Big Negative Review : DFO - General / Guide - Discussions

He has provided screen shots on the betaleaks forums when it as up.

Hello again betaleaks boards, I used to use these all the time back in the day for informative reasons, now I\'m brought back to foretell some warnings about the current state of DF if they do in fact plan to release it within the next few months.

I\'ve been in the beta for a few months now, and if anything I am thoroughly disgusted with the state of the game, the next to useless developers, and I find it hilarious that they\'ve wasted 6 years worth of time and money to develop a resource harvesting grindfest.

My big gripes:

The world isn\'t that big, despite the fact that your character jogs at a rather slow pace for most of the time, unless you simply macro devour food and stam pots to regain stam as fast as you lose it, it only takes about 35-45 minutes to go from capital to capital, most of the space inbetween is for the most part completely empty except for trees, and other nice little decorations such as rocks and the like, any ruins or structures either denote hamlets, city sites, or mob spawns.

To cross the main continent from end to end takes about 1.5 hours if you take the flattest paths possible.


The combat is pretty bland, your characters attacks range from one to three moves based on the weapons your using, and they are basically overhead chop, left and right swing. You have no direct control over your basic attacks...

Blocking is pretty much useless, sure it reduces damage but it consumes so much stamina in the process that you would be better off simply dodging and running around out of the path of the opposing swings then by trying to block anything.

2h weapons cannot block, if they are supposed to do so they either don\'t or don\'t mitigate any damage.

As of the last build I recall playing (high 60 or low 70), stats weren\'t implemented yet so weapon damage didn\'t vary a great deal unless if you found some nice high multiplier weapons off of some nice mobs somewhere.

Archery was pretty much all I used for PVP, hitting someone in the back causes increased damage, and while bows have a ballistic trajectory over greater distances, it\'s not too hard to get accustomed to using them. So with a basic crap bow and a ton of arrows I would run around jacking people in the back for anywhere between 8-15 damage a shot, all the while kiting them and their buddies across the continent.

Skill progression is grindtastic, Lineage II players will feel right at home, after grinding magic for about a week (by shooting my useless magic missiles into the sky in the middle of nowhere) I had about 50 Magic Skill and could use a small slew of new spells if I could somehow afford them from the vendors in town. the devs never helped us with this so if you didn\'t want to macro fish and sell the 9000 fish you could catch over the course of a good 12 hour afk macro session, to maybe make half of the 15000 gold required to learn the magic skill then w00t. I don\'t know of many people that macro\'d magic to the extent that I did and I certainly couldn\'t find a way to buy all the spells that I wanted to test.

Most ranged spells are slow....so slow that they are mostly useless in PVP unless the guu really really isn\'t paying any attention and moves into the patch of the spell...to compensate for their slowness they all have an AOE range to some effect, with the beefier versions of mana missile having a larger range and doing more damage...but it\'s still mostly useless in PVP because they will have ample time to simply move out of the way.

Clans and Stones, heres how they work:

It costs about 2k gold to get a clan charter from an NPC, theres no size minimum for starting one but you will need a few people to help you grind mobs to get the 2k gold in the first place since most gold comes from selling loot.

For another 2k or so (I can\'t remember) you can buy a Clan Shard, which is a small blue rock that allows anyone with General or Higher standing to claim clan stones, this works by simply walking near the stone and double clicking the Clan Shard, it took the beta server about 4 hours to figure this out despite being given pretty direct instructions in the beta forum. The person who claims that town becomes the Mayor, currently you can\'t remove or change mayors because they haven\'t fixed it yet, what good the mayor is or does I don\'t know as we never had enough time to build up a town to actually find out.

Now you have to grind resources to build little building templates that you use to build basic structures for your clan city, this requires a skill that costs a ton of gold and each template requires about 300 gold and about 5-10 pieces of wood and has a 66% chance fail rate, each template weighs a damn lot, but you only need to drag it to a bank and then have a guildmember pull it out of a wilderness bank by your city and relay the crap until you use it to facilitate building something.

This is really all there is to the gameI\'ve read what people have posted about \'sieging\' and whatnot but I\'ve never heard of any sieges going on while I was bothered enough to actually play the beta, and I\'d be suprised if the mechanic was even activated to begin with. They didn\'t activate the clanstones until about two weeks before Christmas, and they claim that the game was already \"tested by professional testers\" that managed to miss all the major bugs and massive design flaws with the beta versions 56-68.

So heres my predictions as a pragmatic player of loads of MMO\'s over the years.

Adventurine has stated that they will be doing a competitive \'pre-order\' process that will allow people with preorders to play exclusively on the main Euro server for about a week before DF\'s release, they\'ve stated that they will not wipe this progress whatsoever.

I believe they are doing this in order to attempt to provide additional funding for more serves in the EU for localization purposes, and because they want to make a slight return on their game before the ghost is out of the bag that it is mostly lacking the gameplay part of any game and is a massive resource grinder...which will drive people away from their release but as long as they are paying a 50+ euro preorder for it they won\'t much care.

I speculate that DF won\'t have much of an open beta before they finally decide to release the game whenever they actually do that, because it WILL hurt sales.

I predict that DF will ship and sell to some extent but I feel that the \'shadowbane effect\' will occour again and 1/2 the purchasing population will stop playing within the first three months of the game, which would probably cancel Adventurine\'s ideas of a North American release, which I would wait for since I prefer to stomp the NA guilds, and typically NA mmo servers are more competitive.