DF:UW – The first two days

April 18, 2013

Quick report on my first two days of DF:UW for today.

Installing and patching the game went smoothly for me, in large part thanks to a private Torrent that an OTG member had setup for us to use. I would occasionally experience the lobby not connecting, but that never required more than 2-3 quick restarts to get around.

Once in-game, I created my character and started in Maharim lands. This worked out very well because OTG had already claimed a hamlet just to the south, and were also using a nearby chaos stone (unlimited character binds) with a bank as a base of operations. A quick run and I was bound to the stone and surrounded by clan members.

A cool little ‘sandbox’ aspect comes into play here. Because so many OTG members were bound to that chaos stone, we effectively ‘owned’ the surrounding area, as we would attack any strangers who came around. This has two almost opposite effect; one being that we can effectively farm together in safety and away from the over-populated starter areas, and the other being that we have now created a mini PvP hotspot, with various groups coming to our area looking for a fight.

Most of my time so far has been spent farming either mobs or resource nodes. The mob farming is helping raise my prowess while supplying some basic gear and gold. The resource nodes provide some nice downtime that also gets me some prowess and mats for crafting. Almost everything I’ve acquired has gone to the clan bank, as OTG has a few crafters we are ‘power leveling’ up to get everyone access to better gear. So far, that plan is working very well, and I believe we are up to r30 or r40 gear in most areas.

I’ve done a bit of PvP, and so far it’s been a blast. Most of the encounters have been a few unlucky fools attacking our members at a mob spawn, only to have 10+ people show up in force and beat them down. What we lack in skill we make up for in numbers without shame.

Most of the time anyway.

Late last night a small group of enemies attacked some of our members and managed to kill most of them. Our usual response managed to kill two or three of them, and a large (20+?) number of us chased the rest. As we chased however, the enemy was able to recover and their group of about ten fought back. As we were fighting some of the server’s best players, we got butchered in short order despite our superior numbers.

The best part was the clan’s reaction after the blowout. After a quick recount of what happened and what could have been done differently, everyone brushed off the defeat and instead focused on the fact that we had an enjoyable PvP encounter. Zero drama, zero raging; good stuff.

3 Comments | crafting, Darkfall Online, PvP | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Darkfall: Unholy Wars – Game actually went live!

April 17, 2013

As MMOs and SimCity go, the DF:UW launch was surprisingly good. A lot of people were able to get in (not all, and you had to ‘work’ a little to get in), the server stayed up for hours during the first day, and when it went down it was back up shortly. No massive bugs or exploits have been noticed so far, and AV has released one patch already to address the cause for the one server crash.

Lag and such was the same as during beta (so none for me, some for others), which is a win considering the number of people online compared to the beta population. We’ll see how things go once DF:UW is available on Steam.

In-game OTG has claimed two hamlets so far, and many other clans also have holdings.

Feels good to be playing Darkfall again.

10 Comments | Darkfall Online | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Darkfall: Unholy Wars – End of beta and the plan going forward

April 15, 2013

Originally I was going to chronicle the DF:UW beta from day one to close, but a lot of what I had down no longer applies, and after re-reading it, it was honestly not that interesting. Instead, I’ll just type up a few quick hits, and then talk a bit about what I expect at release and beyond.

Day one of beta was a comical disaster of epic proportions. You had the normal issues of login queues, disconnects, and patching failures that most/all MMOs have on day one. But magically, on top of all that, you had some pretty unique stuff as well.

For instance, since all new characters now start in a tutorial area, on day one everyone was piled on top of each other, and since DF has hard collision detection, most people were stuck and unable to move.

To make things even more fun, on day one characters stayed in the world even when you would disconnect, which meant the meatpile in the starting area was an ever-increasing trap of fail. The cherry on top was the inability to delete a character, and with DF:UW only allowing one character per server, if you were stuck in the pile, you were done playing.

For those lucky enough not to get stuck, they encountered the wonder that was the persistence bug. Basically, whenever you crashed or logged off, every item on your character and in your bank would go poof. For the first month or so, the only way to safely store anything was to put it in your clan bank, and you needed 2000 gold to start a clan. Oh the joy of farming 1900 gold and crashing!

