Darkfall: A Rush of Progression

Aiden, Entry 2

As previously posted, I was saved by a small group of fighters. I was invited to their party and we worked together killing the rockbangers for a few more hours. I was eventually invited to join their guild as a part of their mass recruiting experiment. I decided to say yes and attempt to be super social in this game; opposite of my somewhat anti-social behavior in EvE. Its worked out extremely well for the most part.

Logging in for my second evening of play, I pinged comms for any interest in an exploration group. Most people were busy killing, but one person, Phuzzy Logic, piped up and asked for an invite. Meeting up in Sanguine, we decided where we would explore; choosing to go around the main center continent of Agon at the waters edge. And so we went East towards the ocean.

The safe zones are pretty large, and for about half our trip, we were in it still. Once out into the "danger zones" we discovered that there are different levels of danger. Similar to EvE Online's system security system ot 0.0 to 1.0, Darkfall has a pretty good system. The more dangerous, the better and more loot you get from activities such as harvesting or farming mobs. I think the random chaos chests might be better loot too, but I havent found many outside of safe zones, so meh. 

Anyhow, we eventually reached the ocean. Agon is huge by the way, took a good 10-15 minutes running on a mount to reach the ocean from Sanguine. Check out the map, enable bindstones and find the group of four purple outlined icons in the bottom right of the center continent. The center in the group is Sanguine. We traveled from this capital city to the east, passing the Heart of Eanna starting village and over the mountains to cross a small lake with an island in the middle and finally the oceans edge. 

From here, we traveled north, a pretty uneventful run. If you follow the map north, roughly four or five tiles, you will see a red outlined icon for the bindstones at which we bound ourselves. This wasnt really thought through beyond the if we die, we'll still be half way up instead of being sent all the way back to Sanguine. We didnt think ahead of how large the world actually was and how we would get back safely to Sanguine. Lessons learned. 

Our journey continues following the waters edge. We pass through areas with islands and almost go to the north east corner continent before realizing thats the wrong direction. Correcting our path, we eventually hear someone mining. Sound in Darkfall is essential to hunting, Ive found. If your sound is off, you're doing it wrong. Anyhow, we track the sound down thanks to surround sound and attack the person. He isnt afk, and begins to run away. Because both myself and Phuzzy are almost brand new, we dont know about mounted combat before engaing, so we had dismounted. Our prey was a skirmisher and handily got away from us.

We remounted and followed in the direction he went. Coming over a hill, we see him and try to catch up. I get a moment to catch his clan tag: Old Timers Guild. Ive seen this name before and a quick search of memory reminds me that its another blogger I read often who is a part of them. I immediately and calmly exclaim into comms "Oh shit, this is a bad idea!" Following this guy around a bend, into a valley, we are catching up. As we close the distance, in the distance, renders 5 or 6  or more people on mounts charging us!

We turn to run, but by this time, its too late. We turn too slow and they kill my mount. Others continue chasing Phuzzy Logic, a couple dismount and corner me into the wall. Apparently, with physics in Darkfall, its got something I like EQ1 had: Player Collision. They boxed me in and I couldnt escape, quickly being dispatched. Laying on the ground waiting to respawn, I see someone come up and cast a spell of some sort: I was ganked! The equivalent to being podded in EvE. The same fate was in store for Phuzzy, who had also gotten dismounted and boxed in.

As so we respawned, at our chaos bindstone. From there, we ran naked back home seeing no one else on that return trip. Rebinding in Sanguine, I logged for the night excited at the combat I had experienced.