So, I reviewed an MMO.
Some director notes. We start with useful information, get increasingly meta.
Now, I’m traveling for the next 10 days, but a glance around the comments reminds me a couple more things I wanted to bring up. One positive, one negative.
Negatively, I catch someone talking about how altering the bindings improves the control system. Which is, of course, like saying “If I reprogram the game, it becomes playable”. You can fix Darkfall, but having something in an optimum position is the game designer’s job. The example I was going to use was the mysterious case of the run key. It’s – if memory serves me – Shift. However, swapping your hot-key bars default to SHIFT plus a number. So if you’re running away trying to switch to a more appropriate weapon – like your staff to allow a little healing or whatever – you actually swap what set of icons rather than to the weapon you may need for a little thing like saving your life. This is fixable – though notably the key I wanted to select for the task wouldn’t work for some reason – but the idea that a developer hadn’t even thought about it – or, even worse, thought that somehow it was a good idea - speaks volumes.
Positively, I mentioned the the joy of running for my fucking life the first time. There was a later time, when I was involved in a duel with an Orc Beastmaster. I’d lured him away from the pack, around the back of the castle, and was committing more energy to the battle than I normally would. He falls as the moment as another player in fancy armour on a mount comes careening towards me. I react immediately. I have to run. Of course, the castle is at the top of a peak. To escape, I throw myself off the cliff. I have more of a chance of surviving the floor than a direct confrontation. Of course, I die. The guy rides up and rather than doing the coup de grace which would send me back to whence I came, heals me then rides off. A lovely little vignette which comes entirely from Darkfall’s characteristics.
That’s the thing with Darkfall. Despite everything, it’s much more like an MMO I’d like to throw my time in than the anything WoW-derived. Its problem is that it’s just not good enough. To be charitable, you can say “yet”. But “Yet” doesn’t matter in reviews. Marking for potential is forever foolish.
It’s been an interesting gig. I knew it would be the second Tom phoned me late on Thursday night to ask if I’d be willing to do it. Of course, I was half-cut, so happily agreed. I was on contract with Eurogamer for a set number of pieces a month. I was off on holiday for a week, so was happy to take this clearly poisoned chalice. And, as I’ve told everyone who’s asked me about it, I ended up feeling like Mr Wolf from Pulp Fiction. “There’s a dead review with a hole in his head in the Eurogamer car. Can you help us scoop up its brains”. Of course, I’m nothing like Mr Wolf, as it took me two months to get it done.
But I got it done. And it’s an odd gig.
Problem is that there’s so much bad blood. Aventurine didn’t want the review for a variety of reasons, but the obvious one is “whatever score you give it, doesn’t matter.” Give it the same mark, we’re just not budging. Giving it high, we’re a sellout and/or admitting EG’s incompetent. Give it a middling one and you’re splitting the difference. Of course, this is true. The job was trying to make it possible for the review to become something else other than just a straight review. Which is what attracted me to it. It’s a job that required both an enormous ego and a lack of one. As in, you had to be willing to deal with things no straight review ever could dare to while trying to keep the “you” relatively invisible.
Because, really, this was a scooping up bits of brain job… but instead of getting the body in a car-disposer, I had to go and perform a relatively tasteful funeral. Ed’s took a world of shit for this, up to and including threatening phonecalls demanding he be sacked to his not-videogames-connected day-job. (I almost brought this up in my recent piece for Drowned In Sound regarding the whole Death of the Critic thing, where I was comparing what music and games critics get up to. I decided to avoid it, as invoking Darkfall before the review came out would muddy the waters even further).
Conversely, I can also understand the outrage of the fans. While I didn’t read Ed’s review, I read a lot of the response to it. And more importantly, as I say in the review, the people who go native in an MMO have emigrated there. The response is at least partially a patriotic response. If I published a serious column in a newspaper saying the USA was shit, I’d get a similarly vicious response. This is about identity. And, as my time with Darkfall proved, most of the players were perfectly friendly. The actual rampage on the net had one major consequence – a lot of people who weren’t committed started to dismiss them as plain nutsoid. Why on earth would you want to play a game with them? Darkfall’s got many problems, but in my experience, the playerbase isn’t amongst them.
