Darkfall Re-Reviewed By Eurogamer

Your Ayumi Hamasaki video scares me. Scares me greatly.

Scott, you’re missing the point. It was never about the score. It was about the review just being factually wrong. Kieron’s review was spot-on – he nailed the interface issues perfectly. That’s what a good reviewer does. The first review was junk, and the first reviewer should have been talked to, if not fired.

Adventuring may have got their 4/10, but this re-review wastes no time in slamming the game’s obvious flaws in every other sentence. It’s almost as if to say, “well, if you guys are just upset about a number, we’ll be happy to increase that number for you, while anyone who bothers to read this review will realize the game defies a rating system by deserving a negative number rating.”

I’m oddly scared and interested by that video. Both in a greater amount that Darkfall could produce.

Let this be a lesson! Complain and you can get your review score doubled by Eurogamer.

It sucked then, it sucks now so I’ll just keep moving.

@dartwick
The one good result of DarkFall existing, is that after seeing all these music videos I seem to have lost my racist impulse to believe all Asian chicks are inherently hot. Now I truly understand they can be just as annoying as everyone else on earth

Just watched the video. Nope…still HOT!

My prejudice still stands

I still have yet to play this, or really look into it any further than their own forums. The smarmy attitudes of the developers are just fantastic, I really need to find a job somewhere that allows me to tell people to suck my dick. (Without working a street corner, I guess.)

I never knew you were such an Ayumi fan, Lum-san.

Oh wait, I take it back. He said EVE wasn’t EVE at the start…

@Adam
Its not that DarkFall its cool or not (i bet that many of the people saying “terribad” havent played it), its just that the most stelwart defenders of that game have been really quiet, that tell us that its just another mediocre MMO in a market full of them. Move along, theres nothing to watch in here (exept Ayumi of course, if you are into that).

“…be sure you don’t miss out on the really tremendously cool game that Darkfall is…up to you though. It is the internet.”

It is indeed the internet and, as GX1080 pointed out, the internet is chock full of mediocre games that may or may not improve with months more patching and fixes. Maybe it will be another EVE…after it adds manufacturing, exploration, trading,missions,…well the list is extensive, lets just say after it puts some sand in the sandbox.

@jujutsu

There are serious limits in the very game design which will keep most any human scale mmo (ie not stars, ships and instance portals oh i mean jumpgates) to a significantly smaller server population than Eve Online allows.

I say this so we realistically assess how much Darkfall (or Mortal Online etc) can ever be “Eve”.

Trading will be limited to the economy of 10k players (at least in Darkfall which I believe has one of largest non-instanced worlds out there) vs 400k plus for Eve.

Manufacturing – not sure what extent you mean but Darkfall does allow the manufacture and sale of large ships and land tanks. Definitely not nearly as sophisticated as Eve.

Exploration- Darkfall has one very large world that has a great deal to see. It’s very well done and appears hand crafted. Darkfall is all the more impressive as there is no gating/instances as you run around with no loading. Eve has 5000 instanced star systems, many that very well could be computer/procedurally generated. This allows “exploration” and conquering of far territories. I think a human scale mmo could procedurally generate landmasses, mobs spawns and npc towns but I don’t know of one that has.

Trading – Darkfall has universal banks and somewhat uniformly distributed resources and so it is right now crippled in how sophisticated the economy is. Most of the players want this to change and it’s just unclear how much Adventurine agrees.

Missions – I’ve never met an Eve player that was in the slightest impressed with the “lore filled pve” missions/quests in Eve. Darkfall doesn’t have them really either. Most of the missions are copy/pasted from agent to agent in different stations/factions according to my friends. I personally don’t miss questing from other games, it was always deadly dull.

With those design differences in mind I think Darkfall is well on it’s way to “being” Eve as the economy gets more sophisticated.

