I guess I should post some of my impressions of the game now that I’ve played it for a bit. Note that this is just that and not a full-fledged review by any means, since not only I haven’t tried some aspects of Darkfall yet, I’m also playing the game on my old PC for now which means I can’t judge the graphics objectively. That being said, let’s dive in.

Gameplay and Combat

The combat system of Darkfall is completely different from all other MMOs that I’ve tried, and similar to that of FPS games. Instead of selecting a target and using various skills strategically, here you have to aim your attacks, predict your enemy’s moves, and evade their strikes. I am not saying that Darkfall doesn’t have a lot of skills to choose from, but right now most people only use simple melee attacks. The strategy involves trying to hit your opponent in the back and pelt him with Mana Missiles or arrows if he tries to run away. If you are the one doing the running, make sure you’re not going in a straight line because if you do, you’ll become a perfect target for your enemies’ projectiles. Chases, by the way, take the longest time since everyone has a lot of stamina and can run/sprint around for minutes. Overall, the combat gives you a lot of freedom and is very different from other MMOs; FPS gamers will surely find a good application for their skills in Darkfall.

The full loot PvP ruleset adds a lot of excitement and sense of danger to the game. It also adds a lot of annoyance sometimes and naked people ganking everyone and some spawnpoints. I haven’t ever played UO and the other MMORPG that I’m subscribed to – Age of Conan – has a pretty much non-existand death penalty, so this is all new for me. I rather like it so far: it never made much sense to me when in AoC the death penalty was so light that people used to kill themselves as means of transport.

There are a lot of skills, including ones like Running, Swimming, or even Resting. The system definitely reminds me of Morrowind, and it’s a lot of fun to get “skill ups” no matter what action you take. Combat skills are harder to level up though, and might take a long while to master since the higher you get, the slower you learn.

The World

The world is huge and seamless, except for a little HDD trashing at the beginning of each invisible “zone” (might be just my 1 GB of RAM though). Regrettably, it also feels very empty. Don’t get me wrong: it is very detailed and full of landmarks such as mountains, rivers, meadows, trees (some giant ones), lakes, lava fields, and so on. However, there are very little mobs around (they’re concentrated in a few small camps), the world is so big that the few thousands of players who bought the game aren’t enough to fill it (run from Alfar to Mirdain starting town for 30 minutes and you’ll likely meet no one), and finally, there are precious few NPCs. Only the starting and the main towns have NPCs in them; while exploring, I’ve come across many very nice and detailed looking towns, which were completely devoid of life. I do hope this only means that Aventurine hadn’t had the time to populate them with NPCs, and not that the server wouldn’t handle the load of they did.

The Graphics

I said I wouldn’t be able to really review the graphics, and that’s true. I’ll just say the game runs reasonably well on my old box (Athlon XP 3000+, Radeon x800GTO, 1 GB RAM). RAM is a problem though and I think having more would really help. I’ll definitely post about Darkfall’s performance on my new “rig” once I get it back from repairs.

The graphics look better than I expected, but there are some glitches and weird things that need fixing. While the sky looks great, the sun looks strange and changes in size depending on the position of your crosshair. It is also sometimes shining in front of the moon. The day/night cycle changes almost instantly. There are some really bad animations and effects, spell effects probably being #1. The list goes on; I don’t want to sound all negative though, since like I said, the game still looks much better than I’ve thought before.

The Sound

The sound in Darkfall definitely needs a lot of work. Some effects (OK, most of them) are pretty much terrible. I guarantee you’ll cringe after hearing all those mana missiles skill grinders shoot off in towns. However my biggest problem is the 3D effects. While I’m able to tell the position of the enemy by listening to the fighting sounds, I can’t tell the distance with any accuracy because it sounds nearly the same: it doesn’t matter if the players are fighting 1 or 100 meters away.

The best part of Darkfall soundtrack is probably the music you hear on the login screen. The ambient soundtracks – there’s only one for each race’s teritory, I believe – are unintrusive and silent, but far from the wonderful soundtracks in World of Wacraft by Jason Hayes, or Age of Conan by Knut Avenstroup Haugen. I guess I shouldn’t even bring this up since Aventurine is much smaller than Blizzard or even Funcom, but it would be nice to have some awesome fantasy/medieval music in the game.

