DDO: Too fast?

Posted on October 22, 2009 by SynCaine

Am I the only one who thinks DDO would be a better game if everything inside a dungeon was at 50% speed?

I think they have a great combat system, one that is both a little action hack-n-slash and also has some nice depth and utility to it. The problem is that everything moves so fast, things are either dead before you blink or you have wiped. All those great utility spells and abilities get ignored because you just don’t have enough time to use then effectively. How many times have you been inside a dungeon, the front of the party spots the enemy boss, and by the time the trailing member rounds the corner, the mob is dead or stepping over the bodies of your party?

Posted in Combat Systems, DDO, MMO design | 13 Comments

Shocking! Asian grind game is grindy

Posted on October 21, 2009 by SynCaine

This is rather amussing.

Damn NCSoft for tricking everyone into believe this Asian import with a year+ record of well documented grinding would be a grind. Those bastards.

(Bonus points for kicking those with high-end rigs in the nuts once they reach end-game. Why would the end-game need to work for everyone just a year after release?)

Posted in Aion, beta | 15 Comments

More DarkFall expansion details

Posted on October 21, 2009 by SynCaine

The bad news about the next DarkFall expansion/patch is that is has been delayed until mid-November. The good news is we have some more info about what it will contain. Clicky here to read the Spotlight piece and all the ForumFall that goes with it.

Before I talk about some of the details mentioned, I find it very humorous that Aventurine just kind of throws this information out there, without the usual PR-ish spin of most devs. Not just because it’s a nice change of pace, but because (and part of me thinks this is intentional) it always drives ForumFall up a wall and back with speculation and ‘slap in the face’ crying. ForumFall really is its own game, and I for one appreciate it on those occasional slow moments at work.

As for the details themselves, racial bonuses were previewed, and while we don’t have the full scope yet overall I think anything that separates one character from another in DarkFall is a good thing, even if those differences are minor. Already the difference races have individual starting stats, different hitbox sizes, and adjusted weapon reach, and none of those things makes any one race significantly better than the other. My guess is these changes will be more along those lines.

The crafting and item changes are also good, logical balance changes. Heavy (expensive) armor SHOULD offer better protection in exchange for magic ability, and having more players PvP’ing in more expensive gear will just raise the stakes. Plus with more heavy armor being used, the demand will increase and high-skilled crafters will see bigger rewards for their efforts. And speaking of effort, giving bigger skill gains for crafting more expensive items not only makes sense, but will in part reduce crafting feeling like a big grind. You will be producing useful items, and while skilling up you can in turn either sell or use those items instead of producing a thousand chain sleeves and mass selling them to a vendor.

Also hinted at in a different Spotlight was a change to the siege system. No details were given, but hopefully the change in some way reduces the overall length of a typical siege, especially since more often than not the first four hours currently are spent sitting around looking at a clan stone or shard holder. Aventurine has pulled unexpected changes/additions out before (village system), perhaps this change will also be something surprising.

Finally the very expected nerf to magic in the form of shared cooldowns. Anything who has been around the MMO block knew this was coming (they don’t call it flavor of the MONTH for nothing), and it’s certainly a much needed change. More archery and melee in PvP is a good thing for DarkFall.

No confirmation if this patch delay also affects EU to NA transfers.

Posted in Combat Systems, crafting, Darkfall Online, MMO design, Patch Notes | 3 Comments

Dealing with the undesirables of any MMO community.

Posted on October 20, 2009 by SynCaine

Yesterday’s post was about the theory/dream of a persistent world with a reactive ecosystem, among other features. One of the very valid arguments against this setup is the possibility of the players themselves not playing nice and ruining everything. It’s a well established fact that if griefing is possible, it will happen. But there are different types of greifing, and even more opinions of what constitutes griefing versus what’s accepted behavior. And ultimately, a game has two basic options: set limits to all players, or create a player environment that creates those limits.

