! Our dream of rabbit hunting will soon be a reality!

I am excited. I will even stop playing WoW for a few hours to play this if I get a beta at some point!

Ok so I just watched the most recent 17 minute long video of the game

It looks...well, it looks like they chose quantity over quality. Everything looks incredibly bad, like, visually, but at the same time they have a lot of features available (supposedly! don't know how good they work yet or at all).

It really does look bad though. Animations, graphics, visual style and character models. It all looks like swamp poop.

I really can't tell if they posted that to try and sound more 'real' in people's impression of the game, or they posted that to brag how hardcore the game is.

After being in a different beta where a division occurred between testers because the starting area mobs were too hard I believe this statement is real.

MMO players who don't play FPS games really have a difficult time getting used to mobs actually trying to fight as if they were PvPers.

I'm actually scared of Darkfall's mobs. I was pretty good in Quake 3 but my limits was reached when trying to practice against nightmare bots. All I asked for in MMO is for mobs to be as remotely challenging as Quake bots and the devs over did it here.  :heartbreak: :cthulu:

Man, I got nothing. So much snark, so little bandwidth...

Anybody who signed up for the beta on a game that's probably never going to see the light of day is a fanboy.  Are you saying there isn't a NDA, I'd normally check that out before asking, but, Darkfall.  When's it being released again?

Why are we still following or talking about this again? I'm confused.

Because mutantmagnet has emerged the Gutboy of DF and I think we all long for the inevitable crash  :awesome_for_real:

The only thing funnier than DArkfall never being released, would be watching the reaction from the faithful if it ever managed to limp out the gate.

mutantmagnet is clearly a delusional weirdo.

I meant the rest of you.

Hmm aside from Signe I never did anything to anyone here to warrant this type of attack. If you are going to be a douche I hope you're as much of one IRL as you are online because it's pathetic if you have to puff yourself up over the internet.


I only talk about Darkfalll because it is something in development and looks it is worth keeping tabs on and your (yes you schild as welll as a few others) criticisms can be insightful when they aren't weighed down by a bloated obnoxious ego.

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/miscellany/ot/ape.jpg)

You didn't do any thing to me.  I didn't take anything you said to me as mean spirited or personal.  I'm good that way. 

haaaaaaaahahahahahaha. Well that clinches it. When you're not beating up on the poor internet people with unwarranted attacks, how do you spend your free time Schild? :why_so_serious:

Well that's some additional good news for the day  :awesome_for_real:

I want to see if WAR maintains the title of worst MMO release of 2008. Sure, Darkfall will probably have to set their player PCs on fire to reach the same level of disappointed expectations, but I've got faith.

... plus it would finally end the "Watch for Darkfall! It's got everything you ever want in a MMO!" discussions. That's worth something.

I play games and gauge market reaction to MMOG development and then call it as I see it.

I wasn't beating him up, I was just stating the obvious. He knows he's a delusional weirdo, that's why he took offense.

If he knows it is he still delusional?

Let's ask Joseph Heller.

He says yes.

At least my game is "Pro" as in people pay money and can log in a do stuff.

I took offense because you're off base. You should stick to analyzing games and not people.

If you get offended by delusional weirdo, you aren't cut out for here.  There is no nice policy on internet. You are only proving Schild right if you think there is.

<insert gratuitous insult here>

I'm pretty sure I'm right.

I'm confused by tazel's greif tittle.  Am I sure he's not Ookii?  Or possibly Trippy?  People are becoming other people.

If you want to refute an off the cuff comment about being a delusional weirdo, don't respond with a comment that suggests even weirder psychological scars. Those internet meany toughguy poopyhead jerks ::COUGH::everyone::AHEM:: will probably just laugh a bit more.

As for the game itself, I'll believe it when I see it. We all read some of the rave beta reviews from Warhammer and the obvious conclusion is that they better reflect what each person wants to see in the game, rather than what is actually in it. Specially when filtered through the rose-tinted glasses of a closed beta filled with hardcore fans and a developer saying AND JUST GUESS WHAT THE PEOPLE ARE SAYING!!!

I'm going to stick with my theory that games of this nature died out simply because no one wants to play them anymore. The hardcore PVP genre has gone the way of the niche-dinosaur, and we have the PVP of today all for a reason. "UO in 3d" is probably exactly what Darkfall is trying to be, and if it doesn't mess that up then it'll just be filled with a portion the oldskool MMO players who still maintain that UO is the best and only true MMO out there.

No, filled with players who maintain that UO was the best/only MMO out there until evil filthy carebears convinced them to ruin it for no good reason, and ever since they've been waiting for another game to descend from the heavens and show all those fucking carebears what for, all while ignoring the fact that EVE has already done the 'meaningful PVP' thing far better than the likes of Darkfall ever will.

Get your narrative right.

Eve has certain quirks that make it very different from the intended features of Darkfall. They would make one game more acceptable than the other in peoples' eyes.

Eve isn't an interactive experience like an FPS.
Eve's gate system strictly defines a lot of how players move around in the game.
Hot dropping and cynos are common in Eve while teleporting in DF would be rare, expensive and limited.
Eve is sci fi where you play as a spaceship (the latter will change)
PVE missions are abysmal
The AI and physics isn't nowhere as sophisticated as Darkfall might be.
Eve offers "infinite" space to explore.
The crafting system is light-years ahead of Darkfall with the introduction of tech 3
The economic mechanisms are most likely going to be different.
You can't actively train skills in Eve.
You are threatened with skill loss as well as equipment loss if you aren't careful.
Eve's borders are defined by high sec, low sec, 0.0 while Darkfall's borders will be determined by bindstones.
NPC Factions in Eve have 0 influence. Darkfalll's npcs supposedly form their own cities if left unchecked. Couple that with alignment and faction is clearly something that can influence player behavior.


This list could actually go on a bit longer but my point has been made. If Eve has done meaningful pvp right I wouldn't see people make comments in the Eve forums about leaving the game for Darkfall and some of these people have invested a lot of time in Eve. One of them was a CSM which was a bit surprising for myself. 

Eve was actually released.

I'm a bit confused. You've played Darkfall?

In what way is EvE 'not an interactive experience'? Do you actually understand the meaning of the words in that sentence?

Well done on coming up with a laundry list of superficial differences between two different games. You have successfully proved that EvE and Darkfall are not the same game. You haven't however even begun to address the actual point that was put to you - that EvE has done meaningful PvP correctly and that Darkfall probably will not approach that level of competence in its field.

Didn't even deserve that much of a response.

Arthur nailed it, Eve was released.

Can't 99% of Darkfall's features be summed up by "supposedly"?

We can go one level more basic:  Eve exists. 

While Darkfall may end up as a contender for worst MMO release of the year, I wouldn't bet on said year being 2008.  Also, WAR isn't the worst MMO release of 2008.  It's just the one with the most wasted potential.

Yeah, what is the dealio with that Tasos claiming that the "game" will absolutely release in December when he's allegedly just started closed beta like right now almost?  And what's with the dealio that people actually believe that and don't think he's some sort of scamming lunatic?  I don't understand people at all!  Thank God for husbands and cats!  Mostly cats.

(dealio is my word for the day)

Do Balloons and confetti fall from the ceiling every time you say it?

The word of the day should have been 'morons'.

(http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l1/rwp80/Darkfall%20Ad%20Banners/DFadsigbanner5.jpg)

DArkfall Faithful - Believe Anything.

"In the largest RPG world ever made"

I'm pretty sure that Vanguard demonstrated that size isn't everything.

It completes the old-school UO/EQ1/AC1 narrative. mutantmagnet is a transplant from 2001 when the mere promise of a maybesomeday MMO had features that made it's dominance over game X a foregone conclusion. This includes the list of "what Eve isn't". You could replace "Eve" with "UO" and almost every line would work.

It's a nice trip down memory lane though...

Yeah, and if he's like the last DArkfall nut, you can't even troll him into talking about Trammel, as he never played UO.

That title still goes to DnL.

But does it have fetusapults?

Do you? I did say it's not as interactive as an FPS, not that there isn't any interaction at all.



I prefer some of the ideas of what DF offers over what Eve ended up turning out to be but I'm not sold yet if DF is going to be the mmo for me, I just find it interesting enough to keep an eye on. If it doesn't release I'm not going to care that much about it but from what I'm seeing I'm encouraged that a product is being made. As for 2001 I never played UO/EQ/AC. Multiplayer on the pc was a heavy diet of RTS and FPS. The first mmo I played before I even heard of the term two years later was Runescape, unless you count Utopia which was text based.

No you didn't.

I don't know.  Even if they could somehow manage to rush the game out before the end of December it would pretty much be suicide since they wouldn't have time for any sort of marketing campaign, nor would they have time to actually sell the game to any retailers (none of whom currently have any listings for Darkfall on their websites).  Their launch would consist entirely of selling direct downloads to people like mutantmagnet.

Velorath, release window doesn't matter. Game was sent to die from day 1. I like some of the folks here, but that place is DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED.

Well, yeah.  It's Darkfall.

What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse. And not attracting an audience comprised entirely of fuckshits.

I can't wait for Darkfall release. Or beta. Whatever comes first to those of us in the good old USA.

It's going to be quite a spectacle to behold. You could compare it to a pony show at one of those old redneck circuses, if you know what I mean.

It should be painfully obvious to anyone Aventurine doesn't plan to have a marketing campaign and if they actually do it's so completely unconventional it's doubtful they paid a third party to do their campaigning for them.

Sorry, but in what universe are the differences he named superficial?  Eve's 'strategic' space-combat and a more twitch-skill experience in a land-based world are two very, very different things, for starters.  I know a lot of people who want "FFA PvP done right", and maybe 10% of them are playing EVE.  10% haven't heard of EVE, the other 80% are waiting on something else.

Also, are those beta comments filtered?  Of course.  But they do seem refreshingly honest, and the people writing them came off as relatively informed MMOers.

The Darkfall devs have done a lot, considering what they're working with.  Considering the AAA releases have sucked massive donkey balls recently (AoC and WAR), it's worth giving these guys a shot.

There's not a lot to mock here, really -- beta's going on, even if their beta timeframe is stupid (but so is everyone else's, albeit not to this degree), they've released video of ingame footage that looks ridiculously fun even if the graphics whores will cry, they're targeting a chronically under-served niche.

P.S., a thought on world size:  The size and scaling of your world is one more system that should integrate into your overall design.  FFA PvP worlds become more forgiving the larger you make them, since they enable lone wolves to carve out an existence for themselves on their own, rather than a small world like WoW where everybody basically knows the whole lay of the land.  A FFA PvP version of WoW would fall quickly to the catasses for precisely this reason.  A band who can strike out in secret and build a niche for themselves far away from the well-traveled paths can pose an asymmetrical threat to larger, better-known enemies; incessant lightning hit-and-run raids, etc.  On the flip-side, if you're the big kid on the block, infiltrating such a group and figuring out The Location of the Rebels' Secret Base becomes an objective.  It leads to a much more dynamic world, where your gameplay has periods of calm despite the FFA ruleset that then contrast the periods of outright war.  It helps to differentiate such a world from the sport PvP that everyone else is doing.

Vanguard had no such considerations to worry about -- their world size choice was just a kick in the balls to casual PvE'ers.  Different games need different systems.

the videos of the game look awful

I don't understand why the title has any fans left at all

(http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/4171/dfte2.png)

I think that wasted potential makes WAR the perfect candidate for worst MMO release 2008. No-one expected Funcom to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but Mythic seemed like a pretty sure thing.

I thought DAoC launched as a pretty shitty product as well?

When DAoC released, it was a very solid game.  It lacked a lot of endgame content, but started off much more smoothly than anything before it. 

It was a pile-of-shit DIKU with no reason to play it, same as EQ.

(See what I did there?)

I guess.

Teen angst?

Or not, though I'd think it'd be the opposite - being old enough to hold down a job would disabuse you of wanting to pay to have a second one.

...and before we derail further, I'll return to point by saying that Darkfall may very well end up sucking after all, but it's demonstrated enough concrete potential that writing it off as 'inevitable fail' at this point is childish and wrongheaded. My main question at this point is what sort of numbers they need to keep the servers open.

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/miscellany/ot/no20u.jpg)

Also, protip, if you're saying things like:


That is in fact like, the top end of the "fail" spectrum. And we're not writing it off as inevitable fail, we're just going by history here. And in the long history of overbaked, indie, pie-in-the-sky style MMOGs, erring on the side of absolute failure is pretty much the best of ideas. Also, I fear how much money they've spent, at this point I'm thinking actual success IS in fact impossible, even if they make a fun game.

(http://fuck-you-im-an-anteater.com/img/fuck-you-im-an-anteater.jpg)

Still, though, "I think they're inevitably fucked from a business standpoint" and "I think their game will inevitably suck" are two very different things.  Unless of course you're alleging both.

Both AoC and WAR kept more people here entertained for at least a short period of time than say, Pirates of the Burning Sea (and whatever else launched this year).  Hell, if for some reason I absolutely had to subscribe to a non-WoW MMO both AoC and WAR would probably still be in the top 5 (a testament to how shitty most MMO's are).

I think that pretty much is the consensus, yeah.

I was just kind of waiting so I didn't have to say that.

Don't you have some required-armor cockblocks to be patching in or something?  Or do the Euros just not do the whole "don't shit on your direct competitors in public" thing?

Say what you will about Darkfall, it'll have a large world (your game does not), twitch combat (your game does not), and real, anywhere-anytime PvP as opposed to bullshit sport PvP (your game does not).  It may still suck, but it's got more potential than your game ever did.  It could deliver on only a quarter of its promises and still offer more to PvPers than WAR does.

You call it a competitor. I suppose that's a little cute.

Why are you taking it so personally though? Are you on the payroll for Aventurine or whatever they're called now? Also, since when is a large world such a great bullet point? Large and good are two very separate things.

You sound like a vault poster. I'm not defending Iain, but back off before I den you, which would be ironic.

This thread makes me smile for some reason (http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/15968/page/1).

And that just sums up the underlying sentiment in this thread. I'm more optomistic than you guys because I didn't have to sit around waiting for DF for almost a decade. But I am aware of their past and patiently say put up or shut up. What they do flies in the face of conventions and I wish people the best of luck in trying to do something different if that is their stated intentions. The devs did say they'll release this year so it's not worth it to me to mock them until 2009 hits and at least open beta hasn't started.

Over-promising, under-delivering, and being way behind schedule and having a couple good ideas wrapped in the monotony of sameness riding on nothing but good intentions when it finally becomes playable is truly something to be considered "flying in the face of conventions."

Guys, we need people like Iniquity and mm to try these games out, if for no other reason than preventing whoever is on the fence from making a purchase. They're not going to be convinced that this game will fail, and more than likely won't be back here when it does  :awesome_for_real:

Me personally, I'm at the point where I absolutely do take into account the viability of the backing company. I don't give my credit card information to just anyone. Not after some of the crap that has been pulled with non-cancellable accounts and whatnot.

Keep dreaming  :why_so_serious:

I'm giving DF a chance, its not like there are many MMOs out there that cater to the UO/AC:DT pvp crowd. I don't care if it has shitty graphics, bugs, poor PR, whatnot. If they can make a niche game and don't go bankrupt after 2 months, then it will be a success in my book.

If it ever releases it will attract the right people, there's tons of old school guilds looking for a good game after Shadowbane crashed and burned (it is still the best PvP game with active population out there) and if the new generation of gamers is putting up with WAR fisher price O-RvR bullshit waiting for it to get fixed, i'm sure they can put up with FFA.

I agree with you guys that there is a market for an FFA PVP game. I just don't think Darkfall is going to satisfy that market in any way, shape or form.

It's likely that it will do more harm than good. Darkfall is going to be a huge pile of shit just like SB was. When it's cancelled, people will just assume that there's no market for these types of games.

SB was never cancelled and at this moment has a bigger population than DAoC. OK, its free, but the dell ads pay the bills  :awesome_for_real:

PS: Hater.

SB is a good game now. Too bad that now is Shadowbane's problem.

I wouldn't mind ads or even small 1min video commercials at startup for many MMO's if it meant no monthly fee

Bully for it. Unfortunately, history has shown that a large world in a PVP game is actually a bit of a detriment instead of a feature, because people don't like having to run 20 minutes to get into a fight that lasts for 2. Shit, in the small world that is Warhammer, the travel times from the PVE areas to the RVR lakes are a detriment, which is one reason the instanced, sport-PVP of scenarios was so popular. Shadowbane had a large (mostly empty) world, and its bugginess made coordinated PVP extremely frustrating because there was so much space between cities - nothing like herding 50 people across a 20 minute walk/summon chain when most of them CTD at least twice along the way, including the leader.

Big worlds in general are highly overrated. A condensed smaller world filled out with content is far more compelling than a giant empty world. Even if the big world has more stuff than a smaller world, it takes more than just a "little bit more" to make it feel anything other than empty.

The "art" of world building needs to evolve.

That it does.  I think Fallout 3 is my new standard for putting a bunch of things in a small area and keeping it interesting.  It's a design that would need to be tweaked for any multi-player game, but it's a good starting point.

AC had a large world and it was a clear feature, people made specific zones (usually delimited by the closest lifestone) their home and hanged out/defended it against intruders and people who tried to use that zone's best leveling spot. The size of the map gave everyone a chance to survive without getting steamrolled in every corner, some runs where epic (direlands) and you could make travelling easier with portal magic.

SB has runegates to speed the travelling process, and there are no "empty zones" every zone in between cities has a PvE area, its not barren. The issue in that case was the rampart sb.exe and client issues the game had, not the big world.

Edit: In the small world that is Warhammer, scenarios are popular because they are the fastest way to level solo and at 40 are the best way to gain renown rank, added to the fact that the post WoW generations are the majority and like that garbage. The runs between PvE and PvP zones are a joke, are you kidding me? Have you played WAR? Its one of the items in the pile of bad design, Keeps are not only meaningless, with a borked system but also turn into a graveyard run very often, you can rez and get back to the keep in less than 15 seconds in some areas.

