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Darkfall is a total pile of junk....and anyone actually pre ordering is getting totally ripped off big time.
After UO there have been very few titles that have dared to try it's initial concepts again.
A few have tried to make a skill based MMORPG's, Wish was one title that the developers cancelled on it's doorstep..
Star Wars Galaxies and maybe AC1 had sort of a semi skill based system, and also free to roam worlds.
EvE, a space MMO in the same sense as Elite or Privateer, a sandbox world and a skill based system that grows skills offline.
And now Darkfall has arrived claimed by it's followers to be a successor to early days of Ultima..
I will give you my review...
Character creation..
A very basic character creation tool, with many basic features currently disabled, like skin tone etc..Basically you will look almost identical to the next characther.
Tutorial and start of the game :
You magically appear at 1 out of 3 newbie areas belonging to the race of your choice, with a sword that can't be looted or destroyed. There is now a tutorial window that pops up as you enter.. After that you can talk with a councelor that gives you a quest for goblins, these quests are the same for every race, they have just copied and pasted them to every starting area..
Graphics/sound/animations:
The worlds graphics aka the outdoor graphics does it's job rather good for an engine that seems to be outdated in almost every way possible. It does look good mostly because of the strong use of shadows but if you turn them off the beauty vanishes almost instantly IMO.
But as you combine the overall effects of bad animations and sound and very ugly avatar graphics you get a game that looks and feels very cheaply done.
Sound FX are borderline disturbing. You will literally have to tone down or turn off your volume otherwise you will end up with some very loud noise when a skill raises or you jump, all the time you will hear the ugly sound of mana missiles as players train that everywhere..there is no environmental audio to speak of and hardly any music..
First fight :
You head out in your underwear, yes underwear with your equipped blade, you will soon notice that some of the matching skills starts to "ding", like running, sprinting etc. When you strike your first blow at a goblin you will notice that melee is nothing else than you strike/goblin strike, you can also try to block the blow with a reactive block.
Bow fighting is rather nice in the game, it's a FPS mode/arc aiming archery so I suppose it's a bit different.
Then there's magic, needs a staff and later it will also need reagents, the problem i see with magic is that it basically needs macroing to get you anywhere, both in the way of obtaining reagents and also in the tedious training of the mage skills..
Alignment system
There are 3 modes in Darkfall, blue = Lawful, Grey = rogue and red = Criminal/murderer.
Each race has a couple of sworn enemies, wich let's you raise your status from red back to blue.
First PVP/Grief and meeting with some exploiter :
There is a greater chance in this game that your first PvP encounter will be another player that tries to fool you to become grey(rogue), this is done with ease in Darkfall, just jump in front of someone swinging his sword, and bang that person is now grey and you can kill him without penalty..
And in the event you became "grey" the towers of any city or outpost will kill you and then the player that fooled you will loot you dry.
And if you will come upon someone that is your enemy it's only a matter of who will drink the most potions of stamina and get the most hits on your most probably running like crazy in all directions enemy.
There are countless of other exploits rampaging this game, the fans of course claim that most of it works as intended. (ha)
I see no point in even trying to argue with these types of fans as they will most certainly not listen to anything, scared that their ability to cheat the innocent players will be removed from the game..
MOBS/Wildlife:
The game is almost empty of both NPC's and wildlife and has a very sparse Mob selection, you can run for a half hour without seeing as much as a single mob, this is done so the game runs smoothly (???), wich it seemingly did during my test.
This basically makes the game an enormous battlefield, but far from a living breathing world which a MMORPG should be.
Too bad really because the developers actually made a decent world but without any population apart from it's cheater of player base it has almost nothing to offer.
Other skills/professions part from killing
There is crafting and Gathering skills wich is a very grind process..
As I also thought this game was supposedly crafted after Ultima Online I also took for granted that they would introduce real rogue skills, lockpicking, pickpocketing etc ...But neither is in this game, and if you try to ask the fanbase about this you will certainly get flamed for even asking..
Overall..
The very basic core game of Darkfall is there, but to truly become something like Ultima Online they will have to work with this game for at least a couple of YEARS more. Now it's not even close to an rpg, as everything is almost left out apart from fighting, there is no lore, no nothing, just a world with locations and your enemies.
Final score:
5 / 10
It actually should be lower but I gave Aventurine a couple of points more due to the fact that some of the areas in this game are semi - good, and If they really stop listening to most of the rabid fanboys they might have a small chance at creating something here. But as it stands now the game is no where near a quality production.
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,i tried for so long yesterday
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