Let’s stereotype and assuming our griefer is a basement-dwelling 13yr old who’s mom never hugged him enough, and now he is in your MMO doing whatever he can do to get a reaction out of you for ‘the lulz’. He corpse camps you for hours for no personal gain, he spams chat channels with ‘big kid’ four letter words, and he has way more time to play than you do so he gets ahead and has a level/gear/time advantage.

One solution is to set rules that don’t allow said kid to do what he wants. Make it impossible to corpse camp, allow ignore to work in chat channels, and remove direct competition so his level/gear/time has zero impact on your game. You give up some things with all your other players, but you keep the world ‘safe’ and everyone protected.

The other solution is to design and encourage your players to play a certain way, one that makes life very difficult for the griefer. If the best content is limited to groups, community becomes a factor. If you are the pariah of the server, you get cut off, especially if you don’t allow for easy switching of servers, names, or reputation. Of course you walk the fine line here between encouraging a community and forced-grouping, but that’s why game devs make the big bucks, right?

The larger point however is that when designing any MMO, you either live in fear of your players, or you embrace and guide them. Fear is the ‘easy’ choice, because limiting options and setting hard and fast rules will yield expected, but limited, results. It’s far more difficult and risky to set rules to guide them, and hope that those rules are enough to establish the type of community you envisioned. The one bonus an MMO has is that the rules can change mid-game, but we have seen all too often dev teams being reluctant to make changes, especially ones that ultimately lead to the admission that a previous system was flawed or broken.

Posted in MMO design | 42 Comments

What the MMORPG genre could (and should) be.

Posted on October 19, 2009 by SynCaine

Last Friday’s post, and the links in the comments to Raph Koster’s posts (here, here, and here) (Thanks Brian) about the old Ultima Online eco system have sparked some old memories of what got me interested in the MMORPG genre way back in 1996 or so, reading about what UO will be like and how it will be a completely new gaming experience, lifting the single player RPG to new highs thanks to thousands of player characters all playing their role in a virtual world. It also reminded me why the current on-rails themepark trend of popular MMOs annoys me as much as it does, because that style of design is almost the exact opposite of what originally drew me in. Prepare for a wall of text incoming, but before we get to my wall, I strongly encourage everyone to read the three posts by Raph first, as they will give you an excellent idea of what the original vision (little v) for a virtual world was all about.

I remember telling a friend of mine about UO before either of us got into the beta. I told him it would be just like the other Ultima games, but all of the characters would be played by real people and not the computer (I was wrong about this, as UO did indeed have some npcs like shop keepers and guards), and how this would allow for endless content instead of ‘finishing’ the game. One thing that always drew me to RPGs was their setting, a fantasy world, and one ‘flaw’ I always saw in them was that no matter how much you liked a certain setting, at some point the game would end and that was it. I saw Ultima Online as the solution to that problem, because as long as I was willing to log in, the adventure never had to end, especially because the development team would stay around and continue to add more for everyone to do, and continue to shape and change the world rather than moving on once the game shipped.

In 1997 when UO was released, it basically delivered on all my expectations. My character started in the town of Yew, and I was free to explore and develop my character as I saw fit. Others were running around doing their thing, guilds were formed to bring together like-minded individuals, and everyone was just wandering around trying to figure it all out (well almost everyone, the powergamers from beta were busy doing their thing, becoming the uber-power PKs that roamed around, but they too played their part as dangerous villains). As this was really the first game of its type, literally everyone was a noob, and just seeing another player character run by was a thrill for everyone. Imagine the first week of any new MMO, but extended for weeks if not months.

I remember scouting the area around Yew with my friend, finding what local monsters we could fight, where the local dungeon was, and what spots were ideal for mining or logging. We managed to place a small house near some mountains, and this became our home to roam out of. We built up our characters to be both adventurers and crafters, and we became friends with those who also lived around us. We also quickly learned the common paths of local PKs, and where their houses were placed. We played the role of total noobs to a T, and it was truly great.

