Why I Won't Be Playing Darkfall Online- A Review (pt. 2)

Continued from my last blog...

Character Advancement

Skill Progression

    The biggest most important part of how your character progresses in the game will be through their skills.  Darkfall has a variety of them and, rather than leveling and putting points in skills, your character's skills increase as they are used.  One thing that's neat about this is that there are skills for EVERYTHING so anything you do, be it running, sprinting, sitting, mining, etc. you are progressing your character.  On the other hand, the system in Darkfall is just as grindish if not more grindish than any other char progression system we've seen so far.  There is freedom in characetr advancement, but it's incredibly lame at times.  Skills take a LONG time to progress.  My magic missile skill got up to about 40, but most of it was due to random castings done as I was running around the wilderness or dicking around my guild's town.  Also, there is no skill cap, so everyone can max out whatever skills they choose.  The devs argue that it won't be possible to do this because of skill decay (it takes a LONG time to max skills), which is probably true.  But the mere notion or theory of it leads me to believe that characters are not going to be very special in Darkfall (and they weren't in beta, might be in the end game).
   To be quite honest, I would have rather this been done like a normal leveling system except that it goes like this:  You reach a certain level and you get a certain # of points to place in any skill you want in the entire game and a certain # of stat points to allocate wherever you want.  Maybe give different types of skill pools to separate out running / crouching skills from the likes of magic and combat skills.  This sort of a system would still give the freedom that Darkfall's system has as well as diversify characters, yet eliminate the retardation that is character advanceent via shooting random blue magic balls into space.

Score: 6/10

Gear Progression

   Full loot is fun.  Another thing Darkfall seemed to get correct was the way gear balance works.  Gear is important to your character, but it is not the end all determinant of a battle similar to how games like WoW work.  This makes sense, because if you die, you lose all of it that you have on you.  Keeping a spare set of mediocre gear in your bank is necessary and affordable. 
   Can't comment on what gear crafting is like.

Score: 9/10

Other Areas With Major Gripes

- The game is not solo-friendly.  If you do not have a guild, I can't see how you'll enjoy Darkfall.   The entry-level goblins for human players are hard.  The way the AI works makes fighting them a royal pain as they'll run away, run at you, run backwards, etc.  I firmly believe that the only reason people were killing any goblins at the newbie camp was because there were so many players that they could overwhelm the npcs.  I tried soloing the second level goblin camps with a set of chain gear and an okay weapon and I was unable to make any progress as I'd be constantly fighting 3-4 because I would be unable to kill any in a timely enough fashion.  Then only time I was able to garner any significant amouts of wealth was when I was with 5-10 of my clanmates farming in a dungeon.

- The game is macro-heaven.  The way the skill advancement system works lends the game to repeating the same actions over and over.  You can macro your spells, you can macro running, you can macro mining and woodchopping to gather resources.  The bottom line is, people that macro are going to have serious advantages.  I hate having that sort of pressure on me in a game.  I'd much rather be encouraged to log out (ex: WoW's rest system) rather than be encouraged to log as many hrs as possible.

The Major Good

- Full PvP is awesome.  From the start I was killing people and getting killed.  It was great until I realized that going red really f'd me until my clan got a bindspot up and a bank, so I had to create another char. 

- Sandbox.  So cool.  I wish all mmo's were sandbox.  The community will drive this game and the community itself will keep the game alive.  There's plenty of trash talking already and the game hasn't released.  The clan beta boards were a highly entertaining dramafest (it's like if all the douchebags from every MMO came together to fight in the ball pit).

- Full loot.  Also cool.  Dying means something in Darkfall and initially that was hard to get used to.  In the end, however, you realize that it makes things better.

Summary

   Darkfall had some genuinely great ideas, but they were poorly executed.  Combat could have revolutionized the genre, but instead if falls horribly short.  The good concepts of full PvP, a sandbox world, and clan city-building/sieging are overshadowed by lackluster gameplay, grindish character development, and an unpolished/uncustomizable UI.  I can't see myself justifying the cost as well as the time investment in Darkfall when I am just flat out not enjoying the majority of my gameplay (honestly, the 5v5 skirmishes are pretty damn fun, if not chaotic an uncontrolled).

   I had thought that DF would be the game for me, but I was wrong.