Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry Ninjalooter

Ten Ton Hammer has braved the rocks and shoals of Darkfall, this month’s MMO kinda-sorta-maybe-launch.

I’m proud to report that no player has managed to kill me yet (though a few have tried) so I haven’t had my body looted. Instead, what these players will do is wait for you to get jumped by more than one mob, then loot the tombstones (mobs become tombstones instead of corpses) while you’re fighting for your life. This is old school EverQuest ninja-looting brought back tenfold. I can’t count the amount of times this happened to me.

Just in case, for some unimaginable reason, you were planning on allowing your teenager to play this game… there is no filter. I don’t mean there’s no filter in the chat channels, I mean there doesn’t appear to be a filter with the naming system either. A sizable number of the players I ran across had names that I quite literally cannot type here and still keep things teen friendly.

Speaking of things non-filtered, let me step back and describe the general chat channels (Public and Racial) a little better. You know how people like creating various drinking games based around the concept of a phrase or action being repeated? I strongly encourage you to resist this urge when it comes to Darkfall. If you had to take a shot every time someone said newb, carebear, gay, or a smorgasbord of other words I simply won’t repeat here, you would be dead from alcohol poisoning in less than an hour. While the game is still very much in beta, what I experienced in the world is still the worst example of an online community I’ve ever encountered, without question.

Despite all of this, the combat model and the reviewer’s “inner old-schooler” makes it a basically positive ‘preview’. Which goes to show you how much community matters in a game!