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Darkfall Set For Launch
Darkfall, a PvP-oriented MMORPG that was first announced in 2001, is finally in the process of going live. After dealing with some launch-day bugs, the Darkfall team reports that servers are going up, and they're processing pre-orders to get players in the game. MMOCrunch has an in-depth write-up from the end of the beta, saying that the game is still "rough around the edges," but also that the team has created a "solid framework of an MMO that offers a unique experience that the genre has not seen in quite some time." Ten Ton Hammer had a similar reaction, tempering criticism with praise for the lack of hand-holding.
9 GB isn't big anymore. 500 GB drives are common now, and cheap. 2 TB drives are available, and 9 GB to that is less than half of 1%.
It really sucks that they didn't hire anyone specifically to focus on Account Management (or so it appears).
I was in beta, was charged for my pre-order, and my account is still not listed as active when I try to log in...and the account management page is currently down. :-( ...and there's no one I can call to verify that I got my pre-order.
Plus the servers are down again...
It sounds like a review of Ultima Online. Apparently you can do *anything*, and on the internet that generally reduces to "be a prick".
Furthermore, my primary USB flash drive is 8 GB.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
First Spore, then Wine 1.0, and now likely Darkfall? Next we'll have pigs flying, hell rising, and finally Duke Nuke'm Forever.
9 GB honestly isn't all that much for a MMO. Warhammer Online is over 15 GB and Age of Conan comes in at a whopping 25 GB.
Even my folder for Unreal Tournament 2004 (from the distant past of 5 years ago) is over 9 GB with all of the maps I've downloaded while playing.
Sorry for the off-topic post, but this has been getting on my nerves. For the past few days, the title of the /. homepage has been "Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that matters (30)". This is with Firefox 3.
30? 30 what? Am I seeing things?
Go to your preferences page and under the "Index" section, click on "General". Turn the beta index off.
Their main customer base is going to be the people upset that WoW pvp isn't hardcore enough, so I think you can replace "generally" with "always" in this case.
And Eve-Online (A PVP MMO) weighs in at about 2GB.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
Not for long. That's for the "classic" client that's going to be discontinued next month.
"Premium" client (=shiny Shader Model 3.0 graphics) is already well over 3GB and the minimum requirements for the new expansion coming next month bumps up the official disk space requirement to 6GB. It might be set somewhat over what's really needed, but the bottom line is that in two weeks, EVE Online client will be at least 4.5GB in size.
High resolution textures take up a lot of storage space. Thankfully the space (and bandwidth) is nearly free these days.
According to the Ten Ton Hammer preview, this game features rampant kill stealing and quite possibly the worst community of any MMO, ever.
That's a ringing endorsement if I ever heard one. Hooray for yet another niche PvP game.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Since leaving WoW quite a bit ago for numerous reasons, most of which they have fixed (still haven't gone back or played the new expansion) I've played nearly every MMO beta/pre-beta/alpha there is out there.
Nearly all of them.
I'm not sure what brought on this bit of self torture as there are more out their then most would think. How many in the last year? Five? Ten? Twenty? Nope. At last count I've played about *forty* different ones in the past year+. While their have been a couple of standouts all of them are going to fail for one reason or the other... which brings us to DarkFall.
Most important reason for failure: Community. You've never, and may probably never ever, have encountered such a bunch of sycophantic whiney idiots this side of an AOL USENET Lover's support group. They can see no wrong in their golden messiah of an MMO. Even worse the mere mention of another game will bring their misguided wrath upon you with more 3 letter acronyms and twelve year old new speak than one may believe possible. While this is a bit funny for a while, it quickly becomes more a cause for murder or suicide, much like realizing you are trapped in an elevator with Carrot Top, while on acid.
Secondly: Graphics. Well okay I get it, some people don't need any sort of graphics to enjoy a game. This too is easy to understand, I've ascended a few characters in NetHack. However the level of graphics must fit the current baseline or at least try to master the best in the genre. DarkFall has terrible graphics for an MMO released in 1995. The world is barren. Character movements are stilted. The art style is like a tribute to the Quake 1 engine. Spell effects are personally quite a stand out to me as they instantly remind one of the beautiful effects from PS1 games. Ahhhh nostalgia in an MMO!