In other words, I wanted to try and do something which was about understanding – try and show what all the sides were thinking and why they were doing so, without actually not writing about what I think. So, the interstitial-essay approach, the (relatively) stripped-back prose style, and so on. Seems to have done okay.
Couple more things:
Firstly, I mentioned I was on contract with EG. Well, I’m not any more. I’ve too much comic work on right now, so can’t really keep it up. As such, it means that RPS is my sole ongoing games journalism commitment – and we don’t do reviews. As such, I could have totally have quit at the end of the review to amp up the drama-llamaism some more. But that’d be becoming the story, and betrays of the lack-of-ego part of the gig upthread. If I didn’t feel so sad over the whole thing, I may have been tempted. But this one mattered too much for stage-gestures.
Secondly, there’s one group I’ve been genuinely furious at over this. That is, a selection of my fellow journalists. Even with a slight amount of thought, you can see why Editor Tom couldn’t back down just from Aventurine saying it’s so. In private conversation, it’s pretty bad. In public conversation, it’s sickening. Seeing long term professionals – and, even worse, long term professionals who I could name reviews which if their editors listened to the reader response should have sacked their sorry asses on the spot – side entirely with Aventurine was the blackest hour of this whole adventure. When you could be the next one to have to deal with this shit, through no fault of your own, a little respect and faith in your fraternity is something you could consider displaying. And if that’s too much, shut the fuck up.
Finally: The Darkfall review was written entirely to the Gallows first album, the Bronx’s third and Sleater Kinney’s Good Things. All are lovely.
Related Stories:
… and you get naked people running round fighting.
“… and you get naked people running round fighting.”
Because they are bad and frightened of losing their trash gear.
But at least they are not too frightened to play the game in the first place.
“You could trivialize the mode shift by just making it so casting a spell auto selects your staff, unsheathes it, takes off your armor to remove the cast penalty, and then casts the spell. Is that the kind of game you want to play?”
Or, you could make it where the weapons unsheath automatically, and leave it at that.
Every aspect of Darkfall seems to be based on making it as painful as possible to play
“When you don’t care about things like that you get things like the WoW mod “facesmasher”, which analyzes the state of your character, your target, buff/debuffs and then tells you exactly the next key to hit for maximum dps. I believe some mods take it a step further and just make the ‘1′ key spammable to do it for you.”
Such mods are looked down upon, and bannable.
Nothing wrong with being a scrub, means you get to flirt with Elliott… ;-)
Also, I’m not calling you hardcore. That’s the last thing I’d want to call you. I’m saying you have a delusion of being hardcore.
@psychopomp
To loot, get on a horse, use the bank, revive a player etc you need to sheathe your weapon, target what you want and then “use” etc. If it’s looting you might have to move 20-30 items one by one from your opponents bag to yours.
So as you finish or decide to stop whatever you were doing because someone is nuking you down you think you should be able to just switch back to spamming your attack with no down time in switching back to combat?
The sheathe and unsheathe are very important in having a sequence that you need to do. Removing it would change the risk/reward ratio in attempting some actions.
As an example- My mount is dead, my opponent is dead with a mount despawned in his bag. I’m getting chased by his buddies. Do I turn and fight? Do I jump in the water to swim? Do I attempt to loot the mount and then quickly flee the scene? What do you do? Quick! Decide…
This stuff can be difficult to do when you are under stress. People screw it up because they start to flap, fail and then they die. This is one of the things that separates newbs from intermediate players….
I World of Warcraft I would trivially autoloot (but only if it was a mob) and then cast my instantcast flying mount or instantly go invisible. I’ve kind of lost interest in that level of game.
It hard to point at any game that doesn’t have some issues with control, visibility and discoverability. I’m sure Darkfall could use some -polish- in this. I personally wouldn’t want them to simplify this much as it would have serious game impacts.
Kieron’s review is bad (I mostly like his work otherwise). Instead of the meta-review and all the gabbie writery stuff he would have put much better time in talking to someone SUCCESSFULLY playing the game to help smooth it out.
Would he have reviewed Eve without getting a bit of help? How do you think Eve would do under that light?
Does every game have to be dead stupid simple? Run around, autotarget, and spam 1234214? Every player type accomodated by every game? Full loot FFA massive guild war FPS style MMO as simple and intuitive as peggle?