Eve has a big world. Biggest of them all in fact. And an entire game mechanic that gives reason to do what players did as emergent behavior in AC1.

But "big world" by itself is no more a killer feature than "lots of classes". It's not the feature, but how you use it.

The fact people here are still calling it Darkfall and Darkfail is a wonder all to itself.

Good that you talked about a game that was #3 (as in sucking hind tit) when there were only 3 MMOG's on the planet. This is not a good example.


LOLWUT? Shadowbane's world was the very definition of BARREN. There were tiny PVE lakes in between vast stretches of empty land where you could build cities. There weren't even mobs in the empty areas, just places to plop down trees of life. The client issues only exacerbated the problem that even with runegates, the summon mechanic and open NPC cities, people still would put up open trees just to be able to teleport around the world quicker.


This is the other reason scenarios were so popular over oRVR. The main reason the scenario concept was so popular was because it was easy as hell to get to. That they were the fastest ways to level was the reason certain scenarios were more popular than others (Tor Anroc over everything else).

I have no defense; but it's good low-brow entertainment and i'm easily amused...

AC1 was pretty good.

This'll be my final post on Darkfall until release, I guess.  Nobody's convincing anyone of anything either way.


Taking the points in order:

1.  Yeah, it's not really a competitor in the same sense that EQ1 isn't really a competitor for WoW.  But at the same time, wouldn't you be a just a -little- taken aback if the devs for WoW shat on Teppy's work on ATITD in a public forum?  I'm not a shrinking violet about these things, but it violently offends my sense of MMO-dev propriety, in the same sense that there's supposed to be honor among thieves, or omertà with the mafia.

The clusterfuck that WAR ended up being (in gameplay terms, I know it's reasonably profitable) just adds another 'mote and beam' aspect to it.

2.  As for why I seem to take it personally, I've got no stake in the game, I'm not in the beta, and whether I buy DF at release will depend on the reviews I see in places like this.  But nearly every game at F13 seems to get some basic sort of grudging, "well, it might not suck" acknowledgment, no matter if it's the most rehashed KMMO diku, whereas Darkfall gets relegated to the DNF/Dawn pile.  Seems unfair somehow.  And sticking up for the Plucky Underdog makes me feel warm and fuzzy  :awesome_for_real:

3.  As for a large world, I'll repeat what I wrote earlier:


Since douchemore mentioned AC1, we can take that as an example, since Darktide is the closest thing to Darkfall yet released.  The large world gave different factions with very different playstyles a bit of room to breathe with one another.  Especially for the first year or so, when a couple of 'hidden towns' weren't on the world map, things weren't very well mapped out, and there was a 'here there be dragons' sense of real exploration.  The things that make a MMO world "good", in the traditional sense, actually weakened AC1's FFA PVP over time as they were added in to strengthen the PvE game; more and more content, player housing, etc. just spread out the playerbase further and took them out of the world map.  AC's best PVP came in the era when the game had the least of we'd traditionally call 'content', as opposed to dozens and dozens of patches later with thousands of dungeons, added land masses, safe zones, etc.

If anything, from the AC1 experience, I'd say the less features/mechanics are hard-coded -- but rather, left up to emergent behavior -- the more interesting the game will be.  The competitive dynamics of EVE were far too hard-coded for my liking.

You might prefer sticking rusty forks in your eyes to playing Darktide Part 2, but there are people out there who'd enjoy it, and those people are Darkfall's target audience.  And they're not all asshats; there were a fair number of anti-PKs, roleplayers, lone-wolf types with no hardcoded philosophy, etc. who played on Darktide and gave the world depth and flavor.  At least in the beginning.  They left a few years in, but ironically, what drove them off wasn't the consequences of death and losing, but the eventual lessening of consequences due to PvE-oriented game changes that undermined player-enforced justice and norms.  The sense of a 'harsh world' actually encouraged more anti-PK activity than when they made the game easier.

TL;DR version:  A large, more procedurally generated world, a-la AC, is more in tune with what the mechanics of full-world PvP demand than a small, hand-crafted world like WAR or WoW.  This is part of why DAoC's attempt at full-world PvP failed miserably, and why even a full-world PvP server for WAR wouldn't satisfy the sort of people who are likely to be interested in Darkfall.

I'm going to make you a cash bet.  I'll bet that DAoC generated more cash (inflation adjusted) than Darkfall ever will. 

You're the only person here that thinks DAoC was a miserable failure.  You may not like the game, that's fine... but calling it a failure is flat out wrong.   

Is it relevant? AC1 was a success and the world was huge. period.


Well, sure. Once every city is built there are no more barren spaces, its PvE zone/City/PvE zone/Open City/PvE Zone, duh. It seems you only played this game for two days, and i wouldn't blame you for being impatient.


Granted, its retardedly easy to play scenarios, push button, play. Still scenarios are the cancer of WAR, the game depends heavily on them, they are the best place for everything. Thats why so many people are quitting in disgust, they came for O-RvR, not crappy ass scenarios (Mythic didn't even recreate the good instanced battleground DAoC had, Thridanki , that prepared you for RvR once you hitted 40-50)where 50% are "grab the thing and run" and the other 50% is domination mode. I believe they are already looking into ways of screwing up the new "Darkness Falls".

Back on topic, stop hating and show some love for a game that is doing something different instead of trying to appeal to the WoW playerbase. You never know they might pull it off, either way i'm pretty sure most people here will buy it for their collection of vapor legends come true.  :awesome_for_real:

and +1 to Iniquity  :heart:

He said full world pvp, I think he's referring to popularity/quality of the FFA pvp DAOC servers (mordred/andred?  I forget), not whether the game made money or not.

Just so we're clear, when I said 'DAoC's attempt at full-world PvP' was a failure, I was referring to the Mordred and Andred servers, which were DAoC's equivalent of AC Darktide.  They closed one of 'em, and the other one is pretty sparsely populated from what I hear.  Standard DAoC isn't full-world PvP, and I wasn't calling DAoC as a whole a failure.

I'd still hate to play it, but it's not a failure in the business sense.

Ok, I'll buy that.  I played on Andred as my primary server for a year or so and found that it was a pretty lousy implementation of world pvp as well.  There were a few things that could have really turned the server around, but the resources to carry out the changes just weren't there. 

Sorry for the confusion.  I think my inner DAoC fanboi seeps out every once in a while.   

Actually I would say MJ is the cancer of WAR. Scenarios were the drug keeping the cancer riddled patient from dyeing quite as fast is all.

lol

Plucky underdog. Right. EQ2 is something that can be considered the plucky underdog. Or Eve. But Darkfall? Your definition of plucky underdog is wack.

 :heart: :heart: Since we're on the topic, what were the lessons learned from DAoC's failure to implement world PvP well that you think a future world PvP game/server could learn from (i.e. things that were systemic rather than my-class-and-talent-trees-were-imba)?

Also, does anyone here play EQ2's full-PvP server?  Heard about its release, haven't read a thing about it since then.

(http://images.watoday.com.au/2008/06/22/133245/ugly%20dog2-420x0.jpg)

Yes, it's basically a dog that needs to be put down (to save it from suffering, publicly and horrifically).

No, that'd be the runt of the litter.

The underdog is the one that's behind, but has a chance to achieve something. What Darkfall is liable to achieve is up for discussion, although the "most unsurprising fail award 2008" seems like a shoe-in.

Since we've established that EQ2 qualifies for plucky underdog status, anyone want to give us a Cliff's Notes on how its full-world PvP server is doing?

EQ2 is not a plucky underdog. They are the descendant of an old empire from a time when the world was much smaller. There's only one game post-EQ1 that actually achieved the goal of being "EQ1 for the rest of us".

DAoC was not a failure. Individual server rulesets didn't work, but they had the money and resources to try that at all. Most games don't get that sort of opportunity.

At the same time, DAoC in no way proved anything about RvR nor World PvP that is useful in the modern business sense. The game began to work for the players who were left something like five years after it launched. That doesn't convert to a launch-day proposition of a successor concept. Like, as we're seeing with WAR for example.

This is the same thing with AC1:DT and pre-Renaissance UO. These are concepts evolved out of the genre because the genre has gotten too huge for anyone to spend much brainpower trying to figure out how to deliver monthly fun to the few hundred people who like this very specific type of all-kill/all-loot/all-the-time game.

And someone's going to mention Eve again, so I'll head that off: really deep fans of Eve are not going to jump to another game in the genre, because Eve is it's own genre, is the only game in it, and there too took years to achieve that status (and a nice bump from SWG:NGE as well).

Being the child of a Holy Roman Empire doesn't exclude you from being the plucky underdog. It snuck in before WoW and crapped itself due to being a mess of design and bad performance and has been slowly fighting for market share since then. Hartsman turned it from hilarious trap into a plucky underdog by slowly improving it into what is probably one of, if not the, best MMOGs on the market right now and it's still nowhere near catching up but the population does, indeed, grow. It's the definition of a plucky underdog. Thing refuses to give up.

EQ1 was in an apple world whereas EQ2 exists in the world of oranges.

Edit: Iniquity, who I thought was leaving this thread as per an earlier post, seems to be under the impression that World PVP outside of Eve is going to be properly done sometime soon and achieve a modicum of popularity besides the 1% of the fruitbags here who think it works well. The population of MMOGers that are willing to give World PVP a shot in it's current state of affairs is laughably small and mostly cloistered to a couple AoC servers and Eve. Really, Darkfall doesn't stand a chance in the fucking world and he needs to stop comparing world PVP in games that aren't designed for it to games that are - even if the design of the latter is laughably bad and the former was a design process shoehorned in after live to make people like him shut the fuck up.

Full pvp without consequences will always fail in my opinion, and fail fast.  The comment about DAoC, as i read it, only referred to the dred servers which had no consequence pvp.  Nobody likes to log into a game and get killed by some punk who thinks it's fun just because they got the levels and the equipment first.

Now for some reason I had fun on Mordred hiding from the griefers and trying to level up my 1 stealth minstrel.  What did I do once I was a few levels above most of the newbies?  Killed newbies!

"Last post about Darkfall" doesn't mean "last post about worldy PvP and games like EQ2/AC/DAoC that have tried it in some form".  So I'll sidestep the argument about whether there's an audience for Darkfall or not, and just ask if any of the DAoC 'dred players / EQ2 whatstheservercalled players have any lessons from those servers that are broadly applicable.

Tolakram:  Do you think the negatives you experienced are world-PvP issues, per se, or issues with DAoC's implementation specifically?

How gankable you are by the high levels depends on a number of things:

-Size of the world, number of places for you to run off to as a newbie where you wouldn't be easily found.
-'Escape' mechanics in combat -- how easily can you flee a higher-level player?  How easily can one person flee an equally-leveled group?  DAoC's heavy emphasis on mezzes, roots, stuns, and crowd control seems especially relevant here.
-The degree of influence that loot/levels have on combat outcomes (as opposed to strategy, preparedness, and twitch skill)

None of these are 'set in stone' factors.  It seems to me like the problems you had are more indicative of How Not To Construct a Ruleset For A World-PvP Game than an inevitable outcome.

EQ2 full pvp server is meaningless. I played on it for a long while and it was fun... briefly. You did loot coins in your opponents backpack (usually none) and it was, of course, faction based. Two factions at start, three (with renegades) after a while.
An afterthought entertaining but pointless twist, bound to insignificance in a 100% PvE game.
If with "full world" you are referring to some FFA (factionless) PvP server then I am just talking out of my ass... never heard of anything like it. But what's the point anyway? EQ2 is definitely item-centric and class matchup + items >>>>> player skill.

Conan is probably what you should look at for your case study. FFA PVP servers are doing great (in Conan's terms) for so many different reasons. First, they are truly FFA. NO factions, so you can whack whoever isn't in your guild. Second, the world is large enough but teleporters send you everywhere. And it's twitchy enough, and definitely based on playerskill.

What is not working, is the lack of consequences upon death. You die, you respawn. That's it. Killer get some PvP XP to eventually buy better items but victim loses nothing.
If Conan had a kick in the nuts with each PvP death, it would be all Darkfall is trying to be, but 150k times better. Would it attract more pvp oldschooler? yeah! Would that lose them 75% of their playerbase? still yeah. Would it be a good deal for Funcom? Fuck no.
There's definitely a market for those games. It's just NOT large enough to justify heavy funding. And without heavy funding 99 out of 100 times your MMO is going to be shit. With heavy funding though you can shift the odds at 95 out of 100.

Finally, while I love the concept of Darkfall and I'd love to play their design documents (always did), you must be so naive to think it has even a single chance of being a good decent MMORPG. You (and the other romantic dreamers on this thread) are in denial, about the industry, the market, the technicalities. It won't just fail, it will be unplayable.

World pvp in general.  But I had fun with the minstrel because I had this magic button (stealth) that made me invisible from a distance.  Kind of like a pvp flag, which for me made it a much more controlled pvp environment.

Darkfall supposedly has some kind of pvp system that might discourage griefing?  Does anyone really know or believe what they say?


That did not work because resist rates on spells in DAOC is set to 85% and then a level penalty applied plus a duration penalty.  In other words if you cast a 30 second mez on an opponent 20 levels higher then you it would have a <35% chance of landing with a duration around 10 seconds.



You call 26 people a market.   :raspberry: 

You underestimate the curiosity factor. The darkfall registered member count tripled from 50k to 150k because of the 17 minute movie the devs released. It hasn't grown much since then but it's a testament how different the influx of new forumgoers are. Darkfall has also gotten consistent attention on the WoW forums whenever a big update comes up.

I don't know if I'm cut out for Darkfall myself, let alone anyone else who hasn't played a game like it; but we won't know until we see how the devs embraced Bartle's point about killer types feeding off of the rest of the player types.



IMO their alignment system isn't about discouraging griefing as much as it is a form of social control. Basically the system tracks your behavior when attacking friends and foes to your race. As you become more evil you become locked out of quests and become kill on site for guards at major cities and at the few guard stattions scattered over Agon. But the guards only care about their race and allies. Ork guards will kill evil MAhirim and Orks while they'll kill any of the four races regardless of their alignment.

Because of this setup players are encouraged to look more favorably on members of their own race and allies as people they shouldn't attack indiscriminately.

I think the devs have more tricks up their sleeves to promote unity. For example the one race that is hated by everyone the Alfar will have their capitol city undersiege by a slave rebellion. Considering how tough NPCs are based on the reports, the Alfar players will have to band together to complete this large scale quests meant to to end the rebellion itself. That type of pressure may make them a more unified group so they can better handle being the faction without any allies because they start out as a more cohesive force.

Dammit man. Stop making my eyes roll so hard. I'm in pain.

Seriously, sounds like this is your second MMO. So full of hopes, ignoring reality. Just wanting to believe.

How will one person form a unified group with himself? 

There is no alignment system, no social control, the system doesn't track your behaviour, you can't become more evil.  There are no quests, no guards, no cities and no races.  Because it hasn't been released.  All responses to this continuing DArkfall fanboy drivel, on forums everywhere, should be "that's nice, when is it released?".  Because none of you DArkfall numpties has any answer better than the answer you would give in 2003, remember 2003?  That's when beta was meant to start.

Release it, then we can laugh talk about it.

Actually the first beta and release date given were way back in 2001.

Your avatar is appropriate for this thread.

:geezer:

If I was ignoring reality I wouldn't say


I'm aware of the pitfalls of past pvp games. Why aren't you aware of the pitfalls of your inability to read and put things in context? You would save yourself the trouble of repeating something we partially agree with. It feels like I should put a disclaimer next to all of my caveats.

Just so this post isn't a complete waste of space the devs have brought in a couple of guys to write up a preview of the game based on what they've seen after they flew to Greece.

DISCLAIMER: (http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.mmorpgitalia.it/forum/f296/darkfall-beta-review-212918/&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=it&tl=en) Shame they didn't have the press actually test the beta from Italy just to show the game works outside of the devs studio.

I just looked at the Italian coverage.  It has screenshots that they allegedly made although the screenshots are all stamped with Darkfall's copyright in the corner.  Dodgy.  Also, it looks like ass:

(http://www.mmorpgitalia.it/gallery/filesnew/6/3/4/8/darkfall_01.jpg)

(http://www.mmorpgitalia.it/gallery/filesnew/6/3/4/8/darkfall_11.jpg) 
Although the wood bits don't look too awful in this one.  But that face!!!   :ye_gods:
(http://www.mmorpgitalia.it/gallery/filesnew/6/3/4/8/darkfall_04.jpg)
I don't know what this is supposed to be. 

True story.  That's why I capitialise the 2nd letter everytime I say DArkfall.

Looks like Vanguard-Lite.

And their font sucks.

I noticed a "you have gathered 0 of 4 goblin axes" in the event log in the first picture.......................

Doesn't seem that interesting or new to me. :uhrr:

Second shot...
Ah yes planer mapped wooden struts. Looks great from one axis only!
edit: on closer inspection I see some other visual glitches implying that the renderer was either having problems displaying textures correctly or the artist simply did a poor job unwrapping the models.

Third shot....
Check out the horribly out of scale shadowmap with the naked bloody male wood elf with... with.. wtf is that a sheathed sword coming out of his crotch?

I personally thought that was placed deliberately...

Vanguards art direction and Technical execution of art assets was far superior. The art doesn't look that bad in darkfall, but just from the screen shots i can see some very basic mistakes.

You're on crack.  Vanguard's art and technical execution was ass.

Yeah, but these are r_Goblin's. How many r_Goblins have you killed in an MMO before?

Negative.

mmorpgitalia.it is a joke. Take a stratic monkey, shake it with 1/3 of a mmorpg.com retard, 1/3 of a 12 years old and 1/3 of an uninformed fascist thief (!) and you have a vague idea of the "fun" you could get there if you could read Italian.