Third: The company creating the game has no idea how manage a community. For all of their ills at least Blizzard somewhat gets it now. I'm sure many will say differently... but if you had played all the swill I've encountered while subjecting myself to this MMO horror fest you would find yourself amazed at just how effing brilliant Blizzard is compared to the others. Most of these companies treat their community like the enemy, have no concept of communication and try to invent new ways to drive players away. DarkFall is no different here, except they get bonuses for trying to mask their failings with "spooky mysterious secrecy".
Fourth: Awww. Fuck it. This is a terrible game, but it does represent a step up for Runescape players
Not that anyone asked but the only game I've played that deserved to be played for the actual story/game/world was Spellborn. But both the developers and their idiotic publishers have doomed this to fail before most people will ever even play it... and Atlantica is a solid game if you can get past their incessant pushing for making you play nearly every day.
That said, a number of the upcoming Chinese MMOs aren't really that bad. Unlike the Korean ones they don't shove the item mall down your throat. Most of them are lacking somewhat in proper stories, translations, lore, but there is some okay gameplay out there. See Perfect World for where the better Chinese MMOs are headed for the English speaking world.
--- I do not moderate.
Go to your preferences page and under the "Index" section, click on "General". Turn the beta index off.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Why is slashdot always experimenting with new ways to slow down the site and fucking break it? I had to give up on that javascript comment system because it kept eating comments and I couldn't make firefox give them back. Now I've gone back to the old way of doing things (replying in tabs, basically) and the site is at least twice as fast. And I have a 512kbps+ connection (burst to 2Mbps) these days so it's not my poor copper's fault. The beta index is one of the slowest front pages I've seen. Slashdot is already slow :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So you didn't get to the part of the second article where the author wrote, "what I experienced in the world is still the worst example of an online community I've ever encountered, without question?" That sort of sums up a lot of the game, I think.
It sounds like a review of Ultima Online. Apparently you can do *anything*, and on the internet that generally reduces to "be a prick".
Quick, before someone makes another reference to an unfunny XKCD strip, Shitcock!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wait, a "PvP-oriented MMORPG" whose "lack of hand-holding" is praised has a community of jerks? No way!
No sorry, 9gb really isn't that big for any game these days...
My Warhammer Online directory is around 12gb and my original Dawn of War is about 20gb (to be fair its with all the expansions)
I was kind of surprised on the size of DoW2 running around 3gb.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I got into Beta over a month ago.
.so who knows what will happen at release. My guild however is one of the most fun I have been in.
The good:
I like the fact that one can start a fresh character, jump into the game and immediately start to contribute to the cause. Sure, if you are a noob, you will suck, but that is only because you suck, and not just because your character is worthless gimped.
I like the combat. It is shallow, at least to start, but it is FPS based instead of target-based. I found myself in WoW staring at my bars waiting for CDs to expire. In DF, I have to focus on the screen and lead my target with my spells and archery. I couldn't play a caster or ranged DPS character in any MMO before because of the targeting system made it boring. But DFO makes ranged DPS very entertaining. Melee isn't much more than a knife fight in an FPS, but, honestly, I kind of like that.
Full loot. Some might not like it and I thought I wouldn't, but the rush I get from pretty much every PvP encounter in this game is unlike any I have experienced before.
The Bad.
Forum community is terrible and childish. But, honestly, I find that to be true with EVERY forum of an MMO. I haven't had much of a problem with griefing in the game itself, but it was only beta. .
Combat lack of depth. I can see this being a deal breaker for a lot of people. It doesn't bother me at all, but it could have a bit more going on.
Crafting/Harvesting is boring and just terrible in general. Harvesting literally is just sitting there clicking every ten seconds. Or, having a macro do it will you go walk the dog, get something to eat, take a dump, molest the girlfriend, masturbate to gay pr0n.
Company inexperience. Everything has been botched for the past few months from a company perspective. Pre-orders pretty much blew up. They have little communication with the community as to what is happening. They announced a release date, didn't say anything for a month, until the week before release they said it would be delayed. It was supposed to launch around noon EST yesterday, didn't launch until 2 in the morning and the servers went up and down all night.
