Darkfall Online

Many players are really tired of playing WoW and are looking for something fresh and new. This is why the expectations for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes were that high. A game that was gonna be really vast and suited for hardcore players. But the game was horribly designed and was really far from what it was advertising. As a result only a handful of players are playing VG now while over 200 thousand quit within the first 3 months. And so time went on and the amount of players wanting a change from WoW grew. Lets precise that its not only wow players that are looking for a new good game, Since i believe Ultima Online there was no game for hardcore players, no game with good Free for all settings and corpse looting and other hardcore features. Them paired with players from other games and mostly the huge wave of players that got introduced to mmos by WoW as well as other people from all horizons makes a pretty huge chunk of players. So they heard that Age of Conan was in development a game with supposedly revolutionary combat and gameplay. While AoC has several good aspects, good graphics, animations, outstanding sound and music. the guys that designed the classes and abilities was really stupid and the game was really unfun to play and lacked several of its advertised feature. People were and are being patient with AoC but they failed and are still failing to deliver what they promised and people get tired of waiting and quit. this is why AoC lost close to half its subscriber base after 3 months (possibly more than that, but all we have is the number Funcom had at the end of july or something like that). Meanwhile, several other mmos tried to copy the wow formula in an attempt to make something better and new like Lord of the rings online, Star Wars Galaxies and the Game enchancements, etc etc. But everytime they failed miserably because while they had a little something of their own to bring to the table, they were not as detailed and polished as WoW.

So its in this context that a game that has been in development for 7 years and didnt get much attention at all is now intriguing many players: Darkfall Online. Darkfall is being developped by a small studio in greece caleld Adventurine. they are being helped by norwegians and swiss developpers. After i read the list of features and saw their long gameplay trailer, I came to the conclusion that DF is a really ambitious project. it seems like they nailed down well what they needed to put in a game to make it good now all they need to do is do it. If they manage like to put everything in there. then we will have a really great game. Things like the ability to create and change your class to your taste anytime you want minus some time levelling, item decay to create a world economy, skill based gameplay, destructible player cities, naval combat etc etc (i dont know them all). But the pressure is high on them because the game looks horrible graphically and animation wise so that is not what will draw players. We also have the right to be afraid that despite teh bad graphics the game will recquire pretty high system recquirements due to the fact that its a small studio. so while the game looks like it would be good in 2003 it might need a 2007 machine to play well but we will see how that goes cause we can always be surprised.

So let us hope the game runs smoothly on older machines so that way the target audience is larger and let us also hope that the game delivers all its advertised feature and we might Finally have something unique Post-WoW that will be worth playing. But I'm skeptical they will pull it off so I'm still looking forward Guildwars 2 and the Star Wars Galaxies pre-combat upgrade emulator.