Seriously, where I live has nothing to do with the fact that you are ignoring the simplicity of: Darkfall has zero chances. That's why you are in denial.

P.S: Who said I didn't try the game?

Then explain yourself, all I saw was repeated use of textures, terribly designed space, shiny plastic graphics and poorly designed dungeons.

Not to mention Chunking, and CTDs and stuttering, but that may be someone elses fault.

You didn't mention the palette!  Don't forget the palette!

Your avatar still creeps me out.

I especially feel like my avatar today.  I thought I'd feel all comfy and cozy with the snow and no place to go and nothing to do, but I feel like pulling legs off of bugs.  Or babies.  Even baby bugs.

I heard kittens make a cut noise when you pull out their whiskers.

Something can be far superior to something else and still be ass btw.

I think what those screen shots show is driver issues or an overheating video card so maybe its not terribly fair to compare the graphics in those shots to anything.

I think it's fair to compare them to ASS!  (http://www.realitybbqforums.com/images/smilies/tease.gif)

:awesome_for_real:

You'd think this'd make one wonder...

hehehe
Fair enough

Does it strike anyone else that the underscore was visible in r_Goblin?
I use underscores in file names but not text that appears on screen...

edit: ah alright I am done poking at those images... Its not helping anything.. this is meaningless.

Apparently Elves do not have nipples.

Sorry, but from what I've played of it (up to level 50 or so), this is not an accurate assessment of Conan (though the problems you note below are correct).

The world isn't nearly large enough, and there are tons of safe areas -- it's more like WoW's PvP servers than anything truly FFA.  Way too much emphasis on progression through differently-leveled zones of PvE content, too.

I also don't think there's nearly enough twitch; correct me if I'm wrong, but if someone shoots an arrow at me, running out of the way won't dodge it?

Conan is probably different from what you remember, on a PVP server. No safezones but the three main cities, which is 5% of the gameworld. Plus all classes can hide, which means ambushing a lot, UO style. And about the twitch, you can't avoid arrows but why shoud you be able to? That isn't possible unless you are Jackie Chan or an Asheron's Call character. The twitch is definitely there but it can't be seriously noticed in PvE or in sucky standing clueless PvP.
Zone tiers? Who cares? In Conan you can beat a player 20 levels higher than you if you are that good. Naked. Progression is 80 levels wide but strength in AoC is in numbers and playerskills, not levels or items. Me and my friends used to band together at level 40 in packs of 6 - 10 lowbie characters whacking every level 80 on our path. We were able to take up to 4 of them together. Mostly thanks to the aforementioned game mehcanics and those players playing Conan as WoW: failing.

Point being: you can play it wrong, basing your experience on your pve leveling, then you won't find it twitchy and you will lose. To have a chance in Conan pvp, you have to find out what everyone else is doing better than you. And that is so many degrees of twitching, mostly.

That said, it's not God of War. Just the twitchiest PvP MMORPG around (if it can survive the night of the gutting...).
Real problem with Conan is you need a veteran, or a motivated group, to find out that sekrit hidden layer of deepness of combat and PvP. If you craft a MMORPG which changes lots of 10 years old rules, you have to do your best to explain the players what is different and why. Thoroughly.
I still go by my old idea that Conan gimped itself by not pushing on the PvP pedal since day 1 (or doing it wrong, resspad slaughtering anyone?), letting so many players apply their old rules and leaving in disappointment because the game was unable to follow them there.


Darkfall? In a dream world, I'd be playing the hell out of it. In this world? Simply too ambitious for their money.

For what it's worth, I've only played the game on a PvP server.  And there *are* more safe zones than that, because there are plenty of instances, and instances are de-facto safe zones, where you can do whatever you want unmolested.


Or... any FPS ever, pretty much.  Tabula Rasa fell down hard on this one, too.  AC1 had its serious flaws, but it managed to incorporate some of these basic mechanics nearly a decade ago.  You'd think such mechanics would be standard by now for a PVP-oriented MMO.  (Charge-up jumping, too, and the player's general 'bounciness' -- AC1's physics engine is probably the single best I've seen in an MMO, as opposed to the current standard where everyone runs like molasses and jumping feels more like an emote than a gameplay mechanic)


Again, I only played it on a PvP server, with my emphasis on PvP.  I only play full- or nearly full-world PvP servers/games if I can help it, it wasn't like Conan was some harsh world existence.  They've actually removed a lot of the twitch, by nerfing jousting.  Zone tiers matter because it influences where and how different groups/levels of player find each other, and thus the emergent PvP behavior.  It's the same Small World model that WoW has, and it suffers from the same problems.  Making the cities into safe-zones is especially bad in a world like this; it kills the one major point of convergence for all level ranges.

The problem with Conan isn't that it's too different, it's that it's more of the same.  Of the dozen or so PvPer friends I know in RL who started playing with me, none have stuck around.

http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=XX4jLw5oM1c

oh god the animations :uhrr:

That's awful.  :ye_gods:

Egads, what was wrong with that woman's legs?

That was atrocious. Hideous. Quite possibly vangardiffic.

Its like they where made with the Spore Creature creator.

<- Does not care about shiny graphics.


It actually looks a lot better than the 15 minute gameplay trailer they released in October, since when have graphics kept people in a MMO? Look at AoC  :oh_i_see:

The graphics weren't terrible. The animation of her running sucked. I suspect they didn't bother putting any leg armor on her for the demo assuming people will not be able to pull their eyes away from her bum. Freakin' amateur hour here.

Might explain the quality of animation right there. Hard to animate something one does not see.

A certain base level is good though, so as not to distract with how bad it is.

Also, if it's amateur hour in the graphics area, why not others?

I don't need perfectly perfect graphics to keep me in a game but I'd want something better than that!  It was really horrible.  Her legs moved funny and her ass didn't move at all!  Her ass was ass! 

Have g-string, will travel ... like a Thunderbird.

Bullshit.  It's cliche to say it, but it's bullshit. 

People want the entire package.

WoW has shiny graphics. Far Cry 2 has shiny graphics. Both work in their respective forms because within their respective engines, everything is self-consistent.

Darkfall made the typical mistake of trying to do old school "realistic" 3D. Unless you've got the money, talent and time to do that, you'll only end up with a game where something that's not working is painfully obvious. In this case it's the animations.

That goes without saying, ok, maybe i can rephrase it.

To me, graphics are one of the last factors taken in consideration for a MMO of this type. Until recently i played SB. There's tons of people out there playing UO and UO free shards, people playing AC1, EQ1, Lineage 1 (millions), etc.

Have you seen L1 graphics?

(http://www.beemania.com/articles/Apple/Apple_Lineage_p1_files%5Ccorridor.bmp)

That's the point though. None of those games tried to be anything more than they had the ability to create. Oh, and they all launched years ago, at a time when just having the game playable at all was still worthy of award.

Have you seen L2 graphics?  :awesome_for_real:

(spoilered because it's a big image)

Honestly, all I really needed from Darkfall graphically was WW2O graphics reskinned for medieval DIKU and I would've been happy.  Problem I've got is it's like Darkfall TRIES to be more than it is but just falls short, looking moreso like an aborted fetus in the process.  Whereas a game like WW2O doesnt assume to be anything else but a great online military sim.  The latter says "dont bother looking at me because you'll be dead before you can admire all the pretty roses... we're plain but we make sense; olive drab ftw" and the former says "look at me, I are perdy (uhhh no), you're still dead, but my sword is teh shinay, and my ass is too big for my body."

If they'd had relevant style with unassuming graphics and phat gameplay, they'd have something special.  They needed to stay away from the flashy high fantasy and go moreso towards a more drab goth style.  If that wasnt an option, then a top-down RTS-like view with a zoom option would've made more sense IMO.  It's easier to get away with substandard graphics if your view is from above rather than in 1st person.  If the players want to stare at themselves or others in detail they can open/inspect their charsheet.

No, I'm with Von Douchemore.  Pretty much everybody I know who's serious about PvP runs all their MMOs on absolute minimum graphics settings, no matter their uber-rig, because it's performance above all else.

Look at Darktide PvP videos on youtube.  We're talking AC1, a very old game.  Not exactly a resource hog.  And yet most of the videos are shot on absolute minimum settings.

Very old, really?  What's that make missile command on the 380z then?

This is from Wiesel, one of the Community Managers of Age of Conan. So not exactly Mr. Lead Dev, but still someone IN the industry and dabbling with a major MMORPG with a strong PvP side. Of course he mentions PvE which is supposed to be insignificant in Darkfall, except for some 0 of 4 axes  :awesome_for_real:. Still, I presume their hardnumbers are better than ours when it comes to target audience.

The first three pages of the thread (http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=99211) are kinda interesting, thanks to this guy inside perspective.

I stand to my original point: there's definitely room for talent-driven miracles (EVE), but

- Fact 1: 49 out of 50 times to make a worthy subscription based MMORPG you need lots of money.
- Fact 2: hardcore pvpers are not that many, after all.
- Question: are these guys enough to justify a huge investment?
- Reply: NO.
- Solution: Let's do it anyway, with less money!
- Result: UTTER CRAP.

I hope every time to be wrong, we all need a new EVE.
But will it be Darkfall? lolrat says

(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2007/doomed.jpg)

Throwing money at a concept won't make that idea any better if it is fundamentally flawed.

IMO MMOs simply aren't being made by disciplined people. Heck I'm not disciplined myself, but I can spot slackers messing up time tables and going over budget because they didn't make a detailed enough plan with enough contingencies to cover needed changes with ease.  :awesome_for_real:

Look on the bright side. If you have ever had the desire to roleplay as a pasty white plumper with severe arthritis in a leather thong, darkfail is your game.

Amen. I agree with this 100%, and I'd cite it as the reason why Darkfall will not do well even if there actually is a game down there. Oldschool hardcore PVP fans, and the developers who make games for them, need to realize just how small of a niche demographic they actually are. While I couldn't fault the DF devs for making a game for this small group, I'd definitely fault anyone who argued that this position will be met with any kind of market-wide "success".

A lot of discussion about the relative size of the hardcore pvp market tends to discount that many the current crop of mmorpg players have never been exposed to a pvp-centric mmo, especially one that is up to the standard of WoW.  I expect the market is potentially much larger than developers would like to admit, but they would rather lay blame elsewhere than admit their failure to create a game that satisfies it.  Warhammer and AoC didn't disappoint because of lack of interest in PvP.  They're just bad games.  All this QQ about the nature of the market is absolutely stupid.

/sign

And is not the real nature of any multiplayer game being VERSUS a human?  That is what pvp is, is it not?  Also remember, even hardcore PvE games have an inherent full-time PvP element... whether it be by simply tracking guild progress, lootz, and other various stats.  It's all PvP in my eyes.  Some do it well, some dont... some water it down enough with other stuff that it doesnt matter.  In the end though, it's all varying degress of PvP.

I do wish for darkfall to be released. So everyone can go "Ah, failure"  :drill:

Well, that might work for other places but around f13 we usually start saying that while it's still in the conception stage.  I don't know why.  I don't know what's wrong with us.  It's alarming!

Other places are filled with darkfall fanbois with UO nostalgia, hell people who didn't even play UO have that nostalgia. Lack of fanbois + lack of nostalgia = 10 page long darkfail thread.

You are stumbling on the point.
You mention hardcore pvp in your first sentence but then you go on clearly using examples made of NON-hardcore PvP.

Your post makes sense if you are talking about vanilla sport-like PvP. (so yeah, Warcraft, Warhammer, Age of Conan)
Doesn't make a bit of it when you think about Kick-in-the-nuts-when-you-die. That's what the AoC guy was talking about. That's what Hardcore PvP is. He's not laying any blame, he's just explaining why AoC didn't go the hardcore pvp way and why future games will have a problem trying to do it.

You have a 10 millions people in non-Asia interested in MMORPGs and PVP extension, cause no MMORPG will ever ship without it again.
You have 100k interested in the kind of PvP we are talking about, and Darkfall is aiming to. Yeah, I think that's a fair extimation even counting EVE.

To sum up:
PvP = Huge market, growing.
Hardcore PvP = Tiny market, shrinking.

Do you disagree? Numbers & Examples, please.

Talking about "absolut stupidity", your post qualifies for the playoffs.

There's also the fact that Darkfail certainly won't be bucking the trend.

Since no one is going to sink the money, effort, and ideas into doing hardcore PvP 'right', all of us saying there is no market for it will always be correct.  We don't even have to get into the social and psychological aspects of why it would never work.

Now if only we can beat in the head of every fanboy the two post above.

garlicwolf,

Lurk more.

Thanks.

Wait, no, fuckit. Ban avoidance. You're gone.

For those wondering, he wasn't Dash.

Tit for tat, and not that it matters much, but the first day I logged into Left 4 Dead, I was paired up with a 'Geldonyetich'.

Do I win a prize?

Yes, this post is about as relevant to the discussion as the 'pvp mmo done right' comments because it'aint ever gonna happen.

I get a lot of nasty PMs on other places when I mention Darkfall Darkfail is going to be terrible when I just point out the graphics/animations.  Then they go into full blown Vanguard/Every other MMO that fails mode talking about promises and supposed features that are "turned off" right now.

You should post them for lulz and "profit."

(It's gonna be a slow monday, I'd imagine the PMs aren't actually that nasty).

I've deleted almost all of them but here is one I got this morning.

In response to one of the latest videos that were out where the PC was a chick in a thong running around I wrote:


I got this:


I'm not sure if this person was calling me a jew or the PC or the developer.  I'm also confused since nothing related has anything to do with typical jewish stereotypes.

Dick in ass sprints are a well-known Jewish stereotype, you bigot  :uhrr:

A lot of overt racists are a significant part of the Darkfall community.

If I got my goon lingo down: he's saying you like to PvE for in-game money.

LOL!!
THAT is some funny stuff right there.

To comment on the art right now. As a level designer in my spare time I could most likely put together environments with better art than what they are showing while still reaching min spec. And don't give me some crap that they want the game to run cell phones..

The art is awful.. the animations should not be getting any response other than "Woah that looks bad..."

Its really bad design and a poor 3d engine that cause the video and the screenshots to get this reaction.
They need to hire artists that cannot be topped by a level designer for starters...

edit: Watching the video again its really just the run cycle that drags the whole video down. I might not have commented on the rest of the art considering it as passable had I not seen that awful run cycle....

Seriously, visuals and animations are the last of Darkfail's problems.

Darkfall isn't aiming for the stars, so fuck the visuals. And yeah, as someone else said, hardcore pvpers usually tone down the settings just to be sure nothing will get in the way of their kills to the point everything could look like the matrix code to them if it is enough to give 'em the edge.

The problem with Darkfall is the game itself. Take a look at the features & faq (http://www.darkfallonline.com/features/).

Personally, I could play it on a black & white TV set if it could deliver in a playable and fun way half the things advertised there. So screw the animations.
But can it? Haha!

I personally think animations are important, and I'm a PvPer

I don't want to be running around with a toon looking like I had a pineapple shoved up my rectum, beating on other toons with the same problem

New preview released today:

http://beta.thenoobcomic.com/df_preview/intro.html


Oh my that sounds like fun doesn't it!  I can't wait to read more....  

I guess we need to delineate between animations and textures/graphics.  It's a well known fact that in many ways animations make something more lifelike than do perdy graphics.  Things that move and act humanoid-like creep us out more than things that simply look like us.  So, I guess Darkfall (and any other game for that matter) should be really more concerned with gameplay, terrain, and how PC/NPCs physically interact with all of the above rather than just how those PCs/NPC look.  Again, it's the low-poly stylization that's key here...  and the sophistication of the skeletons.  Lotsa moving parts obviously slow the game down, but if I had to make a choice I'd say physics over makeup.   Make all of the characters like Toribash fighters.

Shyt, as for Darkfall, right now it's like it'd almost be better if the characters just all FLOATED around (i've scribbled a game-design as such) rather than try running.  In that case, they can go for the prettiness, just make them static except for when casting/fighting.

Gianna is great, I love Gianna. She shouldn't do this, especially cause they are her friends.

??  Gianna is friends with the DF devs?

btw, wtf does Gianna look like?  she sounds like dork nirvana in panties [italian/uk gamer-chic comic writer who works out every day, while holding down an IT job] ...  uhhh, she's not on this board is she?  :uhrr:

Gianna is friend with Tasos and the guys at Aventurine as she stated herself on that link tolakram posted.


Not just friends, PvP buddies!
She hosted a Darkfall banner since forever (seriously) and they hosted The Noob in return.
While I am 100% sure it always was about esteem and respect for each other, and I trust her as a witted, extremely smart and straightforward person, I still think she shouldn't publicly preview her friends' game.

What does she look? There are/were a few pics of her around but who cares? Don't be a pig! Do you ever wonder wtf do I look like?  :grin:

I wondered what everyone in here looked like, for a while. But I got better.

I know what everyne looks like...

 :hello_thar:

Stop it while you are behind.

Let me clue you into something about the larger MMO market today. They don't put up with shit. They are whiny douchenozzles. If you think the whining and QQing on the Warhammer, AOC or even WOW boards are bad, imagine those whiny fucksticks getting double-fucked nightly in a "real" PVP game (one which will likely have long travel times, quick deaths and large power disparities). They will whine, piss and moan and quit the game. For all its flaws, Warhammer and AOC protected the player from PVP deaths fairly well. Old skool style PVP will RAPE those younguns and they will not come back for more.

http://flickr.com/photos/lagthenoggin/111648544/ (http://flickr.com/photos/lagthenoggin/111648544/)

On the topic of a successful hardcore PvP game and the odds of making one...

Success = profit. Failure = no profit and closed studio. That's my measure and I want it on the table early so I'm clear.

That noted, Falconeer's 100K Hardcore PvP audience could be quite a successful MMO provided that someone built it with 100K players in mind and only spent $$ based on that expected return. The problem with most titanic failures in the MMO world is that the people behind them pulled in fewer customers than they needed to pay the bills. Pure and simple.

