Darkfall: Final Thoughts

Not too long ago I took a nice restful vacation, did some yard work, traveled to see family. Upon returning, I didn't feel like playing Darkfall immediately, so I did other things. Then a couple of days turned into weeks and it became obvious the game didn't have enough appeal for me to draw me back in. So I'll leave it as I began, with curiosity and hope.

Despite the public criticisms and the very real frustrations that exist in the game currently, I think AV is on the way to creating the niche game they have worked on for so long. I was never a fanboy, didn't follow development, and always assumed, as many others did, that the game was vaporware. But when it arrived in the world newborn-red and wailing, I wanted to check it out. I knew it was open PvP and full loot, features I have never cared for, but I went in with a philosophical attitude and it paid off; those features had little effect on my enjoyment of the game long term, either negative or positive.

In realizing their goal of a wide-open PvP-focused game, however, the other elements of the game have suffered. As the developers have said, it's not a game for everyone. Nor should it be. I'm glad the MMO genre is maturing enough to support niche games. If Darkfall doesn't survive, Mortal Online and others will try for the free-for-all PvP niche. Perhaps we'll see other games where diplomacy or trade get the intense focus that as heretofore been spent on combat and questing. And so I hope that DF is succesful and develops into the kind of game so many of its fans have longed for since the early days of Ultima Online.

For me the PvP is not enough of a draw. I'm not a competitive person nor a competitive player. I like the grander possibiloities of living in that kind of world, such as in the now-departed Shadowbane, but DF isn't offering that. And so I find myself with little interest in rejoining the world when so many other possibilites beckon. I do hope, however, that those who continue to enjoy DF are able to keep it alive for a long time.

New Video Game Technology!

Beginning with a couple of great points and a firm lede, this well-rounded story from The Onion thrust itself into my attention. No one can lick the Onion when it comes to sliding a story right down the middle. However, this is a news event that can't be constrained by such flimsy coverage, demanding to bust out into wider view. Enjoy!

Darkfall Day 29-33

Lots of play days to write about but for short times each. I've done a lot of farming this week to put myself into position for some spell practice. Right now my Greater Magic is 30.1 and I need to get to 50 for elemental schools. My next training push will probably get me to just 40 unless I can buy a shitload of reagents. Otherwise I'm herb gathering and farming my friendly neighborhood trolls to gather what I need.

In more interesting developments I had my first experience as part of what I might charitably call a gank squad :) A couple of my clanmates needed to pay off their alignment debt to get blue again, so we formed a little group of four and went hunting in Mahirim lands. I've been the victim of such gank squads more often than I care to think about in the newbie areas of human and elven lands. A group of enemies on mounts will swing through and kill a few folks, loot, and move on. I don't get too upset about it as long as it's spread out enough that I get something done in between. Now I've been on the other side.

The basic tactic was to go to a mob camp, most often goblins, and kill whomever we found there. The goal was more to get my clanmates the alignment credit for having killed them than to gather loot or anything, though we picked up a little of that. Sounds are often the giveaway that someone is fighting nearby and can even provide a clue as to how many there are. We dismounted for our attacks, although I've been attacked by mounted groups plenty of times. Dismounting let us use bows and magic, though. So we'd sneak up on someone and chase them a bit till they were dead. Oddly enough, we'd sometimes kill one to find another still fighting goblins. Got to be more aware of your surroundings, friends :)

The more exciting part was when, near an NPC town and emboldened by the towers there, a good sized group of Mahirim organized a counter-attack. We'd retreat, draw a few out, and charge back in, killing as we went. My magic got a good workout throughout this. All that practice leading trolls with Mana Missile also paid off as I was able to kill a couple of folks who were doing their best to dodge the slow-assed spell. I probably did more damage with the area-of-effect splash damage provided when the spell hit the ground or a nearby object.

We also would attack lone gatherers as we travelled through the wilderness, confirming the wisdom of my usual practice to keep a mount nearby and get moving at the first sound of appraoching hooves whenever I gather in the middle of nowhere.

Overall it was a fun experience and I know with greater certainity now that most often when I get ganked, it's nothing personal.

Stats: Week 6

• Strength: 27.7
• Vitality: 26.2
• Dexterity: 20.5
• Quickness: 30.5
• Intelligence: 27.7
• Wisdom: 32.5

Notable Skills:

• Spell Chanting: 1.1
• Adept: 1.3
• Greater Magic: 30.1
• Durable Spells GM: 10.5
• Rend: 36.0
• Beacon: 26.8
• Unburden: 15.2
• Heal Other: 14.3
• Infliction Shield: 5.1
• Lesser Magic: 76.0
• Durable Spells LM: 46.1
• Mana Efficiency LM: 41.1
• Quicken Spells LM: 10.2
• Magic Missile: 65.8
• Heal Self: 54.5
• Health to Mana: 30.2
• Lay on Hands: 28.2
  
• Mana to Stamina: 16.6
• Magic Shield: 12.9
• Launch 5.3
  

• Logging: 89.8
• Mining: 47.6
• Herbalism: 36.6
• Sprint: 64.2
• Rest: 58.4
• Run: 53.5
• Riding: 45.2
• Armor Proficiency: 46.4
• Clubs and Maces: 23.2
• Armored Casting: 22.6
• Rigor: 28.8
  

Another Patch Day

Patch notes today start out ho-hum and then get REALLY interesting. (By the way, always patching on Fridays? WTF?)

• New color systems for names that delineate clan members, allies, warring clans, racial enemies, etc, much easier. This one has been needed from the launch of the game. I remember being totally confused at my first siege. It's gotten a little better over time just as I've become more acclimated, but this is a big and logical change.
• Trade channel! I like to keep an eye on the Alliance chat because that's all we've had as a trade channel and I'm often trying to buy gear and sell resources. Downside of that is you have to watch other people's inane chatter mixed in. That's their right, of course (it's a CHAT channel after all), but I really don't care to see any more Chuck Norris jokes, tyvm. My only fear is that they'll start to use the new Trade channel for the exact same shit because that's where the "audience" will be. You certainly see a lot of that in WoW. Still, thanks for the Trade channel, AV!
• Killing party members is just like killing anyone else. This was needed because the existing system allowed you to kill party members with no penalty. This was a newbie trap, but more importantly it discouraged people teaming up in newbie areas for fear of that trap. This should help.
• Launch now requires a reagent. I just got the spell, so now it will be a lot harder to level it up, but I think it's a fair change. It a useful higher-level GM spell. I'm not going to complain just because it makes my life harder. That would be carebear and all, doncha know? :D
  

Darkfall Day 26-28

Another light week and weekend for DF as I ended up playing another game Friday night and working in the yard all day Saturday. I enjoy DF and the sense of making progress, but I'm glad I can say I'm not addicted :D If you read the Darkfall forums (I recommend not), you see a lot of newer folks worried about being so far behind those who started earlier, not to mention those who have macroed and exploited their way higher. I can understand their concern, but it's a wide-open game and you can make of it what you want at any skill level. Sure you'll get ganked and attacked in unfair numbers by people with greater skill and equipment, but it's far from a constant. Mostly you need to vary your activities so that when the PK activity seems particularly high you can retreat to a city and do some quiet gathering and crafting.

As is probably dismally clear from my slowly progressing stats, I'm not too worried about it myself. Yes, I still do some "magic practice." At first I would cast my two starting spells over and over until I ran out of mana then do some logging until my mana regenerated, repeating the process again. As my magic skills have increased to the point of being useful, I've gained a lot more skill while actually fighting monsters in PvE. Now I will do "magic practice" when I'm fairly close to the next level to grind it on up. With the Lesser Magic spell Health the Mana, I'm able to extend my mana a lot longer and continuously cast for a longer time, so I no longer alternate that with gathering. With a judicious use of potions and healing spells, I can carry that on for awhile without macroing. In fact, I think rotating my spells as I do and casting those whose recast timer has just refreshed as soon as I'm able has allowed me to progress at a satisfying rate in a short amount of time.

I finally reached 25 in Greater Magic, which allowed me to purchase Spell Chanting, a little more powerful school of magic. Its first spell is one that minimizes spell failure, but it doesn't last very long right now. I'll probably put it in my training rotation, but not use it much in the field until I can improve its duration. Having Spell Chanting will eventually allow me to learn Arcane Magic, one of the two highest schools, as I understand it.

I also reached 75 in Lesser Magic this weekend. That one snuck up on me so that I only had to grind a few points to reach it. Using the spells in action in PvE (and also to some extent in gathering) has raised the skill in a natural way that's a lot less painful than sitting around casting at a wall :) Getting to 75 LM let me pick up the Launch spell, which is mighty handy, and a supplementary skill to make Lesser Magic spells cast faster. That's good news because Heal Self is Lesser Magic, as is Mana Missile, my current bread-and-butter attack spell. I've also started using Magic Shield more, which mitigates some damage. With my Durable Spells LM skill much improved, the duration on the shield is much better than at first, so I'll continue to work on that.