Graphics are "eh" at best.
All that being said, when the pre-orders went up, I spent 3 hours refreshing the page waiting for it to work so I could get in on this game on the ground floor. To me it like an entirely fresh genre and I have enjoyed my time playing the game. It has some SERIOUS problems right now, but I think that if and when they are able to sort them out, this will be a great game. I wish I were at home playing right now instead of at work. . . but I guess that ain't saying much.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Oh, if only... If only.
I know everyone has their own reasons for things they love/hate about a game, but frankly, if WoW ever completely got rid of PVP, well, it just couldn't happen soon enough for me. I'd love to see the hardcore WoW PVP asshats all go find a game where they can generally amuse themselves by being twelve year old pricks to each other and leave me the hell alone. /rant
whew, sorry.
(Yes, I play on PVE servers, but you are sometimes forced into it. Some players who want to be world-pvp jerks but their mommies won't give them the $25 to transfer to a PvP server (now that they safely got to level cap), and they seem to excel at finding creative ways to flag themselves pvp at just the right time/place that even though you had no intention of it, you get flagged.)
Can you put up with people looting your kills and a very real lack of direction/hand holding
"Can you put up with a lack of handholding" does not sound like praise to me.
Really, the thing which puzzles me is that all the games which want to harken back to the good old "hardcore" days seem to think that it will excuse them from being buggy, unbalanced, and generally "rough around the edges" - but largely thanks to Blizzard and the degree of polish they've put into WoW, the bar has been raised and a lot of new MMOs just don't seem to have noticed despite the intervening years. A shame, really.
Lack of handholding sound very appealing to me. To me, immersion is a big deal. And when I play World of Warcraft and see little exclamation points over people's head and nice little "go here, do that" explanations, my immersion is broken.
Let's face it, hand-holding has gone too far in video games. I mean, have you played Fable 2? They DRAW A LINE in front of you to tell you where to go AT ALL TIMES. It's like they are trying to make it so that an idiot can play it. That's not what I want from my video games. So this game appeals to me in some way, maybe not in all though.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
I have put together a guide for new players.
Here: Darkfall Survival Guide
Uploading my first video to Youtube atm. Will link from the site soon.
so all the WoW haters are praising it.
Any site that's not known for slamming WoW got a review?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The AC post is a stupid comparison. I could put a ton of flour in my house, that doesn't mean I should.
The actual argument is:
Does the game justify the size?
It very well may, WoW is about 12 Gigs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The game is pretty useless.
The big draw of the game for me (and lots of others) was that PvP would take individual skill and take a lot of factors of your person into account. Some intelligence, some coordination, and mostly the ability to skillfully defeat an opponent.
The game has NONE of that -- it's "click click click" your left mouse button in the hopes that the server syncing will let you land a shot on the other guy. The depth of the game is zero, and "skill" is almost entirely based in the coordination of groups. If you're a solo player, you can't play the game.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
is that before or after both expansion packs? Just curious
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
This game has suckage written all over it!
Age of Conan was the last extremely over-hyped game to crash and burn. It was so bad it almost crashed the whole company with it. The release date was May 20, 2008. Here is the stock chart http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=FUNCOM.OL#chart1:symbol=funcom.ol;range=1y;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
Darkfall has ALL the makings of a repeat suckfest. Even their community is horrible on an epic scale (not their own fault).
You have never seen so many kids trying to overcompensate at one time in one place.
Grab some popcorn, this is going to be a great show.
Is here: http://www.gameolosophy.com/Games/Online/Darkfall-Online-Beta.541609
Enjoy folks, that is the best post on the game I have found yet.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
WoW is to MMOs what Windows is to operating systems. The most popular by a long shot, and good enough for many, and easy so that you don't really need much skill or knowledge to get far.
But, like with Windows, many people don't want WoW, even if it is the most popular. I don't think it's a bad thing that there's competition in the MMO space, nor do I think it's a bad thing that people don't always want the sort of gameplay or art style that WoW offers -- personally, I don't care for either, so I play something else.
Group thuggery. That's the only way to go in these MMORPGs.
