I recently canvassed the opinions of a long-term MMO gamer who quit Darkfall in disgust not long ago. I have taken her thoughts and put them into the following editorial-style narrative rather than a straight Q&A. I hope you enjoy reading this, especially if it saves you from playing this game because I genuinely trust this woman’s opinion and if she says it’s this bad… then it’s bad!

Darkfall represents yet another great concept with bad implementation in the MMO space. It could have really worked had the cheating, hacking, and mass alliances not gotten together and decided it should be a numbers game instead of a skill game. Basically, it’s grindy as hell if you’re not in a massive guild with a massive city where you can macro your skills up to the top in no time flat without actually playing.

If you want to play legit, meanwhile, all your PVP encounters will be against macroers because, hey, the grindiness is just too insane to not take a shortcut around for most people. You will die every time you leave town to harvest, even by your own race (and if you’re Mahirim, ESPECIALLY by your own race). You’ll only be safe near the Ork cities on the other side of the map (because, oddly, the Orks seem to be the most honourable players), but once you leave the NPC cities you’re screwed because Hyperion alliance owns everything and they do roam their territory. Last I checked, Hyperion owned the whole eastern half of the map (they believe in quantity over quality, and while you may have five way more skilled players than any in their 500+ army, you will die instantly when they lag the map your on with their obscenely unskilled army).

And guess what? Those guys promote themselves as being a Human-Mirdain-Dwarf alliance but they have Orks and Mahirim in their ranks too, so even in town you are not safe because they do the whole mass-army, easy-mode, All Race All Class (ARAC) thing that the game totally allows. There’s really no point to there being races or factions in Darkfall at all. You will get killed by your own race — a lot — and their friends who are supposed to be their enemies. How is that meant to be any fun for anyone?

On travelling, while it’s nice to have a huge world to explore, you can spend an hour trying to go from Mahirim towns to Ork towns only to be killed halfway and lose an hour of gameplay. Now, I used to be against insta-travel, and I think boats help a little with getting around (though the world doesn’t wrap around so you will hit an invinsible wall in the ocean), but it’s ridiculous that it takes about an hour of travelling alone to get to an enemy territory (unless you’re in Ork lands, just walk outside town and you’ll have a bunch of humans just waiting to gobble you up as if it’s their land already).

I didn’t mind the grindiness of skills until I hit about 50 points in any one thing (lesser magic, archery, crafting, etc), and it SHARPLY became more difficult to raise the skill. Nobody will buy products from you if you aren’t making skill level 75+ gear, so you’re constantly losing money and spending five hours a day trying to find resources (and trying not to die to the horde of ARAC clans at the same time).

Basically, the game is completely un-fun until your skills are maxed and even with macroing that takes ages. The devs had led us to believe it was so skilled-based, that like in Guild Wars, a lower level player who knew how to use his skills better than a higher level player (there are no levels in DF, just using this as example) that the playing field would be balanced. However, this is not the case at all, a great-magic fire attack only achievable in two months by macroing the skill 24/7, is going to totally kick your mana missile skill, any day of the week. Non-cheaters get the short end of the stick on a regular basis and while the devs were making it easier to report players, many of those players had cheats that allowed them to have names that are unreportable or were able to teleport before anyone could tell they were there cheating. The most skilled players, are ironically, the hackers, and it’s their game now. I would hate to be starting the game as a new player right now becaused you’d be griefed to no end by ARAC clans with hackers that just prey on the goody-two-shoe players.

Darkfall could have been a great game, but never have I seen so much exploiting and cheating in an MMO from day one onwards, not even in most Korean games has it ever been on this scale. If you like cheating, then you’ll love Darkfall, the code is so weak in it that it practically begs for it to be a hacker’s paradise. A shame too, the ideas behind the game were brilliant, but the players have turned it to a pile of crap, really fast.

The game was supposed to have way more depth then that but this is what happens when you put a bunch of people in a game that have never played UO or any other non-easy-mode game. This isn’t UO-esque at all, like it was marketed to be.