Launching a shit game will definitely hurt those odds, but even a good one that spends more cash getting out the door than it can ever return will fail. Period. It's simple business math.

I think that a hardcore PvP game could easily pull 100K subscribers. A million? I'm not going to call that even for a PvE game. I know millions of people are possible for any game, but I don't think it's so easy to plan and project that million. 100K though? I think that's bankable for just about any game... so were I given funds to build a game, I'd target 100K subscribers as the expected initial baseline and then budget accordingly to ensure profit. If that means cutting graphics or a titanic feature list of doom... that's the price of smart business. Launch smart and patch in more fun if you profit.

So I think hardcore pvp could be a rousing success, even financially. :) Now someone find me some VC.

Darkfall... I'm not calling it until I play it. I loved AC Darktide and those guys are influenced by it, that's a good start. The timeline to delivery... not as strong.

To be completely honest, I think your hardcore PvP MMO needs to be profitable at around 50k players. The reason is that I'm sure as much as people clamour for such a thing, half (or more) are going to find that it isn't what they wanted and quit.

Also, I've thought that with the number of MMOs dying off this year, now would be a great time to swoop in for a fire sale, get some of these assets cheap and build a title that would be a bit different to what is currently on the market. Any secret F13 billionaires out there who want to flip me US $30 million so I can try out a theory?  :grin:

Grimwell, I totally agree with your point.

100k could be a total success. I AM one of them, the 100k, the hardcore PvP audience and I hoped to get a game like Darkfall for ages.
Sadly, I see the problem with it: it's just too ambitious. It tries to get it all, all the things the original UO left behind, and the AC parts too, very complex systems and subsystems which don't blend very well with "low budget" and "lack of experience". Dammit, it's 2008 and we still get dikus with huge budgets and autoattack combat being so buggy you would want to puke on the coders, and you want me to believe you can craft a working mmorpg with full loot and dynamic combat with a low budget? Money don't necessarily give you better coders, but they sure buy you some error-margin while crafting your extremely complex mmorpg. Raph told us so many times how Trammel saved Ultima (money-wise) as people used to quit & cancel after some assets-devastating ganks.
That's what happens with hardcore PvP games: gank me one time too much, steal my stuff one time too much, make me do all the walk back one time too much, and I'll stop giving you my money, I'll leave.
So, everything has to work PERFECTLY. Doesn't matter how hardcore your player is, if he has a feeling he lost his stuff because of a bug, a glitch, a cheat, a cheap mechanic, unbalanced classes/skills, unfair lag, whatever! ...he'll stop paying.
Can they face this? Can they guarantee a safe and stable environment for such a passive-aggressive, fragile and delicate bunch of playstyle?

I'll repeat myself but while I totally support projects like this, which I dare to say sprung things of beauty such EVE, I think they are losing bets with an existing but very slim chance of hitting jackpot.
What Darkfall lacks is simplicity, which is a great thing on paper! But leaves you to face complexity, which needs shitloads of money or huge amounts of talent to be dealt with. I'd be glad to realize all the talent in the world sits at Aventurine. So far, I missed it.

Again, I agree with everything you said Grimwell. And yes, I said it already and I'll repeat it here: there is definitely room for a new UO, a new EVE, a new hardcore PvP game. 100k is (for now) that room and it's a quite comfortable one.
But it has to build slowly, solidly, it has to get the players' trust working on basic hardcore pvp features and proving everyone it will work and it is fun. THEN, only after that, you can work on wishlists and dream features. It's pointless to just aim to include everything the players always asked for only to have it all messy and buggy. I think the mistake the Darkfall fanbois are clearly doing here is underestimating the power of The Bug and overestimating that of The Feature List.

Hell, I am the one here cutting slack to poor Darkfall graphics and animations. I wanted it to succeed so bad. And I wanted all the features too.
But there's a point you realize all the promises and the aspirations are backfiring, you've seen happening so many times before, and the reason Darkfall will probably fail is because it tried to keep all the promises made 7 years ago without realizing what changed in these 7 years and why they won't be able to keep it.

Finally, about "success = profit and failure = closed studio" lemme say there's a difference between success as in "Game is still running hence profitable yowza!" and "Game is ok enough that people who is not stuck with it because of a curse can play without considering it torture". Horizons (http://www.istaria.com/) and Dark and Light (http://www.darkandlight.com/en/) belongs to the first category and some diehard crazies are still contributing to their "success", but I don't think that's the kind of "success" we were discussing here, as those are the closest thing to unplayable I can think of. I am sure Aventurine's logic works like that: as long as we are alive we are winning, but players want it to be good, not "successful" (even if in an accountant book the two words are synonyms).

Ironically, I foresee Darkfall going exactly the Dark 'n Light way.

PvPers wont mind getting 1-shotted in the skullbox if there's a logical way to make up for the immense travel distances.  In games like WW2O you basically had firebases, medics, squad leaders, and different modes of xportation like aircraft, tanks, trucks, etc.  If you didnt HAVE an effective mode of reinforcing yourself upon beginning an attack... you just didnt do it - because the 2 hours you spent getting prepped would be a waste.  So basically, what I'm saying is there should be a mechanism to negate the travel distances, but players should have to tactically earn it... or be in danger of losing it.  They (DF) have mounts that can be stolen, so that's 1 thing... but beyond that what mechanics are there?  Is there earnable territory you can spawn from?  Do any classes have a portal ability?  Can you purchase a portal or perhaps a fast mode of transport?  (a ride on a dragon perhaps).

This is generally true -- though at the same time, the ability to get lost in an obscure corner of the world if you so desire is also important to have.

I like how AC1 did it, prior to the "portal to anywhere you damn well please" changes -- a portal network for 'well traveled' areas, with some areas being hidden or off the beaten path, nooks and crannies not everyone knew about because the world was so damn big.  You could be on or off everyone's radar roughly as you wished, and if your group made a name for yourself, people would come gunning for you, trying to figure out where you were based.

About the longest it took to get anywhere useful back then was 20 minutes to somewhere you weren't tied to, and that was at the extremes.

The key is localization; you want people to feel like a certain part of the world is their 'home', and traveling 'far from home' should feel like a fairly epic (or at least meaningful) journey.  Contrast that with a game like WoW, where nobody really feels a specific city as 'theirs'.

One key to this is not dividing up your game-world into tightly level-restrictive zones.  This is one more area where AoC falls down.  Being a high level shouldn't mean you're 'based' in a certain area.

She's elaborated on that in part 2:
Don't know about computer game orcs and hardcore PVPers, but if i want to look behind me there's this thing called neck that allows me to look over my shoulder...

I agree about the "feeling home" thing but it can't be easily solved in a free and hardcore PvP environment.
You are still thinking in rose-colured pre-Trammel terms. Ultima Online didn't have levels and, most important, worked (for some time, before it started bleeding subs because of all the ganking and corpse looting) BECAUSE it was the only thing of its kind available.

More on it, it didn't had quests, it didn't had any content, so players weren't actually let free to go wherever they wanted, they were kinda forced to go randomly around (having houses in weird places didn't help and choosing a place wasn't always up to you), they didn't had an option save for the few dungeons, infamously known game-breakers.

A step further, next hardcore PVP game, enters EVE online. Again, it's an open world basically contentless. You don't *HAVE TO* go anywhere unless you want to, and no one can make your progression impossible just by camping popular content spots.

About size, and "hideability". That works in EVE because of the setting. The universe is supposed to be big, huge looking all the same. Motivations for traveling are different in EVE and lots of things are doable "by proxy" anyway. Do you seriously think a huge, wide, mostly empty non-space world would work in 2008? Exploring virtual worlds in 1999 was really something, even barren ugly looking ones. Do you think a world like AC1 one would work today, just because of its hide-potential factor? You may not like Vanguard, but go there asking how the people received the HUGE world. Just about the world: barren and boring were the two most used words, and arts and visuals weren't bad either.

Finally, I know you are just flamebaiting about Conan, cause it isn't and wasn't ever supposed to be a hardcore pvp game so your point is moot (FFA yes, and it delivers - hardcore no), but let's move beyond it and have an exercise at game designing:

Problem: as a game designer, in a tiered virtual world how would you prevent higher levels/skills players from gathering in areas challenging enough to let them keep advancing their level/skills? How would you push them in lower level tiers if there's nothing they can get out of it?

Tierless? ok then.

Problem 2: as a game designer, in a tierless virtual world how would you prevent lower levels/skills players from quitting in frustrations and canceling their subs by being constantly killed and spoiled of all their belongings by both higher level players and higher level mobs which by design hang in all areas without distinction?

Solution? Just size? Just make it big so I can be off everyone's radar?
I am interested. Not in a hostile way. Really curious. Please answer me.

On a side note, the gathering areas of Conan are the most recent examples of tight areas where everyone has to go (and PVP) regardless the levels. No need to say it's bloody chaos, but it's manageable. It works and it's kinda cool. You know why? Cause death means nothing. Respawn, short walk, nothing ever happened.
If it had consequences, no one would ever gather resources there until they are max level.

Geez, you guys say a lot of words!

Anyway, Chinese Democracy is out.  Where's Darkfall?

Oh don't worry.
It's ready. They are just adding polish  :grin:

Where's your proof???

Here's mine:  (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1f/GNRchinesedemocracy.jpg/200px-GNRchinesedemocracy.jpg)

At the risk of breaking NDA, here it is:

(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3141/3077624744_39e4104513_o.jpg)

The only one who I wondered about was Signe because his/her avatars are just demented and attract my curiosity.


Inexperienced? Yes. Low Budget? No, so that should comfort you a bit.

And what was the development budget for Darkfall?

Yeah, this is intriguing.
What's the budget and what's your source?

I look like all my avatars!  We're not demented, we're INTERESTING!

This is actually a common and mistaken concept. Sure, you can buy assets in a fire sale cheap... but making them work in a different system? Good luck there.

By the time your art team is done combing through them to figure out how it was done and what they can do to use them and make them fit this new world you are building... they could just do their own from scratch and possibly save money.

Consider Gods & Heroes. They showed some great and distinct art and (to my knowledge) they didn't sell it off afterwards. Roman art would be useful in most generic fantasy settings... so why didn't someone go after it? Because it's never as easy as "buy art and attach to game engine at the proper hooks and voila! GAME ON"

Plus, if someone has a budget of $30 million, I can build them a dozen cheap games and still have room for a nice car and some drugs. You are too expensive.  :why_so_serious:

They've spent almost 10 million Euros since October.

You only need to translate the first paragraph. (http://www.gameworld.gr/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1514)

They seem to be fiscally responsible if reports about them actually having 20 million (http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/editorials/3222-Surlys-Column-State-of-the-Game-Darkfall-Razorwax-and-Aventurine-Heres-the-Rub) in loans is true.

From mutantmagnet's link:


And if that article is from July... 2007.  :why_so_serious:

So lets see you provide one link thats not in english telling us to translate it. For some reason i take the time to translate it and find out it reveals absolutely fuckall about Darkfalls budget. And another that is an opinion piece with all sorts of dubious fact checking culminating in the opinion that darkfall is obviously about to be released.

The only problem being its almost 2 years old.  :oh_i_see:

Total thread polyglot victory

That's my fault. I was looking at two different pages and copied the wrong link.

This is the correct one. (http://www.gameworld.gr/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1465)


I didn't bother posting the translation because you should be able to take my word for it.


As for the second one I never claimed it was definite proof of anything. I just added it as additional food for thought.

Why would we request a source if we were willing to take your word for it?

We just wanted substantiation on your claims of its budget. You haven't provided them! And made me translate a heathen tongue to reveal your lies!  :grin:

 :awesome_for_real:

Does this mean they are keeping the other 10 millions from the 2007 20M loan for Grimwell's nice car and drugs?

Cool! I look like my avatar as well.

I know it isn't just that easy, but buying an existing title cheap and then working within its existing framework to build something different is likely to be cheaper than starting that development from scratch. Especially for a MMO, where a lot of the cost comes from continually building systems that already exist a dozen times over in different games. It wouldn't be just tearing out art and putting them in a new game; it would be about working out what worked and what didn't with the title you bought (having carefully selected it from the growing list of dead MMOs), building on the strengths, adding more interesting bits and removing focus from the weaker aspects of the title.

For Gods and Heroes, that would be adding in PvP, upping the involvement of gods, improving how pets behaved and speeding up the lvl curve so that PvE was trivial. Other non-combat would be scrapped. (If I bought G&H - which was feature and content complete, just needed bug fixing at time of "hiatus" - I would want the whole thing, not just the art.) The core of G&H would be that "you are your own phalanx" and then making situations where player phalanx vs player phalanx was enjoyable and rewarding.

And I said $30 million because otherwise that mystery F13 billionaire will think I'm being too cheap!  :awesome_for_real:

Ahh, see now I thought you were talking about trying to use those old assets inside a different game/engine/structure.

Buying the game wholesale and then standing it up and trying to make it to something else/more?

Possibly less expensive. That depends entirely on how well the game itself is documented and how fast you can get a team to learn how it's supposed to be working and then how to insert code into it without explosions. If you are lucky you might get a few people from the original team, but they had to fail to get the product to a point that you could buy it... so they may not be all that uber. The entire production would be a pain to get going but not impossible.

More difficult though would be rebranding it. You are essentially going to have to say "Whamdoodles Online, now with less Shittastic!" and then jaded folks in places like f13 are going to do what they do best: Point out how utterly hopeless the situation is and do so in a grand fashion. You are working uphill on a steep slope in the realms of perception all to make your used game go cheaply.

I'm not saying it's impossible to do what you suggest, but on the business side I'd rather buy some clean and off the shelf MMO tools and build something "new" that does not have perception issues. While it would be risky, it wouldn't be as risky.

I... never really played UO much at all?  I was actually thinking more in terms of Darktide.  Where, during the time-period we're talking about, if I understand correctly the world was *much* bigger than UO, it wasn't the only server available (not by a long shot, AC populations were actually pretty healthy back then), it had levels (though they weren't terribly influential at the time, and still aren't anywhere near as important as both games), and most importantly you had a lot of options for escaping from combat -- fight-or-flight really meant flight-or-fight, not just fight-or-be-cut-down-as-you-try-to-run-away.


Yes, I do think it would work, because the audience it's targeting is completely different than the audience Vanguard targets.

Vanguard's world seemed barren because they had a playerbase that wanted lots of PvE *stuff*.

By contrast, a huge divide regarding the monthly content patches opened up in the AC1 community.  The PvE servers eagerly anticipated the monthly patches, because it meant new content, quests, items, additions to the story.  Darktide *hated* the patches -- not just the occasional instability and bugginess, but the very idea of progressing the game monthly -- because in their view it meant the devs were needlessly messing with a good thing.  They didn't want new quest content, they didn't want new items or this or that, they wanted to keep on playing the same game they've been playing.

Vanguard attracts the type of players who seek to *consume* content that the devs have created.  A barren landscape is like a blank canvas for them.  Darktide, and a future world-PvP MMO, attracts the type of players who want to *be* the content, and want the devs to get out of the way as much as possible.  A barren landscape is like being a kid in a sand-lot for them -- they fill it with their own adventures.

Also, let's look at the antecedents; AC1 didn't launch in a vacuum, it launched when EQ had already been established for a few months (This, along with its hideous orange-brown box art sitting next to EQ's Elf Tits on the store shelf, are probably the biggest factors why AC1 ended up 3rd out of 3 among the original round of mainstream MMOs.), and EQ was much more content-driven in the vein of WoW.  Things nonetheless worked out alright.


Darktide addressed both of these, with its original mechanics -- the mob spawns were the right density so that with careful determination, you could make sure to weave between spawns and get to your destination without triggering something that'd eat you.  There were also spawn points (called lifestones, equivalent to bind-stones in other games) at various points through the wilderness, where you'd quickly learn to set up shop.  Wandering shopkeepers in the wilderness, out-of-the-way little huts with vendors that weren't on anyone's radar... you could have your own little shadow economy going.  Also, my point above about escape options applied to PvE as well -- running away worked pretty well.  Spacing your way through the spawns was helped by having a radar with a decent radius, something I still wish other MMOs had.

Side note on the whole 'running away being effective' thing -- magic and missile attacks in AC1 can literally be physically dodged by running out of their path.  If someone shot an arrow at you, and you moved out of the way fast enough, there was no dice-roll, the arrow simply stuck into the ground (at which point, if you're a low-level and poor like I was, you could run back, pick it up, and eventually sell 'em to a vendor later for tiny bits o' cash).

So if you accidentally triggered aggro from a group of 3 monsters, 2 melee and 1 ranged, let's say -- you would start sprinting away, making sure to sidestep like mad as you ran to dodge the oncoming arrows, and the melee monster only gets one or two hits on you before you're out of range.  Heal up before you start running again, and voila! You've got mechanics where you'd sometimes see level 5 players who'd make their way deep into the No Man's Land area of the game ('the direlands') by painstakingly weaving through the spawns and running like hell when possible, simply for the sheer fun of it.

AC1's guild system ("allegiances") was also absolutely crucial, as it proved hugely successful in getting new players integrated into the server's politics.  If you've played AC1, you know just what I'm talking about, but if not let me know and I can give you a rundown.  It's the best guild system ever implemented into a MMO, bar none, and radically different from the norm.  Nothing else even comes close.  Oftentimes, the high level who just killed you would become your new protector and sugar daddy, and the game gave him an incentive to do so.

In most PvP MMOs, the guild system leads to a lot of "kill everyone who's not us".  In AC1, the incentive structure led to a whole lot of "join or die", with territorial control being at issue.  (More about this if you'd like, it was really remarkable in a lot of ways)

So that level 5 with the chutzpah to try crossing the direlands that I mentioned above?  If a high level ran across him, saw that the guy was resourceful and had a decent head on his shoulders... he'd be recruited in no time.