It's all about the real-world type scenario, not the artificial, "balanced" system.
One Eve Online poster has as his .sig, "If you find yourself in a fair fight, you haven't done your homework."
See, "in reality", if you are average, half of you will be dead after your first fight. Only 1/4 will be alive after 2, and so on. The best fighter in the world would be lucky to win 99% of his fights. Aerial dogfight aces and wild west villains, which would be "bosses" in a game, typically have about 20 or so "kills" during their entire lifetimes, and that's what it takes to get legendary. Red Baron, Eddie Rickenboker, Jessie James, Black Bart, et al.
And yes, in Eve, you can lose stuff that makes purple gear with a hundred raids across six months look like crying over a lost cracked wolf pup tooth.
Think of loot in these games as closer to picking up power-ups in a game like Quake.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Vanguard and AoC are right around 20GB...many others are 10GB...9GB is not big, especially considering the size of their environment.
They're a small indie developer, so many things about it are going to scream from a lack of polish and refinement.
But the concept and mechanics are there, fairly solid, and pretty unique. The game just needs time, and I think the core audience is willing to put up with a pay-to-beta, because they know the realities of development, and they know this is the best shot at their 'ideal' game. Many of the issues have been because there is massive interest in their game, despite the flaws. They are limiting the number of people that can get in as they gradually upgrade capacity. I personally see a LOT of parallels with EVE Online, both in gameplay and in how the game has launched.
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Kind of funny. I don't see those PvP asshats here talking bad about those PvE asshats?
Pot calling the kettle black.
That is why death has to be meaningful....and by that I mean permadeath or excessive skill loss. If you're a dick in the game, people can hunt you down and punish you. This isn't possible if you can just die and resume the game as if nothing happened.
Yes, but too much immersion is annoying. Sometimes you don't have a clue what to do and get so farm/grind happy cause you don't know where to quest, minigame, etc.
Stating where quests start are a BIG help. Although they *might* be able to do it differently without icons above heads etc.
Some reality has to be lost for game interface, you can never immerse yourself when you see a HEALTH BAR at the top left of your screen. Try playing a game with full immersion and NOT reading a manual, and it just seems too difficult to pickup.
You want to know what it would be like with total immersion? Try playing without the tutorials as well... because those are the least immersive things ever. Seriously, I'm playing an x year old character and you are teaching me to do y?! (y being chopping a tree, burning some logs, attacking someone with a sword, shooting a gun, jumping, walking, looking at a map, etc.)
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
If 'do anything' involves user created content of any kind. I fully expect to see a full-scale penis war in Darkfall, the likes of which the internet has never seen.
After. Each major sub-expansion patch added up to 2GB to the original 4 CD install.
There's nothing wrong with PvP, but there's everything wrong with the 12-year-old-being-macho behaviour. On behalf of everyone who survived to the end of their teens I'd like people I could stuff into a locker to STFU on the internet about how hardcore they are.
That does it. I'm making an MMO where you verify your age and receive a big damage bonus for every year you have over your opponent.
Questing sucks anyway. On your first character, sure, go ahead and read the little meaningless 2-cent stories that bracket your "travel to location x and kill / click something" quests. That reading and traveling and turning quests in sucks up too much time to make efficient XP gain. So unless you need quest reward gear (yechhhh.... n00b?) you're wasting time on quests. You gain XP and loot at least twice as fast when you grind. Even solo grind mobs your level or one or two levels below for fast, easy XP that beats questing any day. Just compare, for instance in WAR, a typical quest at level 15 nets you around 2500 XP. But you have to travel a couple minutes each way and set up specific kills. Takes you a good 10 minutes for a quest. But if you kill 1 mob that's 1 level below you, which in WAR you can do without even looking at the screen if you know your keys (because these mobs couldn't kill you unless you don't fight at all), you get 130ish XP. Kill 20 of those, which takes less than 5 minutes, and you already did better than the quest. QED. Oh, and the more mobs you kill, the more good loot you find. World drops don't come from quests, y'know?