@Adam
Your point about being a ‘human scale’ mmo is well taken. However, it seems to me that the game systems included or not included are the result of design choices and scale per se. Darkfall is touted as a ffa pvp game. That’s all well and good but there seems to be little else.
I don’t want to appear to be an EVE fanboi but I think it is much more of a sandbox game that Darkfall in that you do have ffa pvp if you want but there is much more to do if pew-pew isn’t your cup of tea. I’ve been having fun for months without any pvp [although I got podded twice last night so I may be making up for it quickly ].
I know that the hype about EVE is all about pew-pew but if you look at the stats [or just look around in game] the bulk of the population at any given time is in empire space…mostly in the Caldari region of empire space.
I haven’t played Darkfall and don’t have any plans to do so but, imo, it will have to add a whole lot of sand to the sandbox to be a human scale EVE…

Hmm. Aparently people always forget something about EVE: it was planned. Nobody its saying that CCP over hyped their game and then they throwed shit and expected it to tank. They also thowed half baked shit, but they were honest about it and they had great connection with the community since a begining (Hint: Hire a CP right when you open forums).

So they builded for their niche, and their niche wasnt just hardcore PvPers, they were also the guys that wanted an economical empire (thats why the slow pace).

And giving the players the ability of scam others (of course unintended at first, but watching the suscription numbers rise every time somebody does something big) keeped the things interesting.

What DarkFall have: A bunch of designers (Tasos at lead) that spew over hyped bullshit whatever they wanted and now they barely are filling it, the same bunch of designers that are so desperate for the virtual blowjobs of the exploiters despite that they hurt the game that they let them do as they please and dont swing the banhammer until they have no other choice.

Oh and of course they DONT HAVE THE BALLS to do a server reset because they dont want to bother the special kids.

Yes they are fixing the exploits, yes they are rebalancing and yes they can keep at float. But they are not agressive enough against the players that break the rules. So that mishmash only produce another MEDIOCRE MMO in an -oversaturated of them- industry.

Im just not impressed (neither anybody around here, even the former stelwart defenders). Maybe Mortal Online its going to be better, i hear less hype about it.

@Bonedead

Right on. Love this game, hope you find some time to come back and fight.

@EpicSquirt

All games ship with bugs, Eve is no exception.

@Gx1080

I don’t think there are many people that agree that they want their characters wiped.

But I see we both agree in a glass half-full/half-empty way that Adventurine is delivering what they need to deliver.

MO hasn’t shipped and has tons of work to even get to that.

If you are actually serious about playing a game like this Darkfall is here now, stable and fun.

@Jujutsu

Eve was simple at the beginning because it had to be.

When you create these game economies it very unpredictable how the players will “game” them so no sane game developer will try to create “Eve” level economies right out of the gate.

For example Eve had NPC sellers from the early days because they needed to provide people for buying and selling of basic goods. They took them out later as the economy matured. Seven(?) years later and ten major expansions later Eve is pretty sophisticated.

Taken out of context, the economies of Darkfall or Mortal Online aren’t at Eve’s level or ever will be. Take in context of the game spaces they employ I think they will be impressive in and of themselves. I look forward to seeing

There are quite a few crafters/gatherers in our guild that don’t do much else for what it’s worth. They don’t agree that there is nothing to do besides pewpew. I think the fact that gear crafting matters and resources are important in the position of the guild/individual makes a huge difference in whether it’s fun or not. Incidentally gathering from pve mobs is a big part of the resources needed by a guild. Adventurine definitely got that part right.

However I will agree that probably anyone that doesn’t like the FPS core gameplay and combat isn’t going to like the game.

I personally can’t stand the core combat of Eve. The fact that I can’t take immediate control of my ship at all is terrible gameplay -for me-. It why I can admire Eve’s scale but be uninterested in playing.

EVE Online is a completely shitty game, in many ways.

* The gameplay mechanic is ultimately uninvolved that combat is essentially “turn on guns, set optimal range, wait” with the occasional application of something like a shield-booster thrown in.

* The balance is completely borked in that you’ve about as much chance of encountering a fair fight as you do being dealt a Royal Flush.

* The whole thing is one protracted grind where you turn asteroids into components whose sole purpose is to explode at the hands of players such as yourself, rendering the whole point of combat to avoid it.

However, that said, the players have taken the game and made it their own by exalting the spectacle of the thing at every turn. It has all the appeal and logistics of a perpetual trainwreck in that it may be a terrible waste of time and life but one can nonetheless appreciate the drama that went into it.

@Vetarnias

I think the way to “crack” into Eve is actually do something called “Eve University”.