Buying all those new skills and spells left me broke with less than 80 gp to my name, so I went to my trusty logging and was able to gather enough to sell for 1200 gp. It required a quick trip to human lands again to sell it, but I needed to turn in some quests over there anyway. I also got to hang around Copperdale a bit which has a big graveyard right near town and lots of skeletons. I fought Dire Zombies for a quest and took me awhile to kill the requisite four because they kept ganging up on me. It was a nice challenge, though, and I felt competent at least, using a variety of spells as well as obstacles and geography to good effect. Unfortuantley, I doubt I'd still be much of a challenge for a guy with a polearm, but soon I think I'll be far enough along in magic to hold my own. That's the plan anyway :)

The other interesting thing that happned this week is that my clan got a city in a realtively peacful way through our alliance. So I've moved out there and will get to team up with my clan mates more, I expect.

Stats: Week 5

These were my stats going into last weekend. As I've mentioned before, this is probably boring for other people, but I've found it interesting to look back at the progress over time. Trying to resist the urge to plot them on a graph :P

• Strength: 27.0
• Vitality: 25.7
• Dexterity: 20.5
• Quickness: 29.5
• Intelligence: 26.8
• Wisdom: 31.4

Notable skills:

• Spell Chanting: 1.0
• Adept: 1.0
• Greater Magic: 25.0
• Durable Spells GM: 1.0
  
• Rend: 33.4
• Beacon: 23.1
• Heal Other: 1.0
• Unburden: 1.0
• Lesser Magic: 72.0
• Durable Spells LM: 43.8
• Mana Efficiency LM: 38.1
  
• Mana Missile: 63.4
• Heal Self: 51.8
• Health to Mana: 25.6
• Lay on Hands: 22.8
• Mana to Stamina: 13.4
• Magic Shield: 6.3

• Logging: 85.2
• Herb Gathering: 57.8
• Mining: 47.6
• Herbalism: 36.6
  
• Sprint: 62.4
  
• Rest: 56.4
• Run: 52.0
• Riding: 41.7
  
• Rigor: 27.0
• Clubs and Maces: 22.4
• Armor Proficiency: 45.3
• Armored Casting: 21.0
  

Also Left-handed Midget Eskimo Lesbians May Now Stand on One Foot

There was another quick patch today apparently, the patch notes for which contain one of the oddest bugs I've ever heard of:

A bug not allowing male Mahirim characters to fire magic missiles in water is fixed

For those keeping score, that's one gender among two, one race among six, and one spell among hundreds...in the water. But glad to know it's fixed :P

Tasos Responds

Tasos, the lead development person for Aventurine (yeah, I'm too lazy to look up his actual title), has responded to some of the issues brought up in the recent MMORPG.com interview with alliance leaders.

Having read several interviews with Tasos, and of course his own posts, I get this mixed sense of him as being blunt and unapologetic on the one hand while arrogant and dismissive on the other. I tend to lean towards the idea that he's just a blunt person, which is a good thing, I think. He could certainly be more politic, but then you'd get a lot more bullshit out of him, so I'll take the bluntness.

At any rate, I think the developers' continued explanations about cheating in the game are interesting. As someone who's worked in public relations and politics for awhile now, I can believe that cheating via third-party programs and hacks is a far smaller and better managed problem than it would seem from the community chatter. Here's part of what he says in the interview:

It's very often that we see reports about specific players using exploits, and them being used over and over as examples to show how exploits are rampant in the game, and yet we know that these particular guys have already been banned. They are referenced for weeks though to illustrate how rampant cheating is in Darkfall. We don't like the idea of a hall of shame for our players however.

We take reports about cheaters very seriously, but please keep in mind that most of complaining is highly exaggerated, even bogus, and a lot of it is coming from the people making and promoting these programs, from players who are banned already, by players who are using the cheats, by people with an agenda, by people who aren't even in the game, and others who are just jumping on the bandwagon.

Most player reports of cheaters are about players who are not actually cheating. Our own GMs get reported very often if that's an indication. People that lose fights, in the heat of the moment often assume their opponent wasn't fighting fair. Very good players are often accused of using hacks.

Even with all the mistaken reports of people exploiting and the multiple characters per account, there are actually few names reported, and few screenshots or videos of people cheating. If cheating was rampant then we would expect to see reports with specific player names everywhere. It's all really about perception.

I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one because I know how people are, especially the rabid Darkfall community. Game mechanic exploits are something else altogether, and he does address that as well, but I'm willing to believe there's less outright hacks than players may think.

Darkfall Day 23-25

Mostly stuck around the elven lands this weekend, alternating among farming trolls, killing zombies, and gathering, with a little magic practice thrown in for good measure.

I've gotten pretty good at handling the PvE at the level of monsters I'm dealing with. Using Mana Missile has three basic tactics you can use depending on what the monsters are doing: if they're coming right at you or running directly away you can spam it over and over; if they're moving at an angle towards or away from you, you can gauge windspeed, relative humidity, and the average walking speed of a fully-laden Greek troll and try to lead the monster enough with it to actually hit them; or, if they're moving erratically, as they often do, you can make a wild guess and try to hit the ground near them so they at least suffer splash damage. So you hit one try out of five and count yourself lucky. The Mana Efficiency - Lesser Magic skill is helpful since you end up wasting so much mana.

Of course, I've continued to use my mace and its skill level is slowly creeping up. Melee involves constantly circling around the monster to avoid its spells, a tactic that is surprisingly effective, as is jumping up and down a lot when you're at a distance and they're casting at you.

I don't mean to suggest I don't enjoy the PvE, because I do, but it's something like building a house with nothing but a pipe wrench.

At any rate, I've been able to gather a good bit of spell components, which I then burn slowly raising my spell levels. The most recent patch made it so that you can't gain skill while wielding the newbie staff. The main advantage of using the newbie staff is that it can't be broken. So it's a minor inconvenience, but now I have to stock up on real staffs to use while skilling up, ones that break occasionally. Fortunately my friends the trolls also drop a good many staffs, so I'm not hurting for any.

On the PvP front, I'm still aggressive only in the noblest of ways: a true sign of the carebear :P For instance, two new, no-clan players starting attacking a third at a zombie camp the other day. He wisely ran off, but I attacked and killed them both (with some help from the zombies, of course). This is less a testament to my uber skill than to their lack of same. Still, it was satisfying, and the would-be victim and I teamed up and chatted for several hours. So don't let anyone tell you that Darkfall is all survival of the fittest.

I also ran across a pair of Alfar hunting players around the same area. I was able to creep along behind them without drawing their attention, shadowing them as they moved in to kill some humans and elves. I arrived to find one at low health standing over the grave of a victim, but I didn't see the other. Still, having little on me, I figured I'd give it a go, though I'd never survive two players who know what they're doing. I was able to sneak up behind and kill the one character after a brief chase in which the skeletons of the area were helpful. I saw his friend briefly, but he slunk away. I figured my time was short until he made a counter-attack, but the same skeletons who were so helpful earlier were now in my way getting to his loot. I was able to grab some of it, but was fighting off skeletons when the two came back. I can't imagine where they were bound that the one I killed could make it back so quickly. The nearest chaos stone is a good hike up the river, and as far as I can tell they were never mounted. But anyway, as I predicted, two-on-one was my downfall and I lost what I'd looted from him, but nothing really of my own except some resin I had on me and some random pieces of armor I was wearing that I'd got off some goblins.

But each time I engage in PvP I'm learning a little more. I'm using mainly Mana Missile still, a weak weapon if ever there were one, but ranking it up has helped expand the area of effect and damage from it. Still, it's nothing compared to an archer with a bow, so accurate and fast. I'm hoping the attack spells in the elemental schools, should I ever get to them, will finally put me on a par with them.

Stats: Week4

I didn't get to play much this week and missed Friday night entirely due to a bad connection. Here's where I'm at for this week.

• Strength: 25.9
• Vitality: 24.7
• Dexterity: 20.3
• Quickness: 28.5
• Intelligence: 24.8
• Wisdom: 28.6

Notable Skills:

• Greater Magic: 17.6
• Lesser Magic: 63.0
• Durable Spells LM: 37.6
• Mana Efficiency LM: 29.2
• Rend: 25.6
• Mana Missile: 56.1
• Heal Self: 43.8
• Armored Casting: 17.5
• Logging: 78.1
• Mining: 47.6
• Sprint: 56.3
• Rest: 52.5
• Run: 47.3
• Rigor: 21.8
• Clubs and Maces: 19.1
• Armor Proficiency: 41.4

Darkfall Day 21 & 22

I haven't played much DF this week. My weeknight gaming is fairly limited anyway and I've had other things to do. I picked up where I had left off in my journey from elven to human lands and did some mining along the way. I did skirt around some player towns and saw a few people around, but being mounted it wasn't much of an issue. I did have one player shoot some Mana Missiles my way, but since he was on foot I wasn't too worried about it.

