Darkfall Beta Report - Tester First Impressions - Looting, Crafting, Final Thoughts

Tasos Flambouras, Associate Producer of Darkfall, asked us to post this about Darkfall's beta test.

PvP – Looting

We’ve been wiping characters very often so it’s still hard for the testers to dive headfirst into PvP. We expect a lot more feedback in the very near future.

"My biggest gripe at the moment is looting corpses. It's easy enough to switch between weapons during combat but I find it near impossible to quickly loot something. I have to drop out of FPS or combat mode, switch into pointy clicky mode open up the corpse, drag everything at once, pray i'm not dead yet, switch back into combat."

“Furthermore, the everchanging surroundings allow for great stealth/ambush tactics. Crouching behind an abandoned cart alongside a large road, waiting for your target to pass by and quietly landing a few arrows in their back was a very gratifying experience.â€

"Seriously guys, the drag & drop looting is something that should not be touched. It *should* take awhile to loot corpses and sort through piles of things. This worked great in UO and there's no reason why it shouldn't work great in DF."

“PvP combat in this game reminds me so much of watching a sword fight in a movie where the fighters almost dance around each other looking for a weakness to strike at. There is no break and there is no breathing space. Every moment of combat contains so much movement and requires constant brainpower. You won't have time to turn away from your screen or take a phone call, even while fighting mobs.â€

"As i have understood this game is not targeted to the absolute casual player that logs in now and then for 30 minutes.. In Darkfall roads are long and dangerous - and its good this way.. Looting takes time.. and its good this way... even if it bothers sometime - go buy a sack !"

“The PvP actually takes skill! I stood toe to toe with another player with equal stats, equipment, and still got owned!â€

"Is looting intented to be that hard? I reply to myself "yes" since when real pvp starts looting should be hard and not automatic."

“Group PvP is going to be neat. It's already dangerous going 3v1 because the '3' side will constantly hit eachother in melee or with spells accidentally. A skilled solo player can definitely pull off some cool stuff there.â€

“I love the fact that you can hear someone fighting from quite far away. The other day myself and a couple of others ran from the alfar land to the human one, which took a while btw, and we eventually found someone killing goblins when we started hearing the sounds of fighting.
Of course our attempt at ganking didn't exactly go as planned, since we didn't really have any way of slowing someone down and the one starter spell available to us does about as much damage as a ball of yarn at the newbie skill levels we had, so our target was able to escape back into a town. We did get him eventually though, when he came out to bait us and stayed for a bit too long before retreating back to safety (the npc towns have guard towers that do some damage, you can handle one tower for a while but as you go deeper in you get in range of multiple towers and the damage starts to mount up).â€

“And the sound effects are everything they should be, from the blocking of a wooden shield, the tinking of metal on metal, the character's vocal grunts and the spattering of blood... on everything. Even when I don't have arrows sticking out of me already, I can tell something is shooting at me and usually from which direction, when I hear the whizzing of an arrow fly past my head.â€

“Yesterday I had my friend lure somebody out of town, where the rest of us popped out of the shadows and took all his cool stuff. He couldn't see us because it was night out, and we had taken off our shiny armour. Pings from north america to the EU server are in the 150-200ms range and are very stable. Ping shouldn't make a difference until people get really good.â€

“Looting is fine UO style and I don't want it to change. Yesterday as an Alfar I ran into a human town and PKed someone while getting attacked by the guard towers. I didn't have time to loot all his stuff and I didn't notice his mount figurine piled under some other stuff, so he was saved that by the cool looting system.â€

“Oh, and you'll be crouching a LOT. Surviving while hunting is done by being inconspicuous. Breaking line of sight is -not- a surefire way to get rid of monsters on your tail. They'll keep coming and firing at you until they're comfortably sure you know they mean business. Currently I hate them, I hate it, I need thicker armor and hax. Or maybe I'm just going after Ogre's by myself and that's absurd to think of.â€

"Yeah looting is suppose to be hard. For those of you that never played UO, this isn't anything."

“Oh a thing that is not directly linked to PvP but does affect it quite a bit is sound range. You can hear other characters jumping or fighting a mob from quite far, probably as far as you would hear it in real life and you are alerted of their presence. Sneaking up on someone will be quite hard but very rewarding too.â€

“What I liked with the PVP, was that you never know what the other player might have as skills or equipment. You can sort of see it, but if he wears a robe over the armor, you have no idea until you see you're doing little damage.
The tricky thing about PVP was actually hitting the other player, when both are running/sprinting around it requires real skill or luck to keep hitting the other player repeatedly. I assume when you gain more skills it will be a different experience, but the x noobs can kill a highly skilled player story is still true.
When we'll get into clan wars, ambushes and such will really be a lot of fun. Because of how the world is made, spotting hidden players is almost impossible, because of the vegetation and such.â€

The testers haven’t been reporting on crafting much yet. I suppose you start delving in it after you check out the basics, so we expect more on this soon.

"Crafting is pretty neat, rudimentary and to the point. Nothing big and fancy like Vanguard, but it gets the job done without becoming a hassle."