And while some of that greatness can never be replicated because you only play your first MMORPG once, part of it can. The sense of a new world (rather than a starting zone), of freedom, of things changing around you because of player actions (either your own or others), all those things can still happen today like they did back in 1997. Reading Raph’s posts, it’s very clear how much technology limited what they could accomplish, and it’s terribly exciting to thing that today, in 2009, some of those limitations no longer exist. Today’s servers COULD run all those ecology scripts in real time, allowing every area of the world to have its own feel, a feel that would be a combination of player action and the randomness of those scripts themselves.

I also think the challenges of designing a virtual world go much deeper than just providing the shiniest ride and reward to take a player on. Take being a shopkeeper for example. It’s clear to everyone that standing around waiting for a customer is not a lot of fun (the current example of this being to spam trade chat with your wares), but what is fun is crafting/gathering your goods, setting prices, finding a good location to sell from, and all the other macro economic activities that go with running a business. It’s up to the designers to figure out ways to cut out the boring activities and keep you focused on the fun. (In UO you could have an NPC vendor do the standing around for you, while you just worried about keeping him stocked and his prices accurate in hopefully a good location) The solution should not be the easy way out, to simply provide NPCs that sell you the gear so everyone can focus on just combat (or in a themepark, to keep you on track towards some ‘end game’).

The same can be said for the old ecology system overall. Just because the original one planned for UO did not work does not mean the solution is to scrap it entirely and add in static spawns. Why did the system fail, and what needed to be done to make it work? In the years since UO’s release, we have seen very clearly that players will go to great lengths to be rewarded (even if the reward is absolutely meaningless like achievements), and so knowing this it should be very possible to tune an ecology system to function correctly.

Raph talked about the questing system that was never finished, how certain NPCs would have quests for players if certain conditions were met. The common example is a farmer with sheep, who asks players to kill off some wolves that have been killing his animals. In today’s MMOs, this is seen as the most boring of starter quests, the now famous ‘kill ten rats’ style of quests we do just to get it done. Bla bla bla farmer story, we have heard it a thousand times, and we know damn well he will still have an issue when we roll our next alt.

But what if more depended on this simple quest? What if instead of an NPC, the farm was player-owned? What if the player who owned the farm could only collect wool from his sheep if the wolves were kept at bay, but because he can’t be online 24/7, he sets his NPC farmer to give out a reward for anyone who kills local wolves once their population is high enough to bother him? If not enough players are interested, he can increase the reward. If too many players do it, his NPC farmer stops offering the quest. The more time the local wolves are kept at bay, the higher that players farm output is, providing more wool for him to craft with. If his farm gets too big and successful, it attracts more than just wolves (the famous dragon perhaps?). And what if instead of owning just one farm, that player owns three or four such locations, and so must manage a complex set of quests and rewards to keep his whole economic foundation going, where his game is more about collecting resources and setting rewards than heading out to slay monsters. A mine with Kobolds, a fishing vessel and kraken, a lumber yard with bandits, on and on. If integrated into the ecology system, perhaps one week it’s wolves bothering you, the next its bandits, and after that whatever monsters the local town drives towards you. You drive them away from you, and they migrate to the next guys farm, or are forced to attack the local village. As the players react, the ‘story’ continues, without a single patch or update from the development team. If things ever get too far out of whack, send in God (the GMs) and make the needed corrections.

The original thing that drew me to this genre was that the virtual world was what you make of it, and that as a player you could leave your mark in a number of ways. Ultima Online accomplished some of this, but if anything it left more OFF the table than on, in part because of technology limitations and also because it’s very idea was so new and fresh. No one back in 1997 could really predict how thousands of players would interact with a huge world, and so naturally mistakes were made. The genre has had over 10 years to mature now, and both technology and ideas have progressed (or regressed) greatly. It’s very clear that for the majority of those playing MMOs today, the idea of just being a member of a virtual world is not nearly as appealing as being a ‘hero’ rewarded with ‘epics’, even if you are a clone hero using epics that everyone else has. But the MMORPG genre is not about spoon-feeding millions as they solo-hero their way through for a few months. Lets leave that to the MMO (or themepark, or whatever else we want to call it) genre, where the key to success is measured in how well you execute a series of kill ten rat quests and how sparkly your character can be.