Arriving in human lands with a load of ore, but bound to the elven city of Iriendir still, I decided to put the ore up for sale in either human or elven lands. Usually when you're looking to buy or sell items in-game the practicalities of travel limit you to one area. You will occasionally see players advertising their items offering to travel anywhere for bulk sales. So I made an arrangement to sell my ore...back in eleven lands. I had originally travelled to human lands to do some PvE in some locations I knew about, but the more I thought about my experiences in both human and elven lands and compared the two, I decided I'd probably rather be in elf lands anyway. So when the sale was made for Mir Bellith, I was happy to recall back to my bindstone and walk over to make a nice bit of gold. I donated the proceeds from that sale, as well as a bit more, to my clan for the eventual acquiring of a city. My play style doesn't make me the best of clan members, I imagine, but I do try to contribute to the cause when I can.

Otherwise, I did a little PvE with zombies near the elven cities to gather ash for my spells. There I was able to coexist peacefully with some other players who were there for similar reasons. I don't know if it's because of where I am in my progression or something about the people drawn to the elven lands, but I've found them a lot less cut-throat than in the human starter areas.

I was killed once by a couple of mounted orks, and that experience got me thinking again about predation. I can't quite bring it all together in my head, but there's some analogy to be made there with natural selection and migration patterns and predation. Maybe more than an analogy; perhaps even a parallel dynamic in the virtual world of what happens in the real world. Although the incidence of predation is significant, and it occurs most frequently at known places, it still behooves players to frequent those places if they're gathering more resources than they're losing.

Since death isn't permanent for characters in Darkfall, what's really at stake in any death is time. Time is converted into certain resources -- such as reagents, gold, armor, weapons, ore, timber -- that can be taken away in the event of a death. When the character loses those resources, what's really being lost is the time the player invested in gathering those resources. It also takes time to replace them. Some items may also be very rare, in which case the amount of time it would take to replace them can vary widely depending on luck. Players who bank frequently when gathering resources (such as by farming monsters) are banking their time, past and future. They can then exchange those resources for those gathered by other players in order to maximize their time.

With a PK attack, the player can feel frustration, anger, and shame, but what they're really losing is time. If they're converting their time into banked resources at a higher rate than they're losing them to PKs, then it makes sense to continue to frequent the very same places the PK are known to hunt. There's probably even a mathematical formula you could apply to the situation drawn from real-life studies of animal predation. For instance, if a herd of prey animals is migrating and stops at a certain watering hole, that's a place that can also be used by predator species to find their prey. So the behavior of the prey animals who habitually return to that watering hole would have to result from some quantifiable relationship between the benefits they get from using it and the costs of losing one of their members to a lion attack, for instance. There doesn't even need to be a conscious calculation, just a working out of the numbers naturally. In the case of farming monsters at known camps, there's simply a greater chance of losing some portion of your time and resources to PKs. You have to take that into account.

On the behavior of the predators, there also has to be some give-and-take. If they hit the same spot over and over repetitively, they may very well push the situation to a breaking point at which the prey (players) no longer go there at all. That could mean, as one example, that the predators have to spend more time looking for their prey and less time actually harvesting them. So whether they do so consciously or not, those PKs who run a circuit of camps or alternate their activities may be more successful than those who return to the same place consistently.

On the prey side, that's another factor that can be taken into account. If a camp's been recently hit, what are the chances that the same PKs will visit it again soon? That doesn't rule out other predators coming by, but my own experience at monster spawns is that actual PK visits are often spaced out enough to allow the prey characters enough time in between to keep the site a profitable one in respect to the gains v/s loses.

That reminds me of the situation where a police officer has a motorist pulled over on the side of the road. If the goal of the other drivers is to go as fast as they can without getting pulled over, to me it doesn't make sense to slow down drastically at the sight of a cop giving another guy a ticket. Sure, if you're going excessively fast you want to slow down so as not to get his attention. But otherwise, his attention is on the driver he's dealing with at the moment, so why slow down from 65 to 55? Of course, there could be another police cruiser just over the hill, or I've even seen one cop with another cop "pulled over." But most of the time that's the only cop for miles and he's effectively out of action for a period of time. So although psychologically you've just seen a cop and are tempted to slow down, the odds of seeing another any time soon are low: time to speed up :)

To bring that back to PK activity, there's a calculation that needs to be made, perhaps as just a rough estimation, of whether that spot is a good one to return to. In many cases, it can be. Having just been hit, the players trying to farm the camp for resources may find they're looking at a PK-less period in which they could collect back or even exceed whatever resources they lost. On the other hand, if the PKs are persistent, it could make more sense to go elsewhere or switch to another activity.

This all assumes, of course, that the would-be "prey" characters have little chance of fighting back. This is often the case because PKs tend to hunt weaker characters and, further, time their attacks when their target's health, stamina, and mana may be low. They also prefer odds no worse than 1-on-1 and often climb to 4-on-1, with similar disparities in gear and experience between them. PKs are not brave or resourceful people; they're pragmatists and opportunists. That's not necessarily a slam against them, but more a description of the ecological niche they fill. And of course it's not equating PvPers with PKs, though there is often overlap among them.

Anyway, these are the kinds of things I think about while fighting those nasty trolls, zombies, and such.

Alliance Leaders Speak

Another great article from Paragus at MMORPG.com. This time he "interviews" leaders of the top Darkfall alliances.

Close Range

I think Darkfall has been beaten for title of most hardcore game. There's even a playable demo.


Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

Darkfall Day 17-20

At this point in my little Darkfall life, certain things have become common enough to seem unremarkable: a bit of gathering timber and ore; selling these to get money; spending said money on armor and other equipment; losing aforementioned armor and equipment to a PK (Player Killer); chasing away other would-be PKs from newbie areas. These things in themselves make up a lot of the fabric of my gameplay and have thus become unremarkable. And so, though I therefore won't remark on them often here and in the future, you can be sure they form the background noise on which these more interesting experiences take place.

It also becomes, over a weekend, hard to keep track of what happened when, so I'll just relate a few interesting bits, not necessarily in order.

One afternoon in the elven city of Iriendir I had been fighting trolls for quite awhile and decided to do some mining for ore. There's a cluster of four or five nodes all together at the foot of a log bridge right on the edge of town and in my comings and goings I'd noticed no one had been there in awhile, so the nodes were probably ripe for the harvesting. So I got my pickaxe and went to work. Before very long, however, several armored people showed up and one began to attack me; not the token swing to provoke me to attack, but a good four of five whacks. I ran into the relative safety of the area guarded by the towers and banked my stuff.

It appeared on returning that a group of about five members of one clan had decided to "own" the metal nodes. They even had one member perched atop the bridge with a bow to keep other people away. This was all apparently right outside the radius of the town's guard towers because these were humans and dwarves and elves attacking people with impunity.

For the first time in my MMORPG-playing life, I decided I would grief them. What they were doing was within the rules, but what I decided to do was as well. I decided I'd just attack them over and over again until one of us got sick of it. So I banked everything but my permanent newbie weapons and went on the attack. I ran in and blasted the one who'd attacked me with no regard for my own survival; after all, I was close to my bindstone and would lose nothing, unless I happened to kill one, in which case I'd take the hit to alignment happily. I certainly caused confusion and of course died fairly quickly. When I returned a short while later, some other fighting had apparently gone on because several of them were in poor health. I attacked again, running after one of them who, near death, ran into the protection of the towers. Heedless of the towers, I continued to fire on her until I was dead (and she, unfortunatley, was not).

On my third foray out, I decided to cross the river and shoot at them from across its expanse to at least get in some more shots with my Mana Missile. However, on returning I found the whole crew gone. I'm guessing that another clan who makes Iriendir they're semi-permanent base of operations finally drove them off, but I can only guess. At any rate, they were gone and I got back to mining. The disruptions to their plans meant that they didn't actually get much mining done, it appeared, because I was able to drain most of them of resources. I certainly don't mind sharing nodes with others, but trying to dominate them in that way was arrogant and unnecessary. Fortunately, the game gives the players the ability to correct such situations themselves.

On another occasion near the same town I was attacked by two orks using mostly Mana Missiles. I wasn't able to flee very far before dying, but came back with the intention of seeing where they went. As luck would have it, I found them not far away battling another human player, so I joined her. They weren't very well coordinated and kept switching targets. If they'd concentrated their attacks they might have fared better. But as is often the case in Darkfall, those who approach a 2-on-1 or even 4-on-1 situation with confidence are at a lost when the odds are evened up. We killed and looted them both and I got back what I'd lost to them earlier, more or less.

Of course, I also got killed a couple of times by PKs, so it wasn't all win all the time. But in between these disruptive events, I got a lot of PvE fighting done at the troll camp and managed to collect enough bone to use as a spell component to work my Greater Magic up to 18. The next plateau for it is 25, at which time I'll get some new spells.

Two odd occurences also happened. One was the single Alfar who probably could have easily killed me since I was fighting trolls naked and was at low health. But fortunately she was part of my clan's alliance and I even had the chance to help her a bit later. Then there's the Alfar who killed me and revived me afterwards, leaving with a salute. 'Tis a strange world, this Agon.

I also revived other friendly players when they died to the trolls and had them do the same for me. For once there was some comradarie among the anonymous players hard at work slaughtering trolls. Which goes to show that Darkfall can be a civil place and not always the shark tank it often is.

Toward the end of my weekend I decided to ride towards the human lands to visit there again. As I've found before, the cross-country treks can be quiet and interesting, with the occasional fleeting sighting of another player in the distance. I had to log out halfway there, so I'm anxious to see if I can finish the journey successfully.