AS far as having personal moments in MMORPG between players I never met a player I didn’t like in WoW. Even though someone before said I was good at it just because I didn’t have to change the controls (Which is just insane since Wow’s controls are just fine compared to the games I noramlly play say Dwarf Fortress or something)
Once I was out looking for a special pet for my hunter and I spent 5 days trying to find it (not straight, just looked over my entire game play time for 5 days) Finally I was about to give up with another player came along and told me where the mob was , lead me to it, and helped me tame it! Then we have a good chat about how it was his favorite pet before he got a faction based one and all this jazz and the other.
Another time my friends and I got pwned by this Undead cleric about 10 times. We kept running back at hime and dieing over and over again even though we where about 30 or more levels under him just to stay in character. Finally he just sit there doing funny emotes and healing himself while we kept trying to kill him (since the two sides couldn’t talk to each other on that server) And we had a great time.
In EQ I remember sitting in Nektulos forest and telling newbies that if they went out and got me X amount of wolf pelts ect I would make them armor which raised my armor making abilities and gave them armor. I ended up with a ton of friends doing this and really felt like I was critical to the success of theses characters to the point that if one of them was in trouble I’d run off to save them or help them find their body. Also met several people on there that became great friends outside the game and did a ton of roleplaying ect.
UO , wow UO. I played that game for so long and had so many things happen I could never cover them all in this post. I fell in love (yah I know I’m a nerd, what’s new) with one lady I met there and spend hours and days playing with her and helping her with the things she found important and protecting her because she was mentally unstable :P I joined a guild, got really in good with them, experienced some crazy dungeon raids and PVP encounters that ended with us all dieing. Then just as I was really getting used to be in the guild the guild leader back stabbed me and took all my stuff (Which I had been storing in the guild hall because I couldn’t afford a home at the time) Because he thought I was hitting on his wife :P (I was)
Then there was a famous (To me ) time that a random PvP walked up to my house while my best friend and I where talking. A brief battle took place ending with me splitting him in half with an axe. Then he came back and killed us both with a crazy ass blade spirit that was thrown into my house some how and wouldn’t let me get away or cast any spells : P Then we sat on my front porch and talked for about two hours. The guy started putting an etheral llama statue on the porch and then moving it back into his bag. My friend asked him he was doing, then called me on the telephone .He told me to ban the guy the next time he put the llama down so he’d have no chance of getting it back. I did so, my friend stole his llama and to this day any time he shows his face in Fel this entire guild tries to kill him :P
OH YAH , and one time my friends and I crafted a couple hundred boxs and put them on the roof of moonglow bank so that it was impossible to recall in to the bank spot that 90% of the people used :P
The more I read about Dark Fall the more it sounds like 3d UO . I’m going to HAVE to try this.
@Railick
Lol… I didn’t play much UO past the first few weeks but my friend that played it like a fiend for 2 years after release (then didn’t care to play much mmo until Darkfall) said after a few weeks playing “wow this UO 2″.
It’s a good time… see you in game.
I must chime in and say that Im a new darkfall player and I love it! Its not a game where you fight in a group, its a game where you fight in an army! Being apart of a clan really means something, as you have to really risk your life and gear for the clan, and in return the clan puts a roof over your head and friends at your side.
Its a wonderful game, and like any game, is constantly being patched, upgraded, and updated. Infact, it just recently got an awesome new content addition.
@Adam (This is Railick btw, it randomly changes my name against my will ) Well if someone who played UO for 2 years says it is UO 2 then I’m freaking in.
That comment about the naked raids really reminds me of UO too. I used to run around naked with an axe killing people. It wasn’t because I was afraid of losing my gear so much as I was to lazy to replace it after dieing 50 times. I had a newbie axe and newbie apron which always respawned with me so I was pretty much ready to go as soon as I was revived by a healer.
Now an interesting story. One day I was sitting around the moongate near Yew when a dirty Red chicken shows up. It starts walkin around I think “hey, I can kill this chicken” so I attack it , the chikcen disarmed me and killed me in one hit then he went on kill about 10 other people. Morale of the story is don’t mess with a dirty red chicken, it’s really a dirty red player polymorphed into a chicken ;P
@Adam:
By obtuse you mean you never mastered how to switch your weapons.