No. This isn't flamebait. I think I'm on relatively safe ground here, raising an issue that is not one man's subjective analysis -- but a conclusion that almost any MMORPG'er would come to:
This game has graphics that aren't up to Quake 1.0 standards. The game world looks absolutely devoid of detail, and the interface looks like an entry from an indie-games contest.
With the massive number of MMORPG's being released (many free to play), why is this release even getting attention?
If the answer is that its gameplay is so vastly superior to other offerings, that it's dated, uninspired graphics do not matter -- then that I suppose is a valid reason. But *is* that the reason?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Wow, what internet are you using?
I believe the word you are looking for it 'assfucks'. I mean pvpers. Same thing
What the fuck? Why the hell do you even play games anyway? Cunting mother of shit I can't believe I still read the asswank website.
obviously s/the/this/ in the last sentence
is that before or after both expansion packs? Just curious
after both expansion packs
Darkfall Has no levels nubcake.
Not to mention, hes talking about 1 MMO like a retard and generalizing all MMO's have shit quest rewards and actually strategizes by giving XP values.
Most retarded post ever, thank god you posted AC...
About a dozen friends of mine and I had been awaiting Darkfall Online for quite some time. Many of us lurked in the forums for years. The listed features on their extremely limited webpage were enticing, and this from an old Ultima Online player. I missed the days of Pre-Trammel. From what they were saying, the Devs of DFO did too.
Since shortly before release, I have been watching developments very closely, getting information from MANY sources, but primarily from beta tester leaks and forum posts.
Here is what I can gather.
They did NOT recreate Pre-Trammel UO. They recreated the PvP aspect of it, and NOTHING MORE. In contrast, the crafting is not even comparable, there is no player housing(just placeholder buildings in a clan city, no real purpose but to increase the number total of people that can "bind" to the city--think limited recall runes, based on the number of houses built), etc, etc.
Fully half of the claimed features(the ones that have been claimed on their website for YEARS) are missing from the game. Including mobs. There is the bare minimum of mobs, just enough to farm anew set of gear, and some non-soloable mobs for group PvE. Essentially, PvE is NOT a viable playstyle in DFO. Period. Neither is soloing.
To make matters worse in this regard, during beta, when all the testers asked "Where are all the features and mobs?", the reply was "The server is in debug mode, all that will be turned on later, as we don't want to clog the logs with information not useful to our present testing needs.". OK, we can handle that, say the testers, but once the server goes live, IT IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS BETA. It was blatent misinformation to hide the fact that all the features and mobs were actually not in the game. In essence, they lied.
That in itself was enough to entirely turn me off of the game. But it doesn't end there.
The graphics, while pretty slick, in some ways, require too high-end of a machine to play in any stable fashion. The shadow system has been lauded by many, but it seems about half the players in posts have to turn it off to get a decent framerate.
And here is the big one for me. They TOTALLY ignored the worst developer pitfall of the very game they intended to emulate. They put FAR too much of the game CLIENT-side. Exactly like UO did. The problem with this is that there is no means for them to stop Bots, 3rd party apps, and every other cheat, speedhack, etc. that anyone cares to throw at it. One notable 3rd party app group managed to get into Beta and had their app all ready for release. There have been many posts regarding Teleport/Speed hacks already in use in the game, as well as they fact that Botters will be the death of any real economy even before it has a chance to BE. There is no way to fix all of this clientside stuff, short of a complete game overhaul. The game is basically as hackable as UO remains to this day.
A forum full of rude kids, a totally botched release, no customer support to speak of, a billing partner that STILL doesn't have things working properly, etc, etc are among the MANY reasons I will not be playing.
I had high hopes, but they have been dashed to pieces.
All that being said, I reactivated my EQ2 account. Its a nice mix of WoW, Everquest with additional systems in place, such as player housing. The game looks nice, runs superb, and, to be honest, has the most mature player base I have encountered in 10 years of MMOing. As someone said in a previous post, all the whining little kids got bored and went to WoW.
Fine by me!
I also noticed nobody mentioned this before, DFO released in a limited fashion. Only sold 10K accounts, maybe even less. They also only have ONE server up at the time of this writing(which does NOT include a login server....*sigh*) and I have seen no mention of any being specifically set to be opened anytime soon.