Very low-level players could also be decisive in fights between much higher levels, by staying on the fringes of the action in a hard-to-get-to spot, and tossing heals to your favored combatant.  The way health and mana scaled -- a curve that flattened out quickly, you didn't end up with 5 bazillion HP - was very conducive to this.  This helped you 'get in good' with a higher level who'd then be happy to take you under his wing, in the allegiance system mentioned above.  Non-mages could still whip out a wand and do the same thing, thanks to the way the open-ended skill system worked.  (Virtually none of these systems were designed with PvP in mind, but the way they worked together was absolute magic.)

As for being killed and spoiled of their belongings -- the lower level you were, the less you dropped in terms of loot, the more easily replaceable your loot was, and the less loot impacted your performance.  Also, the 5 minute non-PK timer after you died gave you ample time to get out of dodge (Fast runspeeds helped here.  For those who've never played it, AC1's runspeeds are close to what you'd imagine speedhacking is like in other MMOs.  And if you were starting on the PK server, you could balance your template to start with a higher run-speed.)


Will do.  Sorry if the giant wall of text is a bit much, but it's a multi-faceted question so I tried to cover everything that popped to mind.


A few problems here, as I see them -- escaping from combat is too hard, and levels mean too much in Conan.  Also, it depends what the consequences are.  One of the things Conan really did *right* was making loot not have a gigantic influence on your stats (Or at least, dropping down to a lower tier, more easily obtainable tier of loot doesn't dramatically lower your effectiveness).  You don't have to be able to loot everything from the guy, just a bit.

When is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix) coming to games?

Sorry but I would rather pass on seeing someone like this guy entering the MMO scene.
(http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2006/celebdatabase/seandiddycombs/sean_diddy_combs1_300_400.jpg)


Also in spite of their inexperience the DF devs seem to be holding their own.

From an addendum to part 2 (http://beta.thenoobcomic.com/df_preview/part2.html) of Noobs preview

Jesus H. Christ, that webcomic is awful.  Though their parody of democratic whining in anti guilds is spot on.  (Are there any MMOs that feature anti guilds, anymore?  Does Shadowbane have any?  EVE?)

I kinda like the "the noob" webcomic, but take that from a guy who dozes off with PvP/Kurtz and hates the guts of the dude that makes GUComics.

Last time i played Shadowbane there was a pretty big guild  (had like 5-10 cities in their nation) called Dragonscale, it was a mix of strong ANTI and roleplay.

I dare you not to giggle, i present you , Sir Steven's signature, ruler of the Dragonscale Kingdom.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v219/dragonscale/sdsiglatest.png)

Also: The Dragonscale Anthem (http://www.geocities.com/dragonscalenation/DRAGONSCALE.mp3) and their latest video production (http://blip.tv/file/165885).

And of course there's are a lot of old school and new anti guilds in activity, you'd be surprised.

Iniquity, you are a disaster. The Noob is awesome. Period.

Back to hardcore PvP.
Then you didn't play UO and all your experience is based on Asheron's Call Darktide. Fine.
But we weren't looking for cool games here, or just following personal tastes. I for example was perfectly fine with pre-Trammel UO and I still think it's the best PvP ever, and I'd be playing Siege Perilous right now if it wasn't for the skill gain artificial cockblock and the item-tastic new deal which stormed Sosaria. We were looking for a possible solution for a succesful if not popular hardcore PvP game.

What was the most player Darktide ever had? 5k? 10k?

Then It DIDN'T work! The fact that it worked for you and your 4999 friends, 7 or so years ago, doesn't mean it's a viable way to craft a hardcore PvP game in 2008. Unless, of course, you are aiming to 5k players.

While I have to concede on the Vanguard example, which wasn't fitting for the reasons you finely expressed, it doesn't mean your idea of hardcore PvP players has any resemblance with the infamous 100k that would eventually pay for our dream game.


See? In an already tiny demographic an even tinier one was in disagreement. That's not the kind of numbers you build a game on.
I'd say that you solved the problem I presented you with a 5k customers solution. Not really a solution.

Like it or not the gamers changed. When you have a small bunch of players you can't aim to the core of the core of the core of those small bunch based on another core and pretty limited previous experience. While I am sure some would just be happy with a new evil PvP toy, there are more than enough that loved UO, loved DT, but learned to love the passing of time too, learned to love eyecandy, content and oh god even WoW, and couldn't really get back to long traveling times, barren worlds, absence of quests and "can't even turn your neck to look around cause you know it has to be realz the Darkfail way!  :awesome_for_real: "

I am not bashing Darktide. It was great as was pre-Trammel UO for those who liked it that way. I am one of those. I'd welcome a new old-school UO, a new AC Darktide, a new Shadowbane. I am up for ALL the things we talked about, and I am, on paper, even up for Darkfall. The thing is took me some time to accept it but now I know why they had to change UO, why they had to drop the equip loot (not just backpack) thing from Shadowbane, and why no one can produce a game along those lines anymore. Doesn't matter how much we liked, we are not enough to justify the investment without an actualization of the product. You can't only aim to the old geezers who had plenty of time in 2001 in high school and now have families, sons and jobs that allow for a completely different playstyle. Those are most likely pvping on browser games anyway right now, a different kind of old school and a dfferent kind of huge featureless worlds, and are even having lots of fun with it. They wouldn't come back for Darktide reborn, they don't have the time for it anymore. You have to look for some new blood then. And the new, younger blood, would probably hate your old school huge and questless featurless world.
Add to it that "we" aren't even always in agreement about the kind of hardcore pvp we want (there are many subtle differences). So it's not like the first developer who can craft a new hardcore pvp game will get all the 100k. They know it, and they don't really know how to cater all those rabid sociopaths together on a single game.

Closest thing to what we want? Eve online.
First one who can make a believable and stylish medieval EVE wins.

Now, Darkfall is trying to do a kickass old-school-but-new hardcore PvP game. I bashed it enough so I'll just say it's definitely not EVE enough, but still "let's hope for the best". Too bad hoping is even less influential than farting.

It gets most of things spot on. If that makes it awful... perhaps it's the genre that's to blame, not the messenger. Perosnally, i love it. :why_so_serious:

I don't understand how anyone can think a hardcore pvp game can obtain, maintain, or grow a player base when the game mechanics allow the few to decide who survives (read: have fun).

Because being self referential is the new cool here's some stuff I wrote on that a while back (http://antipwn.wordpress.com/2008/01/18/pvp-mmo-design-redux/).

That was good, thanks.  Some of thew early comments are most telling.  It's sad that people will still answer with how players should play ... 


Priceless.

Why do most people at f13 think a game needs to cater to the masses?  Wtf ever happened to creative license?  Honestly, the MMO genre's BIGGEST problem is trying to make their games too big for too many people, and they fall just as hard.  These designs need to shrink in their scope, minimize their expenses, and maximize the fun for the subset of consumers they're attracting.  Really, that's how PC gaming got started... they werent writing code to please everyone - they were writing code to entertain themselves and the other dorks in their Lisp class.  A few got lucky and scored pub deals and distro at "Software, etc." for the mallrats.

Now, Darkfall may be making a mistake by making their game probably too big (expensive) for a small group of hardcore pvp people.  But most of that can be attributed to poor planning and a game that took entirely too long to make.  Their hearts are in the right place and I like the design for what it's designed to do for WHO it's designed for, but I'm on the bandwagon here for if they'll be able to stay in the black, which is a resounding "no."  Then again, it seems no one here really knows how much they've spent on the game.

As much as we harp on the design of this game, I think deep down everyone here secretly fawns over it.  It's an old-school thought process.  Once it's released, logically it'll start small and if it's deserving will grow from there.  Which is the way it should be.  Their biggest problem IMO is resisting the urge to "Puff Daddy" their game, i.e. water it down to popularize it.  They're trying real hard to fight it, but we'll see what happens.  Personally, I prefer they paint themselves into a corner and let the players come to them, not the other way around.

Ghambit,

Do you know how much a game costs to develop and how many hardcore pvp players there are to make money off of?  Do you know what the minimum level of development or polish or whatever is required to attract that crowd?

I'm not a game developer so I can only trust that what most tell us is true; the audience is too small so support any development and the retention rate is too low continue to support any game that gets to market.

If you look at the comments from so called hardcore pvp'ers you'll see they are all over the map with suggestions.  Make the world big enough that griefing isn't an issue (big world, more money) is just one of them.

If you've been lurking here for any amount of time you'll know this is yet another rehash of why hard core pvp isn't sustainable.

Just because a world is big doesnt necessarily means it costs a lot of money to develop.  Anyone in this forum with any kind of PC intelligence can fairly easily design a world just as large as Darkfall's.  Really, it's not that hard... and takes literally a few button clicks.  And really, good games dont always take a helluva lot of money/time to develop... they attract "pvpers" by the shear virtue of the quality of their designs.  There are webgames out there that have more players then most MMOs, devved by ONE person.

As for griefing, if there's player organization it's a moot point.  If you're a lone wolf then you run the risk of griefing or being griefed, that's your prerogative.  My contention long ago with DF was if they didnt provide the tools for the players to organize than yes, there would be issues like you discussed.  There needs to be a command and robust guild structure or too many people will become incensed as they initially log in.  And above all else, it needs to be easy to find (on/offline).

And we need to re-think our views on why/how hardcore pvp isnt sustainable.  Fact is, it's just not sustainable at the numbers games like WoW demand.  But so the fuck what!  Sustain it at the numbers necessary to make the game work, keep the servers online, and the staff paid.  You dont just nix the design because Dave Chappell probably wouldn't roll a bear shaman in it.

I guess I'm just a more objective free-form thinker.  But the fact is there isnt room in this market for a lot of cookie-cutter popular titles.  That's been proven already.  So why keep falling into that trap?

While I agree with you that niche games have the most potential to turn an effective profit, the point with Darkfall is that it has promised the sun and the moon and everything to everyone over the last few years. Had they been a bit more modest or honest in their self-promotion they probably wouldn't draw half the scorn they are currently recieivng.

As far as a pure PvP game goes, I could see one working if designed for such from the bottom up. The notion that there are 100K "hardcore pvpers" out there I find ridiculous though, if nothing because self-titled "hardcore pvpers" cannot come to a single consensus on how they want their game to be. The flawed notion here is that there is a single set of rules that is under-represented in the current market, that would cater for all these people. However I feel that any game aiming to cater for these people will struggle and be forced to comprimise and ultimately fail. This is what happened with the PvP in AoC, by and large.

A game designed for 15-20K subsrcibers could probably do well, and you'd have two or three side by side for varying degrees of "hardcore".

I tried to get passed this, but failed.

Agreed.  Actually I believe WW2O at its core has about 15k subscribers and it's doing pretty well right now.  Hardcore pvpers are finicky folk; as for AoC, personally I was pretty let down by the "hardcore" folk in my guild.  They just have way too much ADD and require way too much instant gratification.  Hence, they're difficult to please.  In reality, they're not really hardcore at all... but a bunch of pussies.  They have no patience for long term planning and commitment.  They just want to kill things the moment they log in.  Now, if DF has room in their game for both types of folks I think they might be able to sustain a decent population.  Regardless, the ADD-hardcore are not a reliable playerbase in any game, but they DO (somewhat) stick with games they like - they might take breaks every now and then, but they'll still be around.

It's called fractal terrain generation.  i.e. Terragen, Mojoworld, etc.  The time consuming part is in populating those spaces with interactable assets like houses, etc.  If you leave that to the player to do then you've eliminated a lot of that though.

Why do I have the feeling that long threads tend to reset themselves every 2 or 3 pages as if no one wrote anything but the poster above you?

I am out. I abused of this thread anyway (my falt), so let's get back to Darkfall will succed because there's plenty of hardcore pvp players and it's easy to make a virtual world, especially a big one, and you don't have to be WoW anyway so yeah it's coming it's coming!

What does that have to do with big world.  A world is a place people are compelled to visit, not a randomly generated fractal landscape.  Time consuming = cost.

No.


It isn't 'watering down' that is the problem. It's the polish on the existing systems. Darkfall won't - can't - have the polish needed to keep the majority of PvP players who cream themselves on forums about it. The second that the network code starts to lag them out, or a memory leak starts seeing slow-downs or CTDs... bye bye hardcore players. And that's assuming the game design is perfect. Which it won't be.

PvP MMOs: cheap to build.

A good PvP MMO that will actually attract players: expensive. Even Runescape - which charges a monthly sub to those who want the extras - upgrades its graphics from time to time.


I'm all for new MMO titles and MMOs going in new directions. But a PvP MMO isn't an easy thing to do. It isn't just building a world and throwing the players into it - you do that and new players get confused and / or ganked by those who are quicker on the draw. Even EvE, hardcore MMO of choice, has safe space for PvE and the non-hardcore.

You throw everyone in together with nothing else to do and you get Fury.

I've already said they've got to have initial organizational structure (to lubricate insertion) to the game or it'll fail.  Of this we agree.  But I still fail to see how that somehow makes things complex.  It doesnt.  Matter of fact if you look at many games, it's entirely handled on the web post-facto (many times not even by the studio).  It's more something you just DO rather than just build.  Even moreso, it's largely easier to accomplish this in a totally pvp game... since there's no crappy PvE treadmill to run before you even get to the good stuff.  So there isnt an army of devs sitting around designing the first 20 levels as PvE "learning mode" just to scratch the surface of being capable of doing anything. 

As for "safe space" for newbs.  Didnt they say there are safe areas in DF?

That seems to be the consensus, so I started from the beginning.  I'm just not seeing it.  It seems to be... loosely based off of a combo of EQ, AC, and UO?  Or something?  Can you link me to a few of the better strips so I can see what I'm not getting?


It was at around 3k peak population for a while, and given the way people bounced around it's possible (high-end but not unrealistic estimate) it had somewhere around 30,000 players at peak.

However, that's in a game that wasn't designed or marketed with PvP in mind *at all*, at a time when the MMO audience was much smaller.  AC in general suffered from incredibly poor marketing and support from Microsoft.

It's better judged not "as a game in its own right", but as a proportion of AC -- and it attracted a disproportionate proportion of the AC audience, despite the fact that the AC audience wasn't a particularly PvP-heavy audience.  A lot of it came via word of mouth.

I'm not saying something much like it would certainly hit 100k today, but it's not improbable either.  The DIKU formula is a lot more stale for a lot more people than it was back then; people who came into the genre with WoW, but are getting bored with that and looking for something different.

Also, I have a hard time imagining 50k isn't sustainable, either.  My anecdote about the Darktide approach to patch day, now that I think about it, suggests you wouldn't need the same sort of content-creation live team presence that a lot of PvE games do.

Another data point pops to mind here - Planetside.  Very different, I know, but hear me out -- the Core Combat expansion bled 'em dry, by adding new content in a way that messed with their winning (or at least not-losing) formula.  Or DAoC with the ToA expansion, where the PvE content messed up everyone's PvP experience.


See? In an already tiny demographic an even tinier one was in disagreement. That's not the kind of numbers you build a game on. [/quote]

Uh, no.  First off, AC1 was at something like 120k subscribers at the time, which considering the size of the MMO market at the time wasn't exactly awful.

Secondly, the divide split along pretty even lines -- Darktiders against the patches, everyone else for -- because AC1 was essentially two very different games, Darktide and not-Darktide, that happened to share a common game-world.  In a game developed roughly off of the 'Darktide Model', you wouldn't see those divisions, because the not-Darktiders of the world probably wouldn't be playing it.


Eve doesn't have twitch skill involved, which to my mind is a far from negligible difference.  Also, you're massively dependent on the economy in EvE to get things done, which is a huge difference between EvE and most MMOs.  If I wanted medieval full-world PvP that'll stay supported and didn't involve twitch combat, I'd play EQ2's FFA PvP server.  If I want a spreadsheet, I'd do something productive with Excel.  It's not just the setting that kills it.

Eh, it's easy to design a game in a vacuum. It's much harder to do so when you have anything like an actual budget, staff, and equipment.

To get all that you need a solid plan to convince whoever's got the money. Nobody is going into those meetings touting the wild success of AC:DT or pre-Trammel UO. If their audience even knows Asheron's Call, it's most likely because they got it from SirBruce's chart in PC Gamer a few years back before the WoW portion of the pie gobbled up the rest of it like that tesserac 4D cube.

Hardcore PvP isn't sustainable because the few games that tried either had it by accident of emergent behavior (pre-Trammel UO) or feature it as part of a huge sim in which the cost of every fight can be calculated down to the last bit of Tritanium (Eve).

And importantly: Note that neither of these most prominent examples of successful PvP games in the Western countries actually had PvP has it's foundation experience whereas those games or servers that do (SB, AC:DT, EQ PvP servers, etc) all had much narrower appeal in the West.

I've long questioned the desire for hardcore PvP en masse. If it's a necessary part of having a holding in a virtual world (plum housing in UO, good systems in Eve), then yea, PvP makes that ownership a deeper experience.

But PvP by itself? Sometimes the near universal belief that something doesn't work in certain markets actually turns out to be the truth.

You just cited the key: "Having something to fight for."  It's agreed that pvp by itself doesnt work, or rather... doesnt work well, unless it's simply a bloated version of a normal high-twitch, heavy graphical, multiplayer FPS.  e.g. it doesnt pretend to be anything else but.  Even still, having a definitive element to fight for long-term is key regardless.  If you're gonna charge a monthly fee those elements better be pretty robust and dynamic.  With DF right now there are too many "?" with regards to economy, resources, and real estate yes?  So we cant really judge how effective it may be at "hardcore pvp" anyways.

This.