By obtuse, I mean precisely that. Hard to understand (which isn’t a problem in itself) but not handled or presented in any clear or intuitive way (which is actually its problem).
Also, when you suggest others don’t understand the game because they aren’t “mastering” something that shouldn’t need to be mastered in the first place, that might be a problem on the apologist side rather than of those who actually tried it. If you’re suggesting the control system only rewards slavish devotion to its arcane workings, you shouldn’t be too surprised when it’s failing to convert more people.
There are two responses-
1- “OMFG DARKFALL IS SO OBTUSE”
2- “OMFG I NEED TO GET BETTER AT THAT”
I picked door number 2.
Kieron and yourself seem to have picked door number 1.
And that’s only because door number 2’s doorknob kept gnawing at my hand. Getting better at something is only worthwhile when there’s some incentive to it. I’ve mentioned IL-2 Sturmovik for a reason and if it wasn’t clear, it’s because the control is hard to understand but provides an affordable and elegant learning curve (unlike Darfall, which ditches the curve for a handful of zig-zags and chasms). I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress lately, which is completely impenetrable to most people, and I can’t remember one single moment where I felt like giving up because of its control method.
Yet, I can think of several in Darkfall. Does that make me a quitter? Does that mark me as another one among the unwashed masses who will never fully experience the rapture of Darfall’s many joyous gifts? Quite likely yes, but I don’t regret it in the slightest. When you’re developing something “forever”, it pays to have in mind not everyone will wait forever for it to play well.
to be fair Diogo Dwarf Fortress’s control scheme isn’t all that bad. It gives you everything you need to know you just have to read and soon or later you’ll remember where everything is. For example I can build a wall 50 tiles long very quickly by just tapping the same combo of keys over and over again. Of coures sometimes I random put something I don’t want in the middle of my wall because I typoed ;P also I hate it when I accidently use a piece of wood for a wall instead of stone, I just feel like wooden walls should be weaker.
“Does every game have to be dead stupid simple?”
No
But simple games shouldn’t make everything as difficult as possible, in order to create the illusion of complexity.
“I World of Warcraft I would trivially autoloot (but only if it was a mob) and then cast my instantcast flying mount or instantly go invisible.”
There are no instant cast mounts, *and* you can’t mount up in combat. Period.
Three seconds is a long time to be standing still, anyway. Ask an caster who PvP’s.
Your move.
@Diego
So using your Sturmovik comparison there would be no reason to have flaps, carburetor and trim controls? That would be bad game design? Or you like the fact that there are things to learn and get used to in your game? Things that if you don’t use at the right moment you will fail (and get drylooted)?
Why is the fact that you have to sheath and unsheath your weapon before digging through your bags is too “obtuse”? That’s not just more real than instant cast button spamming? In a “real” world would you dig through your pack with a 2 handed broadsword? Would you sheath the weapon and be somewhat vulnerable?
The reality is that your criticism of the Darkfall controls is “obtuse” ie just you being difficult. You haven’t really replied substantively to my post. Instead you’ve used multiple metaphors to say Darkfall is hard but yet not had the stones to say “it should be like game x”.
In Sturmovik you were motivated because you percieved there was an interesting game that was worth mastering. It’s ok not to feel that Darkfall is that game.
I would point out that there is literally no other game like it on the market. PVP situations are ALWAYS more complicated than any PVE raid. PVP situations are further complicated by risk (the looting), open world(you never know whats around the corner), guilds (who are your friends vs their friends), capturable resources (changing balance of power), no autotargeting exposes peoples reflexes etc.
I think not getting Darkfall because of the controls is indicative of someone that does not care to play such a game. If you wanted to play this game you would find the minor motivation to deal with your control issues (it does need polish just not reworking imo).
I simply don’t hear Darkfall players crying about the controls. Most of them seem to feel its painful when you screwup but interesting too.
This kind of indicates that its not the controls but the intrinsic values of the gamer.
@Psychopomp
“”"“Does every game have to be dead stupid simple?”
No
But simple games shouldn’t make everything as difficult as possible, in order to create the illusion of complexity. “”"
Your dead simple posts shouldn’t hint at vast levels of complexity.
“”"“I World of Warcraft I would trivially autoloot (but only if it was a mob) and then cast my instantcast flying mount or instantly go invisible.”