"Did some cooking and the crafting system is alright. It's nothing new but it is straighforward and works fine, at least for the few things I crafted."

“none of us have located any leather and many of the more advanced crafting skills such as smithing and bowcraft require it even for the first few produceable items in the menus.â€

"I would like to have a more clear message about resource gathering results. At the moment is says that either I failed, but it doesn’t tell me if trying again will make any difference, I succeeded, but I get nothing in my inventory and that I succeeded and get some material or whatever. Last part is ok, the other 2 need clearer messages I believe."

“Crafting made sense. It was basic and easy to get, but you could make almost everything you want. I would say it was like how crafting should be in a game.â€

“Yesterday I finally got the money to start crafting arrows and bow. I really wanted to try out arrow making but was a little mad that one the items you needed was 5gp. I believe that money should never be needed to craft anything. The only time you should be ask for money might be for rent of the crafting table you are using but then you should be able to craft everything without having to spend more money. I think it’s easier and faster to just farm goblin scouts for their arrows then the time and money it would cost to make arrows.
If I sell these arrows to vendors I get 5gp which is a lost to me on time. Now true you can sell these arrows to other player for more money for the vendors sell 5 arrows for 20gp. I just have not seen at this time where or how you can sell your items. You can trade which is in game but have not seen any market options yet like in other games.
I plan to test jewelry crafting here soon but please take the gold requirement out of anything that you can craft.â€

“Not sure if its a bug right now, but I've probably utilized every single gathering skill there is (Woodcutting/Fishing/Herbalism/Mining)
minus skinning, the animation for gathering for all the different types of things is great (however fishing could probably use a animation upgrade of some sort) ive only gotten most of my gathering skills to 25-30 range and for ex: fishing im able to access 8 types of item pulls right now woodcutting 2 item types, timber and risen, zzz boring) right from the get go, failure and success rate doesn't seem to vary much regardless of 1.0 skill level compared to 25.0 skill level. There's also the progress bar, very plain and boring and set in stone 10.0 seconds, maybe increase in skill level can/should decrease the time? I know a lot of this stuff is still rather specific, but if characters are being wiped on a regular basis, will we ever get the chance to acquire 75-100 skill level to see if there are in fact different types of items that can be pulled from resource nodes? Or are we supposed to have access to every type of resource on a node from the get go? A lot of this is completely subjective on if we are going to get beta phases under various types of conditions (all skills set to 100.0, 100,000 gold in everyones bags, etc)â€

“Crafting so far seems fairly simple but very robust; there's nothing really new or groundbreaking here but it works and it covers a ridiculous amount of stuff. One really nice touch I appreciate here is the fact that any equipment-grade crafting acts as a gold sink - a very cunning ploy by the devs there, and one that should go a long way towards maintaining equilibrium in the in-game economy once in the long run. It all gets stamped with your name too, so pretty satisfying!â€

Final Thoughts:

This was just posted by one of the testers, I think it gives you a good idea of what to expect, so I'm including it here:

"Oh well, on a lighter note... I went exploring the world today with a few other testers. As we traversed the landscape, I was constantly reminded of the gameplay video. Always, in the past, I've seen gameplay videos and screenshots touched up by a professional staff and given a production quality that surpasses the game experience. So I've come to be a little cynical against trusting what is more accurately "marketing propaganda" instead of genuine advertisements about a game. This wasn't the case at all in Darkfall. As we made our way through the world, the feeling of adventure and awe was just as much there... no, more pronounced than the gameplay video would have you see. If I could correlate the majesty of Darkfall in any sensible way to some one who hasn't played it, it would be to tell them "Look again at Aventurine's long gameplay video... and this time, even if it's hard to do now that you're grizzled from all the lies and deceit you've been fed by other games in the past, don't be afraid to let your imagination run wild".

Upon running to a distant castle we spotted over a frozen lake, hopping between the floating ice blocks as fast as our stubby dwarven legs would take us, it was like a book coming to life in front of me. Only in this case the book was a particular scene from the gameplay video where that very thing had played out. Something so simple as that in a video can spark the imagination. Sure, we all looked at that and said "Man, those guys in the video are going out on a cool adventure!" but is the game really going to be like that? Are you really going to be solemnly exploring the rich world with your friends at your side, without a watered down experience where you're more practically chasing down some flashing waypoint in easy-mode? Yes, you absolutely are, and every bit of back-story and reasoning you interpreted into the motives of those intrepid explorers are there as well. I guess with the current trend in gaming, the grandeur of simple things has been completely lost on much of the current generation of gamer... but I sure in the hell was impressed that I could have such a fulfilling experience from something so base as mere wanderlust.

Of course, it helped cap off the night that the location we were traveling to was just itching to dish out wholesale slaughter on anyone curious enough to take a peek. I felt like I was being shelled by artillery after some of the mobs unloaded their repertoire of spells on us. Screen shaking, firebombs exploding all around you, your friends screaming obscenities and running away... the game definitely has a tendency to abruptly take your head out of the clouds and grind your face into the dirt with its heel on the back of your head with no warning at all. And this was just the PvE! PvE!"

We'll follow up with more of these reports as we progress with beta