And because you will alienate (at least initially) those millions, you can’t exactly expect a huge budget or massive team. But UO never had that massive team (not by today’s standards certainly), nor did EVE, nor does DarkFall. And while both EVE and DarkFall do some interesting things with the virtual world concept, neither has really captured the full potential of the genre. EVE’s technology has shown that thousands of players all in one ‘world’ is very possible, and that players will naturally find their little spot in the world and build local communities. DarkFall is a good step towards putting player-skill into the MMORPG equation, rather than combat being a straight math problem of who has more HP/DPS. And while both games have lots of room to continue to grow and expand, neither is very likely to create that perfect virtual world of player-driven content. Perhaps no game ever will, but that does not mean we should settle for what passes as an MMORPG today and assume the genre is fully grown. If anything, after 10+ years, we are just beginning.

Posted in Combat Systems, crafting, Darkfall Online, EVE Online, Housing, MMO design, Rant, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft | 64 Comments

What buying Aion says about you

Posted on October 16, 2009 by SynCaine

The MMO genre has many unique aspects that separate it from other gaming genres, with perhaps the ability of fans to shape future content being among the greatest. Everyone has at least some idea of their perfect game, and while no game will ever match 100% to that idea, the MMO genre at least gives you the opportunity to voice your requests and perhaps see actual results. If enough people request a feature, and that feature is technically feasible and won’t have major side impacts, a good dev team will listen and attempt to please their fans. From beta onward, fans have multiple channels (emails, forums, fansites, blogs) to submit feedback and take part in the future direction of a title.

And while there are indeed many avenues to take when trying to voice your opinion, one will always be superior to the rest: your money. When you initially purchase a box you are telling the company you think what they are selling is interesting enough to drop some cash on, and for each month you subscribe you are giving the dev team a vote of confidence. When you re-subscribe because of a new patch or expansion you are again saying you support this change/addition. And ultimately, when you unsubscribe, it’s the most direct and clear way of telling a company that what they are offering is no longer acceptable or of interest to you.

And with the above as a base: If you bought Aion, you are telling NCSoft and the genre as a whole “more of the same please”. Paying the $50-65 up front, and any months after, and you more or less give up your right to complain that the genre is boring, that no one is trying new things, and that too many games are just shallow time-sinks that apply a fresh coat of paint to the same themepark and rides.

If you are happy with what Aion and games very similar to it offer, no issue, enjoy. But if you log in and realize you are doing the same kill ten rats quests with fairy wings and pretty colors, grinding the pre-cap game to reach the complete 180 that is end-game, and that you wish it did not all feel/play so similar that you can guess what is around the next corner, you have only yourself to blame. At no point did Aion claim to be anything but the Asian interpretation of WoW. That, from day one, was exactly why it was created, to give the east a version of WoW but with some aspects tweaked to account for cultural differences. Once the game got ‘big enough’, it was, ironically, ported over to the west with some westernization thrown in. But again, and this really is the key here, at no point did Aion ever claim to offer more than a 2009 version of what is fundamentally WoW, and when you spent your money on it you are asking for exactly that.

One issue I see related to all this is with how the average fan approaches the genre with unreasonable expectations. We expect something as complex and unpredictable as an MMO to not only be completely new, but also work flawlessly on day one. Yet short of 10 year development cycles and crazy budget numbers, that’s just not going to be the case (and even with those it’s still not a guarantee that what gets created will be worthwhile, see Tabula Rasa). It should be clear that if you are refining an established formula, like WoW did with EQ1, and Aion has done with WoW, more time can be spent on polish. You go into it knowing what’s going to work at the core, rather than hoping your players react how you expect them to.

