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This being the first time I have led a guild in a game like this, I found myself entrenched in a battle against not only my in game enemies but time, skill, hacking and inefficient philosophies for game mechanics. Below I will discuss these observations.


What Darkfall Was:

Darkfall Online was the first Full Loot, Full Consequence game that has launched since WoW tore apart the gaming world at the seams. Darkfall provided many gamers who started MMO's in the past 5 years the opportunity to experience the very animalistic nature of griefing and guilds the opportunity to participate in battles that would equate to some of the most epic fighting to take place, possibly ever. Thousands of combatants fighting simultaneously in a "seamless" world. All built by a crack team who stationed themselves in Greece due to lack of funding.

Darkfall was an Indie MMO that slowly built a following of close to 100,000 over the course of 8 years. This game was never destined to dethrone WoW from it's top position upin the MMO market, but after the recent failures of such titles like AoC and WAR, PVP guilds and their members were craving ANYTHING that could prove to have staying power while providing intense, balanced, lag and bug free combat in a large scale setting.

Darkfall was destined to be a Massively Multiplayer Online Conquest Game where guilds could literally conquor eachother and take from their enemies thousands of combined man hours in the course of a 6 hour siege. This was Darkfall Online, this was the game we expected.


What Darkfall started with that was good:

Conceptually, I think everyone would agree that the devs at aventurine had the right idea in mind when they designed this game:

No levels
No auto-targetting
No quest grinding
Full Loot
Open PK (Note: Not PvP... PK is an entirely different style of gaming)
Advanced City Building
Full Siege System
Massive World- euqating to severe penalty to dying as you would have to travel back to fight.
Naval Vessels
Siege Weapons and vehicles
Mounted Combat
Advanced Player Journal and Guild User CP

Now, all those items listed above would lead one to believe that this game could become the greatest game ever to be played online, sadly however I am about to breach into the reality that has set in over the past few months.

Where Darkfall Failed:

Darkfall Online decided their fate the day they rejected the idea that they should advertise for their game or release their game into a retail store market. The lack of press, advertising and shelf displays passed the verdict on Darkfall Online within hours of launch. The game did not have a quality plan for attracting new players. This failure of the greatest calibure amplified every crack, crevice, hole and gap in their game and within the course of a few short months, the game began to see an irreversable downward spiral begin.

Darkfall's failure in the first 3 weeks of launch to provide hopeful subscribers with copies of the game equated in what I can estimate to be a minium of 30% of all people interested in the game choosing not to play DFO. Entire guilds posted their goodbye threads the day of release when the shop shut down after 5 minutes of being online. Thousands of subscribers lost, no plan to recooperate those losses.

I will highlight next the topic most will remember when discussing the game of Darkfall, the fact that hacking and exploiting and duping decimated fair competition. Many people and guilds did not fully understand the depth that these issues went, but after the dust settled, it became obvious that many players and guilds had engaged in hacking and exploiting so frequently that their success became a joke within the community. They claimed an enormous advantage in PvP which equated to aquiring certain skills to provide a "God Mode" when surrounded by lesser skilled characters. This subtly undermined the economy and competition for months, until end game arrived and everyone realised the damage it had done to the server.

Bringing to light another issue which cost Aventurine a few more thousand of subscriptions was their skill system. The system conceptually is a beautiful design which provides a welcome alternative to the tedius level grinding that most MMO's bore us with today. The system however was fundementally flawed when the devs never implemented a skill cap. Hacking and Duping aside, the fact that players could create a character and spend 3 months grinding out 3 magic schools along with maxing out spells in other magic trees equated to players walking around 2 shotting new players, or even veteran players who didn't have the same amount of time to invest in grinding through that much content. The longer the game lived, the worse this imbalance became. New players had no hope to compete unless they also spent months grinding up skills to a point where they could survive long enough to escape.

Darkfall's early success in creating a skill > time game where players could easily defeat higher skilled characters gradually rebalanced itself until finally, players could cast AoE spells for HIGH damage which required little targetting. These spells for tenured players dipped into the region where they became an unfair advantage and an unbalanced mechanic. The lack of skill required to PvP drove many away from this game as they realized the negative perpetual nature of this issue.

Sieging... Oh the glorious sieging. Never have so many people had so much fun without 6 million jews dieing as the result. The act of sieging within Darkfall was excellent. The system that was implemented to serve as the rules and boundaries for sieging was not. The 6 hour window for a siege gave the attacker the ability to choose the time when a siege would begin and as a result, forced players to schedule their lives around the game in order to protect the thousands of manhours spent to accomplish the creation of their player city. There never was an allowance for the defenders to help govern their fate, and with other mechanics such as shard carriers and player weapons causing damage to buildings, the siege system quickly drained the morale and enjoyment out of participating in these large scale battles. Their effect on guilds who participated in wars with sieges every day was catastrophic.

To Conclude:

Darkfall had most of it right. The game was fun and did support an excellent amount of competition. The issue with darkfall was that after about 2 or 3 months of playing the game, balance was completely lost and there was no adequate means of gaining new subscribers to replace old ones. I can conclude that "Time" killed Darkfall in the end. The community was willing to wait for Aventurine to correct their issues. The guilds were willing to wait to see the siege system adjusted so that they could refocus on ENJOYING the mechanics, not fearing their implementation at midnight. Players were willing to endure bugs, stability and imbalance. Everyone expected the hacking and exploiting to be dismembered quickly and severely. To our horror, Aventurine severed themselves from the community, ignored the philisophical issues with their siege system and scarcely banned any hacker, even known hackers while failing to correct simple but game changing bugs within their world.

The sands in the hourglass are nearly gone now. Aventurine squandered 8 months without ever addressing the most pressing issues. So, I will admit that Darkfall succombed to Darkfail. I must look back fondly on the first couple of months of the game where the competition was fierce, the population was high, the community was healthy and we were knee deep in unforgetable wars and I chuckle. Yes, Darkfall was doomed to failure even though many of us insisted that the game could be saved. But if I were to do it all over again, I would have worked even harder to bring more people along at the start so they could have experienced what once was the best game I ever played.]]> Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:39:53 Darkfall Darkfall Valor en