Darkfall Online

Overview
Full Review
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Area: USA
Official Site: Darkfall Online
Publisher: Aventurine
Developer: Aventurine
Platform: Microsoft Windows

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Overview

Darkfall Online is an intriguing MMORPG with some interesting twists in skill and character evolution.

Features

Fun Combat system
Interesting class selection
Great for advancing skills

Area: USA
Official Site: Darkfall Online
Publisher: Aventurine
Developer: Aventurine
Platform: Microsoft Windows

Review

Darkfall Review

by Cody Hargreaves

It’s no great secret really, that despite its many shortcomings the MMO business is doing quite well. As far as making a few bucks go they really hit the sweet spot with this one; design a game that never ends, and charge people by the month to play it. It’s ingenious.

The problem though (that is, with ingenious ideas) is that everybody wants a piece of the action. Design a game that makes millions, and millions will begin re-designing your game. Of course, those millions are more often than not Chinese, and as the Chinese are about as good at emulating the success of World of Warcraft as a sock is a condom, things tend to turn south fairly quickly.

Skip ahead a few years and you’ve got an industry made up almost entirely of these ‘WoW clones’, and enough unsatisfied gamers to fill a small European country staring blankly at each other and wondering “what the hell just happened?”. And then, there was Darkfall.

DARKFALL?

I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard of it. In the world of MMO releases, this one was a bit of a doozy. Terrible launch issues combined with a small development house and an almost non-existent advertising campaign kept Darkfall off the radar for a long time, though today, with over a year of discovery, has seen our excitement growing once again.

So then, what is Darkfall? Put simply, Darkfall is different, and to quote the developers “In Darkfall, you are free”. And for the most part, you really are. It’s hard to compare it to anything else, as with the exception of the upcoming Mortal Online, it basically stands alone. Though if I had to compare it to anything, it would The Elder Scrolls series; looking a lot like an updated version of Morrowind, but playing more like Oblivion.

You wouldn’t know it from the beginning, as it starts out pretty much the same way as every other MMORPG in history—asking you to create a character that will no doubt receive more attention that your beloved girlfriend/wife/other will in the coming years—and then placing you smack bang in the centre of your races’ respective starting zone. But the cliché MMORPG experience pretty much ends there as you quickly begin to realise that there’s no one holding your hand this time around, and that for the most part, you’re on your own.

GO ON…

You don’t choose a class in Darkfall; you make it up as you go along. Like using swords? Use a sword; you’ll get better with it eventually, and unlock new skills for it too. Like using a bow and arrows? Same thing, and again with the ten different schools of magic, with each individual spell, with swimming, running, sprinting, crouching, blocking, dodging, and crafting, too. It’s a magnificent system, really, and contrary to speculation, it made the jump to the online world seamlessly. Until the hackers arrived, at least. But we’ll come back to that later.

You begin playing by choosing your race from a possible Human, Mirdain (Elf), Ork, Dwarf, Alfar (Dark Elf), and Mahirm (Wolf Man). The Humans, Mirdain and Dwarfs are all allied, as are the Orks and Mahirm; however, the Alfar stand alone. After you’ve decided on a character, it’s all about the combat, and like everything else in Darkfall, that’s different too.

The ‘click-and-wait’ style of combat made famous in almost every other MMORPG has been scrapped completely and replaced with something that once again resembles Morrowind and Oblivion. Excluding melee combat, whereby you play in a limited third-person perspective, Darkfall is played entirely in the first person, and is completely real time. It’s more like an FPS game than it is your traditional MMO, requiring you to aim and fire everything from bows and magic to cannons and siege machines, and hit based solely on your skill.

A MATTER OF SKILL

No, not your skill level—although that does count too— but your actual skill with a weapon. Having 100 points in Lesser Magic is all well and good, but unless you know how to hit a moving target it’s going to be about as useful to you as a spear would be to a Dwarf with no arms. The enemy NPCs’ in Darkfall act similarly to bots in an FPS game, running and ducking, dodging and fleeing; they even work together in groups to take you down, one waving a sword in your face, while the others shoot you from a distance, making a run for cover if you point a bow or staff in their direction.

