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.

2. Did you see the bit above this comment where people started laying into each others metaphors? Brilliant. BRILLIANT.

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.

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.

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 :(

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]