Darkfall Online

After seven years of development, Darkfall Online is (finally) coming out this year. I've been following it for quite some time now, and I figured since it's actually coming out soon (this year), rather than Soon(TM), that I would shamelessly plug for it here :). If you haven't heard of Darkfall, there are several things you should know off the bat:

Combat is skill based. There is no autotargeting, all attacks are aimed FPS-style. Friendly fire exists for everything, so be careful about casting that fireball into the fray.

There are also no safe zones; if you want to stab someone in the back in a major city, go ahead, but you'd better get ready to run like hell from the guards after you take your spoils.

The game is full loot, meaning when you PK someone you can take as much of their gear as you want. (I'm looking forwards to killing Gold Farmers if they do show up, free gold is always nice.

There are no levels per-se. Skills have ranks, but it has been stated by the devs that ~4 new characters can take down a veteran if they have equal aiming skill.

Similarly, there are no classes. Effective class is a matter of skills, and skills are trained by use. At the same time, unused skills decay (to a point). This means that your character will adapt to your playstyle.

No instances. The entire world is seamless.

(Non-instanced) City building and Sieges implemented at launch. This is a step away from the disappointment of Age of Conan (where you have 100 clans' cities in 1 spot). The engine supports massive battles at comfortable framerates: 200 players at 60 FPS on modest hardware, 200+ fps when there aren't as many players around.

I've skipped over a lot of stuff, so feel free to ask questions <3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiIY8tg2qBs

www.darkfallonline.com

Quote:

Originally Posted by Narcowski

There are no levels per-se. Skills have ranks, but it has been stated by the devs that ~4 new characters can take down a veteran if they have equal aiming skill.

Similarly, there are no classes. Effective class is a matter of skills, and skills are trained by use. At the same time, unused skills decay (to a point). This means that your character will adapt to your playstyle.

Sounds like a fancier Runescape (Minus the decaying, of course). Which is not a bad thing at all. This is actually kind of what I've been wanting to see in an RPG. I'll wait to see how it turns out before I dig my claws into it though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by srsinternets

Sounds like a fancier Runescape (Minus the decaying, of course). Which is not a bad thing at all. This is actually kind of what I've been wanting to see in an RPG. I'll wait to see how it turns out before I dig my claws into it though.

Actually, RuneScape was my first MMO, and while I have favourable memories of the beginning, it went downhill quickly when members released. http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=68237 (not posted by me), and a response:

Quote:

The big difference between Runescape and Darkfall is that stats aren't really in the calculations of combat when you attempt to hit someone whereas in Runescape it is, Darkfall is simulated in real time so aiming actually makes a difference and so does tactics, not only that it's been told to us that attacking from the flank and behind does more damage ( big relief for me and makes formations have something of a point ) if you can sift around the crap here and look at the game faqs you'll realize that this game is trying to brace the old sandbox MMORPG that most of us old players here knew and love.

By the way, all current screenshots and video are taken not at a screenshot setting, but on a Geforce 6X card. The efficiency of the engine astounds me.

I don't really feel like making a new thread about this, so I'll bump this one. Not like GH gets half the traffic it used to anyways.

Darkfall Beta will enter the semi-public playtesting phase on November 10 this year. They're currently doing hardware testing with randomly selected members of the community:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tasos, pt.1

Catching you up with our activities to date - in this post a brief recap of our activities surrounding the first official presentation for Darkfall during the Athens Digital Week.

The Darkfall information we’ve been giving out lately has been targeting civilians. While there have been a few interviews, on a variety of local (Greek) and fewer international media, there is really nothing new. We’ve shown about 10 different version of the Darkfall trailer, we’ve given a few presentations about the game, there are some Darkfall ads out there, and more waiting to be deployed, a couple of local television presentations etc. but it’s the general information that people need to be introduced to the game.

You probably already saw Shaar’s update on the Athens Digital Week activities. He did a good job giving the information about what all happened there, but here’s the official take on things:

The presentation didn’t contain much new information. It was meant for a general audience. The video shown was a shorter version of the Darkfall trailer. We played the game live on the stage during the presentation for about 20 minutes and we stopped when the internet went out.

The announcement during ADW was that the open beta phase is scheduled to end early in December. More importantly this means that the game will be ready to release at that point. Marketing consideration kept us from just announcing a release date. The game will be ready for release, and the launch may follow directly, or shortly after, depending on the marketing landscape at the time. Obviously the earlier the better for us, but there are a lot of things needing coordination for the launch, internal and external. So our side of things (meaning the development end) will be ready.

