New Darkfall screenshots and a break of silence

[WonderBrick]

For those that follow Darkfall, after a long period of stealth-mode silence by the developers, new screenshots got released this morning.

http://www.darkfallonline.com/gallery/visuals

For anyone interested in seeing past screenshots, every possible past screenshot was rounded up and zipped up and posted here.

For anyone unfamiliar with Darkfall, many people are calling it the spiritual successor to classic UO.  Read more about it at www.darkfallonline.com and www.darkfallchronicles.com.

New Screenshots - Friday December 17 2004
Posted by Tasos on December 17, 2004 09:12
There are nine new Darkfall screenshots available in the gallery. The area of Trinwood is revisited, as some of the shots are from there, the rest are from the island of Namlit.

For information on these areas click on the 'Read more' link below.
For more information on this Darkfall update and to comment on it, click HERE.



Trinwood is a village just inside the Mercian borders. The human areas are lush grasslands dominated by pine trees and rolling hills. Trinwood is an important village, since whoever controls it, has access to the stone quarry in the area. Stone is an important resource in Darkfall, as it is the main component in most player-made structures. Trinwood is situated a few kilometers north east of the human capital Sanguine, and is the human settlement that is closest to the borders of Morak the realm of the Orks.

The island of Namlit rises - mysterious and remote - from the southern Ruby Sea. It lies due south from Nagast on the main continent, in a location which is, practically speaking, equidistant from Rubaiyat (desert continent) to the west and Cairn (wasteland continent) to the east. Namlit is the domain of the Iklit, a semi-sentient race of humanoid insects, who ate or drove away the island's original inhabitants many centuries ago. Though they hunt and maintain strongholds on the surface, the Iklit are primarily a subterranean species, and the tunnels of their sprawling warrens honeycomb Namlit. It is said that a single queen is the mother of all the Iklit on the island, and that she still breeds in some dark and nameless place underneath Namlit's lush and inviting exterior.

Source

Developer Tasos made this update...

We put up some new screenshots in the Darkfall Gallery so I'll talk about those first. The screenshots were taken during the tuning and experimentation for the final look of the game. You may notice the significant progress - aside from some graphical artifacts due to compression issues and movement in the environment. These only appear in the stills.

Some of the screens are from Trinwood, a human area we've used for screenshots before. Other screens were taken on the Island of Namlit. You can read about both of these areas here.

We'll follow up with more batches from every area on Agon, hopefully in rapid succession after the holidays. We also plan to show some videos, and to have a proper status update.

For now, we remain hard at work on Darkfall and firm to our commitment to releasing a finished game, and while we like to joke that this hasn't been attempted before, we can certainly understand and even relate to the community's frustration.

We at Aventurine would like to wish everyone Happy Holidays.

Source

[Krakrok]

Whoa there hoss. Turn down the blur on those screenshots.

[personman]

I noted the blurring as well and wondered if they were going for some kind of artistic effect in game or just muting the beta models.

I breezed the sites but nothing gave me a synopsis as to how this is a spiritual successor to UO.  Use-base/ROT skills and an economy of just player-crafted goods?

[sidereal]

Seriously.

It's like a pre-Lasik surgery simulator.

[HaemishM]

It's the successor to UO because it has Open PVP and skill-based system. Yes, that's what they mean.

And damn, but those screenshots looked glowier than a Playboy centerfold. Take the vaseline off the lens, it smells like cheap perfume and sex in here.

[Dren]

..Take the vaseline off the lens, it smells like cheap perfume and sex in here.

I thought it was an improvement.

[personman]

So can I precast?  Insta-hit? Steal through walls when stealthed?  Can I buy a sixth character slot from the company, or a "rare" and then curse roundly when the redemption code fails?  :)

j/k - it sounds worth following.  I've been waiting for UO with an EQ2 LAF for a very long time.  I like WoW but it doesn't really qualify just yet.

[Moroni]

Other than the blurriness, I do not mind it so much. I just hope those are bad motion captures rather than renders or stills.

[stray]

There was a time there where I was keeping up with this game, but came to the conclusion that it was vaporware. They've had screenshots before, but that doesn't mean shit.

[Krakrok]

I noted the blurring as well and wondered if they were going for some kind of artistic effect in game

It's a realtime effect. GW and WoW do it to some degree as well just not to the same degree that Darkfall appears to.

Basically you render the screen say at 160x120, stretch it over the 1024x768 screen, and make it semi-transparent.

The reason their version looks crappy is because they used too low a resolution 80x60 or 40x30 which causes the artifacts to show up and it isn't transparent enough.

When I've played with it I used 3 layers of blur (80x60, 160x120, and 320x240) with varying degrees of transparency to get it looking pretty good.

[eldaec]

It's not 'stealth mode silence'.

It's called 'insufficent progress and marketing backup to be a realistic product'.