Monday, January 19, 2009

Negative leak.

He has provided screen shots on the betaleaks forums when it as up. May i ask any leaker who Disagrees with him to email me at darkfallherald@gmail.com and state how you think the game holds up?


Hello again betaleaks boards, I used to use these all the time back in the day for informative reasons, now I\'m brought back to foretell some warnings about the current state of DF if they do in fact plan to release it within the next few months.

I\'ve been in the beta for a few months now, and if anything I am thoroughly disgusted with the state of the game, the next to useless developers, and I find it hilarious that they\'ve wasted 6 years worth of time and money to develop a resource harvesting grindfest.

My big gripes:

The world isn\'t that big, despite the fact that your character jogs at a rather slow pace for most of the time, unless you simply macro devour food and stam pots to regain stam as fast as you lose it, it only takes about 35-45 minutes to go from capital to capital, most of the space inbetween is for the most part completely empty except for trees, and other nice little decorations such as rocks and the like, any ruins or structures either denote hamlets, city sites, or mob spawns.

To cross the main continent from end to end takes about 1.5 hours if you take the flattest paths possible.


The combat is pretty bland, your characters attacks range from one to three moves based on the weapons your using, and they are basically overhead chop, left and right swing. You have no direct control over your basic attacks...

Blocking is pretty much useless, sure it reduces damage but it consumes so much stamina in the process that you would be better off simply dodging and running around out of the path of the opposing swings then by trying to block anything.

2h weapons cannot block, if they are supposed to do so they either don\'t or don\'t mitigate any damage.

As of the last build I recall playing (high 60 or low 70), stats weren\'t implemented yet so weapon damage didn\'t vary a great deal unless if you found some nice high multiplier weapons off of some nice mobs somewhere.

Archery was pretty much all I used for PVP, hitting someone in the back causes increased damage, and while bows have a ballistic trajectory over greater distances, it\'s not too hard to get accustomed to using them. So with a basic crap bow and a ton of arrows I would run around jacking people in the back for anywhere between 8-15 damage a shot, all the while kiting them and their buddies across the continent.

Skill progression is grindtastic, Lineage II players will feel right at home, after grinding magic for about a week (by shooting my useless magic missiles into the sky in the middle of nowhere) I had about 50 Magic Skill and could use a small slew of new spells if I could somehow afford them from the vendors in town. the devs never helped us with this so if you didn\'t want to macro fish and sell the 9000 fish you could catch over the course of a good 12 hour afk macro session, to maybe make half of the 15000 gold required to learn the magic skill then w00t. I don\'t know of many people that macro\'d magic to the extent that I did and I certainly couldn\'t find a way to buy all the spells that I wanted to test.

Most ranged spells are slow....so slow that they are mostly useless in PVP unless the guu really really isn\'t paying any attention and moves into the patch of the spell...to compensate for their slowness they all have an AOE range to some effect, with the beefier versions of mana missile having a larger range and doing more damage...but it\'s still mostly useless in PVP because they will have ample time to simply move out of the way.

Clans and Stones, heres how they work:

It costs about 2k gold to get a clan charter from an NPC, theres no size minimum for starting one but you will need a few people to help you grind mobs to get the 2k gold in the first place since most gold comes from selling loot.

For another 2k or so (I can\'t remember) you can buy a Clan Shard, which is a small blue rock that allows anyone with General or Higher standing to claim clan stones, this works by simply walking near the stone and double clicking the Clan Shard, it took the beta server about 4 hours to figure this out despite being given pretty direct instructions in the beta forum. The person who claims that town becomes the Mayor, currently you can\'t remove or change mayors because they haven\'t fixed it yet, what good the mayor is or does I don\'t know as we never had enough time to build up a town to actually find out.

Now you have to grind resources to build little building templates that you use to build basic structures for your clan city, this requires a skill that costs a ton of gold and each template requires about 300 gold and about 5-10 pieces of wood and has a 66% chance fail rate, each template weighs a damn lot, but you only need to drag it to a bank and then have a guildmember pull it out of a wilderness bank by your city and relay the crap until you use it to facilitate building something.

