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.
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