Most of AC1's world was built procedurally at first, with the devs then going in with handcrafted tools to add personalized touches later.  It worked out pretty well.  Darkfall seems to be going a similar route; you don't need to develop these painstakingly handcrafted 'zones', a-la WoW.  AC environments were more interesting than WoW in a lot of ways, because what they lacked in immense detail, they made up for with heavy use of the Z axis and a real sense of exploration in a seamless world; you didn't just see mountains off in the distance, you could actually *climb* them, and doing so was interesting and fun in its own right.  And sometimes, you'd find a hidden lifestone nestled up in those hills, with a portal to some major town next to it -- voila, you had an isolated raiding base for use against whoever lived in that town, for guerrilla warfare.  A lot of the portals were semi-randomly generated, moving around at different intervals, be it hours (some of them) or weeks/months (others), further making life interesting.


Another area where AC had it right, where guilds formed organically and quickly, and there were easily hundreds of tiny 1-20 person guilds.  Rather than a guild of equals, you had patrons and vassals, with one player swearing fealty to the other.  The higher level, the patron, offered expertise, protection, and loot as he wished; the lower level, the vassal, his XP gains gave a fair bit of 'bonus XP' (the XP wasn't taken from the lower level -- it was generated out of thin air as an incentive) to the patron.  One person's vassal could have his own vassals, and so on in turn, forming a pyramid-like monarchy.  You gave higher levels a natural incentive to work with lower levels and integrate them into the game's system, and there were absolutely *zero* start-up costs for forming what amounts to a guild.  A level 10 could ambush a couple of level 3's, talk them into joining him as vassals, and bam!  There's a 3-person monarchy already.  Patron-vassal relationships in AC were really unlike your standard 'guildmates' relationship in other MMOs, and gave you a personal 'hook' into the world.  It actively encouraged total strangers to meet and get to know each other ingame.  It was probably the single best social mechanism I've ever seen in an MMO.

(I am not a natural guild-leader type by any means.  In fact, I usually don't even *join* guilds in most MMOs I play.  I nonetheless ended up a monarch multiple times on DT, never on my main, but on newbie characters I developed in various regions of the game world to have fun logging in occasionally and experiencing that local 'scene', a world away from the major battles and clans my main was involved in -- such as newb PK/politics in the area around Yaraq.  Pretty soon, I'd be the biggest of the little kids on the block, leading a gang of newbs and trying to team up to take on the higher levels if they rolled through town.  It happened organically, and it was fun.)

It's a shame no other game has tried anything like it since.

Side note:  Downloaded Shadowbane tonight and gave it a shot.

The game is absolute ass.  Whoever thought anyone would play a game that's click-to-move and had zero how-to-play intro should be flogged.  It also had the least responsive combat I've ever seen, less responsive than Rubies of Eventide or Horizons or even that one open-source MMO.

Coming from "twitchy" AC1 it's not a surprise you don't like Shadowbane. It's not ass. It's old and user un-friendly, but it has the best large scale meaningful PvP mechanics ever for a medieval MMORPG (EVE being the absolute best, and the mechanics are pretty similar if not identical). Shadowbane suffered technical issues which were basically unrecoverable given the budget and the incompetence of some coders. Still, it managed to give most people some of their best memories PVP-wise, even in its original and broken shape. Took them ages to make it playable and stable, and with a minimum budget it now is. It's laggy, it's ugly, but it's a great PVP game. You can't see it? Your loss.

I tried to stay out of this thread as it's not progressing beyond the point of "it worked for me and my small circle of friends 7 years ago, so it's obviously the perfect formula, it just has to be replicated and it'll be a blast! Oh, and Darkfall has potential <rolleyes>".

But lemme give you a piece of advice:
Seems to me is that your experience with hardcore PVP games is too limited to be of any value. You didn't play Ultima Online, you didn't play Shadowbane, you don't like EVE so I guess you didn't really delved into PvP there other than for a few exploded ships, and as a final touch you quoted Planetside wich isn't hardcore pvp a bit. Your vision is Darktide-centric and anything that doesn't suit your tastes failed for good reasons while your game was quite a success and missed hit status just because it wasn't advertised enough or the box art didn't have boobs.

It's ok to like a game. Hell, I like Darktide too.
It's wrong though to build theories of fun with such a shortsight.

And no wonders you don't like Shadowbane. There are levels of brilliancy when it comes to PVP there you won't ever notice because it doesn't suit your liking (not twitchy, control scheme...) and are buried under a coat of horrible visuals and a nasty past. Do you know it has infeudations and subinfeudations among guilds, and there are nation rulers, emperors and taxes? So long for your monarchy. Do you know it still has and always had 10 times the players of Darktide? Nah, who cares? "The game is absolute ass". Sure. But what do you think would anyone from around here say by rolling a char on Darktide now? "Oh, woot! Iniquity was right dammit it's the best PvP I've ever had" ?

P.S: Are you Telemediocrity's friend by any chance?

Ass is too kind, Shadowbane was a bag of shit, click to move was retarded.

Which means Asians are retarded?

Feel free to knock up a long post on how good click to move is for a fantasy game.  EvE I can understand, fantasy, no.  Because you are defending click to move in SB, aren't you?  That's what you are doing, right?  You wanna take a deep breath and consider that?

It's all about getting used to, but having played SB and L2 for a long time, when you switch to a MMO with human interface, it's so much better, I've had hand cramps and fear of carpal tunnel syndrome playing my scout in SB after so many hours.


Sidenote: Does AION feature mouse movement like L1/L2?

L2 is click to move as well?  I played that, I must have forgotten.  Allow me to retract my previous statement.

Shadowbane was a bag of poorly implemented shit, there, that's better, because clearly click to move didn't annoy me that much in L2.

No Arthur, I prefer WASD by a LONG SHOT.

Plus everyone who followed Shadowbane at the time knows they chose click to move because they were expecting large scale battles and felt (with good reason, given the average bandwidth available when development started) it would have been unplayable with WASD movement.
Ironically, it was unplayable with point 'n click too, and that's why it crashed so hard. We all know the story.

But a oneliner saying the game is ass and retarded because of click to move, is retarded.



EDIT:

Much better.

Three different comments, taken as a sum of it's parts SB was shit, I mean really, come on.

Played Aion at PAX. It was WASD, but I'm sure they'll have optional click to move for Asia.

I prefer click to move personally, particularly in L2. Click to move provided a very nice aesthetic and strategic element in PvP. People dont run around in circles facing 60 degrees off from the person they're swinging at. In click to move games, combat looks like combat and the hits look very solid and real. You stand toe to toe and duke it out. None of that strafing and swinging while your torso is 45 degrees from your legs. WASD MMO combat just looks unrealistic, regardless of how much more fun it is, and since MMOs are a lot about just watching this simulation of combat while pressing a few hotkeys, how realistic it looks really matters for my immersion.

With that said, WASD is far more natural for movement, I just like the advantages that click gives if you dont find it too annoying to use.

Edit: Oh, but Shadowbane was still a bag of dicks regardless. Asian click to move games really arent that bad though! You just need to know what you're doing.

Your not one of those people that think Photoshop makes instant art are you?

Tasos has done an interview for MMORPG.com
If the amount of trolls that existed elsewhere weren't so noticeable I would think he was calling some people out in f13  :-P

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/4/feature/2494/from/%2Ffeatures%2Ecfm%2Fview%2Flatest (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/4/feature/2494/from/%2Ffeatures%2Ecfm%2Fview%2Flatest)

MMORPG.com:
   

Can you tell us, as of the answering of this Q&A exactly where Darkfall stands in terms of nearness to being a launch-ready title?
Tasos Flambouras:
   

Darkfall could launch today. It's more ready for launch than most, if not all of the MMORPG titles at the same stage that I've personally sampled and it has been for quite some time. Everything has been tested internally and since November 10th we've been using an ever-growing number of external testers.

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MMORPG.com:
   

Darkfall has been in development for a very long time, can you please tell us why this game's development process has been so long?
Tasos Flambouras:
   

So long compared to what? We've been in development since 2003. Look at all that makes Darkfall stand out compared to other MMOs. In order to deliver all that we've had to develop proprietary technology from scratch. We also had to develop a company from scratch and everything associated with running a long game development cycle. We've done this independently.

Even games that license all their technology are taking 5+ years, while still using teams several times the size of our own. All this usually with the backing of major publishers, and most of their everyday problems solved.

So I would say that our development time is consistent with the making a breakthrough game, all the reusable technology to run it, and limited resources to do so. It's a long time, sure...but not for what we've achieved.
MMORPG.com:
   

The length of time that this game has been in development have led some to speculate that this game is vapourware, can you speak to that point?
Tasos Flambouras:
   

We don't pay much attention to speculation but it's not the length of development that has led some to speculate...this has been going on since day one. I'd question the motives of those speculating all these years. We're almost talking about obsessive "trolling" either looking for a reaction, more information, or trying to hurt our efforts.

Darkfall is a game that stands out, it's not a clone. Some people doubt it's possible, others worry that it is. Either way it generates a lot of interest. If people were dismissing it, then they wouldn't be talking about it. The well-meaning gamers root for efforts that try to raise the bar. So who's left? It's so easy being a skeptic.

Another red flag is Darkfall's large, active and very passionate community. A lot of communities would like to be like Darkfall's. Slandering our game is a way to get a reaction.

We have a thick skin; this kind of thing doesn't touch us. It actually makes us feel like we're on the right track. It has also served to fire up our community and has created diehard fans. It got a lot of people to take a closer look at our game and realize that this is what they've been waiting for. All the "trolls" have achieved is to inadvertently help perpetuate the buzz for Darkfall.

We know exactly what we've got on our hands. Our best answer is that our game is coming out and then the voices will have to find something else to talk about.
MMORPG.com:
   

Darkfall is a game that has many within the MMO community buzzing. Can you tell us why we haven't seen a marketing campaign similar to those conducted pre-launch by many other MMO studios?
Tasos Flambouras:
   

The MMO community is buzzing, and then you ask why we don't have marketing. It's somewhat of an oxymoron. We've done what we could with the resources we've had available.'

This has been a time for development. We're not going to sink development resources into traditional marketing before Darkfall is out. We need to be able to support this game and the response is overwhelming as it is.

What would a traditional marketing campaign achieve? To help sell some more game boxes? This is not a single player game. When you sell an MMO you're in it for the long-haul. The best marketing for an MMO is having a great game that retains your players.

Our marketing effort will be in response to our needs. The game speaks for itself...we expect a great deal of word of mouth. Darkfall can compete on merit with any MMO out there, but we can't compete against their huge marketing budgets. A traditional marketing campaign is not where our strength is. Having said that, we'll focus on working with online media that has been supporting Darkfall, and we will have a traditional marketing campaign as well, when we feel that Darkfall is best served by it.

Age of Conan Screenshot
MMORPG.com:
   

Can you tell us, at this time, how many players are in the current incarnation of beta?
Tasos Flambouras:
   

It amazes people that we don't have leaks yet. Our explanation is that people in our beta are serious about our game and they like it. You don't leak information easily unless you don't care, you're disappointed, or feel let down. Our testers seem to care about our game. Most of them have left MMOs they just started playing and are invested in our beta. We find that amazing. We can't talk about our total number of selected testers to date, but several hundred testers are in the game as I write this. We're adding more every day, and their numbers will go up considerably in the days to come.
MMORPG.com:
   

Why is Darkfall's beta being run differently from betas that we have seen other MMO companies run?
Tasos Flambouras:
   

I'll agree that we're different. Even though we're a small team we've invested early in testing the game as much as possible. We know that even large game development studios keep testing as an afterthought, if that. We knew that with the complexity of Darkfall, we'd have to make sure that everything works well together. We're banking on our game being stable. In addition to our overall QA philosophy, we've had a team of professional testers on the game for over a year. An MMO is very complex software..We're not going to depend on playtesters for everything...the game is already tested. We need the playtesters mostly for extra gameplay feedback and to test hardware configurations.

Having said that, there's certainly no prescription on how to run a QA phase of development. Our development certainly has little to do with traditional MMO development. We have a great deal more features, more technologies, and more innovations to test.

We're doing our QA in such a way that we get good feedback on the game, so that we can handle our bug reports. The game is very stable, we're continuously patching, the testers have been impressed at our debugging turnaround. In short, we have to do what's best for Darkfall.


MMORPG.com:
   

There is a great deal of confusion surrounding Darkfall's beta and release schedule. Could you clarify any of this for us?

Tasos Flambouras:
   

We've been trying to get our partners up to speed and there will be an official statement in the next few days announcing a release date for the game. This should clear things up.

UO worked okay.

Lots of them do, it depends on the game.

That interview was surprisingly less than balls.  At the very least he didn't say "This could be bigger than WoW".

Both C2M and WASD.

Edit to add:
Wow I don't even have the energy to point out all the hilarity in that interview.  Maybe I should watch the stick-up-her-ass run animations again for lulz.

I don't think the actual game is the point there; that's just background for satire aimed at MMO players, developers and genre tropes alike.

That was one pompous interview given the games history and what it looks like. Does anyone know if they still intend to charge 15 bucks a month. I just cant see them expecting customers to pay a AAA title fee for this game.

I can't wait until the game releases. And Tacos vomits on the player base.

I usually root for the underdog/indi game developer with a passion. This one, doesn't even have my level of support.

Game sound iffy, even on paper.

Don't worry. If he doesn't come through for you guys, L-C and I will be there vomiting on people instead.

You shouldn't point out everything we can take turns.

The one that made me choke on a biscuit the fastest.

"Another red flag is Darkfall's large, active and very passionate community. A lot of communities would like to be like Darkfall's. Slandering our game is a way to get a reaction."

Yes I'm sure devs want a community as abrasive as the Darkfall community.



He's done that already. There was a huge flamewar over his professionalism and how he represents the company last year. For better or worse the dev team love this guy being their mouthpiece.

Wait wait, I got it! It's elementary encryption!

TASOS FLAMBOURAS

A O F A B U S

12 (12) 11 (20) 1 (12) (15)

M C Q U A I D

Tasos Flambouras will make you his bitch.

Perhaps I am missing the funny parts of the interview... but I basically read him to say, "Our game will stand or fall on its gameplay."  That is a true statement, and more than most devs will say one month or so before launch.

Also, a sort of side note... but some articles on DF and other Euro games seem to imply that they receive government funding as well as private investors.  Anyone have info on this, because I think it might go into the whole "will they make money" discussion.  I almost get the feeling that Greece WANTS this company to succeed and will help finance them accordingly.

Uh Oh.  Claus was just lurking at you people who spew vomitty hate all over his elderly game!  And he never comes here anymore!  Who told?  In any case, I remember when this game was announced that it was in development.  It was 2001, not 2003.  Regardless of the name of the company and it's the same people, new location.  Who wants to shiver in Norway when you can bask in the sun in Greece anyway? 

It's not just the unmoving ass cheeks animations that suck.  I don't like the character models at all.  They look completely lifeless and nothing seems to be even almost in proportion.  Look at the all the crap they've added to the wiki page.  Seriously, are those character models really acceptable?  They even managed to make my favourite race look more like a zucchini than an Orc! 

I can remember only a few games where the developers were as aggressively defensive as some of their more demented fans.  Mourning or what ever the last incarnation of that was, Dark and Light - and Darkfall.  (http://www.democraticwarrior.com/forum/images/smilies/Three%20Stooges.gif)

Big difference being... Dark and Light started asking for money BEFORE they even let you play the game.  Anyone who does that shoots a nice little warning flag into the air.  As with all of the recent launches, everyone will have the chance to see for themselves before they are asked to pay.  And, honestly I would kind of worry about a guy who did NOT passionately defend his life's work for the last 5 (7) years.  If you can't get fired up about something you have dedicated that much time to then your odds of success go way down.  It does not make him "right" or even "believable"... but it would be more concerning for me to hear him just back down and say, "Yea, it probably won't turn out all that great, but no big deal eh?"

I wouldn't go there. The devs are a lot smarter and no where near as defensive than the most rabid fans.

Vinadil - Look back one or two pages to find the info you asked for.

Really, at this point with no released software, any "fans" that are not actively in the beta are more accurately called "fanbois", in that they have no real basis for their fanaticism except hope to be in an exclusive club that was "right all along".  And they are the ones that will fall the hardest if it tanks.

There's seemingly never a shortage of people to idolize games that don't exist (yet).

A brief summary of fanboi reaction to a new title:

1) OMG it will be the best evah - a lot better than everything that is out now!
2) I've read all of their vaguely worded design promises and have constructed a perfect game in my head that is totally awesome - it's a lot better than what is out right now!
3) They've gone into alpha / beta and are launching soon! It will be so awesome and I'm quitting my current MMO to play it!

...

4) It wasn't what I thought it would be - I'm going back to my old MMO.

MMOs are just Quake with better netcode.  Red Dragon Software could tell Darkfall that. 

That's not a statement that inspires confidence. "Hey, look, as least I'm not as paranoid as that raving lunatic!"  :grin:

Passion is fine. But a completely niave and unrealistic worldview that flies over the precipice of actual reality upon launch is the sort of thing you want to avoid. Gamers never ever see the game the same way those who created do. But that's the problem of marketing these types of games. You've got a really investigative audience that can spot spin miles away, because these aren't games. They're services in which you rent time in ongoing play experience. MMOers are the type that need convincing to care, convincing to buy, and then continually convinced to rent.

Yeah, the fanbois scare me.  But like every MMO, the people you actually meet ingame when the game is released and the people on the forums prior to release are two very, very different groups.

Me, I'll buy Darkfall when it comes out, no questions asked, 100%, absolutely regardless of what anyone says or doesn't say about its gameplay.  Simply because even if the game sucks, its box sales will be a part of some future VC-type's analysis of whether there's a sufficient market to fund development of the next world PvP game, and it's worth $50 to me to jiggle that number a tad in the right direction.  I don't know how many more years I can go without an actual world PvP MMO to play.

When it comes to MMOs?  Yes, yes it does.  I've lived in Asia.  I'm moving back there again soon, sadly.  Asia is retarded in a million different ways, and gaming is no exception.  The only decent game to come out of Asia with a quasi-MMO component is Kart Rider, and that's just because it added a multiplayer lobby to Double Dash.