This is really all there is to the gameI\'ve read what people have posted about \'sieging\' and whatnot but I\'ve never heard of any sieges going on while I was bothered enough to actually play the beta, and I\'d be suprised if the mechanic was even activated to begin with. They didn\'t activate the clanstones until about two weeks before Christmas, and they claim that the game was already \"tested by professional testers\" that managed to miss all the major bugs and massive design flaws with the beta versions 56-68.

So heres my predictions as a pragmatic player of loads of MMO\'s over the years.

Adventurine has stated that they will be doing a competitive \'pre-order\' process that will allow people with preorders to play exclusively on the main Euro server for about a week before DF\'s release, they\'ve stated that they will not wipe this progress whatsoever.

I believe they are doing this in order to attempt to provide additional funding for more serves in the EU for localization purposes, and because they want to make a slight return on their game before the ghost is out of the bag that it is mostly lacking the gameplay part of any game and is a massive resource grinder...which will drive people away from their release but as long as they are paying a 50+ euro preorder for it they won\'t much care.

I speculate that DF won\'t have much of an open beta before they finally decide to release the game whenever they actually do that, because it WILL hurt sales.

I predict that DF will ship and sell to some extent but I feel that the \'shadowbane effect\' will occour again and 1/2 the purchasing population will stop playing within the first three months of the game, which would probably cancel Adventurine\'s ideas of a North American release, which I would wait for since I prefer to stomp the NA guilds, and typically NA mmo servers are more competitive.

If anyone has any other questions postem and I will try to answer them as best I can.

53 comments:

Unknown said...

please post the read more section for your friends in China!

Faithkiller said...

the reead more section is working for me..

Unknown said...

for some reason, I'm here in China and i've used several different browsers, and it never works even though it worked when I was back in the US

Bill said...

Minus the archery stuff and exact terminology on things, this could've been written about Age of Conan last May.

Daimyo said...

Worries me a bit.. ive been following DF for about 3 years now actively and unless they really put in some crunch time and fix all the critical bugs and make a playable game then np.. With the shitty MMOs lately its worth the $50.. because I didnt buy WAR or AOC, so I saved a good $100 already. And when he talks about grinding.. there will always be grinding. EVERY MMO has it.. Macros are needed for this.. but I think DFO will implement NPC hirelings in the future to make this grind legal and legitimately part of the game thus narrowing it down to simply programming a Bot to grind for you. Hopefully its a winner.

Unknown said...

I'm not in the beta, so I can't directly confirm this leaker's opionions.

However, I would like to respond to his comments on grinding and shortage of money:

If he is levelling his magic skills by only shooting spells into the sky then of course he is going to find it boring, and it's not going to make him any money.

Secondly if he is so good at PVP archery why not use it to kill some PVE mobs and sell their loot, or even sell the loot from all the players he is apparently shooting in the back so easily?

Finally regarding grinding money and materials for town building, it is meant to take several people to form a town. Sure two or three people could build a small settlement but they are still going to have trouble defending it from larger clans.
Also from Dev Journals the crafting fail rate will decrease as crafting skill increases.

illicit said...

He also answered a shitload of peoples questions. Unfortunately we don't have the Q&A because betaleaks is down, again. Another reason why I vote that you keep this site up :D

joukokara said...

Those screenshots weren't that convincing. I wouldn't believe these "leaks" without more proof.

Here are the screens: http://www.betaleaks.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=3&d=1232417099

http://www.betaleaks.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=2&d=1232404637

Unknown said...

Fuck, seems like they are pulling a D&L on us.

Anonymous said...

I don't think its a problem. Some games are just not for everyone. He's the first real negative we have about the game, so maybe it's just him and not the game.

cwliias said...

OH NOES RESOURCE FARMING... honestly guys I wouldnt expect to be able to spring up a city with out having to FARMgrind OMG farm and grind god forbid... But seriously it should not be easy to get stuff. I'm happy with what this says. And thats 1 bad leak out of a hundred so dont put to much stock in this

Unknown said...

can anyone please post the read more section for me?

Unknown said...

He probably was in beta, and then got kicked when they caught him macroing, so now he's just pissed off.

Unknown said...

Doesn't sound like the DF I hear about from other leakers. Maybe he's just a pissy beta-tester or a Pro-WoW player that wants to shit-talk the game because it's not WoW 2.0?