Fast forward a few months, and Aventurine fixed many of the major issues and game became more (or reasonably) playable. Once that happened a lot of feedback was given and many things changed, not the least of which was the prowess system. In the last few weeks of beta, AV did a lot of patching around combat balance, and the last few days felt more like DF1 than at any point in beta.

Finally, debug mode, a mythical unicorn of performance issues and other assorted items, will be turned off for the live game, and what that means will be something to watch.

The false-start of the November launch burned a lot of Inquisition members, among them leadership, and as a clan Inq won’t be playing DF:UW at release. I and a few others will be playing with The Old Timers guild, and I’m really looking forward to being part of that well-established, solid group.

One of the interesting things right now about DF:UW is how similar it is to DF1 at release. On the one hand the game is missing a lot of features (few dungeons, few boats, no hot-spots like Sea Towers, only 2/4 specs per role), the performance is less-than-perfect, and no one really knows how certain aspects will play out (like the reduced number of holdings, or how the prowess system will hold up long-term).

On the other hand, even in its debug beta state, playing DF:UW is still more fun than just about any MMO out, the combat system makes games with ‘active combat’ like GW2 look like a bad joke, and it’s one of the few true virtual world PvP games out (still).

DF:UW won’t live or die by the minor tweaks it made to an established MMO formula like GW2 or SW:TOR did, simply because if a game like DF is your idea of a good time in an MMO, your options are to play DF or spin on your thumb (or fly a spaceship of course). It will live and die by how quickly AV can fix the major issues (and there will be major issues), and how quickly they can deliver the missing content and then keep going with new stuff.

DF1 was able to remain a subscription MMO for three years because in the first two, AV did a good-enough job with the updates and fixes. At the same time, DF1 could have been FAR more successful if major design mistakes (bloodwalls for example) where not present. DF:UW is that chance, and hopefully they don’t blow it.

Should be a fun ride. Hopefully it’s a long one. More to come as the game goes live tomorrow (probably…)

 

15 Comments | beta, Combat Systems, Darkfall Online, Inquisition Clan, MMO design, PvP | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

TESO looking great on all fronts!

April 15, 2013

Darkfall post coming in a bit, but I need to post this first.

The Elder Scrolls Online video leak disaster.

The video has already been removed from Youtube (if someone has a working link, please post a comment), but the Massively commentator gold is still there. My only question is, how much is Zenimax paying Broken Gears and Rufflepaws, and do they get a refund? Guess that’s what you get when you outsource damage control huh?

I’ll give the Massively crowd credit though, at least some of them are catching on. If this was pre-release SW:TOR-era Massively, the comments would be 90% Broken Gears-types, rather than the 50/50 split that I read (not that I read all 800+ comments, I can only take so much). Still a long way to go, but baby steps at least.

6 Comments | beta, Mass Media, The Elder Scrolls Online | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Camelot Unchained: Concerns based on MJ’s history

April 9, 2013

As previously mentioned, the Camelot Unchained kickstarter is up and running, but as of now I’ve not contributed due to a few concerns that I want to cover today.

First and foremost, the total removal of PvE raises some doubts. I get that City State wants to focus on PvP, and with a limited budget cutting PvE saves a lot of time/effort, but in all my MMO experience, some of (if not all) of the best PvP has been PvE-driven.

Evicting someone from a wormhole in EVE is in part PvE-driven (better sleeper farming).

A holding’s worth in Darkfall is in part based on the local mobs to farm, and the heaviest fighting is often over the most valuable properties.

In UO, PvP often happened in PvE locations (dungeons or good world spawns), and housing location was decided either by economic factors (player vendor traffic) or PvE factors (close to a good dungeon).

Hell, even in DAoC, how much RvR conflict was driven by access to Darkness Falls, a PvE dungeon? Some of the best PvP was clearing DF itself, and that happened because of PvE (safer farming).

What will be the conflict drivers in CU? Will they get people out and into situations on a daily basis? Will they matter long-term?

A related concern; do I want to play an MMO that is 100% PvP? Even though I prefer my MMO with a healthy dose of PvP, I still PvE heavily in them. PvE makes for nice ‘downtime’, and allows for me to still login and play without always putting myself into high-risk situations. It’s also content you can rely on, unlike PvP where sometimes the end-result of PvP is no fights happening.

