On this article you will find a collection of facts and features about the upcoming game Darkfall Online. I hope you find it useful.

The Makers

Aventurine is a company… that.. that.. err, wait, umm *cough* that…*sigh* that…is making Darkfall. What?, ahh you wanted more information?, well I set sail in the Dakfall boat, and surfing the web for information about this company is as hard as killing a dragon with a toothpick.

In a nutshell, Aventurine is based in Greece, they have made flight simulators for the Greek government and they don't have released any visible games. The Darkfall development started approximately in 2001, and they have a developer journal that they publish regularly.

Nevertheless, I found a very interesting post, where a poster drafted a timeline of how Aventurine ended up baking the cake.

Find it here

The Game News

"We installed the Darkfall client on our webcam machine and pointed the webcam towards the screen.

The quality of the picture isnt too good and it only updates every minute, but if you compare shots you can see things are moving ;-)

We'll be moving around in the world during the next few hours to give you an impression of what things looks like "

Pasted from <http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=3352>

Ok, so the guys making Darkfall are not exactly Blizzard or NCSoft, but they have some nice documentation about their game. They have posts from 2001 to January 11th 2008 all about the making of the game.

The Features

There is no way I can post all of the features I have found about Darkfall, many of them fall in the category of "How things are going to work" but lets skip the numbers and cut straight to what is Darkfall offering that is NEW to MMORPGs.

• Open ability system, more than 1000 skills and spells

• There are no character levels, its a pure Skill System

• Wearing Armor will affect the swimming and running speed

• The backpack does not use slots; items can be moved around freely

• Real-Time Combat, with manually aiming and firing/fighting

• When a player is injured, there is a varying degree of unique looking blood and bruising on his face and body

• Friendly fire is always enabled in Darkfall

• Seeing smoke in the distance might mean a town, or a distant battle. Dust is kicked up by galloping mounts

• Every kill gets recorded along with some details about it

• Ships and Naval Warfare

• Mobs carry equipment and can equip themselves depending on the situation. They can wear armor, choose the best weapon to use, and switch them during a fight

• Monsters have their own unique architecture, villages, houses, camps, forts

• Monsters and creatures do not have levels either. They simply get tougher the farther you walk out of the newbie areas

• Heads can be severed (You can cut someone's head off)

• Blood splatter on the ground, trees and walls indicates that someone has just been through that spot and may be injured

• There are no floating nametags over player's heads

• You won’t be able to build cities anywhere but just at key locations, which means more conflict for the limited number of city spots

Since Darkfall hasn't been released I can't assure you that every single one of the above features will be available, but this is from a forum stickie in the official forums of the game. These however, are not all of the features of course, these are just the ones that caught my attention.

For more Feature lists go to http://www.darkfallonline.com/features/freedom.html and http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=43318

The Story

Ok I got to be honest I didn't read the entire story, but it is very deep and you might want to try writing the names and a profile for each character because it’s a long, looong story. It is about the evolution of a civilization, their conflicts, inventions, rulers, and etc..

It has timeline of events which was very nice, and some parts of the story is divided into chapters.

On the forum there had been quite some activity for the Role Players, I found threads and threads of very well written material. Hollywood is always looking for scripts in the wrong places (Please don't make Garfield 3 or heads will roll).

Red Flags

This are some of the features that raised a red flag for me, I am not aware as to how are they going to handle it, but here are my thoughts.

• Traders are good targets for racial enemies, pirates and bandits, so they need to be protected

Oh great, so its not hard enough to have to gather your production materials, attempt to craft something without wasting materials, and actually selling something, you can be robbed too.

• There are no floating name tags over player's heads

Ok, I didn't got the memo that name tags where bad, perhaps I can pk people all day long and not know who they were.

• Monsters and creatures do not have levels either. They simply get tougher the farther you walk out of the newbie areas

I grabbed my sword and threw myself to attack the mighty dragon in the cave. In the blink of an eye I was a dead body, then a party came by and robbed my body of my weapons and armor. How the **** was I supposed to know that it had like 20 times more power than me.

• Player-Characters cannot walk through other Player-Characters or Monsters

Do I actually need to elaborate in this point?, according to them there will be 10,000 players in a server. Imagine one of the most popular cities, it is going to be a royal pain to go into a city and bump into everybody. Not to mention the potential lag….

• Unlimited people can be looting the same corpse simultaneously

Like I mentioned in the previous point this doesn't sound encouraging at all, the part that scares me the most is the word UNLIMITED.

• When a character dies, all of his belongings that he carried with him stay on his corpse and can completely be looted by others

Oops, your platinum sword with the +15 seal, the +20 HP boots and the last 5,000 gold you had just got stolen.

• There are no safe zones in Darkfall

This means "Carebears keep OFF this game",

• As I mentioned, the game has friendly fire, so if uncoordinated groups will end up hitting their own guildmates or possibly even healing you.

Hmmm, I thought handling a PVP battle at a high level was hard enough as it was like it is now, but I don't know why would friendly fire appeal to anybody. I think it just adds to the chaos.

Will it Change The Industry?

Yes, and No. I think Darkfall has some serious breakthrough features that will stand out form the crowd. But as for Darkfall becoming the biggest hit in the next 2 to 3 years… nah. First off, Aventurine has no visible credentials, for crying out loud, they have been working on this game for more than five years and they still haven't made a decent company website. Moreover, the Darkfall website has the latest news dating from September of 2007; umm.. hello? is the webmaster on a 6 month vacation or what?.

Looking at the media, the screenshots were not breathtaking, I really looked hard for the "OMG that’s awesome" factor but I had no luck. I noticed a very dominant brown in most of the pictures, which didn't grab my attention. I downloaded one of the battle videos, and they look good, the naval battles were interesting to me.

One of the strong points of this game is its fan base, if you go into the community link they have it is very complete, and there seems to be quite a lot of interest in the game. The official forums are very active, and I have never seen a RP forum with so much user generated content.

Sources

http://company.mmosite.com/aventurine/index.shtml

http://www.revolutiong.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-874.html

http://www.aventurine.gr/

Thanks for reading, corrections, comments, rants, or suggestions are welcome.