The things they consider to be 'fun' are not 'fun', because half of everyone you meet over there has their head on ass backwards about the most basic shit, and that 'half of everyone' approaches 'everyone' once you're talking to people who do gaming, and the few people who've got a decent head on their shoulders are learning English or French or German and getting the fuck out of dodge as soon as they can.

Chauvinist/xenophobe or simply narrowminded blubber makes you an unreliable counterpart and all of a sudden an uninteresting poster. And you don't need to dig Asian MMOs (I don't) to be able to understand different culture and habits.
Have fun in your self-centered universe.  /ignore.

...Have you lived there?  Because in case you haven't noticed, they're not too happy with their way of living either (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/09/AR2008050902315.html?wpisrc=newsletter).  When I live abroad, I speak the relevant languages, learn the relevant customs, immerse myself as much as possible to get a better understanding.  A pile of shit is still a pile of shit.

But hey, way to keep the American tradition of pointlessly romanticizing cultures they view as exotic (http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34198) alive.

Enjoy your shitty KMMOs.  You're probably getting more out of it the poor teenage SOB in Seoul ditching cram-school to hit the PC-bang just to get some sort of break from his joyless existence while chain-smoking himself into oblivion is.  (KMMOs don't run on click-to-move because it's fun, they run on click-to-move so you can smoke.)

He linked an Onion article to prove a point.

Bravo.

Also, to prove a point about typical American behavior to someone who is not American, pretty sure that's the definition of the fallacious 'speaking out of your ass' style of discussion.

And yes, I've lived in Asia so I am fully qualified to make this statement.   :why_so_serious:

I willing to bet he only read the first paragraph title.

A date is set. Jan 22nd (http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?p=2075657#post2075657) is D Day apparently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0i9uWNDvDg

You're the reason people make shitty MMOs in the first place.  Don't give them money if their product is shit.

Jan 22nd?  Did they state which year?

You say that as if half the people here are not going to buy/try it.

Well I'm definitely not buying it.  I'd try it if it were for free due to morbid curiosity.

Perhaps there is a fine line between stupid optimism and driving faith.  I just finished Seth Godin's new "Tribes", so perhaps I am still on some "you can DO it, you can change the world!" kick.  But, I still say that I would rather find a person who strongly believes they can do it than a guy who "settled" before he even started.

This game has always been extremely ambitious.  But, ambitious is what we all seem to want... we just want someone to make it work and we get to play the part of the jaded gamer and tell everyone how they wasted their time and money when it doesn't.

I'm going to buy and try it. Less out of optimism or curiosity and more small-mindedness and vindictiveness. The hours I spend writing out and I told you assholes all along... will be well worth the price of admission. I'm a petty petty man

If you really need a taste of fail just go play Vanguard, you probably bought that one too.

lol. While reading this last interview with taco here, i got wafts of Brad McQuaid.

Tasos != McQuaid != Jacobs != Jaffe

Right now I'm wondering if schild is going to put Darkfall immediately in the graveyard or will he think of something wittier with its own subforum.

I'm guessing Darkfall never even gets its own forum so therefore never even needs shipping off to the graveyard.

This thread will probably morph into the launch thread and drop off the first page by MLK day, to be bumped for the occasional angst filled 'potential' post and the inevitable server merge post.

You forgot the 'ceasing to operate' post.

The Vanguard you refer to is no longer a live game. Sorry. :)

I'm happy that we have a live date for DF now. Time to see who's wrong.

I suggested putting it in the graveyard weeks ago but no one every pays me any mind! 

No, it's still there.

If Darkfall's shitty, it won't be for lack of trying.  Giving money encourages more trying in the same vein.  By contrast, giving money to DIKUs means more people willing to try to build DIKUs.

This is why I wouldn't subscribe to WoW even if it weren't a pile of total horseshit (IMHO, of course); I'd be contributing to the decision for someone to try and build WoW-part-2.

So you only buy unpopular crap to stimulate the unpopular crap market?

edit: to be less snarky: I like lesser known music. This means I buy albums from unknown artists I really enjoy, not "I buy low selling albums to spur the creation of more unknown bands" or that I avoid buying albums that are popular because they're actually solid albums.

You correctly energize markets by buying things that you enjoy, be they popular or not. Giving money to something just because it's failing just makes people think failure is a niche market.

Give me money and I'll agree with you.

Um, no.  More money MADE from games means more money to make games.  More money lost making games means less money to make games.  Encouraging failure is not the way to get good games made.

Unless you're one of those majoritarian types who thinks 'popular' has much of any correlation with 'good'... the problem with that is...?  I'm willing to make a fixed-cost investment in an unpopular but superior idea, whether the implementation is done well or poorly, so that the next round of people who are considering embracing that same idea and giving it a go will be more likely to take the plunge.

The argument with potential investors will hopefully go something like the one we're having here:

Investor: "Well, you want to do full-world PvP.  Darkfall did that, and their game failed."

Designer: "They failed because the game sucked, not because it was full-world PvP.  People were chomping at the bit for a game like that, if it was done right -- and if we scale back on some of the more ambitious but unnecessary things they tried to deliver and recognize that world-PvP frees us from a lot of the content-building that a traditional, AAA PvE MMO has to launch with these days, we can deliver a world-PvP game that will satisfy this audience within a reasonable budget."

Investor: "Got any evidence that the game might have succeeded if it didn't suck?  That the market for a game like this isn't just hopelessly small?"

...At which point, the designer points to Darktide's box sales.  I want that number to be a high one.


Apples to oranges -- the investment and product creation structures in each market are entirely different.  People get into making music on a wing and a prayer, and the costs of making your first song and putting it on MySpace aren't terribly high.  MMOs are a different beast entirely, and require investors to make a leap of faith with serious cash.

By buying something that is, in essence, crap, you're telling the investors "wow, people like shitty UIs with horrible implementation and low end graphics."

Your money did not come marked with "I really enjoyed feature X, please make more of that, the rest needs serious rethinking"

I do not equate "popular" with "good" but I also don't reverse the fallacy and equate "popular" with "bad".


Making a national selling album is not a wing and a prayer, it's a distribution method, and usually years of work creating, recording, finishing and distributing said work.

Is it fewer people and less startup cash than an MMO? Well yes, and there's a larger market. But the same theory prevails: buying something you know to be shit because it's unpopular is simply putting forth the argument that shit is secretly the next up and coming popular thing, and your argument included not buying WoW even if you LIKED it, just to prevent WoW 2.0. Sometimes something Worked, and deserves to be a genre. Just because people like it doesn't mean you need to go all fucking hipster and hate it because your band sold out and went mainstream.

This is generally true, except that Darkfall exists for one reason, and one reason only -- to be a full-world PvP game.  Its box sales are going to be taken as a sign of what the demand for full-world PvP games truly is.  That's not just 'feature X', it's basically the whole effing game.

So nothing but it's full world PVP is in the box?

Because what I see to bitch about on the game is everything but it's pvp to start. Can't mouselook around? What the shit? I mean, the entire UI seems to be built to excessively punish gameplay. It's not just full world PVP, it's an attempt to be harder core than anyone else on the block. I'd play a full world pvp game for a lark, but I wouldn't put money anywhere near a game design created by someone who adamantly HATES end users. I don't want that gameplay design decision to ever get mistakenly pitched as "good" again, much along my feelings about QTEs being used to replace what should have been cutscenes in console games.

Do you also post elsewhere as Lindorn?

From a money guy's perspective, pretty much.  I'm sorry, but you're just blind to reality if you don't think Darkfall's box sales numbers are going to be read as a major data-point on the size of the market for a world-PvP MMO.


...No?  A bit of googling says he's a guy who's heavy into WoW catassery.  I'm... kind of the opposite?

Is Darkfall going to even have boxes?  No one's going to look at it for anything.

No. To actually do that they need a well rounded marketing plan that already began months ago and has a solid plan to continue doing so after having worked out a robust publishing plan to ensure prime placement in major retailers who along the way chipped in their own efforts to market in circulars and magazines and online.

What DF has is a bunch of quasi-hobbiest who got some great Angel-like funding to fulfill their inner-geek fantasies of delivering the dominant fetuspult man a few thousand people might have been interested in that day eight years ago this project actually began.

This is fine though. DF doesn't need to have market relevance to be enjoyable to be people. But it's important to manage one's expectations. If you want to play a game other people will care about, this one will not be it.

And if you care about market relevance, before extolling the virtues of DF, you still need to look at whether world-PvP matters. Because in the last five or so years, the only people that do are the same people building them. That's not a market any bigger than a statistical rounding error.

DF isn't going to prove world-PvP or not. And therefore world-PvP will continue to be unproven.

I thought Darkfall was going to be distributed online only?

No traces of Darkfall on european resellers yet.
Worse, no traces of a release date on their main page (http://www.darkfallonline.com/) either, or the news section (http://www.darkfallonline.com/news/). Let alone a preorder program.

Preorders at this point would smell too much like a scam. I hope we don't see them until open beta or lifting of NDA.

Also, hi.

Their usage of the main website has always been inconsistent. I wouldn't sweat that. The resellers? Maybe.

So are they planning on launching without any kind of stress test?

How many times have we seen this before?

> Game struggles along in development hell, finally gets a release date.
> Release date is within two months and still no large scale beta testing.
> Game is obviously being rushed to meet a deadline.
> Game releases with broken features, lack of polish, and the few subscribers that stay fund the rest of the development?

I have hope for Darkfall, but this just sounds all too familiar.

How is this game rushed when it has been in development since 2001?

I don't think it has been for the whole of the development cycle. But they're obviously going to need to rush to get the game into beta when the release date is January 22nd and they still haven't entered into a stress testing period. It seems that right now they're in a sort of friends and family beta, which seems odd this far into development.

One also can't talk about broken features when it hasn't released yet.

The only good point is the long dev time. Something like that brings up spectres of past disappointments: Battlefield AD3000 "the last game we would ever need to play", Shenmue "an epic trilogy that ended on its first episode", Daikitana "supposed to make us its bitch", and Too Human "the last hope for the Gamecube several years too late".

I hope Darkfall bucks this trend of flops from unconventionally developed games.



Well they aren't.

Notice the question mark? I was hinting that this could be the end result, where the game is rushed to the point of game features either being in or being poorly implemented, a la Vanguard or AoC. I'm just worried that the warning signs I've seen with many MMOs which failed are apparent here as well.


Maybe I was mistaken. All of the names that were in the leaked beta picture a while back happened to be moderators, devs and some other people associated with the company.

I'm planning on solving the world fuel crisis by developing unlicensed portable fusion reactors. I've worked out that I can keep costs down by using volunteers who've read physics books, unskilled labour and inferior grade plutonium as well as surplus kit from the Chernobyl site that's going for cheap.  To keep funds flowing I'm thinking of selling on any refined product to Iran for use in their weapons development program.

No I know that this might sound a little flaky but it really is a good idea and I really do want to stop the world fuel crisis and provide cheap, clean and efficient fuel to everyone. It might even have a positive effect on the economy. 

Granted I can't guarantee that the implementation will be poor but it is definitely a superior idea so gief gold plz. Kthx.

I'd like to meet your money guy.  A 'money guy's perspective' is money in less than money out.  He doesn't care if it's shit in a box, if it has a positive return he will fund it.  He funds NOTHING that shows money out less than money in.  Every failed project is a toll on the funeral bell of future projects.  Rational people do not reinforce failure, which is one reason why smart publishers, who may need to seek funding in the future, let failures quietly die before ever seeing the light of day.

Darkfall's box sales will absolutely be read as a major data-point on the size of the market for any future MMO, world-PVP or otherwise.  If Darkfall blows it's ass out on the real market, which is what it looks like they will do, every other person with money will look at that and say, "there's less money in MMO's than I thought.  Warcraft must be an abberation and is getting it all.  There must be even less money in 'World-PVP' style MMO's I should take my money elsewhere.

Darkfall aside, this isn't really true. VC's are typically more likely to fund someone with failed startups behind them than someone with no experience at all. Because they understand there's a learning curve and a lot of luck involved, and if you show you've learned from your past, you're better than the naive starry-eyed guy who has no clue what's ahead of them.

Note that I said "Publisher".

The publishers want to show investors that they don't waste money by reinforcing failure.

Developers can benefit more from showing that they have experience, even when that experience was a flop, but even then I doubt that they want to sell the idea too hard that they are mostly incompetent.

I remember when Aventurine was a greek publisher with deep pockets, and had come down from the heavens to save Darkfall.

Am I wrong in assuming that most FPS games operate in the same way?  I am not a huge FPS gamer, but at least in Team Fortress 2 I don't remember being able to do much mouselooking in a 360 way.  I don't see how this feature is "hating end users" so much as clearly targetting a specific set of end users.  At this point most of the naysayers are arguing that their target audience is just too small, not that they have designed a game that hates its own target audience.

Mouselook has been a core part of PC FPS games since Doom. TF2 had it for sure.

As to hating on end users, that part is a stretch. It's more that they don't understand what would make an end user enjoy the game.

Bah, kildorn created confusion by calling freelook mouselook.


Don't you mean "It's more that they don't understand what end user they are going to gain the attention of?"

The UI is fine. It might be able to pull off the level of immersion Deadspace achieved but it's not a feature to be overly concerned about.

It's both. They don't know who they'll get so are not designing appropriately for them.

Any chance DF is thinking of picking off some lost goodwill WAR blew on the DAoC crowd? if so they better rethink things like no freelook. Fast.

After being disappointed in WAR's schizoid "I'm WoW...no I'm DAoC...um, no I am WoW" act. There has to be a load of people who are looking for their open world fix, and since DAoC Origins isn't an option and Wintergrasp is even further from what they wanted in WAR ...

No freelook has me more interested in the game, rather than less.

If you allow freelook, you have to use it constantly in order to be competitive.  This was one of the things that took AC Darktide out of 'world' territory and back to 'game' territory for me, that as I ran I had to be schizophrenically spinning the camera around myself at max range for every possible advantage.

No freelook allows for really good sneaky tactics, and forces me to make real choices about how I use perception.  The optimal playstyle that freelook incentivizes for PvP isn't nearly as fun.

And, as someone above noted, freelook is standard for FPS games anyhow -- and that's the direction I want to see PvP MMOs evolving toward in general, FPSes strike me as capturing a more mature sense of what constitutes 'good gameplay' than your average MMO, IMHO.

Now we're beginning to circle the "Darkfall's intended audience" wagon.

The devs misunderstood the idea of of marketing. It's not about generating hype. It is about managing expectations and raising awareness.

The devs want people to look at Darkfall differently, and they need to do it in a way that makes different look attractive, which results in the people being mentally prepared for the strengths and weaknesses of the game.

If they actually allocated money, instead of pocket change, to marketing by hiring someone who was more savvy than Tasos they could've achieved this. Instead, they've looked at how marketing has been commonly used and they perceive it as a waste of money.


From this mindset they are going forward with this idea that Darkfall will build itself up with a grassroots campaign. When Tasos was saying Darkfall's greatest asset was its community he wasn't exaggerating and that was the statement that made me laugh the hardest.

Darkfall's greatest liability is its community regardless of the condition of its playability.


The devs aren't ignorant of the community they've built up. This community is generally hostile, elitist and overly harsh against anyone who doesn't fall in line with the ideals the devs have pounded into them. That's why two weeks prior to releasing their video which stated Darkfall release 2008 they had the mods begin to crackdown on everyone trying to undo they festering problems they instigated for years. They have tried to manage expectations in the same way they've done it on the forums, but their efforts were totally inconsistent across IGN, warcry and mmorpg.com.


Many misunderstood how the audience for wow played a role in wow's marketing. Many people who defended Blizzard the most were veterans of MMOs like EQ, and SWG. They had experienced shitty launches for games with inferior game mechanics. Any attempt to criticize Blizzard for making an inferior game was met with civility and eagerness that for once an MMO was reasoably stable and OMG LOL this is fun.

Yet a large portion of the Darkfall fanbase are the type of people who derive fun by exerting their will on others.  In game they'll commit acts that threaten to canabalize the game. Couple that with my other points and you have a group of people who's ability to spread news will come across as arrogant and acidic turning off may from even giving the game a more serious look.

It amazes me the core group is this bad when the majority of people are older than 21.  :ye_gods:

Eve Online's community has a playerbase similar to Darkfall's but they are far more ciivil and the devs have made it very difficult for Bartle's killer types to ruin new players ability to have fun and learn the game. This was probably the greatest factor allowing EvE to grow consistently for years.

People have stated once Darkfall releases, people will settle down because the stress from waiting is finally removed.

I see that happening but it won't undo the obnoxious elitist attitudes typified by DF fans. I also expect quite a few of the core members will be disappointed when they realize the ideas they had of Darkfall won't be what they envisioned.

 We'll see how this plays out, but right now I see this as the devs wanting to create an audience that is suitable for this game though the audience they are going to get will clash greatly with their central members.

I always thought that was a very odd feature of AC1 (from 1999 to this day).  It ran in 1st person or 3rd person.  In 3rd person, you can adjust the floating 'camera' like most games, however, unlike most games you can adjust it insanely, 360 in x-y, 0-180 deg in Z, and unzoom so your avatar was a dot.  Its like you have a 'remote viewing' spell (which some classes did in DAOC IIRC).   It was locked so the adjustment was centered on the avatar, but could be rotated around that point.   The other odd thing, the invisible floating camera was blocked by terrain (both base-ground and objects)!  So if you tried to zoom back under a tree - it stops if it hits a branch! 

Also AC1 still does not have 'mouse turn', you have to use the keyboard to turn, and to move the camera, and turning in place is quite slow, but the mobs have the same turn rate limit, which I like.

I'm not sure that it's fair to condemn the game's community based on the asshats who frequent the game's forums.
All forums are full of the types who think they know everything and love to spout shit about anything under the sun.

Fortunately, the forum whores are only a tiny (but vocal) minority of the player base.
I'd wait and see before judging anything about the community, or the game for that matter.

