Thursday, April 5, 2012

Darkfall: The EVE of Fantasy MMOs

I forgot yesterday was Wednesday, so I didnt post this then. Ive recently been busy playing Darkfall, as the title suggests. They have a 14 day free trial and my brother convinced me to try it out with him. I tried the game a few years ago but I couldnt get into it due to the heavy PvP aspect of it. I couldnt get into it because it was too hard for me to accept the constant loss of equipment. This is at a time when I was heavily raided in EverQuest 2 and having high level gear was the epitome. I didnt like the full loot system and starting over every time I got killed and looted by another player. Two or three years later, none of that bothered me anymore.

Why is that, you ask? Well, Ive been playing EVE for about a year or two now. Ive lost that sense of connection to my equipment and ships. Sure, I have some ships that last awhile and I grow some attachment to them, but when that happens, I purposefully go out and explode that ship. R.I.P. Blondie. **tear**

Anyways, trying out Darkfall trial. Extremely similar to EVE in rules and learning. Mentioned later, but I incapacitated a person and remember X being the gank ability by default (From reading the controls and editing hotkeys) so I hit it and podded this guys body. Totally. Fucking. Awesome. Downside is that I went from full +10 to right in the damn middle, leaning on the evil side. I got rebound to some location so damn far away by default, that when I eventually died, I had no clue wtf I was doing. I dislike the auto-new-home-thing when you become Evil.

I deleted that character, with a name I wanted, thinking I could reuse it. Not possible. Lesson 1: Dont gank people until youre ready to be full time pvp. Lesson 2: Consequences for your actions, even deleting your character. Awesome.

So I re-rolled a dark elf. Didnt like the area. The place I started in was more confusing than Neriak in EverQuest 1 or maybe Kelethin in EQ2. Promptly deleted that character. I liked his surname though, so I kept that with the new character, that I stuck with this time. Enter Bronan Darkfrost.

Human of Mercia. Twin blade, side magic user, shitty archer (but getting better!). Tailor. More tradeskills to come. All prety intricately intertwined, or so it seems. Ive attacked a few people, been ganked once or twice myself, no kills yet on this character. Darkfall has a learning cliff exactly like EVE.

The first time my brother lost a fight and got ganked, he lost all his gear because he didnt listen to me about banking stuff and only carrying what he can afford to lose. Lesson 3, should be 1, 2, 3, 4, ect.... Sound familiar? He died a few more times to people we attacked, Old Sun Republic or some crap, I dunno. He is still stuck in the "must have better gear" mode instead of "have lots of spare gear" mode. Anyhow, the one guy kept running back to the guard towers, and it took me a minute to figure out wtf was happening. Guard Towers = Gate and Station guns when attacking players. Lesson 4: Dont attack players in lawful areas.

And this is over a period of about four to five hours. Skill grinding is definately part of the game, and I keep seeing people say dont craft until you have 40 wisdom, which is when you can aquire the trueforge skill. To that, I asked how to raise wisdom. With a reply of "Go fishing", I went fishing. Lesson 5: Attribute gains are slow. Ive been fishing for about 2 hours and only gotten half (0.5) points of Wisdom gain. Well, this is going to be awhile..

For new characters, its inconceiveable to put off crafting your own gear until wisdom 40 while only harvesting until then. Yeah, better durability is good, but fuck, youre going to lose the gear anyways most likely. Thank you, EVE, for departing on me this wisdom. As soon as I equip that gear from the bank, its already lost. Just like a ship Im sitting in; the moment it is undock, it is already exploded.

I love EvE. I love New Eden and its history and lore. I also love fantasy RPGs. Darkfall has an insane lore and history to it. I continously find myself looking back on Darkfall for the stories the devs and players came up with. Two years ago, I was not even looking at Darkfall in the same way as I am now.

Darkfall is harsh. Darkfall is a world full of consequences for your actions. It is more like EvE than not, when excluding the whole spaceship vs caveman thing. I love Darkfall.

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