The Wishlist

• Chat bubbles – right now, everyone is asocial in the game. The chat system pretty much sucks and if you say anything to people around you, there’s a high chance they won’t see it. I believe text bubbles  above your character’s head with messages that you post to Public or Race channels would be great and help the community feeling. Before you start screaming that it would break stealth or whatever, consider that you don’t need to talk while sneaking, and party/guild chat or /tell text wouldn’t be visible anyway.
• Improved chat system: right now you have to switch between the chat channels in order to see what people are saying in them. Like I mentioned before, no one ever uses Public since they won’t see miss Race or Party otherwise. There’s no “All” channel that would have all the messages in one place. It would be best to have fully customizable channels like in Age of Conan, where you can choose everything from what channels should be visible to what combat messages you want to receive.
• Tradehouses: some people might think spamming the chat with WTB/WTS for hours is cool, but let’s get real. It’s 2009 and modern MMOs must have a way to sell your stuff easier. It could be auction houses, AoC-like tradehouses, NPC vendors that you hire, or, heck, even player stalls/shops like the ones you see in Asian MMORPGs. To improve realism, the trade houses could even be local for each city instead of universal. Anything that makes trading easier and more fun.
• Proper party controls – some people might think it’s “hardcore” and cool to have to invite players into their party by typing /party_invite First Last every time. I don’t. Darkfall needs a proper Party window for creating, inviting or leaving parties.

State of the Game

Darkfall needs a massive amount of polishing. The GUI is awkward (although usable) and incomplete: it says gui_window_chat_toggle in the Input Bindings, for example, and not Toggle Chat.  All hotkey descriptions are like that and it just screams “beta test!”. When pointing at objects, the status window also happily informs you that you’re in fact looking at a r_Alfar_Female_Robed model and not an Alfar Female that would make more sense in this stage of the game. These are all small things, but they add to the overall “unfinished” impression.

Despite all the flaws, Darkfall does have a lot of potential. Right now the biggest problems I see is the Aventurine’s failure to meet the demand for the game, the lack of proper customer support, and abundant macroing or even hacking. However, they seem to be aware and working on all of this problems. If the company keeps improving DFO they could turn it into a truly great MMORPG, so I wish Aventurine developers the very best.

Go to Source

If you read Forumfall you might remember the hilarious video about how Hitler wanted to get into Darkfall beta. Now the same author Placebo came up with one more funny short clip that you can watch below. I stumbled upon it in MMORPG.com forums and laughed my butt off at how they portrayed Aventurine HQ “handling preorders” or two women friends of Hitler complaining about missing a WoW raid. It’s a parody of the german movie Downfall; probably won’t be as funny if you know the language, but otherwise, lulz are guaranteed:

The launch was pretty terrible indeed, but the servers are working fine right now (and have been for some time) so hopefully things will take a turn for the better and we’ll be able to enjoy Darkfall for months to come.

Go to Source

There has been a new Darkfall update on the official forums. Of course, the forum itself is still disabled since it’s server can’t handle the load, so the update was posted in place of the maintenance mode message. You can read it below:

Update 5.49pm GMT

After addressing a couple of early issues the servers have been running very stable for several hours and we have a large number of players in-game right now.

It’s normal to expect more issues to surface in the next couple of days. We postponed our scheduled maintenance of 10 AM GMT for later until we can gather some more data and address anything that comes up in a patch later tonight.

We’re aware that some areas are experiencing sync issues for some players. This is a high priority issue that we are working to address as soon as possible. We know the cause for it so it shouldn’t take very long. We will keep the servers up while this is being fixed and we will bring them down for a patch later tonight. For now, players can move away from starting areas to improve their experience.

We have processed the problematic accounts that were never charged but received a successful pre-order notification. Only a small percentage of these were successful and we found out that this is because most of them contain incomplete or incorrect account information. We will try this one last time again tomorrow morning European time, and we’ll open up account management later tonight for these accounts to be able to correct their account data and credit information before we reprocess them. If anyone does not want the pre-order to be processed, they should remove their credit card information from their account. After this is concluded we should be able to open up sales for more Darkfall copies.

