Another day, another Spotlight, more drool in the drool cup.
I’m happy that the wildlife coming to DarkFall will be part-time scenery, part-time resource node for leather/meat. That’s exactly what they should be, and I think the addition will really bring more life to Agon. It’s funny to watch the ForumFall community cheering the addition of non-aggressive deer to the game, so much for keep up the basement-dwelling sociopath image, at least outside of the General forum.
The mob AI and difficulty/loot changes also sound interesting. While overall I feel mob difficulty/reward is more or less on target right now, there are still certain mobs that are way too tough for the loot they drop, and some mobs are a little too easy to solo using some clever (but legal) tactics. It will be interesting to see how players adapt to the strength/weakness aspects as well. Will we see more players skilling up multiple weapon types, or will most people just avoid mobs they are not skilled to take on? How effective will brute force be? Will this AI update help or hinder exploiting? Will anyone finally kill a devil legitimately? And finally, how in the hell is Aventurine able to add so much stuff into one expansion given the size of their dev team?
Now just give us some info about caravans, boats, and a release date, if that’s not asking too much of course.
Hardcore Casual 
I’m glad to hear Darkfall is getting regular critters. It’s, in my opinion anyways, important to have such things to flesh out the world.
However, where I think they go wrong is in adjusting loot tables to be in line with mob difficulty. While there should be an upper cap based on difficulty, simply being a dangerous mob should not mean it drops valuable loot. There’s all sorts of things out and about in the world, and there should be a lot of things there that simply aren’t worth fighting. Loot tables always seem so contrived to me.
Now, I’m a huge fan of the virtual world. Particularly in open PvP games. I like to look at them as plausible virtual worlds, not just colourful deathmatch arenas. I understand that a lot of more “hardcore” pvp players disagree with this sentiment, and want to see things all have a purpose… but there’s a lot of things in the world that simply don’t have a purpose at all (relevant to people, anyways).
That said, leather, meat? Sure, that’s all good. But things like that should be logical, not contrived. For example, the wow-esque model of ever better types of leather coming from ever more difficult mobs is terrible IMHO. It fits with the level-gated game, but it’s just awful. Hell, some of the best leather comes from harmless baby creatures after all!
In an open-pvp game, difficulty doesn’t need to be mob-centric. If there are easy to kill mobs that can provide valuable materials, then the players themselves become the difficulty setting.
So mining nodes should fight back too eh?
Well currently mobs in DarkFall drop generally what you see them wearing. So if a mob is swinging a 2h sword at you, it’s very likely to drop a 2h sword. I’m not sure how that design will line up with expanded loot tables, but we will see. I like that if I kill a Black Knight in heavy armor, he drops heavy armor, so hopefully this update won’t completely change that aspect.
But even today certain mob spawns are avoided because of high traffic, and I think that will continue. The issue they are solving is mobs like Devils or the Baradon, which are stupidly difficult mobs that drop less loot than mobs 1/10th their difficulty. I doubt Devils will be come ‘easy’ mobs, but rather a worthwhile target for a group of players, similar to how the Red Dragon works now. Sure he is a bitch to kill, but that 50k and T key makes it worthwhile, if very risky.
This seems excellent, looks likes a great way to prove to all the naysayers that this game isn’t just a fad.
Another ten years of minor feature additions and they may have something :)
I’m really pleased to see this, I’ve really liked the Darkfall pve already and this should really put it on top.
When added into the fps style gameplay this will be a very unique pve environment.
For now I’m happy for this to hit the live servers but…we are going to need a test server in the future. The sum of changes in the expansion is getting really significant.
Looks like I joined DF at a good time. The NA server has been great and most of the large bugs/problems have been dealt with. Now I get to enjoy cool patches.
gg Aventurine.