Stats: Week 3

I'm closing in on 75 Logging, at which time I'll need to decide whether to go for Logging Mastery. At 100 it takes 2 seconds off the 10 second logging attempt, which doesn't sound like much, but is 20% shorter every time. But the skill costs 500gp and it would probably take a long time to get to 100, so the benefits would be much smaller for the near term. Something to think about anyway.

• Strength: 24.6
• Vitality: 23.6
• Dexterity: 20.2
• Quickness: 27.2
• Intelligence: 23.4
• Wisdom: 27.6

Notable Skills:

• Greater Magic: 3.2
• Rend: 6.1
• Lesser Magic: 55.2
• Durable Spells LM: 32.2
• Mana Efficiency LM: 18.7
• Mana Missile: 49.4
• Heal Self: 37.2
• Logging: 71.7
• Herb Gathering: 46.2
• Mining: 37.9
• Armored Casting: 14.2
• Armor Proficiency: 37.5
• Clubs and Maces: 15.5
• Sprint: 51.0
• Running: 44.0
• Riding: 38.5
• Rest: 48.9

Patch Day

Ah, another patch day is upon us. And what is this I see? Magic lovin'!

Sounds like mana and stamina regen a lot faster, and Rest makes it a lot faster still. Also, they lowered some mana and stamina costs for spells. Some tweaks to higher spell schools as well, but since I've not used them yet anyway, nothing too exciting for me there.

Maybe this grindy route to greatness won't be impossible after all. :)

Darkfall Day 15 & 16

Tuesday I did a little gathering. Not much magic practice this week as I need to farm up or buy some bone so I can get to work on Greater Magic. I did get the chance to spar with a new player and work up my melee skills a bit, but I really have to make that a priority this weekend. I'm not enamored of the melee in this game, but I'll need it to survive.

Last night I was planning to do some PvE for a change when the call came that our clan and its alliance were involved in a siege on another city. Our task was to defend the attacking city throughout its window of vulnerability. This is a feature of the siege system that makes the attacker's city itself vulnerable before and during the siege on the target city. It was important to ensure that the battle didn't end before it could begin.

Riding in a war party can be one of the most fun things I've experienced in Darkfall. All around you are warriors in armor, bristling with weapons, helmets topped with Romanesque plumes. The thundering of hoofbeats drowns out every other sound; I'd hate to be a lone crafter in the forest and hear that sound coming over the hill! On a long journey, though, the excitement of the war party can dull to that of a tedious expedition, especially when the romance of the thing is interupted by people losing their connections, lagging up at server boundaries, etc. I even had the peculiar experience of seeing a comrade's mount countinue on up a hill while he sat suspended in the air!

Meeting up with others of our clan, our war band eventually numbered somewhere around 20. We got to the attacker's city in plenty of time to set ourselves up on top of a building to act as snipers guarding the clanstone. Unfortunatley, there were some enemies who were bound to the city's clanstone (not sure what the story is there) who made a nuisance of themselves for the hours preceeding the attack and during it as well. I say unfortunately, but at least it gave people something to do.

I think I've compared warfare in Darkfall to the real thing before, only in the sense that everything is "hurry up and wait." There is a lot of tedium, especially on defense it seems. In this case, it took quite awhile for anyone to show up and try to attack the city we were defending and even then they didn't advance far enough into the city to make it to our position. Most of our guys ended up back on the ground to meet the attackers at the city gates where the latter were stymied most of the attack. Me being fairly useless in melee, I stayed with the rest on the building to watch the clanstone and occassionaly fire a Mana Missile down on the harrassers. A few attackers did make it through to the clanstone and proceeded to hit it with siege hammers, but the combination of arrows and Mana Missiles raining down on them ended that pretty quickly. I feel a little bad for the city defeders who were on foot and attempting to engage the hammer-wielders because they must have gotten caught in some furious crossfire.

The most interesting part was when some of the attackers managed to get on top of a tower and send a salvo of Mana Missiles at us. I used the Magic Shield spell to some effect, and the cover around, while returning fire. Pretty quickly some defenders made their way up the tower and ended the brief magical battle. The experience does confirm for me, though, that at this stage of the game magic is most effective as an artillery of sorts, best practiced from some height and distance.

Speaking of artillery, this was an alfar-style city and the cannons were pretty cool to see in action :) I've been on the receiving end of cannon fire and I know it can be intimidating. When the shots land, they really shake the screen and make a lot of noise. Plus they seem to have a decent sized area-of-effect. Glad I was inside the city this time.

The pre-emptive attack never got anywhere and after the target city became vulnerable it was essentially done. I ended up joining my clanmates on the ground, prowling around outside the walls. We killed a few stragglers and I picked up a little more positive alignment. But two of us also ended up chasing a lone enemy into a counter-attack and got killed. So what was almost a death-free PvP experience for me ended with a death after all. Lost some scraps of armor and a handful of reagents I'd not had to use. I ended up back at the elven city where I'm currently bound, so that was it for me.

Overall an interesting night with not a lot of action, but the attack was succesful, I hear, so our allies picked up a new city! Which, I expect, will be lost and won again many times over.

Darkfall Day 11-14

Several days to catch up on here with some interesting action having taken place.

On Saturday I made two trips from Ymir's Tear, the dwarf capital, to one of the elven starter cities. The first trip was to buy some armor and try out a different area. But I neglected to bind there, so when I died fighting trolls, I ended back up in Ymir's Tear. I decided to make the trip again since it wasn't too bad the first time and I had wanted to explore more down there.

I rode my horse in an almost direct line southwest across the mountainous lands of the dwarves, through the browning and parched forests of the Mahirim, down into the lush water-coursed woodlands of the elves. I had been told that the interior of Agon was a more dangerous place, but the world is so vast and empty at this point that I hardly saw anything threatening, and those I did see were easily outrun. It certainly makes for a quicker trip than skirting the coasts as I tried to do when travelling from the human lands to our alliance city.

On my second trip, I decided to try some mining along the way. I'd seen lots of metal nodes in quiet, out-of-the-way places on the first trip. Ore sells for a good amount more than timber, is always in demand, and the mining of it also provides me sulphur for my spells.

I decided to try something that might have proven stupid, but in fact worked out perfectly. Instead of despawning my mount, I kept it standing right next me in case I needed to make a quick getaway. This could have been bad if a) my client crashed and I lost the mount or b) someone snuck up on me and stole it or killed it. As it was, I picked spots that were either well concealed or conversely in wide open areas where I could see anyone coming.

As it happened, I was stumbled upon by other players twice. Mining makes a distinctive stacatto sound that can be heard from a good ways off. It can be hard to use only sound to pinpoint the miner, but it'll get you in their general area. The first time I heard hoofbeats coming from over a ridge. Possibly they weren't headed towards me, but I decided not to risk it. I hopped on my horse and sped away. The second time, much further away, I also heard the hoofbeats first and looked up to see a rider headed towards me, Mahirim I believe, but a good ways away. I quickly mounted back up and sped away and there was no use in his chasing me firther, so he peeled away in another direction.

I was sure to take my time and look around a lot while I mined, in case anyone did try to sneak up on me, but I was lucky in that regard. So my test-run on mining worked out fairly well and at the end of my trip I was able to make about 300 gold from the ore I'd collected.

The second notable event of the weekend was accompanying my clan on PvP raids. I'm not sure why we were attacking the particular hamlets and cities we did, but I take it we were harassing some foes. I'm not sure you really need a reason, but when you get to the level of clan warfare, usually there's some political considerations involved.

This was my first experience of large scale skirmishing outside of the city siege I participated in. The general tactics seemed to be to ride en masse towards the target habitation, dismount close by, and run in and kill anything that moved. When the atackees managed to organize a concerted defense, we'd mount up again and ride a ways off while they chased us. This would most often result in the defenders becoming strung out and unorganzied, so we'd dismount and counterattack again. This went back and forth for awhile. Eventually I got killed and had to run back, which wasn't a lot of fun, but my clanmates had saved some of my gear.

We also attacked a city. I won't talk too much about the tactics there, but suffice it to say some thought went into planning both a suprise attack and an escape route. In this battle, I actually had the chance to use my magic some. There were defenders up on the walls shooting down into the city where we were slaughtering their comrades. I was able to send Mana Missiles up at them to keep them harried and forcing them to focus on me for a bit. This was another case where the splash damage from the spell worked in my favor, because although they were dodging, I could hit them with some of the area of effect damage. I also got to kill a couple of guys who were fleeing and picked up some alignment points for that, the first I've earned in the game. I even finished one guy off with the gank skill.

Another satisfying part of this battle for me was after we retreated a bit and regrouped. I was able to use the Lay on Hands spell to help some of my clanmates and our allies regain health faster. I'm finding that magic is fairly useless when the melee is hot and heavy, as you're just as likely to hit your own folks, but this support and artillery role can be effective.

But of course I got killed again, so that was it for me for awhile. Overall, I had fun, but just like the real army, there was a lot of "hurry up and wait" among the action. I don't feel like I contributed a lot, but through experience and increasing my magic skills, maybe I'll get the hang of it.