Take Ultima Online for example. Before the games release, the developers expected players to play a certain way, and so they created a living ecosystem that would react to player behavior. Kill too many sheep in the local area, and the wolves would get more aggressive in their search for food. Kill the wolves, and the local dragon would start attacking people to get his meal. It was a living world that reacts to the players, and a great system on paper. Once live, players killed all the sheep to grind for wool, killed the wolves to grind sword skill, and quit because they did not like getting killed by the dragon or because the sheep did not respawn fast enough. A month or so after release, the system was scrapped and replaced with the now very familiar static spawn system, with all the hours put into the previous system going poof. Had the devs been able to predict such player behavior, all that time spent designing the ecosystem could have instead been spent on polishing animations or network code.

Blizzard saw what worked in EQ1, saw the flaws, and designed WoW to be what EQ1 would be after years of player feedback. It’s much easier to fix flaws when you are working from the ground up, so while EQ1 devs did their best with what they had, Blizzard was free to make the changes needed at the root of the problem. They knew players liked PvE a certain way, they knew directing players worked, and they knew gear was a great motivator, all because they had seen it work for years in EQ1. As a result, very little of their dev time went into things like the UO ecosystem, things that would ultimately be scrapped, and that leaves a lot of time/resources to polish what you know already works, while also not launching with potentially broken system. (Which is not to say Blizzard would not have their own ecosystem-like mistakes: how many different PvP systems has WoW gone through?)

MMOs that try drastically new things, be they Tabula Rasa, EVE, DarkFall, or Fallen Earth, have many uphill battles compared to clone games. For starters, they are much riskier to fund and launch simply because you don’t know if your formula is even going to work, and hence usually don’t get as much money up front. No amount of polish would have saved a game like Fury because its very idea was just not very good (but you can’t be sure until you try. Why does Counter Strike work so well and not Fury?). And even if your core ideas are solid (EVE) you still might have to scrap sections of the game to make everything work, and all that takes away from polishing. Not to mention your fans will notice the systems that don’t function perfectly, and in what is now a highly competitive space, those mistakes could doom a game from the start. The ecosystem might not have worked in UO, but back then fans of MMOs could either play UO or not plan anything, and that’s clearly not the case today.

Finally it comes down to player preference. For me an MMO is indeed always a work in progress, both in the amount of content it has and also it’s very design. As players enter the world and interact with it in the way they do, the world (devs) reacts accordingly, and round and round we go. To me themeparks are flawed (in terms of what an MMO should offer) because due to their on-rails nature, the players all more or less follow the same path, doing the same things. Your options are so limited, your path so guided, that far less dev time is spent reacting to what the players are doing, and instead simple ‘more’ is added to the end. I’ll always trade some polish in for a new, fresh living world, even if it means I’ll die to an angry dragon from time to time.

Posted in Aion, beta, Darkfall Online, EVE Online, MMO design, Rant, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft | 51 Comments

Get to know Aventurine

Posted on October 15, 2009 by SynCaine

Aventurine has launched their company website, and it’s actually worth taking a look at. From the initial page, with it’s “slow for the short bus kids” statements, to the different pictures of DarkFall-branded sports cars, to gems like:

Note: It’s Aventurine, not Adventurine. We’ve seen our company name routinely misspelled by media, job applicants, business contacts, and by fans. We forgive the fans.

And could this be a hint at some upcoming buddy-pass system?

We appreciate all the support Darkfall gets by its fans! There are many ways you could help Darkfall grow while earning Darkfall rewards. More on this very soon.

Overall you get the impression that Aventurine is a company of very talented people who love being involved with technology and gaming. Their indie budget might not afford them a fully staffed PR department, but much like DarkFall itself, other companies in the genre have the PR-BS well covered, and let’s hope Aventurine does not change that approach anytime ‘soon’.

Posted in Darkfall Online, Mass Media, MMO design, Random, Site update | 1 Comment

DarkFall: Attack on Aradoth

Posted on October 14, 2009 by SynCaine

DarkFall is really testing my writing ability lately, as it’s getting harder and harder to write posts without just typing “it was awesome” over and over. For the good of the blogosphere, I’ll try my best yet again today.