Unknown said...

seems like a lot of the gripes here (block-stamina loss, weapon strength, spell speed, cost of things) are simple configuration changes, and hopefully will be tweaked with time as more people play the game?

Unknown said...

Read More section :
The combat is pretty bland, your characters attacks range from one to three moves based on the weapons your using, and they are basically overhead chop, left and right swing. You have no direct control over your basic attacks...

Blocking is pretty much useless, sure it reduces damage but it consumes so much stamina in the process that you would be better off simply dodging and running around out of the path of the opposing swings then by trying to block anything.

2h weapons cannot block, if they are supposed to do so they either don\'t or don\'t mitigate any damage.

As of the last build I recall playing (high 60 or low 70), stats weren\'t implemented yet so weapon damage didn\'t vary a great deal unless if you found some nice high multiplier weapons off of some nice mobs somewhere.

Archery was pretty much all I used for PVP, hitting someone in the back causes increased damage, and while bows have a ballistic trajectory over greater distances, it\'s not too hard to get accustomed to using them. So with a basic crap bow and a ton of arrows I would run around jacking people in the back for anywhere between 8-15 damage a shot, all the while kiting them and their buddies across the continent.

Skill progression is grindtastic, Lineage II players will feel right at home, after grinding magic for about a week (by shooting my useless magic missiles into the sky in the middle of nowhere) I had about 50 Magic Skill and could use a small slew of new spells if I could somehow afford them from the vendors in town. the devs never helped us with this so if you didn\'t want to macro fish and sell the 9000 fish you could catch over the course of a good 12 hour afk macro session, to maybe make half of the 15000 gold required to learn the magic skill then w00t. I don\'t know of many people that macro\'d magic to the extent that I did and I certainly couldn\'t find a way to buy all the spells that I wanted to test.

Most ranged spells are slow....so slow that they are mostly useless in PVP unless the guu really really isn\'t paying any attention and moves into the patch of the spell...to compensate for their slowness they all have an AOE range to some effect, with the beefier versions of mana missile having a larger range and doing more damage...but it\'s still mostly useless in PVP because they will have ample time to simply move out of the way.

Clans and Stones, heres how they work:

It costs about 2k gold to get a clan charter from an NPC, theres no size minimum for starting one but you will need a few people to help you grind mobs to get the 2k gold in the first place since most gold comes from selling loot.

For another 2k or so (I can\'t remember) you can buy a Clan Shard, which is a small blue rock that allows anyone with General or Higher standing to claim clan stones, this works by simply walking near the stone and double clicking the Clan Shard, it took the beta server about 4 hours to figure this out despite being given pretty direct instructions in the beta forum. The person who claims that town becomes the Mayor, currently you can\'t remove or change mayors because they haven\'t fixed it yet, what good the mayor is or does I don\'t know as we never had enough time to build up a town to actually find out.

Now you have to grind resources to build little building templates that you use to build basic structures for your clan city, this requires a skill that costs a ton of gold and each template requires about 300 gold and about 5-10 pieces of wood and has a 66% chance fail rate, each template weighs a damn lot, but you only need to drag it to a bank and then have a guildmember pull it out of a wilderness bank by your city and relay the crap until you use it to facilitate building something.

This is really all there is to the gameI\'ve read what people have posted about \'sieging\' and whatnot but I\'ve never heard of any sieges going on while I was bothered enough to actually play the beta, and I\'d be suprised if the mechanic was even activated to begin with. They didn\'t activate the clanstones until about two weeks before Christmas, and they claim that the game was already \"tested by professional testers\" that managed to miss all the major bugs and massive design flaws with the beta versions 56-68.

So heres my predictions as a pragmatic player of loads of MMO\'s over the years.

Adventurine has stated that they will be doing a competitive \'pre-order\' process that will allow people with preorders to play exclusively on the main Euro server for about a week before DF\'s release, they\'ve stated that they will not wipe this progress whatsoever.

I believe they are doing this in order to attempt to provide additional funding for more serves in the EU for localization purposes, and because they want to make a slight return on their game before the ghost is out of the bag that it is mostly lacking the gameplay part of any game and is a massive resource grinder...which will drive people away from their release but as long as they are paying a 50+ euro preorder for it they won\'t much care.