Darkfall Needs Slavery

I've just made a new post on Darkfall's Suggestions forum for a new feature I think is necessary for the game. Check it out.

PvP and Skill-based Systems Don't Mix

I've long been a fan of RPGs that use skills instead of classes. For one thing, they usually offer more ways to develop a character. Want to be a wizard who uses a sword? Go for it! I also like the idea that you progress in the skills you use and that quests can be more about completing the objective than sopping up every stray experience point. The Elder Scrolls games are a good example, though they do incorporate some level-based mechanics. Ultima Online as it originally debuted was also purely skill-based. Since they're taking so much inspiration from UO, it's no surprise that Darkfall is also a skill-based system.

I'm starting to think, however, that skill-based systems and PvP are a bad mix. Maybe Darkfall just does it poorly, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be working out well. Part of the problem could also be that players have seen and experienced a lot of MMOs since the advent of UO and our expectations are different now. Here's a few of the problems with skills and PvP as I see it.

The Grind:
In a skill-based RPG that's focused on PvE, like Oblivion, you progress in your skills as you use them against computer-controlled foes. There's little incentive to sit in a town and use the same skill repetitively just to increase it when you could be out raising your skills while having fun. In fact, in Oblivion the monsters level up as you do to provide a suitable challenge, so there's sort of a disincentive to grind skills.

By contrast, because Darkfall is focused so heavily on PvP, there's a great incentive to "grind" skills to a higher level so that you can be competitive with the other players who might want to kill you or who you might want to kill. Magic is particularly bad in this regard as in its earliest stages it's simply not competitive with a guy in armor wielding a polearm. But grinding, to put it mildly, isn't fun. It's makework, a time-sink. It sucks. You could go out to a camp of monsters and PvE to raise those skills, but you're at far greater risk of getting killed by other players who come looking for inexperienced characters to kill. You can also "spar" with clanmates, which can be more fun and provides an incentive to join with other people. This works well for melee skills.

The need to grind out skills is why we see ridiculous things like people running in place against a wall in town for hours, or swimming against a wall, or splashing around in acid pools to raise their resistance, or (as I have done) casting Mana Missile over and over again at trees.

Character Diversity:
One of the fun things about PvP is seeing the different tactics people use, even if you're on the losing end of those tactics. That's assuming, of course, that the tactics are a clever use of positioning, character skill, and player skill and not just some abuse of game mechanics. In early UO, though, the PvPer's PvPer was the tank mage, a guy in full armor who also used magic. There was also the naked-with-a-halberd guy. But for all the freedom of the skill-based system, there were a lot of folks who were practically identical. They had to be to be competitive.

Maybe it's just the infant state of Darkfall, but I'm seeing the same thing. If you want to do PvP and do it right, you need to be in full armor and wielding either a polearm or a two-handed sword. You also have to use bows, both for closing action and for giving chase. Unless you've progressed to the elemental schools, magic is probably out of the question. Oh, Heal Self and Mana Missile can come in handy, as will Mana to Stamina. I'll do another post on the problems with magic in Darkfall. The point here is that, for all the skills made available, there's really only one or two "builds" that work.

I dearly hope this changes over time. Darkfall is already geared towards the "nasty, brutish, and short" mindset. If the only thing that's viable is butchers in full plate, it's going to be a tedious game.

Endgame:
I don't know about the MUDs that preceded it, but in UO I don't remember there being a concept of the "endgame." This is the idea, particularly prevalent in World of Warcraft, that the real action happens after your character's level and/or skills are maxed out. Everything leading up to that is a series of hoops you jump through to get to the endgame. To me, this seems to be a perversion of the idea of fun. I'm glad there's more content and higher level action to look forward to, but if I'm racing through a game to get to that content, then I'm spending an awful lot of time going through the paces before I get there. I kind of have this idea that a game should be fun from day one and that it ought to offer fun all along the way.

In a PvP game like Darkfall, the endgame is really the ability to be maximally effective in player v/s player conflicts. For some it includes large-scale clan warfare, city building, and conquest. For others it's just being able to wtfpwn anyone they come across. Either way, it means that developing your skills, rather than being the game, is all the shit you have to do before you can play the game. Shadowbane, although a class-based game, had a similar mindset; if you hadn't reached the maximum level, you couldn't really be competitive with those who had. Ergo, get there as fast as possible.


In addition to these issues, Darkfall also has the problem that they've implemented their skill system in an inconsistent and unsatisfying way. For most of the skills, it's hard to see the benefits that higher levels accrue to the basic functioning of the skill. For many of the skills, you only see significant improvements at the 25, 50, and 75 skill point levels, and the main benefit of attaining higher skill levels is that they allow you to purchase different, augmentative skills. This is really a level-based system in drag, without the classes, cross-bred with the worst aspects of a skill-based system. I get the feeling that Darkfall's developers were more enamoured of the idea of a skill-based system than the reality of it. The result, at this point, appears to be an unholy mess.

Darkfall also violates one of the most fundamental ideas in good RPG design: give the players interesting choices to make that have consequences. We often see this is single-player games as it applies to quest branching and the choices you need to make at each level. But I think the principle should hold true for MMORPGs as well or they're not really RPGs at all. As it stands, Darkfall has no caps on skill or stat points, so every character can learn every skill and max out every stat. I presume this is slated to be changed, but that's where we are right now. Further, they've removed the restrictions that prevented someone skilled in Air magic, for instance, from learning Earth magic (and the same for Fire and Water) so that those choices no longer have any meaning either. It's great that Darkfall is a "sandbox" and you can choose anything you want, but being able to choose everything simultaneously makes those choices meaningless.

As a fan of skill-based RPGs, I hate to say it, but I'm starting to think they don't make good PvP MMOs.

Stats: Week 2

This week I switched from swords to maces, but I haven't had much time to train it. Gathering skills are bringing in the spell components I need to raise my Lesser Magic (primarily resin and sulphur) and some money.

• Strength: 22.7
• Vitality: 22.1
• Dexterity: 20.0
• Quickness: 23.5
• Intelligence: 22.1
• Wisdom: 23.8

Notable Skills:

• Lesser Magic: 44.6
• Mana Missile: 40.8
• Heal Self: 27.9
• Durable Spells LM: 24.4
• Armored Casting: 10.2
• Logging: 57.0
• Mining: 32.2
• Armor Proficiency: 30.3
• Clubs & Maces: 7.5
• Sprint: 39.4
• Run: 35.2
• Rest: 35.0
• Swimming: 32.1

Patch Day

Ah, I remember when the mere phrase "Patch Day" would bring shudders of fear to UO players everywhere. Alas for my misspent youth.

And today, a patch to Darkfall, including...

About siege mechanics: A few days ago a siege ended without the expected result. We investigated why this happened and discovered a combination of unrelated errors were responsible. Everything associated with this has been corrected so it won't happen again. We want to thank everyone for their feedback on this incident.

Too late for Orks R Us, I suppose, but we're early yet in the life of this monster, so it's good to see the siege mechanics being fixed. I'm sure many more gremlins still lurk in there to bite us.

Other changes seemed to involve mainly graphics issues, which will no doubt piss of the forum-dwellers; it's not like the graphics are the worst of the issues they face, but then I suppose Aventurine's artists have to have something to contribute. Tweaks to Arcane Magic and Necromancy could be more interesting. I wonder if anyone has reached these highest level spell schools yet? There were probably Known Issues with these schools that Aventurine held off fixing until players advanced that far. If no one has reached them yet, I would imagine they will soon.

Darkfall Day 9 & 10

Day 9 was more gathering and spell practice at our clan alliance city.

On Day 10 that city was lost.

One of the things that drew me to Darkfall, despite not caring much for wide-open, free-for-all, full-loot PvP, is the potential for political intrigue and siege warfare. Amusingly, a certain section of the playerbase thinks the game should be about solo PKs killing solo newbies and taking their shit. Fortunately for me, there's a great number who are already engaged in building cities, alliances, and the engines of war. Never mind that our clan and its alliance were just on the losing end of the the latter.

A large alliance helped one of the allied clans attack and capture our allies' city from its stalwart defenders. When I got the news that the attack would be taking place in a few short hours, I made sure to hurry home after work to participate. The outcome was, to my mind, vitually pre-ordanined; I didn't expect us to hold the city, really, not in the face of overwhelming odds. Ironically, by careful study of the rules of war laid out by the game's developer, our undermanned alliance did actually win the contest by capturing the attackers' home village while they were just starting their attack on us. Perhaps that reads a little convoluted, and in fact the rules are full of various suppositions and mitigating clauses. Short version: attack another city but lose your own first and you've lost. Defenders win.

So if we won, how did we lose? Because of a little ruse de guerre called a "fucking bug." Ah, I'll let wiser men debate the finer points. Simply put, the pertinent rules didn't work. And so, fat saved from fire, it was promptly dropped back into the coals.

This is not to say that the attacker's wouldn't have won otherwise. The taking of their home village was a desperate gambit, one that, miraculousy, should have paid off. But kudos to them anyway for amassing a larger and better prepared force.

