With one gaming-heavy weekend over, I’m going to talk about what Conquer the Seas has brought to DarkFall, but first let me toss this out for everyone. On one side of the MMO dev spectrum you have Aventurine, and on the other you have Blizzard. Blizzard believe in polish>content, and so while WoW is the slowest MMO to update, the updates (usually) work and deliver what’s promised. On the other side is AV, who in one year have added more to DF than Bliz has in five, but apparently view live servers and paying customers as their test server and QA staff. In a perfect world I’d like AV content at Blizzard quality, but given a choice, sign me up for QA. Where you fall in this spectrum is something to consider carefully before signing up for DarkFall. If bugs drive you crazy, more than not seeing content updates for 6+ months, current-day DarkFall might upset you more than delight you with each patch/expansion. You have been warned.

That said; let’s start with the major theme of the expansion, ship combat and the new sea fortresses. For starters, Aventurine has somehow managed to re-introduce the same bug they had in their previous expansion (elemental bows doing damage to village stones) to this one (those bows now deal damage to the ‘cannon-only’ sea fortress). How does that even happen? Of course players quickly figured this out, and both fortresses were captured quickly. The good news is their rewards are substantial, the bad news is that the current bug makes bringing an actual ship pointless. But fear not, because actually MAKING a ship is also pointless atm, since despite being in the patch notes, ship costs remain unchanged, if not higher (VAMP turned in close to 15 Leenspar keys to try and get an astrolob, no luck). The Kraken looks very cool from the videos posted, and rumor has it the beast drops good-enough loot (how it was killed remains a bit shady). Big bag-o-fail here AV.

Another area of fail, although this one I’ll call semi-fail, is wildlife. They have been added to the game, there is a good variety of them, and they look cute/cool. The don’t really roam how I would have pictured it, and currently they feel a little too much like a non-aggressive mob spawn to be honest. That said, a clan member and I did have some fun chasing a few down on our mounts (they do run away from you, and they do run further than a regular mob), and they do interact with each other and aggressive mobs (we thought we had come across some players farming, and as we snuck up to the area, we watched as some mobs were chasing a couple of foxes down, funny stuff). Overall wildlife is a good addition to DarkFall, but the implementation needs some work. No report on any epic loot, the few I killed skinned for very basic stuff (mean, leather, Q1 horns and teeth).

Speaking of aggressive mobs, this expansion has also made more than a few mobs impossible, and overall raised the difficulty of PvE too high. The major problem is with caster mobs, who now basically machinegun out spells at you with aim-bot accuracy. When a Deathless Mage spell hits you for 63 in the face, and you have 300ish hitpoints, and those spells are coming at you at a rate of one every two seconds, well, good luck. Even the lowly goblin shaman, a mob new players will be facing, has a tendency to cast his spells a little too fast, and while my character can still take them down, I can only imagine how devastating they are for newbies.

In addition to the spell bug (it has to be a bug), the new mob vulnerability system is a little too restrictive. Rather than fire elementals now taking more damage from water spells, the system instead makes them basically immune to everything BUT water spells. I’m sure you can understand why that’s not exactly ideal. Many mobs are now very resistant to archery (the preferred method of killing mobs pre-patch), and while itself not a terrible change, when you combine it with jacked-up mobs, it leaves many of them in the ‘impossible to kill’ range. Grouping up to kill them helps, but then the problem of time/effort creeps in, as those mobs don’t drop ENOUGH loot to justify bringing some friends. I think the idea of group-only mobs is a good one, but they need loot tables to match.

Speaking of loot, its variety has been increased from the mobs I’ve seen killed. Gold amount is now more varied, and the ‘random’ items mobs would drop seem to drop more often and their table has been expanded. The core stuff like weapons and armor seems to remain unchanged, which is fine and still goes along with the ‘if a mob is using it, he will likely drop it’ design. Overall this is a good change, but some work needs to be done to the higher-end mobs and their rewards, if they indeed are intended to be group-only kills.

The major player-impact change in the expansion is the reduced importance of magic, specifically AoE spells. In this regard I think the expansion succeeded on many fronts. For starters, heavy armor (chain, banded, scale, plate, full plate, inferno, dragon) now has MUCH higher spell resists. Wearing a mix of scale/plate will allow you to withstand magic damage in much the same way it allowed you to mitigate melee/archery damage pre-patch, at the expanse of increased encumbrance. This encumbrance makes not only casting very difficulty, but also starts to penalize your archery damage. The biggest sign of success was when about 20 VAMP members were heading out to PvP on some rafts, and we noticed almost everyone was wearing a different combination of armor based on their preferred combat type (melee/archery/magic). Pre-patch everyone was in full bone. That’s a huge win on many levels.

Along with improved armor and spell cooldowns, the other major, major changes to combat in DarkFall are all the new specialization options introduced. Players now have some options for both melee and archery specialization, with costs ranging from 400 gold up to 3000. Each options brings its share of bonuses/penalties, and already some difficult choices exist, most notably the choice between jump-shooting and water-shooting with archery. As we quickly learned, following someone into the water without aqua-shot is asking for death, while the ability to jump-shoot is certainly a very useful tool for many PvP’ers. Some tuning will be needed (currently the side-step ability for melee is a little lacking), but overall I think specializations are a tremendous addition to DarkFall, and will truly allow players to customize their character based on their preferred method of play. I’m sure I’ll go into more depth and my personal preferences in another blog post soon.

VAMP made a little trip to one of the new Trade Route centers, and I came away with the impression that these will be a very nice addition to the game. The basics are you ‘invest’ a certain amount of gold (500 minimum) at one center, you get a trade backpack, and you must deliver it to another trade center on the other side of the world, the faster the better. If you succeed, you get paid out a % of your investment, with perhaps an additional reward. If someone kills you along the way they get 80% of your investment. If you disconnect you get 50% back. I think that’s how it works, but not having done it myself yet I’m obviously not 100%. On our trip the center was about to close, but we still found some PvP in the area, and that after all is the point. More on this at a later date I’m sure.

Then there is a ton of little or not-so-little stuff. Villages, trade centers, and sea fortresses now all appear on the world map, along with a timer on when they go vulnerable. This is huge, and should really push all of them to become better PvP hotspots, as well as make it easier for clans to plan ahead and organize village-capture groups. Armor now has a lengthy equip timer (3-10 seconds per piece), which is a good combat-related balance change (no more switching into robes to cast a heal and back), but makes gearing up/down at a bank a more lengthy process. It’s a sacrifice in gamer convenience for PvP balance, and while many will bitch, I think it’s a good change. It also makes quickly gearing up/down at a bank when your city/hamlet gets raided more difficult, which again I think is a good change. The new tombstones are nice, and the glow around them makes finding them much easier. New splash screens never hurt. Etc.

Overall the future impact that CtS will have on DarkFall is very promising, but its short-term impact is somewhat painful. Given that Aventurine has already stated they plan to patch all week (and very likely beyond) to resolve issues, I doubt the major stuff will be around for long, but I don’t think expecting the game not to go back to a beta state after every expansion is too much to ask, is it? But considering I spent the better of ten hours in-game the last three days, even the minor/major bugs can’t overshadow the fact that DF today is more fun (PvP-wise anyway) than it was pre-patch.

(DarkFall-related post disclaimer/reminder. If you click the image link near the top-right of this page and buy a DarkFall account, I get paid 20% of the client cost. If you believe this taints my views and reporting on DarkFall, your opinion is wrong.)