I speculate that DF won\'t have much of an open beta before they finally decide to release the game whenever they actually do that, because it WILL hurt sales.

I predict that DF will ship and sell to some extent but I feel that the \'shadowbane effect\' will occour again and 1/2 the purchasing population will stop playing within the first three months of the game, which would probably cancel Adventurine\'s ideas of a North American release, which I would wait for since I prefer to stomp the NA guilds, and typically NA mmo servers are more competitive.

If anyone has any other questions postem and I will try to answer them as best I can.

Anonymous said...

Oh darn, the website is down !!!

Can some1 upload the screen some where else ?

Unknown said...

It is good to see opinions from the other side of the spectrum. It opens up for discussion. Obviously DF has flaws, but to what extend we didnt know.

I wouldn't just blindly deny the validity of the source just because it's critisism though.

Anonymous said...

You guys saying the screenshots are fake really need to take a step back. The screenshots have been confirmed by multiple people, and still not believing it just makes you look like a rabid fanboi.

As noted earlier- he was macroing which would have gotten him little to no gold and he is playing amongst a small playerbase so there is no market for items other than vendoring them.

The valid things of concern that he did raise are the world size, and mob random walk not being implemented. These are things that are fundamental to the game and either cannot be changed or would require a lot of testing.

Unknown said...

1.5 hours to cross continent ?
A trusted leaker say 3 - 4 ..

In a later post he changed that a bit
to Mirandil - Sanguine distance and not coast to coast..

No one should blame fans for questioning his credibility. His leak stands out as explicit negative one against what we heard to now.. He misspelled Aventurine, claimed to be forum whore but didn't kmow about stealing is out is officially stated. Said beta don't bother to test but then all fear to loose beta spot and it took
20 pages till he presented a screen ..
Later he droped his negativity somewhat and without him sound angry the leaks (answers to questions that are lost now) sounded not bad..

Anonymous said...

heh steve actully why ill get proof of his screenshots from my friend thats in beta : ) but he wont be on until later today sadly : )
ive said it already but ill say it again show me a screenshot of the beta forums and then i mite bite

Anonymous said...

I yea leaker i guess you didnt know there will be tools to help out with the resource grinding too geese any one knows that resources you was going to have to grind for thats common sence but i guess hes a wow noob and doesnt know shit

Unknown said...

I don't trust anyone that can't type a proper sentence with grammar and spelling. While what he's saying may be somewhat 'meaningful', I don't trust his opinion.

As has been pointed out previously, his biggest gripe is about not having the gold to buy the next spell etc, when he clearly stated that he raised his skill via doing NOTHING.

Also, as James pointed out, why didn't he sell all the phat l00tx0rz he got from his 'awesome PVP' archery skills? Likely because he was stalking people who were dropping nothing (ie, only had their starting gear.).

If this person doesn't play the game after release, the better DFO will be.

Unknown said...

Wow lots of rabid fanbois here...
I too want DFO to succeed and turn into a great game but it's hard to shake off that feeling that the game will be a disappointment.

Afterall everyone is different and just because we haven't seen alot of negative leakers before doesn't mean that this guy is one of a kind. It's easy to think something is better than it is just because you really want it. I will still pre order the game afterall everything is possible to fix with patches however I doubt the game will be perfect at launch.

Jonny Cook said...

I'm fine with him having an opinion on the game, even if it is a bit contradictory to what other people have been saying. What worried me was that he said that all the devs seemed worried too, that "they just wanted to get rid of it", or something like that. Now, it's entirely possible that I misinterpreted what he said, but I read it a few times and that's what I got... he also could have been referring to a bothersome feature.

Either way, he just painted a very depressing picture. It's only natural that the "fanbois" would try to dispute him, as most of us have been very excited about this game for some time now.

Unknown said...

The guy is definitely in the beta. He's being overly negative though. Some of his concerns are valid, like how they keep wiping the servers not letting people flesh out their characters. And bow being overpowered right now is true, and magic being too much of a grind. But, issues like that can be resolved.

