Darkfall

I've been watching Darkfall since it was first announced, and I couldn't believe it when I received a beta key on Friday. Here are my impressions of the game, after nearly 5 days.

A quick background on my MMO experience
My first experience with MMOs began with Ultima Online. I really enjoyed the freedom that UO offered, but I moved to EverQuest when it came out, due to the more immersive graphics. I played EverQuest for several years, with a short stint in Dark Age of Camelot, until Star Wars Galaxies came out. I moved to SWG with the hope that I could experience some of the more sandbox-style gameplay of UO - which it certainly offered. Since SWG, I've played nearly every MMO imaginable: Shadowbane, EverQuest 2, WoW, Vanguard, EvE, Guild Wars, and several others. I currently lead a guild, and have done so since SWG. I also work in the game industry for a living.

Some of the leaked beta reports I've read have had me questioning my sanity, due to the complete lack of criticism. It seems that nearly every leak release so far have been either entirely positive or entirely negative. I will be providing a mixed review, which aims to be as objective as possible.

The Good
I'm going to start with the good. As a longtime MMO veteran, I appreciate very much what Aventurine has tried to do with Darkfall. I agree entirely with their design principle, and the overall architecture of the game. On paper, it offers everything I've been hoping for in an MMO. Here are some of the good things.

* The client seems to perform well, in terms of FPS. Even with all details set to max, I experienced a consistently good frame rate. I also never experienced a client crash.

* Overall, the graphics are nice, especially for an independent game. The landscape graphics are superior to most current MMOs (despite the clip plane, which is quite bad). The player models are fairly well done as well.

* Moving between "zones" only causes a minor interruption. With a fast hard drive, it only take half a second or so.

* The shadowing system is impressive. Every environmental structure and player casts a shadow, and it looks really nice, and lag free.

* The world feels very big, and some of the structures I saw looked really cool. If only the clip plane were further. As I mentioned before, the only thing holding back the immersion here is the clip plane, which is very reminiscent of EverQuest 1, at launch.

* The thrill of being in a game where death actually matters, and caring about every single loot drop, is a very nice change of pace.

The Bad
Here are some of the things which I consider to be bad.

* The Darkfall server, which the devs claim is designed to support up to 10,000 simultaneous users, can barely stay online with only a few hundred. Since I got into beta, the servers have been down more than they have been up, and crash several times per hour. In all my years of MMO testing, this is by far the most unreliable and laggy server I've experienced.

* The world is absolutely devoid of life. Finding something to kill takes a high degree of patience, and luck. Friendly NPCs are also equally sparse. The human capital city only has a half a dozen NPCs in total. In all my hours of exploration, I only found goblins just outside the starting areas, and zombies in a graveyard near Sanguine (human capital). I walked for miles and miles and miles, and that is all that I found.

* Movement speed is painfully slow. For it to even be bearable, you have to hold down the shift key to sprint the entire time - draining your endurance. Moving around in Darkfall feels like you're running in mud.

* Combat feels laggy and disconnected. I only tried sword and polearm combat, so perhaps archery or magic is better. As it stands now though, the combat in Darkfall needs a great deal of work.

* The user interface is quite simply the worst I've seen in a game. The journal, from which you view your quests, guild and group is nothing more than an embedded web browser that loads web pages. It's slow, and extremely amateur. The world map is not zoomable, so all your points of interest are crowded into a tiny area which cannot be read.

* The clip plane is bad. As you can see in the screenshots people have posted, you can't see more than a few hundred feed in front of you before everything starts turning grey - very reminiscent of EQ1.

* I'm sure you've all heard about the important role that sound will play. The way combat sounds work is almost laughable. Rather than get quieter the farther you get from a fight, it just stays at full volume, then disappears completely. It's also not directional, so you have no way of knowing which way the fight is. I hate to say it, but the sounds in Darkfall are like a shareware game from the 90's.

* The chat commands are difficult to use, and poorly thought out. Forget simple and intuitive command like /g. In Darkfall, it's /group_say. Forget /tell Username. In Darkfall it's /msg FirstName LastName. Other commands are equally ridiculous, and make me question the thinking process of the developers.

Conclusion
To say the least, I'm disappointed and genuinely disheartened with the current state of Darkfall. I am also extremely disturbed by the fact that it's Associate Producer, Tasos, has been claiming the game is "complete" for months. The game, if released today, might be able to maintain a very small following of ultra-hardcore Darkfall fans, but it could never attract and maintain the sort of critical mass a PvP-oriented game like this needs to be enjoyable.
I'm afraid that unless drastic measures are taken by the dev team, Darkfall will go down as yet another multimillion dollar MMO failure.

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