Darkfall Online: Preview
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-08-26

The number of newly announced mmorpg's is literally booming. Although many skeptic voices are predicting that only a few of them will survive and ever hit the shelves, almost every single game out there has its own fan base, its own unique features, its promises to the player community. While titles such as Warcraft, Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, Middle-Earth, Warhammer and more recently Ultima (again), can count on a great deal of attention by the nature of their franchises, other titles don't have that luxury. We would like to put one of those lesser known titles in the spotlights this week. Bringing you, apart from this introductory preview, extensive interviews with the development team and an exclusive wallpaper in the following days, we hope to bring you as extensive a look at the game as you can get. Let me introduce you to Aventurine's first mmorpg: Darkfall Online.

Darkfall takes place in a typical fantasy world called Agon, populated by not only the obligatory goblins and dragons, but also more fantastical creatures such as the water-dwelling Matayin, the lizard-like Sadayel and Serpentine dragon maids. According to the official FAQ, the world of Agon is huge... maybe even the largest single online world ever created. Hmm, didn't we hear that before? I've yet to find someone who actually enjoys walking for 45 minutes on the empty desert-planes of Tatooine in Star Wars Galaxies, but Darkfall might just be different. No more randomly generated terrain, no more boring zones of repetitive landscapes; because in Darkfall all terrain is hand-modeled and hand-textured by the art team. But there's more to the terrain than simply providing the background for your actions. Heights affecting combat, escape routes through off-track wilderness and secret hideouts in deserted forests are all among the many possibilities.

Six player races populate the world of Agon: the Orks, Dwarves, Humans, Mirdain, Alfar and Mahirim. Each race not only has its own physical appearance, lore and capital city, but also its own special abilities, weapons and armor. Those interested in reading about the lore of Agon and its races will find very detailed descriptions for each of them on Darkfall's website, which gives us a hint as to how much the developers will value and encourage role-playing. Darkfall uses a completely skill-based character system, allowing you to pick up any combination of linked skills that you want, both regarding combat and trade. For those wanting to stick with the more familiar class-based system, there are still the prestige classes: pre-made skill templates such as Paladins or Druids, with a few special abilities and some restrictions. The developers' promise remains to keep Darkfall open-ended at all times by making it possible to change your prestige class at any given time, and making it actually impossible to "gimp" your character by choosing the wrong skills. With 300 skills and 200 spells already designed, and with plans to get these numbers up to 500 before release, Darkfall certainly aims at bringing a lot of variety in character evolution and combat. Most of the combat will involve using magic, so I bet we can expect a lot of fancy effects when a team of mages goes out hunting.

The clan system of Darkfall is mostly based on the different races of Agon, so although multi-race clans will be possible, they probably won't be very common. Details are yet to be revealed, but there will be an extensive conquest and player politics structure in the game, with the possibility for clans to take part in city conquest or even empire building. The racial differences play a very important role in the whole Darkfall world. Not only are some NPC's naturally hostile toward players from certain races, but also racial wars will be quite common. On the other hand it looks like the system will be more flexible and less linear than usual, thus allowing, to a certain extent, for players to choose their own side in a conflict. With no safe zones at all in the Darkfall world, the alignment system will be very important for those wishing to follow the path of treachery and evil. Having an evil alignment will be possible, but will be very hard and challenging because of the high risks of getting hunted by players and city guards.

Apart from these main features, Darkfall also offers a few less known novelties that are quite rare, even for projects still very early in their development. One of them is player collisions. No longer will you be able to walk through your friends or enemies, or literally stand inside their bodies. This will result in players being able to actually push enemies aside, or to form blockades to hold off an incoming army. Another fairly innovative feature is the chat system that can also function as an independent messenger outside of the game, so you don't have to log in anymore if you want to simply talk to your guildies. Lastly, one of the most remarkable characteristics of Darkfall is the decision to only have a first person camera view implemented. The reasoning behind this is that a first person view would make for a more immersive gameplay experience and offer a better view on the landscapes.

In the next couple of days we'll be bringing you a more extensive look at Darkfall Online as we publish our questions about the game to the development team. At the end of the week you should be able to have a good idea of what the game is all about, and what kind of potential it has if all goes well. Currently the game is still at an early stage of development, but is getting ready for closed beta testing in September. More information can be found over at the official website of Darkfall.

See you tomorrow for the first part of the Darkfall interview!