Darkfall First Impressions

[Tbone]

Well, I like this game. It's not going to be easy. If you get pissed off easily, this is not the game for you. We're going to lose a lot. But hopefully we're going to win a lot as well.

So far there's about three of us playing - me, lik, and lithium. Feel free to yell at Broin, Bell, and Fuse for having keys and rarely being online. So with three of us we're only operating at 10% capacity. We're getting ganked a lot and dying and all that good stuff, but we're learning A LOT, which is the important part.

Essentially, don't plan on doing anything by yourself. You're going to be in a clan and we're going to have lots of enemies and they will kill you no matter what you are doing. The only way to survive is to be stronger, more prepared, and have more of you in everything that you do. I see the game operating a bit like a never-ending game of Risk. We'll be working hard to claim a city or hamlet, then working hard to defend it, then working hard to take over our enemies. Where you place your cities can be strategic to takeovers or resources or whatever else.

Right now every hamlet/city we've run across has been claimed. They're going to go fast. We'll either need to beat people to the punch or take over one right from the get go. There's not many safe areas in Darkfall, so having a city with your own guard towers is going to be essential to our survival as well.

It's a hardcore game. There's not much penalty for killing anyone, so you really can't trust anyone. At first I was surprised there weren't many mob spawns out and about - it made it seem rather easy to get around. But now I realize the reason why - other players will quickly become more dangerous and plentiful than any mob aggro. Hell, we were toting around a clan shard and took the long route around just to avoid running into any hostile players.

So just be prepared - when you first get in, you are going to die a lot and feel like you can't get anything done. But that's why we're all here together, right? Hopefully when we ALL get in TOGETHER, we can accomplish some big things.

[Setun]

Teamwork and maybe, just maybe, some friendship...anything is possible with friendship!

[Zero]

If I can handle Halo, I can handle anything, hahaha.  I believe Halo was the first time I ever experienced anger, hahaha.

[Anonymous]

Wow, sounds scary... LETS DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!! hows range compare to Melee so far? Are we going to need some hard hitters?

[Anonymous]

Needless to say, I can't wait.

[Tbone]

I spent some more time in the game today. No one else was in, so I decided to try some solo things.

The first thing I did was experiment with crafting. I managed to buy the Bowery skill to make bow and arrows. Each specific craft needs a tool and you need to be at the right workbench. I decided to convert the timber we had been gathering into wood. So I went and got a saw and got to work. The success rate was 95%, so I had no problems cranking out 44 pieces of wood. For every 5 timber I would get 2 wood. I wanted to try to make an arrow, but to my dismay I had only managed to mine stone and needed iron.

So I stripped my character down and set out with a pickaxe to find some iron. Doing a little bit of reading, I found there were two different types of nodes - stone and ore. I could find stone everywhere, but couldn't find ore. I remembered a mining town full of baddies and thought that might have some. No, it didn't. I wasn't sure where to find the ore. I'm sure there are mines somewhere, but I didn't find any.

Giving up on my mining, I decided to do some more exploring in hopes of finding more clan cities. We had been exploring a lot to the north and east, so I figured I would head southwest to the coast. Along the way I saw a few ore rocks (labeled as metal spawn, I believe) that seemed to be close to baddy headquarters. Didn't have my pickaxe with me, though, so I ignored it and kept traveling.

I got all the way to the coast without finding a beam of light (from what I can tell, city and hamlet clanstones have beams of light shooting into the sky...though I am not certain if that is the case if they are unbinded). There was an island on the map that seemed fairly close, so I set out swimming.

Swimming was going pretty well until all the sudden I got attacked by something. I then saw something swim in front of me and was just able to make out the words "Great White Shark". Haha. It took quite a few chunks out of me, and I was pretty low in health when I finally reached my island.

The island was small, and to my disappointment did not contain any claimable spots. I did find what seemed to be some sort of skeleton voodoo altar and a bunch of baddies I didn't mess with on a dock. Feeling defeated, I began my swim back to a different point on the coast.

I got back to the main land and right off the coast was a beam of light. I traveled upwards to find this HUGE Mirdain-influenced clan city. Of course, it was already claimed, and it wasn't long before I had three Oromea guys asking me what I was up to. The city was the best I had seen yet, I think. And it's possible it might have naval capabilities, though I couldn't tell for sure. The Oromea guys were nice enough, answering a few of my questions before getting bored with me and shutting up. I added them to the clan's "friendly" list, made a mental note that the city might be a good one to claim come Live, and began traveling further down the coast in search of more cities.

I hadn't gone very far at all until I saw another beam of light. I started to run to it when...CRASH! Servers down! Sigh...I'll have to trek back out there later!

[likwidtek]

Nice!  Yeah I am looking everywhere for a city stone.  

[Phienyx]

So we have a list here on the forums of friendly and non-friendly clans yet?  This might be good info for all to know even before we get in game.

[Tbone]

The list is in game in the clan system. It keeps up with all of that for us so we don't have to. We even have our own public, private, and officer forums via the game. Since the game makes it easily accessible, I don't really want to have to constantly update a list on our website as well.

[Lithium]

I will be coding a simple map that we can sticky notes to when we find points of interest. If I have time tonight I will probably get something simple but effective put together.

[Anonymous]

sounds like a whole lotta fun so far

[Tbone]

I will be coding a simple map that we can sticky notes to when we find points of interest. If I have time tonight I will probably get something simple but effective put together.

That would be excellent!

Clan politics feels very local so far. You are gonna have alliances and wars with the clans who settle near you while those on different sides of the map you will never even see. I'm sure that changes as you progress in the game but so far that is how it feels.

The world is massive. I spent hours exploring today and probably did not cover half of the mirdain area even.

[Lithium]

This doesn't leave here obviously. I don't want to have to lock it down.

Be patient if you are on a slower computer, it has to load a large image and 10,000 positioning tiles.

http://thefuriousangels.com/darkfall/map/

[Jarimus]

That is pretty F'in sick man. So good!

[Pirus]

wow thats awesome.