Darkfall Online: Interview Part 2
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-08-28

The second and last part of the interview with the development team of Darkfall Online has arrived. Previous Darkfall features this week include the introductory preview and yesterday's first part of this interview: go check them out if you haven't already. Answering our questions today were Claus Grovdal (Producer and Lead Designer), Erik Johansen (Network Programmer), Trond Evanger (Designer) and Kjetil Helland (Lead Programmer) from the Darkfall team.

Claus Grovdal: We don't really want to comment on what other games are doing or not doing, but in layman's terms what we have done is that we first built the system that makes this possible - from scratch, and then built the game on top of that. It usually happens the other way around.

It's impossible to explain this further without getting a bit technical, so here's a more detailed explanation by Erik Johansen, our network programmer:

Our server and networking technology, which we've dubbed a "Real-Time World Simulator" or RTWS for short, has been built from scratch using a design that's in between the peer-to-peer way of thought, and the newer Grid computing concepts. What the users will see as a single server, will in reality be a series of many similar computers, dynamically and continuously moving tasks around in order to keep the workload evenly distributed and timely processed.

We are able to simply add a new preconfigured computer to such a server cluster, and have it join its capacity to the already running world simulation without interruptions for the users. And the other way around, if one of the server computers fails for any reason, the remaining ones will take its workload, distribute it and continue after some seconds of reorganizing.

This scalability will be an important asset for us when we work to keep servers as responsive as possible for the users. In addition we do of course have prediction algorithms on multiple levels, from simple dead reckoning to advanced analysis of player behavior. The rest is merely about having enough bandwidth to keep up with the network traffic.

Some of Erik's related experience over the last 10 years includes developing an internal content distribution system for a large industrial company serving thousands of simultaneous users, participation in the development of networked communications software used daily by more than 100K users, and development of software for distributing specific tasks among several nodes within a severely reduced/damaged network, with a focus on redundancy and failover mechanisms.

Claus Grovdal (Producer - Lead Designer): Most spawns in Darkfall are dynamic, and even consequential in nature. If you keep killing all the hill giants in a forest over and over, they will eventually move out (hey, who wouldn't). Monsters also attack and kill other monsters. A red dragon moving into a mountain area, will fly around and kill everything it finds, so eventually the area will be empty of life. A group of goblins left alone for a while, will eventually set up a goblin village, and start breeding more goblins. They will start taming and breeding wolves for defenses, and hunt all small animals they can find.

The world will have a life of its own, and players will strongly influence and leave a mark on the world they inhabit.

In additions to the dynamic spawns, we also have lots of static spawns related to quest areas, and other adventure areas important to the lore and story in the game.

Claus Grovdal (Producer - Lead Designer): Players can ride their mounts around freely. There are no restrictions. Mounted combat is an important part of Darkfall warfare, and there are several skills associated with it.

Trond Evanger (Designer): With a few exceptions, the learning certain skills will not prohibit learning others. A player may therefore create a fighter/mage/thief/cleric hybrid if he wants to. There will be no penalties for this, although it will require great patience, work, and time. After a character has a certain amount of total skill-points, he will receive a penalty to his skill increase rate. The time spent "completing" a fighter/mage will exceed the time of first a fighter, then a mage. The severity of the progress penalty and when it is applied will be tested and determined during beta. What we want to achieve is to make it fairly quick for a new character to reach an acceptable PvP-level, but practically impossible to totally max him out. We don't want the "100 in every single skill! Hurrah, I owned the game!" scenario.

Trond Evanger (Designer): The constraints associated with the prestige classes will hopefully not feel restricting or awkward. Anyone playing a Paladin cursing the fact that he's not allowed to kill anyone he meets shouldn't play a Paladin. Someone who wants his character to be a holier-than-thou warrior most probably already got a Good alignment and no need for mindless slaughtering of innocents. He'll then benefit from a couple of extra combat skills and a handful of spells (castable penalty free while wearing armor), without any reason to feel restrained.

Trond Evanger (Darkfall Designer): I'd have to say the necromantic spells. Evil mages have been shafted in enough games already.

Claus Grovdal (Producer - Lead Designer): Crafting skills work like all other skills in Darkfall, meaning they increase by successful usage. A player that wants to increase his fishing skills will get better by spending time fishing in a river or from his boat at sea. Fishing is my favorite example. Believe it or not we actually spent some time making fishing a interesting and viable profession.

Kjetil Helland (Lead Programmer): Darkfall is a real-time MMORPG and not turn based as most of the other well known MMORPG's out there. You will control all of your character's movement, but the final outcome of a battle will be a combination of your character skill and your real life player skill.

Claus Grovdal (Darkfall Producer - Lead Designer): I think Darkfall will have a healthy mix of all types of combat. A group of Humans exploring a dungeon deep in the wilderness may run into a group of Alfar exploring the same dungeon, and you get exciting small scale PvP. Later that day the same group of humans may join their clan for the scheduled siege of an enemy city, with hundreds of players on each side, giving them an epic scale battle that may last for hours.

Lots of thanks go out to Tasos Flambouras and everyone who took the time to answer my questions in this Q&A. Finally, I'd like to apologise to all Darkfall fans for taking some of the precious time away from the devs... But I hope this interview makes up for that. *g*