Action and Adventure

About a week later, I again logged into my new addiction. Beta was really ramping up and release wasn't too far off. More and more people were starting to be let in, and you could tell, both in and out of game. If you want to skip another rant about forum hysteria, then skip ahead to under the picture!

On the forums, the story wasn't so pleasant. Opinions were obviously mixed about the game at that stage, but there were a few specific posters who were going out of their way to not only derail threads, and not to just troll, but spread misinformation. This ties into the Forum Hysteria I commented on in my first post. Well these specific posters ended up doing some actual damage before they were removed from the beta program (again, not because they had differing opinions, many had differing opinions and were arguing them vehemently. These folks were there purely to bring chaos). This damage, resulted in the first big forum hysteria.

It started with the guard towers. The intention of the developer team was to put guard towers at a few newbie quest hubs outside of the newbie cities. The vast majority of these were within sight of the newbie cities, sometimes even just a 30 second run from them. However, by mistake, one guard tower (just one) was placed in the middle of nowhere, deep in the wilds of Agon. One person reported this issue on the forums, and soon, it was taken up by the dedicated chaos bringers. They began to spam post after post, topic after topic about these new "wilderness towers". They claimed there were dozens and dozens of these, spread thick throughout the world, and that PvP was literally impossible now, because EVERYONE could just run 20 seconds and be within tower range. No one could get in game and check at this time, because it was down for patching, but that didn't stop people from commenting as if they had seen it themselves.

Soon the forums were on fire with rage posts about these dubbed "wilderness towers" and how they are the death of the game, and how Aventurine is turning their back on the PvPers, making the game carebear, lying, etc. All the while, the truth of the matter was, there was only 1 guard tower that was in the middle of nowhere. A developer (Claus maybe?) posted that this tower has been removed in the patch, and that it was purely a developer error, all was again ok with the world. This post was utterly ignored. People raved over these wilderness towers, not just for days, but for over a month, even bleeding into the regular forums once the NDA was dropped. It's a myth that lived on for a shockingly long time, considering how fast it was cleaned up. Just another example of forums gone wrong.

Anyway, enough rant, now for the fun.



These are Alfar. If you run into them in the wild, chances are, they're going to try to kill you, and very likely succeed. This is the story of my first run in with them.

As I mentioned before, beta was in full swing by now, there were more and more players in the world. I ventured out of my home in Sandbrook and checked out the immediate goblin spawns. I noticed a great number of people being flagged grey for accidentally hitting others. Like rabid animals, as soon as someone went grey, the entire camp of players descended on them to finish them off and get free loot without an alignment hit. A terrible sight to behold, but this is Darkfall.

The camp was not just inhabited by new players though, the first newbie gankers were showing up. This was not such a good idea with such a large newb population. One character charged into camp wearing full banded armor and tried to kill someone at low health. The entire camp of newbies dropped what they were doing and charged the ganker, blood lust in their eyes, drunk off the prospect of getting banded armor. He didn't stand a chance, he was dragged down and butchered by the waves of new players. Someone had hit the wrong person in the melee, and he too was cut down where he stood.

I decided that it was not a wise choice to kill goblins today. Picking a random direction I set off south towards Hildershall. I stopped at a few camps to test them out, hivekins, sarlids (would soon become my favorite mobs for the swords they dropped)

Sarlid Swords!



But the real treat was when I found this massive NPC city filled with rebel Mercians. I noted that some of the guardsmen were wearing banded armor. It was still my deepest desire to get banded armor, after being robbed of the chance to get some from troll lords. I tried killing the Mercians several times on my own before realizing they were just too hard and too many to kill. Then made the horrible mistake to ask for help over global chat.

While I waited for a response, I explored. Not too far away, I found one of the coolest things I've seen in an MMO. There a medium sized hill with an ornate stonework platform atop some stairs. The platform looked like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, like a part was missing. It didn't take long for me to find out what was missing. A floating crystal platform came down from the heavens and connected with the hill platform. It waited for about 10 seconds before taking off again. Away into the sky it floated before reaching a giant island in the sky. But I would explore that later, I pushed down my awe and got back to business.

After about 15 more minutes of trying to kill Mercians, I noticed another player. He wasn't moving, just standing there, so I began to type to him, asking if he wanted to join me. That's when I noticed the blue shade of his skin, and my heart sank....