After watching “Behind the Music: 50 Cent” (Which was great, of course), I log into DarkFall at around 9pm EST to see what’s going on and to get myself to our new chaos city home up in Yssam. We decided to move up there for a bit just to mix things up, and also to be closer to our good buddies TRA, who own the entire island. For a warm welcome, as soon as I runestone in from Bladethrope with a ready bag and a mount, two TRA members start chasing me around trying to kill me. Now it would have been very easy to dump both the mount and the bag in the bank had I known its location, but seeing as this was my first time there, I was running around like a fool trying to dodge arrows and spells while looking for the damn thing. At about 50% HP and with my stam running low, I spawned my mount hoping to distract them, and as I turned the next corner found the bank. My bag went in just before my HP hit zero. Welcome to Yssam.

Shortly after that warm welcome, I got a quick tour of our new surroundings from one of our members (some very nice mob spawns are close by), and as we were about to go scout a few hamlets, we spot two different TRA members riding around. After a little chasing, we killed both in somewhat comedic fashion as one guy lost his mount, his buddy kept on going, and eventually he came back AFTER his friend was already dead. Welcome to Yssam part two.

On our vent an alliance clan leader popped on and asked how many members we have on currently, and if we want to help some friends in a siege. Group gets formed, ready bags get pulled out, and soon we are riding towards the city of Aradoth to kill a shard holder. Now as big as last Friday’s siege at Bladethorpe was, this event brought out a whole slew of big names out to play. On our side we had a few Cairn alliance groups, the Ruby alliance (who’s hamlet was being sieged), and the Zealot alliance mercs who were hired out (the same mercs who fought against us when we lost our city and hamlet a few weeks back). On the other side was the ShadowPact alliance (who started the siege) and TRA. At some point a third, random faction also showed up to cause trouble and scavenge any loot they could.

Our group received orders from the siege leader to breach the west wall and hold that side of the city down. We meet little resistance as we launched ourselves over the walls, and looking down we could see a fight had already broken out near the entrance to the cave system. The city of Aradoth is one of the tougher cities to attack, as most of the city is beside a mountain, but the key parts (bank and bindstone under the protection of two zap towers) are deep inside a branching, narrow tunnel system. AoE magic + narrow tunnels = bright shiny death. What came next is the very definition of trench warfare, as inch by inch our attack force pushed the defenders deeper and deeper into the tunnels, but at the cost of some players being insta-killed from massive magic and arrow fire. There are two tunnels that eventually get you to the room with the bank/stone, and we knew that was where the shardholder was being protected.

Our Apollo group along with some other Cairn allies went left, while Ruby members and Zealots went right. Our strategy was to make a push with a few people, with those behind throwing healing as we pushed. After a few feet, those who were taking heavy fire would peel off to the side and rest up while those behind continued the push. It more or less worked, but it was slow going and more than one person went down. Eventually we were at the mouth of the cave entrance, and it was at this point that our push stopped and a long (20+ minute) ranged and occasional melee fight started. We just could not clear the final room, and the defenders had the advantage of being able to restock at their bank should they go down. Yet after 20 minutes of heavy bombardment, they eventually broke and we were able to get enough people into the room to finish off the remaining defenders and kill the shard carrier.

The timing worked out well, because shortly after the shard carrier kill a second force of TRA and others came into the city and began fighting, effectively pinning the attacking side inside the tunnels. I believe most were able to fight their way out, but I do know a few went down during this phase as well. Although we had won, and most of us were able to loot a few tombstones, it was a fairly close fight and it’s not clear if we could have continued the push for much longer due to attrition. For a random Tuesday night, it was one hell of a battle, and just great fun to be a part of. Yes, it was awesome.

edit: A two-part video of the siege. Enjoy!

Posted in Combat Systems, Darkfall Online, PvP | 6 Comments

MMO fluff: What is it?

Posted on October 13, 2009 by SynCaine

One of the more common complaints about DarkFall from the players actually playing the game is the lack of ‘fluff’ content, and the upcoming expansion may seek to address this. One question I have is what exactly is fluff in an MMO, and more specifically what would be considered fluff content in DarkFall?