It's like people don't know what a sandbox game anymore. A lot of folks are going to be disappointed by Darkfall because of how sandboxy the game is. It's not going to be perfect.

Unknown said...

I would like to know more about
"that managed to miss all the major bugs and massive design flaws with the beta versions 56-68."

We have seen many leakers and none of them has ever said the game has major bugs and design flaws.

So weird that we have read so many positive leaks, but this one comes out of the blue; I do appreciate the extra info, but I shall listen to the majority rather then a really long negative leak.

Nardagor said...

real or fake, the "leaker" just makes himself look stupid, Fanboi? cant even spell Aventurine. and hepretty much sounds like a carebear, even tho he says he's not one.

Anonymous said...

Screenshots mirror ?

Newjack said...

big deal, anyone who is playing this game for the seiges and town building knew that there would be plenty of resource harvesting, which then in turns makes resource hotspots constant pvp action.

This guy is a newb and wants to build a town by himself and kill everyone with his leet skills. You need friends and a guild to make this game work.

Unknown said...

The fanboyism here is disgusting.

enornymous said...

His issues mostly seem to stem from playing alone when doing things you should do with a couple of friends, and playing with a couple of friends when doing things you should do in a clan of 50 or so. Kind of like complaining that, say, 3vs3 Team Fortress 2 is boring.

I'll work through the legit-sounding issues:

>To cross the main continent from end to end takes about 1.5 hours if you take the flattest paths possible.

I'm pretty new to MMOs but this sounds fine to me. Detouring into ruins, backtracking, fighting mobs; we can effectively double the time if we do this instead of hold W for 90 minutes, and that's just for one vertical strip of the map. Seems big enough, and there are plenty of islands to boot. Other testers say the world is rich with things to see, so overall this point doesn't worry me.

>The combat is pretty bland, your characters attacks range from one to three moves based on the weapons your using, and they are basically overhead chop, left and right swing. You have no direct control over your basic attacks...

This is worrying. I can only hope melee isn't finished yet - on the other hand, mounted combat would seem to be the "advanced" form of melee. People have also talked about melee skills they've got such as knockback, so again, I think he just didn't explore into melee enough before he changed to ranged.

>some crap about how expensive spells are

You're playing in a beta where the game's whiped frequently, so you're levelling up by shooting spells at the sky. That's fine for a beta (maybe?) but in game you'd actually shoot monsters with it, and make gold, as well as progress slower.

>Most ranged spells are slow....so slow that they are mostly useless in PVP

This is worrying. I can only hope for the best, I suppose.

Unknown said...

The pics do look a little odd. I wish he had posted better pics

any already confirmed leakers confirm what he is saying yet?

Jupsto said...

if you factor in this is probably a theme park mmo player being negative about sandbox style mmo, the whine about grind is expected.

thanks to the leaker for posting.

please keep this blog up at least until betaleaks.com is definately working.

sounds like there is a good chance they are pulling a D&L, thanks for warning I won't be buying the game until the NDA comes down and we hear what actually made release.

epidemicz said...

Whats a D&L?

Jonny Cook said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_and_Light

It was an MMO that was being created awhile back that turned out to be somewhat of a scam.

Well, maybe not a scam, but it was a complete disaster and people wasted their money.

Jonny Cook said...

I personally think we've gotten enough positive feedback from the leakers that it's safe to say Darkfall will not be another Dark and Light. But then again, I wasn't there for the whole Dark and Light thing, so maybe what's happening now is similar to what was happening then.

Pretentious Teenager said...

So wait a minute, He's generalizing all magic as slow and useless in pvp when he's only gotten to level 50 lesser magic skill? Yeah, K buddy, stop being so overtly negative.

Free Stuff Guide Blog said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jonny Cook said...

Two more days until we'll (hopefully) know for sure.

anom85 said...

hey, can someone host the pictures somewhere else? i can't register on betaleaks.

Nofogdj said...

A lot of what he said was brought up by a troll/s on the Darkfall forums about 2 days ago.

One thing I thought was funny was that he says it only takes an hour and a half to reach the other coast. When in reality this make little sense because that means that each one of those map squares (zones, chunks, what ever) would only take five minutes to cross even shorter if you're on a mount. So if you use common sense you can see that he is lying form the get go.

also,

He says something about being able to swing left and right, I believe a Dev or a beta leaker has confirmed that you can't choose what direction you want to swing except for over-head.