WoW had plenty of naysayers before it launched and no one, not even Blizzard, knew that it was going to be so popular.

A lot of the people who were anticipating good things from WoW were pretty much the same people who had played Diablo 2 and other Blizzard games, not so much the EQ and SWG community who were the most sceptical of the game.

If Darkfall does get off the ground. I'm sure there will be plenty of corpse camping, baby killers and all manner of "hardcore" players, but there will be many more who want a game that has the things that Darkfall promises (you've seen the list and are either interested, or not).

Personally I want to play Darkfall. I want it to be hard. I want to sweat with fear and I want to see some of these asshats who can talk for years on a forum about a game that doesn't even exist. And I want to gank them.

If the game flops, so what. It won't be the last game to flop over and die, but at least play it before condemning it.

WoW had a ton of naysayers prior to launch?

Might have been wherever I hung out, but the basic WoW thing I remember was "can't break NDA, too busy having fun"

edit: yes, that's a joke, I know WoW lacked an NDA.

Nearly all of the doom-sayers I remember from WoW were the sort who threatened to commit suicide if they didn't get in the beta.  So they weren't really about WoW the game, but about their own foolish selves.  At least, that's what I mostly remember.

I have noticed, however, that both the official forum and MMORPG.com Darkfall forum are full of the most hilarious enthusiasts I've seen in ages.  I don't think I've ever heard the word "troll" so liberally abused and applied in the wrong context.  They're hard to totally ignore, however, because even while my IQ slips a bit reading, it can be entertaining.  Some times it's incredible how posts about games can sound like the silliest, most extreme babble you'd think you would only find on the sort of forums frequented by militant Christian zealots.  As vocal as they are, though, I do agree that they most likely represent a mere microscopic speck in the world of MMO gaming.  I don't think most MMO players have even heard of Darkfall or it's developers.  Most of us here have heard of it because we're gaming forum whores - just not the same sort that Rake mentioned.  But we are whores, ask anyone! 

Nobody relevant doomsaid or doomcasted WoW. Mostly it was people underestimating how successful it would be.

I didn't doomcast it at all, but predicted a tight head to head with EQ2 for the next three years.  :uhrr:
What can I say? I really loved EQ2. Yeah, at launch too. Which happened 14 days before WoW's.

You really want to admit this?   :ye_gods:

I can only, always, tell the truth. As much as I like to quote myself when I am right, I am good at ridiculing myself when I deserve that. See Vanguard.
This is not the same though. While EQ2 definitely improved tenfold over time, it was a very good game, bugs aside, at launch too. I am glad to disagree with the world.

Yes all forums have their miscreants and the miscreants of Darkfall forums are those who object to full loot FFA rules or those who just make really retarded posts.

You're obfuscating how societies develop on the internet.

Darkfall forum started with a core group of people who longed for the days of preTrammel UO and AC in updated format. People attracted to Darkfall years after the central group has established itself are like immigrants moving into a new country.


There's a reason the Eve forum is a far more civil environment than the Darkfall's. I only wish I was around when Eve was in beta and launched to know what the core group was like.


Yes it has been liberally applied but the way some threads start by some people trying to give fans perspective act very hostile in ways that doesn't engender respect or a high ground.

In a world without WoW, EQ2 at launch is what we would be playing in other forms, because that's what we would have deserved :-)

But as early as September when WoW's second Beta Event happened, we knew there was a game coming that truly was EQ1 for the rest of us.

EQ2 devs thought they had the right bead on things, but they didn't. Archetypes without respecs, that stupid Call for Help thing, itself only needed because of arbitrary contrivances on how players could interact, linked mobs that added further contrivances to how players could hunt, instancing in the places you want public interaction and until-late-beta public spaces for where players wanted instances. The list goes on. Many of these were just bad calls in general. Some of them though were seen as "improving" EQ1, when in face they weren't. And I've long felt there was a very clear reason for why:

At the time of early development (circa early 2003 iirc), when I was writing for EQ2 Stratics, they had announced early beta invites for the Stormhammer player. As you'll recall, Stormhammer was the server on which the EQ1 Legends subscribers played, the people paying $39.99 for a "premium" experience (queues the recent EQ2 mtx thread). So you had a game that was supposed to attract back lapsed EQ players being guided by the hand of the most hardcore EQ players there was.

THAT is the very essence of how you arrive at a mismatch between your target player and the game they actually want to play. WoW could have launched a year later and it still would have crushed all comers handily.

Whatever. I don't disagree.
I just always knew WoW wasn't the game for me. At every step of beta that was only clearer to me. EQ2 on the other hand was exactly what I was expecting and looking for. Hate to use "I" that much, but it fits just right in this few posts.
I am the one who liked EQ2 tons over WoW, amd still do, and I am the same one who wanted to love Vanguard, and stumbled breaking a few teeth over it.

You're a strange one that's for sure, but that's why we like you.

You and I are similar here.  Broken, maybe... but similar. 

/unsigned

One of my main pet peeves about hybrid FPS/MMOs (like TR) is that even when they allowed a truly FPS-view, you could never free-look while in it.  Some allow the freelook in the 3rd-person, but that almost always messed up navigating your PC.  If they're TRULY going to allow a 1st-person view AND freelook at the same time then we've got something special there.  Then I could finally put my VR rig to the test in an MMO (HMD, TrackIR Pro, etc.).  It also just looks damned cool when you're able to shoot in one direction and run in another (which will also limit the dreaded circle-strafing).

Lastly, I've said in this thread before... it's not as important what your PCs animations look like in an 1st-person perpective game.  Your FOV is limited, therefore your view is constantly changing to maintain awareness.  Rarely do you really have the ability to notice how something moves.  So, as much as we knock the animations for DF... as stated, if they implement the gameplay properly - it wont matter as much.  Now, a 3rd-person game suffers from situational overload;  You notice every little thing around you at once - so it all better be good or it becomes a negative distraction and immersion is lost.
Is there anyone in f13 that isnt "broken?"

I disagree.. a lot.

Explain why?  Have you ever played Arma with a TrackIR4?  (I have)
Sure, the animations in that game are top notch, and yes, I do notice them (in a way).  But cognitively, I'm not processing those animations because I'm worried about getting owned - constantly shifting/zooming my view.  Granted, this is largely dependent on how busy and frenetic the gameplay is.  A sniper crawling in a bush by himself for an hour to get into position for 1-shot/1-kill is more likely to notice every little detail.

I can see why you disagree though.  In an MMO sense one must figure for a lot of idle time just wandering, traveling, and doing nothing around town... so in that sense the lack of quality animations are a hindrance.  But in a battle-sense, in FPS mode, with freelook... not so much.

I could be running out of a burning building and I would still notice if everyone around started running like a 2 legged giraffe with a log flume stuck in their ass. It wasn't just something I noticed, it was the first and almost only thing I noticed from that video.

We've all played games with dodgy movement animations before. This is probably the worst I've seen since playstation I. It's definitely the worst I can remember.

Basically if the animations are piss poor the rest of the game is piss poor (most of the time).  It's all about quality of a game, especially one you're paying a monthly fee for.

Agreed, but animations can be fixed a lot more easily than a game's inherent gameplay.  And if you asked me to trade good animations for a hybrid FPS-MMO with freelook I'd do it in a hot minute if the gameplay was good enough.  Especially if once those systems were in place the devs could then focus on improving the eyecandy (ala WW2O).   

Ya'll know I'm all about the graphics, but really, I can understand the thought process (as it pertains to animations).... as long as they dont screw up the terrain, meshes, etc.  I draw the line there, gameplay or not. 

"inside 2008" is coming to an end... color me shocked.

At what point do we get to call this vaporware (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware) again?  I forgot the rule. 

To each his own I guess.  I just don't wont to play any game that just looks retarded.

Nebu:  I thought I read Jan 22nd.

January 22nd 2009 Launch Date Announced for Darkfall Online.  (http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=87239)

Funny thing, they have been saying the game is ready scene 2001......... (http://rpgvaultarchive.ign.com/features/interviews/darkfall.shtml)

Jan 22?  With those animations?


This is going to be a fun one to watch.   :popcorn:

8 years of POLISH!

This.
I've come to learn that an organization either has its shit together enough to produce a quality product or it does not.  The chance that an organization is failing just on the art asset side, or just on the client programming side, or just on the design side is vanishingly small.  They either have the mojo or they don't.

If I remember correctly, the turning radius could be adjusted in some options menu or another?  Either way, there was 'fast turning' of a sort... you hit back, a sidestep key, and the opposite direction's turning key (i.e., since I used Z and C as my sidestep keys and X for moving backwards, you'd hold AXC or ZXD), it'd turn you out and away from what you're facing, a very useful defensive technique in PvP.  You could stagger it with runs (i.e. AXC-WZ-AXC-WZ-ZXD-WA-ZXD-WA) for an approach on an enemy that was almost like a running back's juking in football, helped big time for throwing off projectile targeting.

There were a million advanced techniques like that in AC, which was something I liked; things like fast casting, where breaking into a forward run at the right moment in your casting sequence could let you cast a spell early, or slow-casting, where by turning and running into your spell during the middle of casting, you could lag your cast for basically as long as you continued to run in a curved arc (using the fast turning technique above so you're not just running in a big circle), useful for throwing off the enemy's timing.  (And remember, for anyone who never played AC1 -- your projectile attacks are almost like rockets in Quake, they're dodge-able and dodging them is a huge part of combat)  But of course, despite the fact that you can slide and even run around like this while you cast, your spell will fizzle if you move too far from the area you began casting -- so that was another thing you had to consider.

Add into this the fact that AC1's classes weren't 'rock-paper-scissors' at all (being one the first kids on the block before the rush of EverQuest clones, it just didn't occur to them that that's 'how MMOs are done'), but more akin to the balance between the shotgun, AK, and AWP in Counterstrike -- very situational -- and you had a very deep PvP game.

The key to all this, in AC, was that animations weren't *just* animations.  They actually reflected the actions your character was taking, and if you 'broke' through the animation in some way (by using AC's unprecedented freedom of movement), you broke the action as well, turned it into something different.

Archers had one of the more hilarious advanced techniques... jumping against a slope of the right angle while rotated around toward your target, and at the right power, and jamming the 'quick shot' key...  you could release a barrage of about 10 arrows at once that would have almost no accuracy.  Any normal PvPer wouldn't be terribly damaged, but a noob who didn't know about this would find themselves back at the lifestone w/ no idea how 10 arrows all came at them so fast. :)

So which studio has met this requirement??  I say none.  It's almost like we're forced to compromise.

Eh?  I can name 5 without trying hard.  Note that 'not fail' is not the same thing as 'completely satisfy'.  If a company is producing some aspect of their game deeply below the market standard, run away.  Don't assume they'll make up for it somewhere else.

The original design for EQ II was to "fix" everything the devs thought were broken in EQ, it was not to make an EQ that was more fun than the original. This is why you couldn't originally run while combat (didn't want people to be able to run to safety), had linked mobs (didn't want to have people "split" or "pull"), had "scout" mobs everywhere so you couldn't stealth through areas (didn't want people to "skip content") and so on. I wasn't a part of the early betas but it seems unlikely to me that those decisions were made based on what the early beta testers wanted.

I know it must sound that way but they are really Norwegian with Greek tendencies. 

By the same token though, if the game does not include ability to pan your camera then in order to be competitive (it's a dog backstabs dog full-PvP world out there) you need to constantly and schizophrenically spin your character around instead, to counter these "good sneaky tactics". Maybe if the game was called Whirling Dervish MMO...

Debating whether Darkfall should have freelook is like debating whether unicorns should fight each other in tanks or jets.  At the end of the day, the debate doesn't matter when the subject doesn't exist.

Sigh.  We're debating based on beta impressions a reasonably prominent guy has posted.  This isn't Dawn, and Adventurine is not Glitchless.  The game exists, whether it's any good or not.  Your asinine bullshit isn't really adding anything to the discussion.

Everyone knows that unicorns have to use tanks so that their horns can stick up through the hatch in the turret. There's no hornspace in a jet cockpit!

Also, no freelook is just shitty design. In real life I can and do glance behind or to the side any time I want. For example, in the dance club on a military holiday weekend.

reply warning edit: reasonably prominent guy just sounds like well-hung to me

Ugh, I hate to get into fights about "features" of a decade old MMO, but almost everything you listed was classed as an exploit and fixed sooner or later.  Hell I remember when they first put in the jump-casting fix and the mad scramble for everyone to hex edit the fix out of their client so we could still do it.  I can still picture the ad -d- and I posted up on CoD, a horribly photoshopped picture of my avatar doing /atoyot or something with "D and Atani's jumphack.exe, only 10 motes!"

The slide-casting thing wasn't an exploit though, it's just everything else you listed was and stemmed from it.

This is... simply not so?  I specifically listed the things that they officially classified as 'part of the game' and kept.  For instance, they made it so that fast-casting couldn't allow you to cast twice as many spells-per-minute as everyone else, but you can still fast-cast, and it's strategically useful in a number of cases.  They made it so you couldn't slide-cast and shoot your spell from a bajillion miles away, but you can still slide-cast so long as your spell eventually shoots out from somewhere near the origin point of the cast.

I specifically didn't touch on issues like godmode that were exploits that were eventually fixed.

Just about the only thing on that list that *might* have been removed is the 10-arrows-shot-at-once-on-a-hill trick.

I can't be the only person to point out that it'll be T minus a week until freelook is hacked in for exploiters.  Unless the client only downloads entities in your cone of vision and reacquires when you turn your head, which I'm pretty sure is impossible with stnadard latency, then the information on entities behind you is in your client.  And information in your client is available to people who can find out how to get to it, which isn't rocket science.

Iniquity was Hyu (Mediocre, Telemediocrity, etc). He's gone again.

How are you able to find these things out if he posts from a different IP then in the past?  Your magic ability to do this has always frightened me. 

EDIT:  And its hilarious that he's a Darkfall supporter.  I always knew his star would keep rising.

I can identify other people, but I'm bad with Hyu. Rasix on the other hand can identify Hyu in a very few number of posts. He just happened to be posting in places - this time - that Rasix didn't read very often.

Hmm, I'm remembering it differently mostly in how SOE was positioning it at the time (when they were going on about how EQ1 and EQ2 could co-exist). The part about fixing mistakes was applied to things like how to build a more modular game that was easier to make system-wide adjustments too.

But I could be remembering it all wrong :-)

Asherons's Call, whether it were Features or Bugs, did have some of the best game play I've ever had in an MMO.

The more modern MMOs in comparison can be played by dangling your balls on the macro keys and doing very well thank you.

I suppose face rolling is a slightly more PC way to describe it, but you get the idea.

Really, Schild, I figured you'd have picked up on it sooner.

I mean, c'mon, a long series of posts extolling the virtues of AC1 Darktide?  It's not exactly like I made it a fucking Rubik's Cube.

If anything, I apologize for making it too rote and boring, this cycle around.  Next time I'll try and come up with something more interesting.

It's still adorable, in a world where proxy servers and other Fun Things exist, that you think you can ban people from a message board and actually have it stick. *chu*

I didn't think this time was that interesting either (http://vnboards.ign.com/ac_general_board/b5141/97441620/r97443847/).

Shit, people even remember that?  I feel like Matt Taibbi in the year 2058, in the twilight of his life, if people ask him about the founding of The Exile, or playing basketball in Mongolia.

(Side note: I still think that nameban was total bullshit, IMHO.  BP-X got to keep his name for god knows how long...)

Tried to warn you all days ago  :oh_i_see:

It's also anatomically possible. :rimshot:

FWIW, I gave you silent credit for calling it. :awesome_for_real:

I have a bookmark folder called "desperate for attention", I just noticed you were in it twice by accident.

Well, you've pegged me well, if nothing else.

Prolonged battle of wits with Hyu?  I think we've just found 2008's first F13 Christmas Miracle. 

The first Christmas Miracle was Grim in this thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15445.35).

I missed that whole thing.  Damn Edits.

I thought Hyu was funny in the past. A self-absorbed dickhead, sure, but that's everyone around here. But this "I R HAS PROXY SERVAR, I IS INVICIBLE LOL!" shit is weak. It's the sort of thing I do after posting Goatse in a bunch of Stratics threads.

The EQ2 beta was full of the hardcore catass EQ1 fuckheads. The forums were full of asslicking fanbois who only wanted EQ but PRETTIER with fewer bugs. The game itself in beta was a fucking tragedy in motion. The changes they made to it after release turned out a decent game whose biggest faults were its hardcore underpinnings. The crafting system, even after the threat of death was removed, was created by a fucking RSI-inducing sadist.

EQ2 is solid evidence that if you make the software well, few bugs, robust, etc... the fun can be 'patched in later' as long as there is enough will by the live team to make it happen.  A couple of games have shown that releasing as a buggy mess can also be overcome with time and effort.

As far as I know being an un-fun buggy mess at release hasn't been overcome yet.

Eve?

Eve is still an un-fun buggy mess. What are you trying to get at?

EVE is fun, at least for people who play it.

People play EVE?  I thought people just watched it.

Only for the first hour or so, then they tab out to read up on the alliance drama in the forums, which is generally more entertaining.  :grin:

I'm not going to post them here but there are a few leaked game screenshots floating around.  They mostly suck though.

Half the pics were repetitive in information but I liked what I saw. They did at least affirm how the spell schools will be laid out.

Ya, and I've talked to several testers now. They all complain about the same problems, and agree that the game is a turd. It's only a matter of time before the flood gates open, and the shit spews out.

I'm waiting for the tears of anguish from the rabid fan base.  OOooooh so good.

While I agree that it is fun to see naive fainboys crushed, I am kind of dissapointed that Darkfall is going to become another turd in the crowd. I am running out of MMO's to play here

I'd pick another genre of games.

I already play the other genres.  :oh_i_see:

Still hoping for something refreshing for this genre though.

Hmmm, Is it a turd because of technical problems or game design issues?