To me fluff content is something you do just to do it, but it has no real impact on anything outside its own context. The best example I can think of is vanity character slots, where you can equip different gear or clothing to change how your character looks, without it providing any benefit to your characters actual performance. (Clearly only in a PvE setting, as seeing what someone is actually wearing in PvP is very important. While amusing, hiding your Titan ship behind a vanity Shuttle would be rather game-breaking). Another example might be emotes such as waving, pointing, sitting, etc. Finally we have fluff like achievements, non-combat pets, and stat-less titles. Achievements are a little tricky, because while some are purely pointless (total number of mounts, pets, whatever), others can be used to identify a given characters competency. You assume someone with the achievement of having cleared raid X has at least seen the raid, and you can use those types of achievements to put together a PUG group.

In regards to DarkFall, the next patch is set to add roaming mobs and/or wildlife to the game, and many are calling this the start of needed fluff to flesh out DarkFall. More toys being added to the sandbox and all that. To me roaming mobs are certainly content rather than fluff, as you assuming they will be aggressive and drop some loot. They will bring variety to all areas of the game, and a bit of unpredictability to the world, but I would say they go far beyond the title of fluff. Especially if they do fun stuff like roam into a hamlet and kill (loot?) afk players, or wander across a player harvesting and chase him for a bit. It would certainly make it much harder/riskier going out naked to harvest for any length of time, and city walls would gain an added bonus since they would keep such mobs out and the players inside safe. Different types of mobs could also roam different areas of the world, so while goblins might roam near the starter cities, Deathless Mages might patrol the center of Agon.

Roaming wildlife is another story. Assuming the wildlife is not aggressive (otherwise they are just mobs that happen to be animals, and DF already has some of those), and depending on whether they drop anything when killed, they might fall under the category of fluff. Personally I hope they do have some drops, but only things like low-rank enchanting mats from skinning (blood, teeth, essence), and natural things like leather and meat. This would make them perfect crafter mobs, and with such low-value drops, they should be easy enough for even new players to take down. Veteran players or those who are simply too busy would be able to ride past the wildlife without drawing agro, or perhaps even scare and scatter a group of cows, deer or sheep (not the player variety, as that already happens).

Another nice fluff addition would be the ability to sit at a table and play card/board games. You could do this way back in 1997 with Ultima Online, so why not in 2009 with DarkFall? Four hour shard defense a little boring? Bust out a table and play some chess while taking turns on guard duty. Waiting for your PvP group to gather? Time to play a quick game of poker using in-game gold. A player-city tavern with a weekly bingo tournament would not only bring guild members together, but also provide everyone else with a good place to party-crash, and everyone loves PvP.

To me even fluff should server some greater purpose than just a checklist of random crap to do or to collect. It should help shape player behavior in a way that benefits not only them, but everyone around them as well. The huge advantage a sandbox game like DarkFall has over more on-rails MMOs is that every player has a lot of freedom in their day-to-day actions, and so fluff is even more effective in shaping that behavior. You will never leave the zone of roaming mobs due to your level, nor will you ever ‘out gear’ the need for leather in crafting or meat in cooking. Once something is added, it’s more content for everyone rather than making the ‘old’ stuff obsolete, be it for a first-day player or someone playing since go-live, and that is the true beauty of living in a virtual world molded by skilled developers. CCP has been doing it for years with EVE, and so far Aventurine is one for one in DarkFall (villages, chaos chests), with everyone hoping they go two for two in October.

Posted in crafting, Darkfall Online, EVE Online, Housing, MMO design, Patch Notes, PvP, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft | 22 Comments

Science proves why DarkFall > WoW.

Posted on October 12, 2009 by SynCaine

Science talks about videogames and how they might affect your brain.

The TLDR version as provided by my fiancé:

WoW = easy = dumb brain

DarkFall = hard = smart brain

She’s a keeper.

Posted in Console Gaming, Darkfall Online, Mass Media, MMO design, Random, World of Warcraft | 6 Comments