Darkfall Day 0

After two days of downloads, a couple of hours or patches, hours of queuing, a sound card spazz out, and a graphics resolution kerfuffle, I finally entered Darkfall to the sounds of violence and death. It's then that it occurred to me that I'd never heard whether one is in any way protected while logging in, especially since I could hear what was going on around me several breaths before I could see anything. Probably that's an intended feature; after all, the world is harsh and you just might get slaughtered upon first waking up any day now. Best not to think about it.

But before the cacophonous login, I got to make a character. For anyone interested in actual role-playing, Darkfall offers some interesting choices. The lore for each race isn't bad, hewing enough to the standard archetypes to be familiar while giving each race a little tweak. Standard CRPG fare for the most part.

The Humans are expansionist colonizers who believe they're descended from a god and on a holy mission to dominate the world. So they're basically Americans under the reign of George W. Bush. The Dwarves are their usual uptight selves, but this time because they have a 20,000 year plan from Chairman Mao - I mean their prophet/philosopher/god - which they stick to religiously. The Mirdain (aka Elves), I don't know, live in trees or something. These three races are loosley allied. Yay team!

An interesting new race is the Mahirim, a tribalistic wolf-people. My wife suggests the females of the race should have six tits each, but then the males would probably never make it out of their starting villages. The Mahirim are allied with the Orks, who for some reason remind me of the Goons from the old Popeye cartoons, except with bones in their noses.

Lastly, the Alfar are a dark elf variant allied with no one. The PK's PK, as it were.

Though the races don't offer a lot new role-playing-wise, the fact that Darkfall has a skill-based system with no classes means any race can fill pretty much any role. True, all but humans start with some pluses and minuses to various stats, but these differences seem minor, and anyway share the same cap (unlike Shadowbane in which your race could limit the upper bounds of your stats).

Character customization in Darkfall suits me fine. To me, the amount of variation possible in Everquest II or Oblivion is just too much; it's too easy to end up with a character who looks like fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Darkfall gives you more limited choices, but they should be enough to recognize a clan member, for instance, at a glance. I chose to create a human character and discovered the facial choices were more about scars, tattoos, and painful-looking piercings than bone structure or proportions. And honestly, that's probably about right for this game. If I can figure out how to get the camera in front of my character, I'll post a screenshot of his lovely mug.

I only had time this morning to dip my toes into the world, walking around a starting village a bit, before heading to work. An update on my actual "Day 1" should be more interesting.