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, few hotfixes later, and almost everyone got in fine, except me... Thankfully, community to the rescue. A torrent was circulated amongst some folks (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 looked around me. There was an impressive waterwheel and a flowing river directly infront of me. Around 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 that had been so often raved about. Hmm... the quests were marked on the mini map, kind of annoying, but I guess necessary for newbie quests. I was 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 missed this rush. I was very careful not to leave cover, and to always know which way to run back to guard tower range. I ran 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 my butt kicked. 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 played this large of a role in game. I managed to make it within tower range once I realized staying and fighting would result in my death, and he got gunned down in the water attempting to follow me. I tried to loot his grave, but it vanished. Guess he had nothing. Aw..
Venturing out to the last camp marked on my map, and hear combat noises. Wow, you can really hear them far off, and so detailed! I sneaked towards the camp, and saw... no one. Weird. Again the area was desolate. But hey, there was a cave! I approach this cave, entering excitedly. I walk in a little ways and eventually reach the far wall inside when shadows fall across my character as the light from the mouth of the cave is blocked. I turn to see another person standing in the entrance. He begins to fire a bow at me. I race towards him, and he draws his sword, blocking my escape. We fought for a good 3 minutes or so, 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, until, both of us were out of stamina. I couldn't do anything. He hit me a few more times before he was out too. Then, he did quite a silly thing. He ran straight for the guard towers. I guess he was afraid of me killing him, but 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 this gear, and reflect on all that had happened... This was going to be a fun day.
Later that day 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. 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 had'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 go gray, and then wipe them out and steal their loot. I was about to confront one of them trying to steal my goblin kills when the server went down for the day. Lucky for them! I was a force to be reckoned with!... well not really.
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.
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