Hi, I haven't played Darkfall since New Dawn and my appetite for starting over again was very very small. Besides, what would I even do in a game that I have played to the moon and back? - Well, it turns out that there's a whole lot of new content in Rise of Agon, and I have to really applaud Big Picture Games for their work on this Darkfall. I was immediately taken in by the game like a hand in a glove, and really flattered by the countless intelligent game design changes and decisions. The new player experience is impeccable. The fast gains, the keybinds already set up, the automatic skills and spells just being placed on my character. It really helps to get the ball rolling and a great help for new players. The game feels really modern, rewarding and very helpful towards someone just starting a new character. I really didn't expect any of this, but I get skills, money, attributes just thrown at me by the game for just playing the game a bit and doing different things. I got 100 mining and woodcutting mastery in a very short time and people are buying my stone like madmen on the global marketplace. These design decisions feel incredibly rewarding and really helps someone like me to overcome the massive psychological barrier of starting again. The low population doesn't even bother me because Darkfall has always been so rich in content and things to do that a lower population simply means less griefing, which is great when you're just starting out. And I imagine that finding PvP won't be a problem down the line. I can see the villages are always getting taken and there's action at the sea towers and 2 sieges this week that I know about (Silmiyat and Calfardar). Why did I decide to start a new character and try to play? Well, honestly - Mortal Online 2 is about to come out and I played that for a couple of days. At first it seemed interesting and new. I have never played Mortal Online 1, so it was cool and there are like 1000 players running around. I was amazed with how many systems are heavily inspired by Darkfall. But on day 3 I found myself getting frustrated with the poorly designed combat system and the various lack of content overall, not to mention the really terrible monster AI and overall PvE experience. I tried to live in a chaos city, but the harassment by other players was brutal. Eventually, I asked myself... Why don't I logout right now? Why am I playing a broken and poorly designed early access game that has so many things that make me annoyed? Why don't I just download Darkfall again and play that? I could play for a couple of hours whenever I feel like it. The game is free and I would have no obligations to anyone. The game isn't very populated either, so it would be smooth sailing. I could kill a few of the mobs I used to love killing in Darkfall, and it would be much more fun than Mortal Online 2. .. So that's what I did. ... And after playing for a couple of days, I just have to extend my compliments to the people behind Big Picture Games who worked on this game. You guys did a really clever job with this one. I didn't expect so many positive things done right. Well done! The game plays really well.
Nice post. Problem with easy grind is that, eventually, people stop farming, except for their own items. So people dont grind to feed the market which creates quite a big disparity. Then things become overly charged. Grinding dont make the player neither so its hard to convince a 300 hour old player to come here just to to have him getting killed by a day one player.
The average modern Western player no longer considers grinding to be content. And I don't think your comment is fair. I'm not aware of all the new content available, but I see a lot of new content and features. This is a massive overhaul of Darkfall with lots of new things to do and new ways to do old things. Compare this with any early access game or newly released game, and I think it will be very difficult to find a game with more content than Darkfall. I do understand your sentiment though. As a player, you always want more interesting content. Especially, if you've been playing a game for a long time and have gotten to know the game inside and out.
There is basically no new content, the only decent content they added is the champions and even then they added to many for them to be pvp hot spots. The char and gear grind created most of the pvp content there was, but both were significantly reduced. They also made cities basically worthless for a long time, so that removed most of the reason to fight over cities.
Arguably, cities were also what caused the most imbalance and hate/grief in the game, where some easily had a lot of stuff, while others were left to struggle and fight for scrappy leftovers. That was part of the recipe for disaster that caused many players to quit. Seems good to me that BPG has addressed this issue to some extent. Poor players only stand to benefit and some gear grind remains regardless. Things aren't free by any means in the game now. You still have to work for the gear bags.
No, I'm just giving my honest opinion. I haven't played Rise of Agon before and I haven't played Darkfall since New Dawn. I think most people are just too jaded to realize what they've got. We could go back to having no Darkfall servers online. I'm sure we all remember the years where Unholy Wars tanked and there was no version of the game online except a singleplayer emulator.
Even if they did have plans to wipe, which they have said many times they have no plans to, it would be pointless to wipe it without a lot of changes.
I prefer more of a grind for a better sense of progression too, but i'm just glad we can still play Darkfall in 2022, gameplay is still fun and it also looks great in 1440p except that sometimes the shadows are too dark. And lol i wonder how many people will come back to try Darkfall due to mortal online. Both mortal online 1 and 2 just made me want to play darkfall.
There is no real new content added to this game since alpha/beta and even then it wasn't enough; there is a reason why this game has been dead for years. Some very back design decisions from this team, like removing racial wars which was an entry-level gateway for PVP for new players and veterans. They should have expanded on that with the capturable territory for your Race alliance, cosmetic rewards/titles for achieving things with your factions, rewards for helping your factions and penalties for betraying them. More fluff like in-game poker, or their own custom card game where you can farm the pieces from all over the game world. Instead, it was just half-ass XML code fixes to the game and they were surprised the population died off. Most of the issues from DFO were still in this game(I'd venture to say New dawn tackled more issues like character customization and living in a region with local banking, although RoA definitely has improved the grind; maybe too much). The current development point of RoA should have been what they had in alpha...maybe beta then launched and started adding more content once people paid their sub fees, but they figured the community would stick around again after no development progress and RoA had their own "We are not working on a Darkfall 2" moment with their Chinese version which flopped just as Unholy wars did. Ironic. This is not to say the game has been improved(Generally more so then New dawn was) buts nowhere near enough to keep players retained, especially in RoA version where all the try-hards group together and stomp on any noob that comes into the game to the point that they leave(Once again why take our Race wars?). Then those same poopsockers complain when the game is dead because they ran everyone off new that may have stuck around because the game was new and fresh for them(Vets left because it's mostly the same ole shit again, despite being the best pvp mmorpg ever made). Anyways /rant
