Darkfall "Released"

[mutantmagnet]

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.

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. 

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.

[Sunbury]

  [freelook]...  This was one of the things that took AC Darktide out of 'world' territory and back to 'game' territory for me....

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.

[Rake]

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.

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.

[kildorn]

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.

[Signe]

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! 

[Venkman]

Nobody relevant doomsaid or doomcasted WoW. Mostly it was people underestimating how successful it would be.

[Falconeer]

I didn't doomcast it at all, but predicted a tight head to head with EQ2 for the next three years. 
What can I say? I really loved EQ2. Yeah, at launch too. Which happened 14 days before WoW's.

[Draegan]

I really loved EQ2. Yeah, at launch too.

You really want to admit this?   

[Falconeer]

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.

[mutantmagnet]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Venkman]

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.

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.

[Falconeer]

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
[moar]

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.

[Draegan]

You're a strange one that's for sure, but that's why we like you.

[Nebu]

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 and I are similar here.  Broken, maybe... but similar. 

[Ghambit]

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.

/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.

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 and I are similar here.  Broken, maybe... but similar. 

Is there anyone in f13 that isnt "broken?"

[Draegan]

 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.  

I disagree.. a lot.

[Ghambit]

 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.  

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.

[ashrik]

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.

[Draegan]

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.

[Ghambit]

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. 

[Nebu]

"inside 2008" is coming to an end... color me shocked.

At what point do we get to call this vaporware again?  I forgot the rule. 

[Draegan]

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. 

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

"inside 2008" is coming to an end... color me shocked.

At what point do we get to call this vaporware again?  I forgot the rule. 

January 22nd 2009 Launch Date Announced for Darkfall Online.

Funny thing, they have been saying the game is ready scene 2001.........

[Nebu]

Jan 22?  With those animations?


This is going to be a fun one to watch.   

[Vinadil]

8 years of POLISH!

[sidereal]

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.

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.

[Iniquity]

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.

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. :)

[Ghambit]

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.

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.

So which studio has met this requirement??  I say none.  It's almost like we're forced to compromise.

[sidereal]

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.

[Trippy]

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.

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.

[Signe]

8 years of POLISH!

I know it must sound that way but they are really Norwegian with Greek tendencies. 

[tmp]

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.

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...

[Triforcer]

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.

[Iniquity]

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.

[Xerapis]

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