just enjoying the darkfall

Already Darkfall has proved to be the most divisive MMOG since… well, probably since EVE Online was released six years ago. Controversial reviews have unearthed fans that have mobilised themselves with worrying fervour, sweeping aside valid concerns that developer Adventurine might have been going about things in entirely the wrong way.

As with EVE, Darkfall was forged in the afterglow of Ultima Online rather than World Of Warcraft, by a small independent studio in a country far from the epicentre of games development. Its makers too have been unapologetic in wanting to make virtual the harshness of human endeavour, where advancement is measured in coin and unhindered by moral code. Thus in Darkfall you are, as in EVE, a potential victim wherever you go, or else on the hunt for one. However, only in Darkfall can you be casually gathering fruit under the shade of tree, only to have your veins opened by a passing killer, before re-spawning to discover your blueberries missing.

Hopefully by this point you will have suffered the indignity of death enough times to have realised that you must bank often. You learn quickly that you do not venture out, or outstay your luck, with equipment or resources you cannot afford to have looted from your corpse. Hence why you won’t see woodcutters, miners and other gatherers adorned with shining plate armour, nor will they put up much of a fight when ambushed. To them a few berries lost is hardly the end of the world.

When the starting areas are often camped by player-killers, where your early hours require you to learn the ropes, Darkfall can be frustrating beyond measure. Quests are few, rewards are paltry and if your time is constricted by other concerns and you were hoping for unbridled levels of entertainment to stave them off, you will probably want to quickly escape for good. After all, buying the game was hardly the most endearing process. Curious early adopters were tasked to visit what is effectively an online back alley – but only at particular times on particular days – and hope for the best. More akin to buying crack than a computer game… we assume.

However, once you are wise to its ways, Darkfall’s shortcomings are much easier to forgive, and its triumphs – and there are many – easy to champion. For example, combat absolutely does not require you to squint over the action bar as you would in other fantasy games. It’s fiddly and initially disorientating for sure (both the action bar and the combat), but you have to try to out-manoeuvre your opponent, and sometimes chase them down. But more importantly than that, you have to out-number them. Three poorly equipped noobs who know what they are doing could probably make short work of an obnoxious unseated veteran with high-end gear. It’s not a perfect system by any means – the advantage is with the attacker and the hunter– but it’s not such a bad thing that as a consequence you’re forced down a path of co-operation with other players.

There are arguments that say you shouldn’t have to change your mindset about what makes a good MMO experience, which is perhaps why Darkfall is proving easier to acclimatise to for EVE, Shadowbane and Ultima Online veterans than it is for the younglings brought up on WoW and Free Realms. Your experience in Darkfall is reliant on and dictated to by other players, but at the same time the limits of what is possible are not fully locked down by game design. Even when the resource nodes have been exhausted and the spawning areas over-run, there is always the quest you’ve signed up to beyond the mountains. It’s not a fully developed world blessed with content by any means; it’s a frontier that offers opportunity on the proviso that there are no guaranteed rewards.

Darkfall certainly isn’t the prettiest MMOG to emerge in the last 12 months, but it looks and sounds decent enough. It lacks the polish we seem to be increasingly spoiled by and it’s a PvE wasteland in a genre where PvE is increasingly dominant, but Darkfall’s allure lies beyond such low-lying foothills. Similar to a certain sci-fi MMOG, Darkfall’s endgame brings in alliance-level conflict that requires hundreds of troops and dozens of war machines – a natural environment where trust and betrayal can thrive. For many that sign up to the game from here on in, that is where the future lies, and it’s where the developer has to concentrate its long-term efforts to ensure it holds onto the players it has, so that even more may be tempted to join.

Darkfall Gold has more good features than bad, but what is pleasing for a game so early in what should be a long life, is that it has masses of potential to be a slow-burning success. Of course, that potential may not be enough in a market very different to when the game first went into production, before WoW put the masses into multiplayer gaming. But in an age where persistent worlds are becoming more homogeneous by the month, it would be a shame to see Darkfall become the Darkfail some already make claim it is, because from what we’ve seen it is anything but.

Darkfall is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Aventurine SA that combines real-time action and strategy in a fantasy setting. The game features unrestricted PvP, full looting, a huge, dynamic game world, and a player skill dependent combat system free of the class and level systems that typify most MMORPGs.