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? ;)