They have essentially setup a Corp that is entirely there to get you trained and into the larger game at which you would find some more people to form a corp or make connections to get you into one.

Guilds are part of most of these games. You might not find its that bad joining one…

Nevermind being trusted to join a top-flight corporation. You’re disqualified simply because you haven’t got the years of offline skill grinding and accumulated venture capital to participate.

Truly, EVE Online has succeeded as an unregulated capitalism Sim. The Haves and Have Nots are well-established. The rich get richer by simply buying and reprocessing the spoils that the poor don’t have the resources to – these are the average standing ore purchase offers you’ll see in training space.

If EVE Online’s economy was socialist by nature, it wouldn’t have that great sandbox appeal, but it would probably be a lot more fun. Or maybe it would show another example of a major flaw in a system by allowing corruption to rise to the top and ruin everything.

@EpicSquirt
The difference is the level of rampant paranoia in EVE. The “good” guilds in other games may not be open to new applicants a lot of the time, but once you’re in, you’re in. In EVE, after six months with a corp you could still be suspected of being a deep cover mole.

@Geldonyetich
Players who are at all bothered about making money in MMOs (beyond covering their raiding/PVP expenses) usually view the economy as “PVP by other means” – they do business to crush, and wouldn’t find a socialist economy very much fun.
EVE does lack social mobility, but that’s because the game doesn’t allow for disruptive innovations. There’s no way to be the Google of the EVE universe and vault from nowhere to God-Emperors Of The Internet. The sources of wealth are locked down by the wealthy and carved up into feifdoms, more like medieval Europe than a dynamic modern economy.

Death is nature’s wealth-redistribution model. Nobody dies in EVE Online, monolithic assets just float about as unbreakable pillars until somebody accidentally misplaces the keys to disband the alliance.

Actually, except for the misplaced keys part, that happens in real life despite death existing. It happens through inheritances (extremely wealthy families) and corporations, which have their own succession mechanisms.

You’re taking me too literally.

I was just pointing out that, for all its claims to dynamic content, things in EVE Online tend to stay awfully static. The balance is such that eventually an alliance has a space so heavily fortified that invasion seems infeasible. The BoB disillusion has shown that the only way to win at the game is not to play it on the level.

Perhaps the trouble is that time doesn’t touch this game. Players subscriptions may lapse, but their assets remain floating about indefinitely. There’s no real maintenance; parts last forever. EVE Online is sort of a game that doesn’t need to be played.

@Guy

The problem starts when I see some players actually think of the no-holds-barred capitalistic world of EVE as a good thing. When I complained about nothing stopping fraud in EVE on another forum, I was offered the usual responses that the poor are poor (in real life, mind you) because they don’t do their research and just whine instead (wish they’d say that to the single mother of three children), that “natural selection is a good thing” (even though something definitely went awry in the transfer of that scientific principle to the field of socioeconomic ideology), that regulations are bad, that government intervention is about protecting stupid people (rather than the weakest in society), and that I should just read Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” to be enlightened (even though I’m well aware of some of the controversies surrounding both book and author). As I’m always been wary of people who can’t differentiate between a game and reality, and that the libertarian fanatics appear to be drooling over the game (while I despise that ideology), why should I want to stick around?

Oh well, the whole conversation’s over there: mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/14/view/forums/thread/242539/page/2

So they dismissed me as a whiner who didn’t want to learn how to play. The problem with this reasoning is that at its core, the real matter is that EVE is boring. I would gladly be content with being just another nobody in the game, if the game to which I had access proved interesting to some degree.

Take Puzzle Pirates, my ideal comparison point. I’ve never been in a large alliance, let alone one powerful enough to run an island. And even then, chances are that I would just have been an ordinary officer in that alliance just running a ship instead of an island governor. Did I mind? No, not really, because the game to which I had access was varied enough to offset the loss of a meaningful role in the political game. I ran stalls, owned a small fleet, etc. And puzzles were at the centre of the game; as long as you enjoyed doing them, did you need anything else? Sure, I tired of it eventually, but it took months.

In comparison, I started playing EVE on June 24. Mining asteroids was fun for a week or two, then shipping it to market became an annoyance, so I resettled as close as possible to my selling point. Then mining got boring, to the extent that I would mine asteroids just as much as I needed to. Finally, two weeks into the game, I had to wait a week for my skills to level up to be able to sail my already-bought mining barge; that broke what was left of my spirit. At the time, my friends were already indicating that they would leave the game as well, so what reason could I now have to return?

