Developer Update : DFO - General / Guide - Discussions

Hi everyone,

First I want to thank everyone for helping us test Darkfall and making it ready for release. Your interest and passion for the game is very humbling to us, and we do not take it for granted.

We understand that it is frustrating with the constant server shut downs, but they are necessary and extremely helpful to us at this stage.

We read the beta boards carefully, and listen to everything you have to say. While we can't respond to every post or thread individually, rest assured that everything is read and considered by us.

Now I want to touch on some of the things discussed here as far as design issues go:

World Map
The current ingame world map is a placeholder map, and will be replaced soon. The new and improved world map will feature a zoom function and functionality to turn annotations on or off.

Regeneration
We believe that the current regeneration rates are good. While significantly slower than some popular PvE based MMOs, we think that a reasonably slow natural regeneration is helpful in rewarding good realtime PvP decisions. We believe that this is one of the fundamentals in making actual player skill stand out in combat.

Having said that, we have decided to implement three new skills, which default characters will start with. These skills will help the natural regeneration of health, mana and stamina. The adjustments are small, but they will help you regenerate slightly faster. We recommend eating food, drinking potions and using the rest skill to decrease your downtime.

Melee Damage
We have decided to increase the melee damage slightly. It's a very small boost, but it brings it more in line with our plans for combat dynamics. Melee damage output is based on several factors, such as skill level, strength and weapon. We have added a slight damage increase to each of these components.

Run Speed
Agon is such a huge world, that moving around may seem a lot slower than it really is. You only get a feel for the real speed if you are inside buildings or running next to small houses. If the movement speed becomes too fast, it becomes a compounding problem; ping times become increasingly important to the outcome of a fight, aiming spells, bows, cannons becomes harder, prediction becomes less reliable etc. We are considering making run a skill that raises by use, which will increase your overall speed slightly, and we are running some internal tests to calculate the impact of it.

Sprint
There has been a lot of feedback about sprinting. We are not entirely happy with how it works on the live servers, and are considering several options. One of the options we are evaluating was suggested by Osium on these boards, and involves two separate forms of stamina - one for sprinting and one for other tasks. If we do change how sprinting works however, it is likely to be sometime after release.

Darkfall is not for everyone, and we are fine with it. Our plan has always been to make a game for players that want something different than the mainstream games, and we feel we are close to having something really special here. No MMO in history has been perfect at release, and Darkfall probably won't be either. Our main focus is to get the very core of the game as good as possible, and then build on it from there. Our plan is to continue to work with you guys, and keep building on Darkfall aggressively after launch.

Thanks again for all the help so far, and keep the constructive feedback coming.

===============================

This is from Claus.

If you were wondering what he was referring to when he said about the idea from Osium, here you go:

Sprint would function essentially the same way. However instead of having 3 to 3 and a half minutes of constant sprint, the sprinting stamina would quickly drain over a period of seconds, and quickly regenerate. Allowing for frequent bursts of speed. The sprinting stamina would also drain the regular stamina as well while it was being used. In essence the change would change the frequency of sprinting rather than how much you can sprint.