He pulled out a serrated two handed sword and took a swing at me. I was drawing my own weapon to fight back when I noticed 8 other Alfar tearing towards me from behind him. Well I did the obvious thing, I ran. I sprinted as fast as I could, dodging and weaving while spells flew over my head, arrows hitting me in the back. I thought I was going to die, and with all the loot I had gathered today! As I got to the crest of the next rise, I saw the floating platform. It was coming down back to the ground. I had a chance. What follows sounds like a load of BS even to myself, but it did happen. You can probably already guess.

I charged towards the hill with a squad of Alfar behind me. One was just behind me, the others a bit farther off. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. I got to the top of the stairs just as the crystal platform was leaving, with a leap of faith I barely landed on the edge and was sailing to safety. Or so I thought.

The enemy with the two handed sword had landed on the platform with me. His companions were left impotent underneath us, firing futile spells up at the lift. Me and the alfar circled eachother for a bit, swinging now and again, he with his great sword, and I with my shortsword and shield. But I knew that this battle had to be quick; I charged. The battle was fierce and close, but in the end, I stood over my foe, his blood on my sword, staining the pristine crystal we stood upon. I took his expensive armor and reagants and stepped off the platform onto the floating island, safe at last. Then, I took the cowards way out, and logged off.



So ends my series on my beta impressions of the game. This serves to give a feel for the game as a whole rather than getting into the specific mechanics of the game. It's been 11 months since that adventure on the floating platform, and a great many features have been adding to the game, but the feeling you get from the game, has not changed. That's what these early adventures are to show: just what is possible in the game, and why I support it so wholly.

In the coming weeks, I will be adding a lot of different things to this blog site, and taking input from anyone reading as to what you want me to do in the future. Primarily this will serve as a site for Travelogues, first person stories from a new character in Darkfall, but I am open to suggestions.

This is Signus, signing off for a while, have fun out there.

More Beta Tales(and woes)

Well I was now back at college, reading the beta forums constantly, while trying not to totally ignore my professor talking about the formation of stars. It was difficult, because I could think of nothing else but getting back into Agon and going on another adventure. Indeed I already had my adventure for the day planned out.

I spend a good amount of time in IRC, being a mod and all that. There was a lot of traffic going through with people asking about beta, release, and all that good stuff. I had to resist the temptation to break NDA and tell them all to stop panicking, that the game was great fun and would be out soon! Meanwhile, I was sending messages to other folks in knew in beta who were waiting for the server to go up. Jonkar, leader of a RP Merc clan gave me a little hint about a place it might be possible to get some great loot. The loot in question was scaled or plate armor of some sort, the location...deep in Alfar territory, on an island in a lake, with horrible skeletons guarding the treasure. We couldn't do this alone.

Messages requesting help were sent out to those we could reach, and before long, we had a group of hardy humans willing to march to battle to try to be some of the first players to get this armor (ok, well we thought we were the first).

There were about 8 of us, 2 I didn't know. The two set off ahead instead of waiting for the whole group, constantly firing manna missle into the sky to level their skill and never responding to group chat. I would find out later these two min maxers who felt it necessary to give away our position every 2 seconds, and had tried to swing the majority of the group into killing me and a few others for no real reason. Jonkar, thankfully, told them to shove it.

We ran for about an hour, seeing many camps and monsters on the way. We found a clan city (I marked it on my paper map) and an underground fortress with a great lake in the center. There was not much to be seen here at the time, but we looked forward to coming back when the camps would be populated.





Eventually, we found a tower in the wastes filled with troll lords. We needed to go through in order to get to our lake, so we decided to fight them. This was our first group PvE experience. The trolls were firing things at us, darts of some kind, doing minor damage. We managed to trap one and melee it down quickly. It had dropped what I thought might be a breastplate of sorts, but someone else looted it before I could even move my mouse. We were about to move onward, but a second troll came upon us. At this point I was low on health and we all ran into the tower to hide. Mistake.

Well, from the Lord's room came yet another troll charging down the stairs at us. We managed to off this one too, but we were seriously hurting and starting to get overwhelmed. At the top of the tower, a third troll lord trapped us. I jumped out a window, landing on a rock spire and started running for safety. No one had a heal spell they could use at that point, so I knew my only chance was to get out of range. Just when I thought I could get away, I got insta killed(instead of downed) and sent all the way back to Sandbrook.

So ended my first real adventures in beta. The rest of my group went onwards towards the hidden skeleton lake, but ran into Alfar instead. The fight was fierce, from what I heard, with humans winning out, but more Alfar on the way. A great battle was brewing as both sides called for reinforcements. But before the two forces could clash a second time...the server went down... but it was the first large fight in the Darkfall beta, and was discussed all the following week.