There are no instant cast mounts, *and* you can’t mount up in combat. Period.
Three seconds is a long time to be standing still, anyway. Ask an caster who PvP’s.
Your move.”"”
Gank character with feral druid.. out of combat… instant cast flight form… spam /lol at pursuers and you.
Maybe you should play that game some more…
It should be like Mount & Blade.
Really, there’s a reason nobody makes a game to game comparison with a sentence like that unless they’re trying to stir up an argument.
And, controls or whatever, bad is bad. Doesn’t matter whether one player can get used to them and one player can’t. Doesn’t matter whether one person’s seen something similar before and another hasn’t. It’s hard to convince someone else to play something that, on the face of it, is flawed in many ways, no matter what amazing secrets might lie deep beneath the surface. If it’s easy to play then, of course, even if the game’s bad a player is more likely to slip into it, a la WoW. Ideally you’d want a combination of the two – a good game that’s easy to get into, so you get trapped in it. Not that I’ve seen an MMO do that well yet.
An example for you: I simultaneously love and hate Eve, and yet haven’t really ever managed to directly convince someone else to play it yet – if they can dig through and get to best parts of the game, and they like that kind of thing in a game then they’ll probably play it. But it has bad stuff. So all I do is inform them of the game, what I know about it, and what they should expect, along with what I thought of it. I leave it up to them to decide whether they want to try it or not, and whether they do or not is up to them. Even if they’ll never get to the far end game they could stay in it – even Eve seems to rely on its casual players to some degree, and tries to make it easier for new people (they’ve even worked on the new player experience a bit to help out). If they seriously need more convincing before they’ll go as far as trying the demo, or need convincing after the demo, I’ll just ward them away – it’s probably not for them. Because, good as Eve can be in many ways, it’s also rubbish in many others.
Even Jim said himself: “I can’t honestly recommend Eve Online. I play it, and it’s remains one of the most fulfilling, frustrating, exciting and excruciating gaming experiences I’ve had. Eve is a game that has expanded the list of interesting stuff in the world, and it has created an utterly unique and beautiful game in the process. But I can’t recommend it. I can recommend Peggle to anyone, but Eve, well, I’d say that you should consider yourself warned.”
And that’s basically what Kieron did. He can’t really recommend it to anyone as easily as Peggle, or Portal, or Tetris. It’s not a game for everyone. He didn’t try to treat it as such, far as I can tell.
Telling everyone they should like a game, and hinting at everyone that’s uncomfortable with the idea that they’re sub-par examples of human beings (”Intrinsic values of the gamer?”), won’t make it so. And make just put them off :)
[It's not like this isn't common, of course: loving a game so much you feel it's right to defend it, and defend the game so much, so passionately, that you end up putting people off instead. It happens everywhere, in everything. Maybe someone will work out how to prevent it and make everybody happy again, maybe with giant global hugs. But I doubt it'll happen. We're only human. It'll probably require everyone in the world doing the impossible and agreeing on something! Like that'll happen.]
“I simply don’t hear Darkfall players crying about the controls.”
The ones who don’t like it aren’t going to stick around.
“Your dead simple posts shouldn’t hint at vast levels of complexity.”
Way to dodge the point there, champ.
Also, I have not tried to hint at, nor do I have delusions of, complexity.
“Gank character with feral druid.. out of combat… instant cast flight form… spam /lol at pursuers and you.”
Touche. I’ve never leveled a Druid.
Even Jim said himself: “I can’t honestly recommend Eve Online. I play it, and it’s remains one of the most fulfilling, frustrating, exciting and excruciating gaming experiences I’ve had. Eve is a game that has expanded the list of interesting stuff in the world, and it has created an utterly unique and beautiful game in the process. But I can’t recommend it. I can recommend Peggle to anyone, but Eve, well, I’d say that you should consider yourself warned.”
Unfortunately, most people aren’t as level headed as Jim.
@Adam:
You haven’t really replied substantively to my post.
I’m not sure in how many more ways I can explain the word “unintuitive”.
Instead you’ve used multiple metaphors to say Darkfall is hard
Also not sure how pointing out its control scheme is clunky is a metaphor. Now, if I were to say Darkfall’s controls were a challenge for people who don’t think nailing pudding to the wall is hard enough, that might be one.
but yet not had the stones to say “it should be like game x”.
