Insider story of Darkfall’s development

Posted on March 3, 2011 by SynCaine

Pretty interesting read.

While I’m at another lull in my activity with Darkfall, it’s still the MMO I keep my eye on more than anything else, I still log in once a week or so to catch up on activity, and it’s still the game I know I’ll be playing going forward. While what is there now is pretty fantastic (especially given how many people made it), the design is such that each year, it only gets better, which is rather exciting from a players perspective.

About SynCaine

Former hardcore raider turned casual gamer.
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4 Responses to Insider story of Darkfall’s development

  1. Max says:
    March 3, 2011 at 2:54 pm

    Great thanks for the link. Quite insightfull – never knew they did java/c++ . I always thougt darkfall was always a failure in game design, but actually relatively decent from technical point of view ( if compared to shadowbane)

    I see one big problem with many indie projects is that they do not design games . They throw idea out there (we do x) and do not take into account the fact that its supposed to be a game They dont design the experience to be fun.

    Designing a fun game is actually hard ,and designing a virtual MMO world game is much more so. Aventurine did manage to overcome all the technical obstacles in their way ( a huge task on its own) but they never addressed the gameplay issues.

    If one starts dissecting why exactly a successful FPS (say quake) ,RTS (starcraft) or MMO(wow) in particular are fun you will find many complicate pieces of the puzzle carefully put together and polished that in the end it all looks like one whole great experience.

    Both shadowbane, darkfall and even eve have exact same issues with gameplay.- its poorly designed. It just few concepts (full loot ,open pvp, etc) not well thought nor polished.

    I do admire the devs who created them for persistence and hardwork – they are immense projects get done. But I cant consider them a success. As games they are failures.

    • SynCaine says:
      March 3, 2011 at 3:25 pm

      Wait so you are saying EVE is a failure because it’s not fun? I think some 7+ year vets would beg to differ.

      Not fun for the masses, sure, but that is totally different and, honestly, not the goal of something like DF. For a DF player, playing WoW is pretty painful, no matter how many millions consider it super fun.

  2. Max says:
    March 3, 2011 at 8:24 pm

    What I mean is that being better games being wow clone . EvE has its audience and so does DF, but they have gameplay issues which could be vastly improved. They could have expanded their audience considerably had they had better design.

    And I do not mean by appealing to WoW kids , by appealing to people like me for example who enjoy pvp, enjoy worlds, but just not willing to overlook the obvious flaws and omissions . Gameplay needs to be fixed – the niche is much much bigger than what they they have as sub base.

  3. Max says:
    March 3, 2011 at 8:25 pm

    dammit no edit button: “being better game being wow clone”

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