Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Darkfall beta comments

Aventurine, the makers of Darkfall Online, "selected" quotes from Darkfall beta testers and posted them in a forums thread. Then they asked every blogger and games site to link to that. Well, I'm willing to do that. But of course I have some remarks to make: Reading cherry-picked quotes from beta testers isn't likely to give you a fair and balanced view of the game. Aventurine has obviously not used the more negative kind of quotes. And the beta testers are players who are fans of the game anyway, not a representative sample of the MMORPG population.

I still don't know whether Darkfall will ever come out. But I'm absolutely certain that it will get significantly less subscribers than even Age of Conan, not to mention WAR or WoW. Darkfall is hardcore PvP, where you can not only attack anyone anytime, but you can also loot his complete gear after killing him. Which basically means no gear progression at all, lots of player killing, ganking etc., just like in the "good old days" of pre-Trammel Ultima Online. I'm sure the small handful of pre-Trammel UO fans will enjoy Darkfall, but there just aren't all that many of them. Hardcore PvP is a niche in the MMORPG market, at least in America and Europe. As Darkfall Online has been in development for over 7 years now, it isn't even obvious whether they'll ever get all that development cost back.

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