Anonymous said...

hes just has no idea how a sandbox is suppose toplay

but i just got it verified the SS he did give for proof is real

enornymous said...

I love how because he criticized the game everybody feels the need to call him a "carebear", "theme park MMO player", "pissy it isn't WoW 2.0"

Seriously though, I don't think you guys need to embark on this little slur campaign. He's one unhappy tester amongst dozens of happy ones - listen to what he has to say and let it go

theuprising said...

Its a wonder why the devs made blocking so stupid, but then again, the devs lack common sense, so its not suprising. And wow there's 3 directional swings O.o that's way better than what it was supposed to be (no directional swings)

and yeah this game looks like shit, the devs DID say that they could have made this game much faster if they didn't make a custom game engine. So who knows if they've actually been working on the game from 3 yrs to 1 year. Thankfully MO is coming out in summer, they've made every deadline so far to make the summer release, unlike aventurine (DF 03 anyone?). DF will be a good holdover until MO though, i wouldn't expect more out of this game though...

Jupsto said...

"so maybe what's happening now is similar to what was happening then."

I'm not saying it will be another dark and light i'm not in the know, but if you read the D&L forums its frighting how simular they are to DF forums.

D&L also didn't drop NDA and hyped everyone up and alot of people wasted thier money. sounds to me like DF might not be dropping thier NDA and trying to get a quick buck. somebodies gotta fund 9 years development.

@the uprising
I'm just excited as everyone else about MO, but I pity you if you think it will come out this year. MMO's always get delayed.

and yes betaleaks is down (always is, its a shit site), anybody else got a copy of those sceenshots?

Jesse Twain said...

The only thing here that really concerns me is the size of the world.

theuprising said...

@joseph

well that's what i thought to until i saw a timeline for their release schedule, they were in dev. (serious development, the actual project started around when DF was conceived) since 2005, and then they began marketing more than a year before release (its when they showed everyone their project, which warded off vapor trolls). They planned to have alpha in Dec. And beta in April, and go gold in late june. So far they've made every deadline (alpha happened in dec.), so they have a history of making them (unlike DF).

Though yeah, the game, like most, will probably get delayed, but don't be surprised if you see beta this summer


... they are already giving out beta accounts btw

If DF fixes its problems and is everything it promised, I would still choose MO over DF, b/c MO has atleast 500x more complicated combat, but can handle MUCH less people on screen, and even a dev said that large scale combat wasn't a goal of MO. So people who like large wars will stay in DF.

Lee Joyner said...

How the hell do you register at beta leaks?

Lee Joyner said...

The thing that sucks is that I was a member of betaleaks, but now can't re-register. : (

Unknown said...

He called them Adventurine, fail.

Unknown said...

I honestly can't understand why someone can not accept criticism of a game that they 1. have not played, 2. Had no part in making and 3. Have little to no actual solid information on the game.

This is the most detailed and realistic leak I have seen yet. All of the 'positive leaks' that everyone has mentioned can really be summed up as "This game is teh epic uber awsomesauce!!!!1!!1ONE!!" At least the ones I have seen.

Maybe the past few MMORPG releases have me a bit skeptical. Admittedly I am hesitant to get excited over a new MMO. The idea of Darkfall Online has a lot of promise, but who knows how the execution will play out...

What I'm trying to say is, take the good with the bad, leave the name-calling at the door and open your mind to the possibility of not only the great things but also the not so great things.

Abe said...

There is something that has to be pointed out here. Tasos said here:

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=82111

that "our tester sample so far is diverse. The testers range from our biggest fans to our biggest critics, and from near “carebears” to the most hardcore players out there."

Now let's look at this lovely bit this beta tester left us:

"This is really all there is to the gameI\'ve read what people have posted about \'sieging\' and whatnot but I\'ve never heard of any sieges going on while I was bothered enough to actually play the beta..."

"while he was BOTHERED ENOUGH TO ACTUALLY PLAY THE BETA..."

I think we know what kind of beta tester he was. 'Nuff said.

 

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