Why would the size or mere presence of my genitals have anything to do with it? Not that I mind people discussing my stones – they are, after all, works of art, petite but sturdy marathon champs. But why should I even feel the need to address Darkfall’s controls by claiming it should be like X or Y game? Not only would that go against fans’ prefered method of defense (ie., “Darkfall is its own thing and should not be compared to other titles like World of Warcraft”) it’s also not very reliable, is it? I mean, I could say I’d want it to be like Dwarf Fortress or Wii Sports (or that weird-ass japanese arcade I once saw that simulated sexual penetration but have since then forgotten its name) in terms of control and neither would help – even assuming they could be an honest opinion. It’s pointless and disruptive, since it does not address the fundamental issue and bears little reference to the original object of discussion. I could say I’d like it to learn some lessons of functionality from Neverwinter Nights… And can you honestly tell me no Darkfall fan is gonna wail at that suggestion? Citing different games, different themes, different experiences and so on? In fact, I thoroughly despised NWN (its official campaign, at least) and can say the controls were rather optimal for what they were trying to do. In Darkfall I feel the opposite – I enjoy the premise and concept of the game, but the controls put me off. Andy’s suggestion of it being like Mount and Blade, at least, seems spot on.
I simply don’t hear Darkfall players crying about the controls.
Yet even you, a fervent defender of the game, admit they need a bit more polish.
I like you Diogo. You two should get your own blog where you just argue back and forth about Darkfall and see where it goes ;) I know I’d check back and read it every single day.
@Diogo
“”"I’m not sure in how many more ways I can explain the word “unintuitive”.”"”
Thats my point about your writing and your metaphors, why are you repeating yourself? Your posts consist of a Darkfall’s controls as a doorknob that bites your hand(not just a metaphor but a mixed one) and “zigzags and chasms” (another metaphor).
These are both metaphors and also fairly content free versions of “Diogo doesn’t like Darkfall controls, they are bad umkay?”.
I proposed a few reasons why you might want multiple steps in some of the actions in an earlier post and then I show some similarities to the Sturmovik game that you held up as a model for how Darkfall should be….and yet you respond with? Well lets look at your next post?
typingtyping”I don’t want to propose anything”typingtyping”Maybe it could be more like Mount and Blade like the other guys says”
Ok well I was going to respond to Andy anyway.
@Andy re Mount and Blade controls
How is it really different than Mount and Blade? I do not recall but I thought M&B had a sheath/unsheath of the “equipped” weapons? Darkfall also has a staff, bow, 2h, 1h and shield always available to play with? Actually anything in your bag really. Darkfall also has potentially 50ish spells to manage as well.
Darkfall also has “equipped” weapons but you can equip anything in your bag. It must then be unsheated for the reasons I’ve exhaustively listed above.
Mount and Blade has an “in combat” mechanism (which doesn’t work well for an open world pvp environment in general) to restrict your weapon choices to before combat. You can then pick 1 of 2 “in combat”(am I remembering this correctly?).
As I said earlier “in combat” is very prone to basic glitchiness, is annoying in what it restricts, arbirtrary in when you are/are not in combat. In an open world game those flaws become more pronounced, for example in large group combat someone in your party is in combat so are you automatically? I really really like the fact that Darkfall does not have “in combat”, “in combat” is like the fps barrel/crate of mmo’s (that’s a simile for those watching).
If someone knows Mount and Blade and/or Darkfall well enough to respond in more detail I think it turn this conversation on a more interesting tack.
As far as I know in Mount and Blade you have a limit to how many weaposn you can bring directly on your character but you also have access to a chest where you can change your weapons in the midst of combat. (This may have changed however, I know a lot changed since I lost my Key and was unable to patch the game) IT allowed you to switch between weapons on the fly just by hitting a button and there is no sheath/unsheathed (since the only time you use your weapon is in combat so whats the point of sheathing it right?) The only time you get to sheath your weapon is when you’re sheathing it in another person’s stomach ;) I love that game so much.
would it be fair to say Dark Fall is like a combo of UO and Mount and Blade, if this is the case I shalt leave my wife and kids and dedicate the rest of my life to playing it.