Well, that was my last group encounter in beta, as school began to rule my life and I found little time to log in, but there are a few more beta memories to share. In the next post, I'll talk about my first run in with the bloodthirsty Alfar.

Uncertain First Steps

As it is right now, I am not sure how to proceed. It was always my intention to get my own website up to do the whole travelogue thing, but due to lack of time or html experience, I had to settle for a blogspot website. This makes organization difficult, unless I am missing something. If there was an easy way to split my posts between ramblings and travelogues I would. As it is now, I think I will just post about my first and fondest memories of Darkfall, and once I am out of University, I will begin anew with my freshly remade character on NA1. The journey will be from the point of view of this new character and the various adventures he goes on.

It was the tail end of January before I got into the Darkfall Online beta. I had been waiting, as I'm sure many others were, for what felt like centuries. I had about three days left of Winter Break, then it was back to college. I was desperate to get into the game. I downloaded the client, fired up the patcher, and waited.

And waited... and waited.

It wasn't that the wait FELT long, it WAS long. For some reason, many folks were having major issues downloading the game. Well, a few hotfixes later, and almost everyone got in fine.... except me Thankfully, community to the rescue. A torrent was circulated amongst some folks (I got mine from BcB) and I was able to torrent the game and get in with a day to spare.



Slowly, the game loaded, I got to the character creation screen, blew through all the options (there weren't a ton at that time) and was given a choice of three starter towns to pick from. After looking at the map, I picked the town on the outskirts of civilization by the water, because even then I knew I wanted my character to be a sea faring adventurer. I chose Sandbrook, and my adventure in Darkfall began.


I entered the world with a strange crunching noise(which I'm sure most of us have grown fond of, and I later learned is a reference to Quake), and looked around me. There was an impressive waterwheel and a flowing river directly infront of me. Surrounding were cranes and crates, big city walls, a glowing stone shooting a beacon into the sky, and many new players like myself taking in the sights. I was overwhelmed. I couldn't believe I was finally here! After years of watching videos, reading interviews, reading dev posts, dealing with vaporware trolls, studying the lore, and counting the days... I had finally made it into Agon.



I took to the controls quickly; they were very much like Morrowind's. I had also read as much as I could about them while downloading the game. I ran up to William for my first quest: killing goblins. I'd finally get to see these beasties and their AI that had been so often raved about. Hmm... the quests were marked on the mini map, a bit more hand holding than I'd like, but I guess necessary for newbie quests. I am one of those madmen who would have rather had a static map than one that follows you. This is mainly due to habit, being raised on MMOs that did not have any sort of map. In retrospect, the Darkall world is so much bigger and more detailed than those early MMOs, that not having some sort of map would have made things difficult indeed.

I ran off into the wilderness, already fearful of my surroundings. I had missed the rush PvP can add to the world. I was very careful not to leave cover, and to always know which way to run to get back to guard tower range. I traveled to the closest marked camp and... there was nothing there. No goblins, no people. Huh.

I ran to the second camp, nothing here either. Had someone already killed them? The chat quickly told me that a lot of spawns were turned off or bugged. Glumly, I started walking back to town, only to be set upon by a madman with a leafblade. I was terrified. We fought for a while, but man, I was getting destroyed. I couldn't understand why, we were both new characters without any gear. On one end, I was frustrated, on the other, I was overjoyed that player skill over character skill played this large of a role in game. When I realized staying and fighting would result in my death, I sprinted into guard tower range. My assailant got gunned down in the water attempting to follow me. I tried to loot his grave, but it vanished. Guess he had nothing. Aw..





I collected myself and ventured out to the last camp marked on my map. As I drew close, I could clear see the sound of fighting. I sneaked towards the camp, and saw... no one. Weird. Again the area was desolate. But hey, there was a cave! I approached this cave, entering excitedly. I walk in a little ways and eventually reach the far wall inside when shadows fall across my character. I turned to see another person standing in the entrance, blocking the light. Before I could think he fired an arrow at me. I raced towards him, and he drew his sword, blocking my escape. We fought for a good 3 minutes, back and forth, blocking and dodging. I jumped on a rock and hopped over his head and hit him in the back, he wedged me into a tree branch, hacking until, both of us were out of stamina. He couldn't even swing his sword. Then, he did quite a silly thing. In a panic, he ran straight for the guard towers. I guess he was afraid of me killing him. Instead, he just killed himself. I quickly stuffed all his loot into my bag, reveling at the feeling of taking this killer's ill gotten gains.