The siege, or raid, was both awesome and suckified. Seeing the defenders arrayed along the battlements in their armor was very cool. Raining arrows and spells down on the attackers as they finally arrived across the narrow isthmus connecting the city to the land was thrilling. Being in and amongst the chaos of the fray was fun. What sucked: frame rates that made it seem like we were playing a slideshow instead of a game and that also made it nearly impossible to aim at anything; client crashes when respawning after deaths (25% of the time for me); the inability to tell friend from foe unless you happened to know all of the names of the two-dozen-or-so clans involved in the melee; and the lack of a freaking door on the city, making all the walls and fortifications moot.

In its suckitude, the siege reminded me much of those in Shadowbane, which were always insane lagfests once you got above 40 characters on the screen. Last night we had probably a couple hundred, maybe more. I turned down all of my video and audio settings, but it didn't help.

As for me, I died 8 times. I didn't have much equipment to start with, so after the first death it was mainly a matter of running around and trying to attack the enemy with Mana Missile and my newbie staff, although I did try to melee a bit. Having nor armor, though, I tried to keep my distance. I'd look for players sitting down trying to recover their health and stamina, or those relatively low on health. I'd peridodically find a quiet corener outside the walls and rest myself. And at some point, when an alliance commander suggested it, I used my brief time of post-respawn invulnerability to block those smashing our clanstone with siege hammers, to not much effect.

All in all I'm glad I participated. It was about what I expected, which is to say a fun-filled lagfest, even if I did die a lot. Aventurine is going to have to get the siege system worked out if they expect the game to survive for long. It's not much fun to fight by strobe light, and it's no fun at all to play by the rules and get shafted anyway.

As a further irony, this is the city I spent all day getting to on Sunday through many perilous adventures. Now I'm based in the dwarves' capital city. Nice knowing ya, dear city, I guess.

Darkfall Day 8 - Part II

Making your way into the interior of Yssam is what I imagine stepping into the Yucatan is like. But with Raptors. There are fascinating ruins that look like something from Central America but haunted by the shades of fallen elves...and other things. The mountains all around are green and jagged. The valleys are filled with large strange flowering plants that look like they might eat you.

We found out about the Raptors close-up as a couple came to gnaw on us. And we stumbled across a goblin village near a desolate clanstone whose warriors were tough and agile. Fortunately we didn't have too much trouble evading them once it became obvious our Mana Missiles weren't going to do the trick.

As we made our way along the southern coast, we began to hear the sounds of logging, so we switched to crouch-walking through the high grasses and slipping behind trees. At one point Valucis scouted ahead and came sneaking back when he realized there was someone directly on the other side of the tree he was leaning against casting spells and buffing up! Could be they were macroing, and at any rate I suspect now they might have been part of our alliance, but we had no way to know at the time. With one of us naked but for newbie weapons and the other not a lot better off, we decided to practice discretion.

Night fell and we crept along in a purple darkness, sure that some wandering clan would come upon us and send us back to the clanstone. At one point we stopped, Valucis behind a large rock, me behind a tree, and the sounds of someone walking through the forest seemed awfully near. Just as we were ready to move along, Val lost his connection again and had to reboot his computer. Sucked for him, I'm sure, but being the guy sitting there behind a tree waiting for him to come back was no picknick either ;) When he got back, we decided to sprint along and put some distance between us and the sounds of active habitation.

As the sun rose, we finally made our way back to the coast and prepared to head south. I'm not sure if it was then or after we had swam a ways from island to island that we came upon a clanstone near a beach. I do remember that we were glad to be able to bind again further along into our journey so that if we died we at least wouldn't have to make such a long trek back.

It was then that we stumbled on the Mahirim. He was red and naked and at low health, having respawned, I suppose, at the very clanstone we were travelling to. Without a word spoken we both attacked, sending a fierce volley of Mana Missiles at him. For such a big dog he was very quick. He dodged our slow spells fairly easily, and ducked behind a large tree. We ran around it from different sides, but it seemed he'd given us the slip, and quickly, too. All around the little cove we looked, to no avail. But as I was walking back to the clanstone, there he was, hidden behind a tree. A master move, really. He'd given us the slip and set us up for an ambush while gathering his health back. Out came the newbie pole arm, slashing at us mericlessly. We dodged in an out and tried to flank him but were getting hit an awful lot and not doing enough damage back to panick him. I was getting to the worse of it and dove under the water to escpae for a moment. It sounded like he might be behind me, but then I saw Valucis's health meter dropping. I came up for a quick breath and dived again to come around curve or rocks and try to get some health and mana back.

Unfortunately Val went down. I felt bad about saving my own skin, but he rightfully pointed out that I was the one that still had something to lose, including my mount. Still, I would like to be able to say we hung tight and focused our attacks, but it didn't happen. With more practice maybe we'll be formidable. At this point, we got whacked by a naked Mahirim.

Val had bound to the clanstone there, so he respawned in short order, only to be chased again. I tried to get on land and mount to use my horse as a weapon, but they were taking the chase southwards across the water, hopping from small island to outcropping. So I swam in that general direction and tried to coordinate with my clanmate to gather back together. I believe he had a second death then, but swimming and diving, we were finally able to reconnect.

The last part of our journey brought us, drenched in seawater and blood, to the northern peninsula that was our destination. We ended up approaching the city from the south across a narrow bridge beneath imposing walls with ivory spikes and dark towers. The place felt immense and not a little confusing. As we approached the city's clanstone, Valucis kissed it, and I can't say I blame him one bit.

An epic journey, my friend.

Darkfall Day 8 - Part I

On Sunday, a clanmate and I decided to make the trek from the Human starter area to the city in which our clan is based. Valucis is also a Human and we have a similar focus on magic (woe to us). He had tried unsuccessfully to get to the city once before, so we hoped that having two of us would improve our chances.

The problem is that the city is past Ork lands. The various races are arranged along the outer rim of Agon's central continent in such a way that every race has an enemy to either side. Go southwest from the human lands and you end up among the Alfar. Go north and you soon arrive among the Orks. This is a problem because we'd not only have to navigate past potentially hostile Humans (and, to a lesser extent, Dwarves and Elves) in our own lands and the open lands in between, but the last stage of our journey would be through a big area teeming with Orks for whom we'd be open season.

Our initial plan was to head east and travel along the coast, making our way north, then to take to the ocean and swim around the worst part of the Ork lands. We had mounts, so we proceeded fairly well, making good time and avoiding conflict. The coastal lands were fairly empty of players; we probably saw more monsters than people as we made our way north. We saw what we thought might be player hamlets, only to discover goblins of a tougher variety that we were used to. We discovered a toolchest sitting in a little shrine-like structure near the water's edge that we were able to loot for tools and crafting materials. Apparently these are similar to resource nodes in that they respawn over time? At any rate, we got to see some interesting terrain and watch the sun coming up and down over the ocean as we travelled.

At some point we took a short break to take care of real life stuff. We sat down on a high mountain, mostly concealed from anyone passing below, as I went AFK and left Valucis to twittle his thumbs. About the time I got back he experienced a lock-up of his computer and had to reboot. When he came back he said he'd seen Orks passing by below while I was gone. Seems we'd caught a lucky break there.

Heading into the sea now to swim around the Ork lands as much as possible, we came upon a couple of islands just off the coast that had structures on top of them. Some Alfar were swimming back and forth between the islands and we could see their heads bobbing in the water. Presumably they could see us as well. We decided to dive down under the water, but you can't hold your breath very long in Darkfall, so we had to come up for air quite a bit. At this point I guess we took diverging paths around the southernmost island. My thought was to go south around it and avoid the swimming Alfar altogether. If I had enough breath I might have tried to swim under them, but I knew I wouldn't be able to. Where Valucis got off to, I'm not sure, but soon he was in battle with the Alfar. He was killed, losing his mount and everything else he had on him. It was a bad setback.

Fortunately we had taken every opportunity to rebind to clanstones along our route north. These are scattered around the lands and provide a place to bind away from the starting villages. When you die you reappear at these stones naked with just your starting weapons. At that point we had to decide what to do. I recalled to the bindstone using the hideously-long-casting binstone_recall command. Seriously, it takes probably three mintues or so to cast, all the while bobbing in the water with murderous (is there any other kind?) Alfar nearby. Anyway, I showed back up at the clanstone where Valucis was waiting and we reformulated our plan.

To the northeast of the main continent is a large island/small continent called Yssam. We decided to swim up to it, travel along its southern coast, and come down to our city from the north, bypassing the hairy northeast of the main continent. It was a long swim, as it turned out, but fortunately we didn't encounter any sharks (as I understand can happen in deep waters). We made our way up Yssam's southeastern peninsula along the top of a high ridge looking down on verdant jungles. I expected to see some real "Land of the Lost"-type shit any minute and we wondered if you jumped from the highest peak into the ocean if you'd survive the fall or plunge so deep you'd run out of breath before you came back up.

