So we were talking about Darkfall...

[Garem]

I've had an extraordinary amount of time on my hands as of late and I've been spending it all the wrong ways. After discussing it with some folks in IRC, I downloaded Darkfall about 5 days ago to give it a shot out of a raging case of "oh, what the fuck."

If you want the short of it, here goes: Meh, this game had cool potential but fell flat virtually everywhere. My one positive gem? I didn't HATE HATE HATE harvesting shit. Weird, right? That should say something.

The long of it:

My MMO experience is somewhat limited. I played Everquest for a year or two, DAoC for a year or two, Planetside for a year (if that even counts) and I took a few months to skim into SWG back in its first year or two. Ever since these games (circa 2004) I haven't looked back to the MMO market. Plus, I had CoA and then EfU since 2005.

Anyways, Darkfall definitely piqued my interest when I started following it in early 2008 (2009?). Eventually, I got busy and just forgot about it. For those who don't know it, here are a few neat features:

-Skillgain based on use!
-You can PvP ANYWHERE! With FULL loot, all the time (banks for security)!
-The world is inhabited by waaay more players than NPCs. NPCs play a minor role.
-Your character can do ANYTHING he wants!
-Clans can claim territory and defend it!
-Skill based combat!

Sounds cool right? Except, as I said, everything fell flat.

-The skillgain is an obnoxious grind to the caps so you can optimize for PvP (the only thing to do, really...). And everyone can do literally everything-- so everyone who's played for 4-6 months is a melee-archer-mage (see below) because there is NO skill cap at all. Lame.
-You can BE PvP'd anywhere. At lowbie levels with jack shit, I was PK'd twice in 4 hours of playing. Why? For a meager amount of gold... and because the high end players that did it had shit else to do, apparently.
-The world usually felt extremely empty. You'd see 5-10 NPCs in a town that should have 30 people. You'd see about 5 PCs in the town over an hour on average. Also, there's very little incentive for teamwork in non PvP. You just get half of the shit you'd normally get... why bother?
-"Doing anything you want" consists of finding a mob spawn to camp for hours and hours, grinding up magic, archery, and melee... because you want to be on par with everyone else, who also does everything with no specialization. Why be a wizard? You're just at a disadvantage against the melee-archer-mage. Oh, yes, and if not combat, you can harvest shit (while reading a book IRL, in my case).
-Now, I never participated in these big battles. I tried to join a Clan, but it hasn't panned out yet. Regardless, as I understand it the positives for taking territory isn't all that positive, at least not for how much input is required.
-Skill based combat... it's alright. If you've ever played Mount and Blade, it won't impress you. If you haven't it might be more amusing. Melee is a spam fest, ranged and magic takes you to 1st person, and requires more finesse.

Anyways, that's my summary so far. There are positives, but it seems like they're just marred by various flaws that cripple the experience to me. If you don't mind dedicating several months to grinding so you can PvP like a pro, then you'll probably enjoy this game.

As for me, I'll stick with good ole EfU and my other recent side-games, Global Agenda (sooo much fun! Reminds me of Planetside...) and M&B:Warband - cRPG mod/Strategus.

[Porkolt]

Sounds like a good game ruined by players with the wrong mentality.
 
Thing needs some filtering, which isn't really possible with a commercial project.

[Garem]

Well honestly, the PK'ers didn't bother me as much as the grind-iness and allegedly, the skillgain speed has been increased five fold since the game started so new players can catch up faster!

If they had some sort of skill cap to force players to use more specialized combat roles... well, that would be nice. Then again, looking at other PvP games like [insert virtually any FPS, like Call of Duty] then I guess it's not all that different since everyone plays pretty much the same role with only slight differences so maybe my argument isn't all that fair since I've come in with a bias or expectation for SOME sort of Tank/DPS/Caster/Archer/Engineer/Buffer or whatever.

More cool sandbox stuff would have been nice, too.

[Porkolt]

Guild Wars has a huge PvP focus, and is very build-based, especially because you can only gear up a maximum of 10 (was it?) abilities at one time.

[Egon the Monkey]

8 skills on your hotbar at a time, the trick is finding the right combos, and Guild wars is instanced. I used to play it a lot. For PVE, your party of up to 8 does missions in their own copy of the mission area. For PVP, you go to PVP arena areas or pitched battle environments. You can redistribute your skills and abilities any time you're not in combat, so your PC can specialise in different things per mission.

I used to mostly play it on the PVE, with friends, trying to beat stuff on speed runs, Hard Mode, with crazy builds, etc. Because PVP only PCs are max level when they start, you can play that in a competitive environment from the go, rather than grinding skills. As PVE is instanced from towns that serve as lobby areas for the world and campaign missions, there's no griefing. The worst part is gold farmers or IG merchants spamming general chat, but I always had that off. Yes, I'm looking forward to Guild Wars 2 this year.