Even more paranoid now that I had something to lose, I ran into town to bank the gear, and reflect on all that had happened... This was going to be a fun day.



Later, I discovered that Monkfield had working goblin spawns. I made the dangerous journey northward to where the REAL bulk of human players were.




I went tree to tree, always wary of player killers. I could hear some heavy fighting going on. Someone in chat was spamming "LoD are killing people, look out!" Now, I had heard of LoD. Their reputation preceded them a bit, and I became even more frightened. I took the long path 'round to Monkfield, coming on the goblin camp from the north. I finally found LoD and there were indeed a lot of them. They hadn't made a clan yet, but each of them had LoD in their character name.

Darkfall's very first zerg guild had hit and they were having some good fun killing anyone they could. They would trick people into making themselves get flagged grey, and then wipe them out and steal their loot without taking an alignment hit. I was about to confront one of them trying to steal my goblin kills when the server went down for the day. This was likely lucky for me.

A good first day, and I could not wait for more. But now it was time to pack up and return to college and the real world, Darkfall would have to wait for a little bit.

Forum Hysteria Allegory

Early January of 2008, I was on Christmas break, spending time with friends and family, shoveling endless amounts of snow, and spending a good deal of my time in IRC waiting for any news of the imminent Darkfall release. I was not alone; the IRC was bursting with activity, and things were quite out of hand. I had been following the game for about 3 years at that point, and tried to give clarity to certain aspects of the game where some people were confused.

For whatever reason, I was recruited to become one of the IRC mods. Suddenly, I couldn't talk much about the game I was excited about, because despite the indicator under my forum name, people took my word as official. I still popped into the forums now and then, and especially at times where "Forum Hysteria" would hit. One person would have a bad beta experience, post about it, and mass panic would spread. The first instance of this is I noticed was when a developer mistakenly placed a guard tower in the middle of nowhere. Someone found it, made a thread, and everyone assumed these towers were everywhere, ruining potential PvP. Later that night, the devs made a post that the tower was a bug, and had been removed in a hotfix, but the threads continued. I kept linking people to the dev announcement about it, but it did little to stem the hysteria. People continued to believe that PvP was impossible, and that guard towers where rampant in the game well into release.

I am very familiar with Forum Hysteria. It happens to every game. And it's happening again now on the Darkfall forums. Oddly enough, a VERY similar thing happened with Asheron's Call 1, with what is happening on the Darkfall forums now. I listened to a former Turbine developer talk about their system of monster weaknesses and resistances on a podcast.

Once upon a time, there was apparently a mob called a lightning rat. It used electric attacks, which were strong against people wearing chainmail. One chainmail wearing player had found this mob in game and had been killed very quickly. In his shock he posted about how overpowered the mobs were. A few others confirmed his post and soon mass hysteria broke out. Threads were popping up faster than anyone could keep up with, demanding these rats be removed from the game or patched immediately.

Among all the madness, a few players had discovered that all you had to do, was wear armor that had lightning resistance. Lightning rat, makes sense. These posts were BURIED under all the screaming, which started pouring from people who hadn't even fought the rats yet. There was outrage when Turbine didn't patch the rats until slowly, people began to realize what was happening. Some weren't happy that they had to wear leather armor or enchanted chain for a specific mob, but it helped at more depth to the system, that's how all of Asheron's Call worked anyway.

I find it kind of funny, considering almost the same thing is happening in Darkfall at the moment with the revamped Monster AI and the resist/weakness system. Personally, what I think needs to be done is have the system reflect better what was said in the spotlight article. (original article here)

Mobs with resistances would take much longer to kill, but would be possible. The resistant damage wouldn't be something insane like 1 (which it isn't now, after the patch) and most other damage types are neutral, with the mob having a weakness, which you could optionally exploit for better productivity. Now people have the option of seeking out monsters they are strong against, or grouping up with friends to take out harder mobs than they would normally be able to handle. We're quickly getting there, I just hope Aventurine doesn't revert back to the mindless AI we had before.

Probably not the best subject to bring up in my first post, as it seems highly controversial between the people who want a deeper more fleshed out PvE system, and those that are offended the devs are putting any time into an aspect of the game they have no interest in, and making their income harder to earn.


Anyway, my first impressions of Darkfall, progress from beta to Conquer the Seas, and the Travelogues will be coming soon.