The goal of Darkfall is its support for large-scale territorial conflict between player clans (guilds). To this end, empire building through the construction and conquering of cities/forts/castles is expected to be a major part of the game. To promote such conflict, the developers have stated that there is a finite number of geographical locations (97 locations-44 Clanstones, 53 Hamlets) within the world that are able to support city building. These potential player-built city and hamlet sites are marked in-game by structures known as clanstones.
These city-building sites are spread across the entirety of the world, and vary greatly in location, surrounding terrain, access to nearby resource nodes, and consequently, their ability to be defended by the owning clan. The developers expect certain sites, such as underground cave sites hidden by a waterfall, or a precipitous mountain-side location with a precarious one-way approach to be more highly coveted than other sites, adding to the potential for territorial conflict.
Player clans have full diplomatic control over their relationship with other player clans, and can declare war on other clans unilaterally. The “At War” diplomatic state is preceded by some unspecified amount of time in the ‘Weary’ diplomatic state after which time players of clans that are at war with each other may kill each other freely without alignment penalties. The declaration of war also allows player-built cities to be freely attacked and sieged as a prelude to complete capture or destruction of the enemy city. To this end, Darkfall contains a variety of different siege weapons such as trebuchets, catapults and ballistae, all of which are player-crafted. There is a limit on the rate of destruction of a captured city of 1 building per day, however any number of buildings may be disabled at any time by bringing their structural integrity to zero.
As is typical of any fantasy MMORPG, Darkfall will feature an as of yet unknown number of dungeons and underground areas, many of which will be heavily populated by monsters and monster bosses. Some underground areas are also available for players to colonise and build cities within. Both the Alfar and Dwarven racial capital cities are located predominately underground. It should be noted that the dungeons in the world of Agon are not traditionally “instanced” like in other games. An instance is a separate game universe that a group of people are taken to when usually entering a dungeon so they can fight through the dungeon alone. In Darkfall, the dungeons are available for everyone, and are not instanced. The most notable effect of this is that players are fighting with other groups of people that are in the same dungeon in the non-instance world.