As it turned out, it was neither lizardmen nor dinosaurs we encountered but some sort of earth elemental kind of thing, which we quickly dubbed Bigfoot. He came after us, so we did our magic thing, pelting him from all sides and maneuvering for better position. He hit pretty hard himself with some bleeding spells that did not-insubstantial damage-over-time. Unfortunatly he was a bit too tough and we scattered to get away. If I'd remembered to give Valucis (who was without gear, you'll recall) some sulphur for his Health to Mana spell, we might have beaten the thing. Not much you can do without mana and any protection to go toe-to-toe with Bigfoot, though. So after losing the big guy, we managed to head off further into the continent.

To be continued....

War in Darkfall

Another great post from Paragus, this time about battling to take over a city. Although this particular effort went FUBAR because half the attacking force got disconnected, this is exactly the kind of large-scale battle-with-consequences that mosts excites me about Darkfall.

Epeen and You

Love the way NewtonD on the official forums puts this. Quoting his post here in full for posterity, but reading the replies is enlightening as well.

Epeen runs rampant in this game and its community. I'd like to point out a few things.

It's a game. Nothing about it is hardcore. We're sitting down when we play it. The mental requirements are not on the level of chess or go. The physical requirements are to stay awake and be able to move your hands. Ping pong is more demanding.

Someone please explain to me from where in this game you're getting the kind of pride that I keep seeing in these forums.

Some of you are so "hardcore" that one would think you had chased down a cheetah barefoot before beating it to death with your phallus and eating it in one go without chewing.

Don't get me wrong; I love video games. But let's not go confusing ourselves into thinking that they are in any way representative of a real world accomplishment. Feel proud about your loot, high score, or whatever, but stop acting like you accomplished something real. It's a virtual accomplishment in a virtual world. It's a game someone made for you to pass the time. Not a road to enlightenment or personal betterment.

Even tiny and mundane real world accomplishments outweigh virtual ones. I'm more proud that I cleaned my house last week than I am that my guild took a city. That's called "keeping it in perspective."

When virtual worlds mean more to you than reality, it's time for a priority check, people.

Of course, this applies to us carebears as well. You're going to have to get over losing your virtual stuff if you're going to play Darkfall, that's for sure.

Darkfall Day 7

PvP was the theme for Friday evening. Our pacifist came out of his shell a bit and attacked an ork who was skulking around some of the human newbie hunting grounds near Heart of Eanna. In Darkfall you can attack anyone anywhere with varying degrees of consequences. Generally humans, dwarves, and elves are aligned, so there's a negative consequence to attacking them for me, a human. Orks and Mahirim are aligned, but enemies of humans, so there's no problem attacking them. Alfar are aligned with nobody and are open season. In the twisted logic of the Darkfall community, though, I'm sure it would be considered carebearish to only attack a legitimate target ;) At any rate, me and the trusty laser-cannon town towers slew her (carebear!) and found that she'd likely been looting newbies hunting goblins, so there was a bit of justice there as well.

But lest you think that I think that I'm now the PvP gawd, I did get my ass handed to me by a couple of Alfar on mounts. That running battle convinced me to spend some time reconfiguring my key bindings because while I would be sprinting and trying to switch spells I would instead be switching to different hotbars. Battle's chaotic enough without having unexpected results to your frantic key pressing. I also got ganked by a group of naked humans, which was less expected. I even got a system message after they killed me "Do you want to forgive your killer?" Hell no! I suppose that has something to do with the alignment system, maybe for cases where someone inadvertently kills you? Not in this case. Nope.

There was also a fun bit where I was trying to work on my melee skills at a goblin camp and this clan kept sweeping through. I guess they were running some sort of newbie circuit. It was good to see people firing back at them, and the persistent zap of Mana Missiles behind them seemed to hurry them along. They were definitely not as ruthless as they could have been.

My basic PvP strategy at this point, which isn't much of one, consists of Mana Missile, Heal Self, Magic Shield (if I have time) and lots of Sprint. It didn't take long to figure out that strafing while you run away is fairly useless. Better to make sharp turns to avoid incoming spells and arrows if you hear them in time to do so. Also a jump here and there can help with spells because they're often aimed low. I'm also trying to make use of the fact that you can hold down the left mouse button when casting and hold the spell indefinitely. Helps a little when people dodge expecting the spell to come whizzing at them but you're able to delay it.

To conteract the violence, I also did something I imagine few people have done in Darkfall: I stood by the clanstone in Heart of Eanna and healed people as they respawned after dying. I wanted to work on the Lay on Hands spell, or whatever it's called. You have to shoot it at them like all spells, but it does a few ticks worth of healing. No one thanked me, alas, but I enjoyed it and got to raise the spell level a bit. Pacifist FTW!

Stats: Week 1

Probably no one cares about my stats really, but part of the reason I'm doing this log is for my own amusement later. In that spirit, my stats at Week 1, which doesn't include progress from the most recent weekend:

• Strength: 21.8
• Vitality: 21.3
• Dexterity: 20.0
• Quickness: 21.4
• Intelligence: 21.2
• Wisdom: 22.9

Notable Skills:

• Lesser Magic: 35.7
• Mana Missile: 32.8
• Heal Self: 23.5
• Durable Lesser Magic: 16.5
• Logging: 50
• Sprint: 31.7
• Run: 29.1
• Rest: 27.5
• Armor Proficiency: 26.8
• Armored Casting: 6.8
• Sword: 14.3
  

Failure to Communicate

Aventurine, the company that makes Darkfall, has a problem with communicating. As in, they don't. Not often or well enough, at least. They're trying to fix their game and finesse the ongoing launch, I get that. But quick up dates on their progress wouldn't take much time.

What do they have to update the world on? How about the fact that they implemented a patch to the game this week that changed several significant features. It's been up to the game's players to compile a list of what these changes are (which is apparently buried so far down in the game's forums that I gave up trying to find it to link it here); no patch notes from the publisher or confirmation of the player-discovered changes.

How about the fact that, since they've now apparently solved the problem of interminable queues just to get into the game, that there's still a lot of people who are wondering when they might be able to buy it. See, they're still limiting how many online subscriptions they'll sell at a given time and even those sales have been suspended since last week. Those of us already in the game aren't likely to complain, but it seem like they could at least give those anxiously awaiting the game some kind of ETA on re-opening sales.

Maybe at some point they might like to change their web site to not imply that they're still in beta testing. Oh wait...

Now they did add more forums this week, which is nice in that it gives the players discrete places to discuss different topics. But again, the change happened without any acknowledgment or explanation. Just one one day, BAM!, there they were.

Maybe this all part of the strategy to keep the game "hardcore." News is so carebear.

Darkfall Day 5 & 6

These little daily diaries have ended up being more of an examination of individual game elements, which is fine, but at some point I reckon I'll have covered most of Darkfall's features and end up doing "What happened this week." In the meantime...

The last couple of days have been more soloing fun, though I have found a guild I like and joined. Small with an interesting backstory, I think it'll be a good fit. Now I just need to schlep my ass out to our alliance city and partake in some heated PvP. I'm encouraged that they have beta experience and seem to approach warfare with some strategic intent.

As for my aforementioned examination of game elements, what came to mind last night as I did the gathering and magic-practice thing again was that the difference in starting stats among the various races may have more influence than I originally estimated. I didn't think a 5 point difference here of there was significant, but seeing how slowly stats increase, I believe I was wrong, at least in respect to the early game. Humans start with 20 in every stat with the eventual maximum being 100. Other races get bonuses and penalties; for instance, dwarves start with 25 in Vitality and Wisdom, but 15 in Dexterity and Intelligence. Other races are balanced towards other strengths and weaknesses. Stats increase over time as the skills they're associated with increase, but it seems to be a slow process. I've gained a little in all of the stats over the last week, but the only stats I've seen a whole point increase in are Strength and Wisdom (because of all the gathering I've done; gathering skills, as "crafts," are associated with wisdom). This all occured to me because it would sure be nice to have an extra 5 points in Intelligence and thus is mana! It would make levelling magic a bit easier for sure.

On the day before, Day 5, I took a break from the gathering and casting Mana Missile over and over and went out to do some quests. This brought me in contact with several different monsters. I was hunting hivekin, for one, and got see a few of the tougher varities, such as the Soldier, who hits a lot harder and has a nastier range attack than the Foragers I had been fighting. In teams of three, as they'd sometimes come at me, they were too much to solo and I retreated several times. I also ran across some centaurs out in the woods. They hit pretty hard with their bows and didn't seem overly impressed with my Mana Missiles. They did a good job of circling around me as well, so I had to high-tail it. I also saw some skeletons in route to somewhere else, but didn't have the time to stop and fight them just then.

As I found a couple of days ago, the new gathering situation doesn't seem to be too bad. I don't know if it's that so many of the players are from Europe or what, but I haven't had a problem finding places to gather relatively close to the cities. Sure, many of the nodes right in town are already exhausted, but there are lots of other places to get resources right nearby. So I'm not too worried about it.

Also last night I bought a horse, but I've yet to ride it. I just stuck it in the bank. A horse in the bank? Well, it's just a little statue you use to summon the actual horse. Should help with travel, and yolu can even fight from them, but I didn't have a need for it last night so I just stowed it away. I'm sure it'll see some use this weekend.