As you can probably imagine, this system transfers to PvP (Player VS Player) incredibly well. Gone are the days where a player could annihilate you on sight simply because he had less social commitments than you, and thus, played for twenty hours a day. In Darkfall, you actually have a chance against these guys—provided that you’re good enough—regardless of play time, and it makes the taste of victory that much sweeter. Stats still play a large part in combat, as do weapons and armour, but it’s much less noticeable than in games like WoW, and there is always a chance to win.

And the best part? That juicy detail that I’ve been holding off as long as I possibly could; that decision making quality that brings everything in Darkfall together into the gigantic ball of awesome that it is? The world is eight times the size of any other in MMO available, it’s completely open PvP, and you keep what you kill.

KEEP WHAT YOU KILL?

You can kill anyone you want, any time you want, and everything they own becomes yours. Well, everything they’re carrying at the time, at least. Of course if you die, you lose everything too, and will appear naked as the day you were born at your chosen bindstone. There are towers to protect you in the starting villages, but they’re nothing to be afraid of, and an alignment system to prevent total anarchy that deducts points for killing allied races and adds them for killing enemy ones. Dropping below zero alignment changes your alignment to evil, denying you access to the major cities; however, with hundreds of player built towns and cities littered throughout the world, and with most clans choosing to mix race anyway, it’s not such a bad price to pay for socking that smart-arse kid one in the teeth and stealing all his gear.

So you’ve got an enormous ‘sandbox ’world to conquer and explore, a combat system that rewards actual skill opposed to total play time, and a ‘no-holds-barred’ licence to kill anyone that takes your fancy. It’s the perfect recipe for radness, but it doesn’t stop there. There’s crafting—everything in the game can be crafted by players, from weapons, arrows and armour, to mounts, siege machines, ships, and buildings. There’re dungeons hidden in mountains and waterfalls, and in the darkest depths of the world.

And then there are all the little things that you simply can’t do justice in a few lines of text—like the adrenaline rush one receives when sneaking silently in the dark behind an unsuspecting victim, using the shadows of the trees and rocks to stay hidden until the opportune moment. The graphics aren’t amazing, as you can probably tell from the screenshots and videos, but even but they have their moments too, as does every other aspect of the game.

And it’s all about those moments, isn’t it? Those feel good, heart-pumping, adrenaline- rush situations that you know you’ll never forget. It is for me, and it’s why I’ve taken a liking to Darkfall this much. It’s a world, as vast as it is dangerous and unforgiving; and you make the rules.

EXPANSIONS

By now, there are likely a good bunch of you saying “Yeah, well I played it, and it sucked.” Don’t worry; it wasn’t so long ago that I felt the same way. The launch period of Darkfall was a truly unforgettable experience; many of the promised features were nowhere to be seen, server stability was abysmal (often seeing players lose valuable items for no reason at all), only one server was available, it was in Europe, and the lag was often unbearable. Also, there were balance and loot issues, and the developers were less than hospitable, and in many respects, handled the situation poorly.

But that was launch, and while it pains me to let it go (having suffered through it for over a month before finally leaving disgusted), that time has passed. Alongside a large handful of minor patch releases that addressed many of the finer issues players were experiencing, there have been two major expansions released, and as I hear it, the results have been amazing.

The first, released on February 25th, 2009 added some much needed balance to the world of Darkfall alongside many of the promised ‘missing features’ that players had been longing for; such as player housing, player village construction, and the ‘you-really-need-to-see-it-to-believe-it weather system; though it was the second expansion released in December 2009, Conqueror of the Seas that received the greater reception. With it, Darkfall saw siege warfare on the water, the Kraken (a giant sea-creature roaming the oceans and quite literally ripping boats to the bottom of the sea), new player housing features and castles available for siege; but most importantly, a complete overhaul to the melee combat system, removing the significant advantage offered to players that chose the path of magic. It also added trade routes, offering players large sums of money to travel between cities (thereby forcing more people out into the wilds and upping the clan-free PvP aspects of the game quite a lot), Clan City Guard Towers to offer additional protection against large clan sieges, and new spell effects and animations, too. In effect, it made Darkfall look a great deal more like it sounded a year ago, and as a result, is one of my most highly recommended MMO experiences for those seeking something fresh, new and exciting. Free trials and a North American Server are now available, so you’ve got no more excuses. Get in there.