Some general information on the Athens Digital Week activities because a lot of people were asking: We organized the entire gaming section, mainly to support publicity for Darkfall’s first official presentation. There was an international Quake 3 and Warcraft 3 event, the ESWC Masters of Athens, where the best professional players in the world competed for the top spots. It was nice to know that most of them knew about Darkfall and a few were waiting for it to come out. Then we held the World Cyber Games national finals, there was a large LAN set up for the public, and a bunch of game consoles with the latest Xbox 360 games. There was a concert with the symphonic orchestra of the city of Athens playing videogame themes. Last but not least we had a small game developer’s conference for game developers in Greece.

We were happy with the attendance of the event, a lot of international journalists covered ESWC Master’s of Athens and had a lot of question to ask about Darkfall, and we met a lot of fans during the Darkfall presentation, but mainly in the days following it. I was very surprised at how many people were asking about the game, and about when we would have another presentation. We didn’t know we had such a strong following in Greece. Unfortunately our time slot for the Darkfall presentation was during normal business hours and many people couldn't attend.

I’ve posted some pictures from the event in the gallery.

We’ll follow this up with a Darkfall status report within a couple of hours from this posting.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tasos, pt 2.

Ok now for the Darkfall community update:

As you know we’ve been conducting the first phases of the Darkfall beta, specifically the hardware configuration testing. This is where we test that Darkfall runs on most hardware configurations without problems, and we also test the absolute basics. We’ve been putting the testers through the motions: they download the client, log in, patch, create a character, enter the game and run around long enough to make sure that they’re not experiencing any weirdness and that everything is running smoothly. All this needs to be done so that in the next phases of testing a greater number of testers won’t experience any problems with the basics and so they can focus on other important testing. These have turned out to be very productive and useful testing phases. During this time we’ve addressed various hardware compatibility problems, compatibility issues with programs running simultaneously with Darkfall, we identified and corrected some patcher issues, some login server problems, and various small issues around the game world. At the same time, it’s business as usual with our internal testing.

Let me give you an idea of what’s been happening during these first testing phases: Right now, the entire Darkfall world is up on its servers. It’s being kept up most of the time. We’ve been running a methodical and functional testing environment. We started the hardware testing with the minimum of options enabled. Since then we’ve been enabling and disabling features needed to be tested. This is done so that we have the minimum noise in case something happens on the server side and we need to isolate it. We’ve been wiping characters as often as once a day, usually within 2-3 days. This is because we’re not testing character development yet, and we’ve been making some optimizations in the way that things are stored. We’ve been enabling features gradually and we’re to the point where most are enabled. Some of the things we still have deactivated are mobs outside the starting areas, most of the dungeons, most of the clan city building locations. Another thing worth mentioning is that during testing, testers have options and tools available to them that they won’t have during the retail stage of Darkfall.

Our goal during this testing phase is that the important things work perfectly as we move all the way down to the polish during the subsequent testing phases. The game had always been in a state to be run in its entirety, but this would have been a huge waste of resources and would have hindered this early testing. This is where Darkfall differs from other MMOs. We could have easilly had it running full featured if this was a railroad game, but it’s not. Darkfall is a sandbox game and there are infinite paths that players can follow. This is not some quest driven game where you could go through the motions quest after quest until you’re ready to actually play a few months down the road. You actually play Darkfall from day one. So as you understand, there’s no single path of testing. Player behavior in Darkfall varies wildly and we need to try and predict all eventualities.

This is what has been happening until today. The reason we’re mentioning all this is to familiarize those of you who aren’t in the beta already with our testing philosophy, and to catch the community up with what’s been going on.

Moving along, and we’re about two weeks behind schedule announcing this, but we’re going to start opening up the beta to more and more testers on or around November 10th to coincide with the next phases of our server deployment. We will be enabling a lot of the features we currently have disabled – as needed and dictated by our testing needs. Again I must stress that this beta period’s purpose is for us to get Darkfall ready for release so we’ve been operating under strict directives. Having said that, I can’t help mentioning, that even in this current stage of testing, the game is a lot of fun and we hope to see all of you enjoying it while helping us test during these next phases.

Thanks for reading

If any of you guys are interested in playing with me once the game releases (mid-December), please let me know. My clan (as it's coming together) could use some more members.