I've always considered myself a competitive gamer, and I tend to keep my eyes on the beta horizon. For sometime now Sinister has been active beta testers and live subscribers to any game who catered to PVP. Since Ultima Online, where this guild formed, we've tried Everquest, Asheron's Call, EVE, Lineage 2, Shadowbane, World of Warcraft, Asheron's Call 2, Age of Conan, and most recently Warhammer Online. In each game we played on 'hard mode' taking the PVP rule set and usually picking the toughest server with the most competition at release. When Darkfall was announced some five years ago it was greeted with much fan fair from the PVP community and inside the Sinister core; at last a game for us. Fast forward the five years of development and many people have simply written the game off as Vapor Ware. I'm hear to tell you the game is for real and has a punchers chance to be really good fun if you like the genre. A game based upon PVP has to have a combat engine that is engaging and Darkfall delivers on this promise.
- Combat that matters. You fight for territory you want. You fight for loot from the players; that's right boys full looting.
- FPS targetting required for any action; there inst even a target frame in the game. Watch for Ren's target tooltip to popup when he's facing targets.
- Everything in the game costs stamina; when your hit, when you swing, when you cast, sprint, or shot your bow.
- Most damage appears to be
splash damage. Translation: coordinating your attacks and your defense needs to take into account the other players positioning. On more then one ocassion Ren hits his own guys and I think even scores a TK at one point. I'm glad the camera wasnt on me ;p
So the skill in this game comes from coordinating your individual / group efforts, taking into account the terrain, your enemys movements, your teams positoning, and your classes skills. Gear and items play a VERY marginal role in your damage. The result of all these 'skill' friendly design decisions is already beeing seen on the beta forums where you can frequently find chest-bumping threads about small groups beating big groups outnumbered. Our first week in game we really didnt know any of this shit, and this video isnt by any means us saying we PWNFACES, but it will give you a really good impression of combat in the game. The fight shown in this video happened cause we PK'd some dude, took his loot, and his guild came for revenge. We were Dwarves and they were Dwarves so targetting was additionally complex. After the first battle where both teams were dodging the Alignment system (think UO's Karma system) they declared WAR on us and the shit was on. Final note, two days later their guild capitulated and they petitioned us in game for peace. You can guess how well that went ;p
Will Darkfall last? Will it be another in a long string of short lived jumps of entertainment? I really don't have the answers, but at least for me, it far exceeded expectation. Don't get me wrong, you wont find Ragnaros styled content in this game and you will likely find bugs and imbalances. However, if your a PVP fan, or are looking for a game with consquence, then this game is made for you. Oh, and one final note this game has NO client stability issues . You wont find sb.exe or goofy ass polygons-of-doom in Darkfall. Througout the fight I managed to keep 80-110 FPS and I'm optimistic the client can support medium-large scale combat. Come to think of it, the only time I've ever crashed in the beta is when they brought down the servers.
Darkfall Preview Part I - Combat
Linear Mode