I’ve been told that my approach to EVE was wrong — that I should not be waiting for skills to level up — but then what else could I do? I’m not in a corp, if you exclude that which my friends started; I wouldn’t trust, nor be trusted by, a corporation run by a complete stranger; I don’t really like PvP (especially not the griefing kind); and I’m sick of mining. The only reason I log in these days, as I still have a month to go, is to replenish the skills queue, on the off chance that I could change my mind and renew. Since I’m past the 1.6 million point training speed bonus, that’s pretty much once every three to five days.

So it isn’t, and hasn’t been, a matter of L2P in my case. If anything, I like steep learning curves in games, except when it gets to the point of being steep beyond what I am supposed to learn as a result, like those command inconsistencies in Dwarf Fortress. EVE, while being complex, has such gaping holes that I simply can’t excuse even if they turned out to be deliberate design choices, yet similarly can’t overlook as unimportant; corporation management, for instance. Sure, I was not the CEO of our small corp, but it seemed to me that the corp management interface was a step down from Puzzle Pirates, as though CCP voluntarily left a gaping hole to make sure that people with enough rank could steal everything your corp kept in its hangars, instead of just part of your corporation inventory. I saw huge parts of the game remain unused (at least among the Empire space outcasts), like offering shares in other corporations or meaningful contracts, even of the courier type, because everyone is either a scammer or worried about being scammed.

My interest in most MMO’s has always been economic (and yeah, I guess you could regard it as a form of PvP), but it has always been above-board. So seeing people gleefully announcing their latest scam (along with the victims’ names) on the official forums is too unsettling for me. As for a legitimate business pattern, all I have seen so far is that most of the money seems to be made in tier 2 and tier 3 items, which are impossible to produce without research facilities, which in turn require a player-owned structure you can use — hence back to this need for a corporation. I’m sure there is some money to be made producing newbie stuff, but it’s probably small potatoes in a crowded market, so the game deliberately excludes new players from the economic game.

I saw one of those EVE ads on a website recently, and I jotted down the numbers it mentioned: Week 1: 500,000 ISK; Month 3: 180 million ISK; over a year: 4.7 billion ISK. So this is, according to CCP, how much a player should be expecting to have on this time scale. When I see people on the forums talk of a billion ISK as though that were a trivial amount, I’m tempted to agree with Geldon: players starting out are nobodies, and will stay poor for the better part of a year (assuming they don’t get scammed or don’t go broke). Add on top of that being forced to join a corporation which, in turn, will treat you like a mole, and you’ll understand why I have tired of EVE.

Hmm. First, EVE do have context, all the good materials and stuff are in 0.0 space. And miners need the alliances for being able to go in there without dying. All all the routes from 0.0 to empire space pass through low sec, so theres also activity in there. Maybe it isnt much, but its better than the nothing that DarkFall offers.

There is a concept in EVE, thats why it hasnt failed like PlanetSide and WWIIOnline. Those games do were long-running deathmatches and for that theres Half-Life 3 and Counter-Strike.

IMO you do need to be a “misery inducing barbarian” for lasting in a game like that, not only for being able to have a good win/losses ratio, also for go and search your own adventure instead of staying in empire space.

Yes it appeals to the worst of the Internet, yes it isnt for everybody. But so far it had worked for them.

To your point geldon, whats the difference between acumulating power killing a raid boss and acumulating power killing other players?. Its still open ended and thats the point of MMOs. Most people want an undisturbed e-peen massage where they are the supreme heroes. No MMO can provide that.

Vetarnias: I can certainly sympathize with your having to deal with free-market-solves-all types. Funny thing: governments will always naturally arise in a society; you might say government is a result of free market forces. EVE being a game, on the other hand, puts all world mechanics in the hands of the developers, not to mention the “Empire”, thus artificially maintaining its low-sec Wild West surrounding high-sec Empire space dynamic.

I too, wish there was more to EVE.

“coup de tat”

Geldo, I don’t know if you did that on purpose, but that’s an awesome combination of “tit for tat” and “coup d’etat”.