Finally, I don’t know how much I trust Mark Jacob to deliver a solid MMO. Yes, he was responsible for DAoC, but he was also responsible for the ToA expansion to DAoC (an expansion that killed the game for me, and many others), along with WAR. And while MJ has tried to distance himself from WAR and its design decisions, it would be crazy to assume he holds zero responsibility.

ToA was just bad. It added a must-do forced-group PvE raiding grind to a well-established PvP game. I say must-do because the abilities and items you got from ToA were silly powerful, and made you near god-like in PvP if you fought others without ToA powers. How much of that basic concept (adding raiding to DAoC) was MJ? Was it his idea? If not, did he step in and realize it was a bad idea? If he did, was this another example of MJ being overruled, or just putting his trust in the wrong place?

We know a lot of the history behind WAR, but again how much did MJ influence the design here? The lack of a 3rd faction is obvious, but what about the decision to group the races to begin with? Why was WAR not a six-way fight? The lore/IP easily supports it, the PvE structure could have remained the same, and end-game population balance issues would have been very different.

Did MJ really think low and mid-tier RvR zones would hold up long-term? Sure, they sorta-worked while the initial population wave progressed through the game, but as soon as that was over, all of those areas below the cap became ghost towns and wasted effort.

A major issue in DAoC was rampant crowd-control. A major issue in WAR? Rampant CC. Other than blind faith, what’s to suggest that CU won’t have CC problems?

Remember the original structure for the end-game RvR? Funneling everyone into a single city siege? How much of that was MJ? How strongly did MJ believe in that design? And if he did see the design issues early on, why again did a product with his name on it ship designed like that? When such a moment happens with CU, and it will, what will MJ do?

CU is on my radar. In many ways it’s a game I want to get behind and support. It’s trying something different in some of the directions I want the genre to go in. And overall I like MJ from what I’ve heard/read about him. I do believe he got screwed by EA with WAR (because, let’s face it, everyone gets screwed by EA, be they devs or players). At the same time, the above are all concerns I have.

 

39 Comments | Camelot Unchained, Dark Age of Camelot, MMO design, PvP, Rant, RvR | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Darkfall: Unholy Wars is coming April 16th. Probably.

April 4, 2013

Darkfall: Unholy Wars has a release date (again) – April 16th.

More here when the NDA is down.

 

12 Comments | Darkfall Online | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Going small

April 2, 2013

Edit: Camelot Unchained kickstarter is live today, which is relevant to today’s topic. I’ve not donated yet, but more on that in a different post.

After the WAR bubble burst, one of the many complaints was a lack of population in the RvR areas and PQs. Many attributed this to the general decline in the number of players playing overall. Pushing that line of thinking further, many believe you need hundreds of thousands of players AT LEAST to make a game feel populated and ‘alive’.

That’s horribly wrong.

For WAR, the game’s poor design lead to the feeling of under population. Unless you were part of the initial population surge through the leveling game, most areas felt empty, and RvR battles were non-existent. This would have been the case had WAR retained 1m subs, 500k, or 100k.

On top of those poor design decisions, WAR’s population was always spread across multiple servers. Some retained population well, while others were ghost towns from basically day one. If you happened to pick such a server, you got screwed. And as the population overall started to decline, more and more servers dropped below ‘critical mass’.

How many players do you need on a server for things to feel alive? In Ultime Online: Forever, the concurrent population often hovered around 300 (I believe), and yet the game felt lively. Some of this is due to UO’s design, which on most fronts is simply superior to themeparks, WAR included. But design aside, you really don’t need that many people to give the world a lively feel.

The reason we had not seen MMOs with only one ‘normal’ server (EVE is different, as always) in the past was due to cost. The theory was that MMOs had to be very expensive to produce, and so you needed to attract a lot of people to make any money. As many games have shown recently, and will in the coming years, that theory was about as accurate as the 4th pillar being a core value in an MMO.

This is a huge win for MMO fans for a number of reasons. We get away from the cookie-cutter “MMO for everyone” WoW-clone design. We get MMOs that are more targeted, be they PvP-focused or otherwise. We also get MMOs that (hopefully) won’ succumb to chasing the ‘everyone’ crowd later on and watering down things for the core that is actually playing.

At least, that’s hopefully the trend something like Kickstarter can help start. We’ll see if devs and players alike actually see it through.

15 Comments | Camelot Unchained, MMO design, Warhammer Online | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

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