Adam: I don’t know, I barely played M&B (played the demo ages ago so don’t remember much, only just bought the full game which I haven’t touched yet), and I haven’t played Darkfall, I just picked M&B as the example “it should be like” game of choice since I figured it was probably close anyway, but I’m guessing more refined, if my vague memories of the M&B demo and the descriptions of controls here are anything to go by.
But seriously, I just needed something for my “argument fuel” point, which you and Diogo may have (can’t be certain due to other factors involved) unwittingly proven for me.
Now I feel cruel :(
I’m a Darkfall player and I didn’t have a problem with the review. The best parts of the game were missing, but complaining about that would be like complaining about a WoW review not covering top-end raid content and arena matches. Darkfall’s endgame is the city holding, alliance building, political manuevering, money-making, resource gathering and massive warfare most of us have become addicted to.
Honestly, the controls are a bit awkward until changes are made to keybindings and chat options – that’s just how it is. It certainly didn’t bother me, but I’m one of the players that rebinds my keys in every MMO I play before I even get 10 steps from the initial spawn. Still, saying rebinding for the sake of fluidity is like the developer forcing you to ‘reprogram their game’ is a bit much. That’s like saying that changing your interface options in WoW to include additional hotbars is WoW making you redesign it’s UI in order to access the full range of your abilities fluidly. Really, it’s not that bad.
All this stuff about the game being painful is, well, subjective. I wouldn’t play a game if I didn’t enjoy it. The ‘challenging’ part isn’t about item loss or overcoming a cumbersome control scheme. The challenge is in being given the opportunity to do anything at any time. Sounds easy, right? Except you don’t have dozens of convenient quests telling you what to kill and where to go next. After the initial run of goblin quests, you’re basically told “you’re on your own now, go get ‘em!”. I loved it.
I didn’t realize how much I loved it until NA1, though. When I first started on EU1, I had serious difficulty killing more than 1 goblin at a time. When I started on NA1 with the same zero-skill character, I wiped the floor with entire goblin camps without even pausing to rest. How many games can you honestly say allow for player ability to make that much of a difference from the first moment you spawn into the game?
I’m hooked for as long as the game lasts, barring some catastrophic change in philosophy on the part of AV. I just can’t go back to an overly helpful and restrictive level-based character advancement system like 99 games out of 100 use now…I’m too used to the freedom of doing anything at any time despite my character’s level – the time I spend just allows me to do it better.
“Your posts consist of a Darkfall’s controls as a doorknob that bites your hand(not just a metaphor but a mixed one) “
Not really. That particular answer was to your own metaphor for people who gave up on Darkfall’s controls (choosing doors). It kinda helps to keep the context of my replies in mind if you want to take issue against them, and to remember what you wrote yourself before waving the anti-metaphor banner.
“the Sturmovik game that you held up as a model for how Darkfall should be”
I used Sturmovik as an example of a game that, like Darkfall, aims to provide “a challenging environment for a seasoned player to master”. Not as an example of what Darkfall should be, but what of Darkfall doesn’t manage to do very well.
typingtyping”I don’t want to propose anything”typingtyping”Maybe it could be more like Mount and Blade like the other guys says”
I said his suggestion was spot on but it wasn’t me who did the suggestion, was it? Besides, you’re only looking to fuel the argument not otherwise. Earlier you accused me of not having the stones (something the missus would gladly dispute) of saying Darkfall should be like game X or Y. Then, when I apparently do it, you completely gloss over it and ramble on about me having done it.
So, which is it?
If you don’t like my balls just say it, man. But don’t play marble with them.
1. The Review is one of my favourite reviews ever
2. Did you see the bit above this comment where people started laying into each others metaphors? Brilliant. BRILLIANT.
You started your review with “Of course, I haven’t played it enough.”
You should have stopped there.
When a mainstream journalist like yourself reviews an ultraniche game like DFO … well you know what I’m going to say.
Not to mention the fact that because of the previous “review” by Mr. Ed your hands were tied. You’re a “professional”, and that means you never had the option to give DFO a better score. Your first priorities are with your colleague and Eurogamer (you know the people that pay you money). Giving DFO a higher score would have made them look like amateurs.
Disclaimer: No I don’t play DFO. I playedtested the beta for a while, and I didn’t like it at all.