Darkfall Day 4

Last night was a night to warm my little carebear heart. In fact, I didn't intend to play as long as I did, but I was on a roll and having fun. Queue time was more reasonable at about 40 minutes. At some point last night they were supposed to beef up the server to further reduce queue times, but I don't see any indication that's happened yet.

I was in Sandbrook last night, a human starting village. It was oddly vacant. It could just be a weeknight thing, and the fact that a good portion of the population lives in Europe, but I suspect it had more to do with two changes that were implemented in yesterday's patch. The various NPC cities have guard towers that blast criminals (and I assume enemy races, but I don't know that for sure) with lightning bolts. Previously you'd have a dozen players in the middle of a town intentionally going gray by striking someone then parrying the towers' attacks to increase their own parrying skill. It was noisy and chaotic, but didn't particular bother me. People will always find little game quirks that aren't really cheats but maybe "unintentional features." At any rate, the new patch changed it so that towers can't be parried at all. That prevents people from skilling up off of them, but it also means anyone who goes gray near a tower has no chance to block it until they can escape. So the side effect, I think, is that many of the warring clans who would fight inside the NPC towns also left for fear of accidentally striking a bystander and getting hammered by the towers.

The second change affected resource gathering. Previously the various trees, bushes, and rocks that yield lumber, herbs, stone, and metal were instanced so that each player could only harvest a certain amount from each node, but an unlimited number of players could do so. So, for example, if you could only get 20 ore from a rock, that rock would produce 20 ore for everyone who mined it and they'd each have to wait for that rock to regenerate for them individually before they could mine it again. Each node could produce, I guess, a nearly unlimited amount of resources in this way. Under this system, you'd see a lot of people gathering resources in towns, with five or six characters huddled around each node, all pulling in the maximum they could. It's safer to gather in or near town, and since there are a number of resource nodes accessible in each town there was less reason to stray further out. Now with the new patch, each individual resource node has a finite amount that can be gathered from it by all players; no more per-player instancing of resources. If there's, hypothetcially, 100 ore in a rock, then one person might gather all 100, but two people might split it, and three or four will split it even further. When the rock is out of resources, nobody can get anything from it until it regenerates.

This change certainly makes more sense and it will have the effect of pushing players farther out from the towns. There's also a concern among the player base that this will make resources rarer and crafted goods more expensive. It's definitely less convenient for the gatherer/crafter, but in my experiments with it last night, I didn't find it to be too bad. For one thing, the nodes regenrate within a couple of hours to max capacity, so it's stll possible to gather in and near towns. In the nodes further afield there are a lot of resources there to be harvested as well, so once you get down to gathering you can get a lot out of it. I think the combination of these things will mean that harvesting is not as screwed as it might have at first appeared. The sheer number of harvestable trees, for instance, means thaere's a lot of resources out there to be had if you can get to them safely.

And there's the rub. This change makes gathering more dangerous, but that's what Darkfall is about. Last night, even outside the towns, there was a pretty low population level while I was playing. I was definitely more cautious as I did some gathering afield, and I was fully armed, but, at least last night, it wasn't overwhelmingly more dangerous. I expect in the future that it will be hairier, but last night was a soft introduction to the new rules of gathering.

So on to the good stuff. I had a quest to kill hivekin. They're pinkish hairless naked humanoids, about 3/4 the hieght of a human, who apparently spit some kind of acid as a ranged attack. I honestly didn't spend a lot of time reading my logs to se what they were shooting at me! Again, the player population was low enough in my area that I had this particular hivekin camp to myself for awhile. That gave me the chance to use my magic to kill them. I must say Mana Missile is an annoying little spell in that it travels so slow that it's not too hard for even AI to see it coming and dodge. Learning to lead a moving target with it is also tricky, but I got better with it. But then, of course, we're talking about the lowest level damage spell in the game, so you can't expect too much. Apparently the higher level magic spells travel faster, which will be nice.

The splash damage that makes the spell so difficult to use when other players are around was a benefit last night in that when I didn't get a direct hit, I'd often still get some damage in by hitting near the monster. Damage was not great as it would take me about half my mana to kill one of them, but then the spell itself right now is around 26 and my Lesser Magic is around 30. On the plus side, by keeping them at range and dodging as many of their acid blobs as I could, I took very little damage. I also used my new Magic Shield spell to protect myself from the splash damage from my own spells. It's ranked pretty low right now and I'm not sure how much it helped, but I think it helped some when they were right up on me and I was at greatest risk of hitting myself with splashback.

I have to say, I'm still not decided how impressed I am with the AI, but last night the hivekin used cover (whether intentionally or not I don't know) and flanked me to give one of them a shot at my back (where more damage is done). They were also pretty good at dodging spells if they were far enough away. They appeared pretty smart to me.

Pulling put my sword and shield on occassion, it became clear that I've got to go back and fight some goblins to get my sword skill up if it's going to be any kind of effective backup. I did run out of mana a couple of times when I'd finish fighting one hivekin and find two more descending on me. In fact, I died once and had to run back. Fortunately no one had come along and looted me, so I got all of my stuff back and was able to finish killing the hivekin I needed for my quest.

Later a couple of players did come to the camp and I decided to stay on the far side from them. When they moved in my direction, I circled around. I don't know that they intended me harm, but in this game it pays to be cautious, especially since I don't yet feel capable of putting up a good enough fight for two armed guys. Earlier I had seen my first red character, which is to say a player character who had become permanently criminal from attacking too many of his own alliance. We played cat and mouse in a forest for a bit until I was able to work my way around him. His mistake was probably trying to sneak up on me once it was clear I had seen him; he probably should have just run at me, but I wasn't complaining :)

And to keep up my carebear rep, I tried to revive a player who had died near town, but either he didn't accept it or maybe lost connection or something. Anyway, eventully he died and there were a couple of others standing around ready to loot him, so we did. So maybe that's two points carbear, one point dick? ;)

Darkfall Day 3

Day 3 was a Sunday spent idling in the queue to get into the game broken up by a few hours of playing in two different bouts. Lag was worse than usual and my ping was pretty high, so I stuck mostly to gathering near towns. First I got my Lesser Magic up to 25, the first level that allows you to buy additional spells and skills to enhance it. Each of the many types of magic in Darkfall is its own skill with subskills that rank up separately. The spells themselves are also like skills in that they increase their level with use. So, for instance, my Lesser Magic is now around 27, my Mana Missile spell is around that, and my Heal Self spell is around 20. After reaching 25 in Lesser Magic, I picked up a spell that converts health to mana, a spell to heal other players, and some protection spells that protect me and others against the Lesser Magic damage spells.

I'm not sure how useful the protection spells will be. The Mana Missile, and perhaps other Lesser Magic damage spells, do "splash damage" in addition to their regular damage. So, for instance, if I shoot one at an enemy that's right up on me (or even just at the ground at my feet) I take damage from the spell as well. The same would apply if I were working with allies and trying to use these spells while they're engaged with an enemy. My thinking is that the protection spells, levelled up sufficiently, can help mitigate that splash damage so that I won't hurt myself or my allies as much when using them. The problem is that, at its lowest rating, the protection spell for the caster at least persists for only 2 minutes. Which sucks, honestly. Now I also purchased a subskill of Lesser Magic that extends the duration of Lesser Magic spells, so maybe it will have some benefit. I'm hoping for a doubling of the duration, but even a 50% increase would help. It is used automatically, so now that I have it, casting Lesser Magic spells should level it up as well.

The Heal Other is, at this point, not a factor, but when I get to the point that I join a clan, I'll try it out. I'll probably do a separate post on my thoughts on healing soon.

The hinderance with all of the spells but the initial Mana Missile and Heal Self spells is that they require reagents to cast, so I'll need to start carrying around sulphur, mandrake, nacre, etc. I did a bit of gathering to build up a small supply of these, but I'm thinking it will be more effective to focus on one gathering skill, such as my lumberjacking, sell what I gather, and use the gold to just buy the regeants I need. Right now, though, it's cool to try out the different gathering skills and see which will work best for me. After fishing a lot, I took the fish and cooked them up. Food gives a short boost, I think to stamina regeneration, but the specifics, as on everything in this game so far, are murky. I actually kind of like the fact that it requires some experimenting. But again, the buff is only like 2 minutes for some of the basic foods. Better quality foods have longer buffs, but I'd like to see all of the durations increased. Right now food is more annoying to keep up with than worthwhile, IMO.

Travelling from one human village to another, I did encounter a few goblins in the wild that had no other players around. So for once I was able to use only magic to kill some monsters and it worked out well. Fortunately you can cast while moving, so that helped me dodge and weave a bit and still use some offense. As their health would get low, the goblins would run away, and they were pretty good at moving erraticaly enough that I missed a few times shooting at them. It's going to be a LOT harder to use against players, I imagine, especially since most of the offensive spells move slowly enough that an observant player can dodge them.

I also bought a few rank 20 staves from a player who was selling them at a reasonable price. These will make my spells more effective. The item "ranks" correspond more or less to the skill level, as I understand it, so in if your sword skill is in the 20's, you'd want a rank 20 sword to do the most damage. The next rank of item I've seen is rank 40. Obviously this is another area in which, because I didn't play in beta, I really have little idea how it works. I guess I'll find out.