I have been experiencing something that I believe is related to those “sync issues”, so I’m glad Aventurine is on to it. Sometimes after swinging my weapon the hits are delayed, or not delivered at all. Some players are “teleporting” or moving jumpily as if it’s lagging, even though my ping is usually around a respectable 70 ms. Problems like these are very annoying so I hope they will be fixed soon.

Go to Source

It seems Darkfall Online has failed to launch on time yet again since it’s already 1:30 AM, February 26th in Greece as I’m writing this. The forums are down as well, but just recently instead of the old “server load too high” message there has been an update posted by Tasos:

We’ve been waiting for the pre-orders to process through billing and it has been moving along but not fast enough. We’re almost done with this. Many of you will be getting notifications of this during this process. As soon as this is concluded we’ll process the accounts and open up the servers for the pre-orders. This will be done tonight; the game has been ready and waiting.

Unfortunately we’re running behind schedule as far as opening up the extra sales which we hoped to do tonight as well. We’ll do this tomorrow as early as possible, likely sometime around noon GMT time, around the time of our first scheduled maintenance. At this time we will also process the problematic accounts which had 0 euro problems, no charges, no balance, but received a successful pre-order message. We are also looking into the few cases that have pre-ordered but have not received a confirmation email and we will resolve all these issues. Most of these problems were due to a combination of lag, multiple sessions, and multiple charge attempts.

We want to thank you for your patience again, and we would like to let you know that we’re adding a couple more days to the free month of play making them 33 for everyone that pre-ordered and that will buy the game tomorrow. This is to make up for any bad experience with the account management, the lag and the delays you’ve had to face with purchasing.

The traffic volume we’ve been experiencing has been unbelievably high because of the initial rush and was compounded by users hammering the system with multiple sessions. You should also know that we have been doing everything necessary to resolve all these issues as soon as possible.

We’ll post again as soon as the server is open.

The forums will return shortly as well.

This only mentions the preorders so I’m not really sure about the game servers themselves. Since I’m getting a “Account not active (#3)” error, I guess that means my pre-order hasn’t been processed yet and that I’ll be able to play as soon as it is. Actually, I just checked my bank account and my credit card hasn’t yet been charged 47 euros for the game. Of course I was charged 3 euros for the preorder about two days ago, so everything’s alright on my end and I can only wait for Aventurine to finish up with the billing process.

Go to Source

Tasos has posted one more update on Darkfall’s launch date and time as well as explanations of some preorder problems.

First of all, the account management page has been opened once more so those who wish to cancel their preorder or to create a new account can do so (and try to purchase the game tomorrow when more preorders are available). Sadly, you still need to try like 20 times before you’re able to get in.

Second, there’s some info for people who got 0 euro charges on their credit cards (it seems you have nothing to worry about since your preorder still counts as valid):

There has been an issue with some people who have received an email message that their pre-order was successful but they show a zero charge and a 0 balance. This happened because of the time-outs or because of multiple ordering attempt. We will treat most of these cases as successful pre-orders and provided the credit card transaction for the purchase is successful, they will be able to purchase the game. If you belong to this group and you want to cancel your pre-order, all you need to do is remove your credit card information from the account management page and you will not be charged. There’s a link that allows you to do this where your credit card information is stored.

The most interesting part is of course the actual time of the release – and for those who didn’t preorder, the time when more preorders will be available for sale. Here’s what Aventurine had to say on the matter:

We’ll open up sales tomorrow Feb. 25 evening European time. We’re doing our best to make this a smoother experience but again the large volume we’ve been experiencing has been difficult to catch up with. We’d like to thank you for your patience so far.

The game servers will also open up sometime in the evening. We’ll keep you updated throughout the day tomorrow.

So there you go, a rather vague statement that the Darkfall servers will be opened “sometime in the evening” tomorrow. I bet Aventurine are working their butts off right now, so we’ll likely get more concrete schedule in the tomorrow’s updates.

Go to Source