I bet that you read the title and thought "oh shit, now we get to read some stupid roleplay story!". That was the only purpose of the title, so I hope you did.
So, why wasn’t I looking behind my back when I got ganked, as I described in part 1? Aside from me just sucking, that is…
Well, forget mouselook. The only time that you can mouselook around you is when you sit down to rest. At any other time, the only way to check if anyone is sneaking up on you is to turn and look.
Now, if you are fighting a monster in melee, you also have to be aiming at your opponent to hit, because there’s no such thing as autotarget like in other MMOs. This means that if you are in melee and you want to look behind you, you have to either circle around the mob while still fighting or stop aiming at it and turn around.
In 3rd person view the camera is pretty close to your character and it’s fixed, so you can’t mousewheel back until your character is tiny and you can see for twenty yards behind you. Your chance to spot other people is to actually turn and look. Period.
This is not all, though. If you happen to be a tall guy, like my ork, and you’re fighting someone shorter, like a goblin, you have to aim DOWN at the little fucker while he runs figure eights around you, which means that you have even less awareness of your surroundings. This particular thing is something that I dislike, just because it might give an advantage to dwarves and alfars - who can hack away at big guys’ ankles while enjoying the view at the same time. On the other hand, it would probably look strange if you could hit someone who barely reaches your chest by swinging at the air over his head, so I guess it makes sense the way it is now, it’s just that I find it annoying.
Otherwise, once I got over the first trauma of “OMG! What happened to my right mouse button?!? Where’s mouselook? Aaah!”, I really warmed up to the fact that you actually need to look around you, because it brings a whole new element of player skill to sneaking up behind someone. From what I’ve seen there are no such skills as stealth, vanish, hide in plain sight behind a twig, disapparate, and so on. I haven’t checked all the magic schools and I don’t know if there’s anything in there of this kind, but otherwise if you want to creep up on a guy, you have to do it in the old fashioned way of moving from cover to cover, shadow to shadow, behind his back, until you’re on him. This is made possible by two things:
On the other hand you can hear footsteps, so that will give away a guy sneaking on you, unless of course you’re in combat with plenty of yells and screams and footsteps noises of creatures running around you.
Which leads me to another thing, that I quite like… combat is NOISY. Not in the sense that you need to lower the volume of your speakers, but that it can be heard from quite a distance. This means that you have to watch your health and stamina when you are fighting monsters, because the racket that you’re making is broadcasting to everyone within a hundred yards radius or more, “HELLO! I AM HERE! YES, LOOK! HERE! I AM FACING AWAY FROM YOU, I'M FIGHTING A MONSTER, AND DID YOU NOTICE HOW MY HEALTH IS QUITE LOW? WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO WEAR A TARGET SIGN ON MY BACK? WOULD IT HELP?”. It’s a really cool feature because combat should not be silent, and for people out and about pking it’s quite exciting to hear all this “victim over there ---> ” noise and sneak up on them.
Just to conclude on a negative note in true beta tester tradition, I don’t like most spell sound effects. The first time I heard a spell’s “fizzz” while visiting the Alfar capital I thought that my speakers had broken, or that some tit was broadcasting static in vent. I almost sent a bug report, “there’s a really horrible, shrill sound like a thousand banshees tuning their TV sets at once, at location x y z” before I realised what it was. But then again, badass sounds are not at the top of my wish list right now.
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P.S. Something that I didn’t mention last time is that when I talk about the game, it’s only about how the game is right now, as experienced while playing it – and since it’s beta anything may change, for all I know. Please take all you read here with a big pinch of salt.
I don't have time to post an update this morning (I should be on my way to work already) but I had a look yesterday at the forums on the Darkfall website and I'd like to address some of the concerns that were raised there by these previews.
1. Public beta. This seems to be a really big issue and I can see why. These previews are NOT a replacement for it, they have nothing to do with it, and most of all I have no idea if that's going to start tomorrow, in a week in a month, etc. If I say, "in the next few updates I plan to... " please don't start consulting the astronomical calendars of the Maia to determine the date of beta from what I wrote, because I know it as much as you do. If that's any consolation, every day I see new names and there seems to be a steady stream of people joining.
2. Stability and state of the game. Relax! It's not been wiped at all since last week, and even if at some point it's going t o be wiped twice a day it's because they are testing things according to their test plans, not because something's gone horribly wrong and they have to shut down everything. The game is stable. I crashed once to desktop, which is a lot less of how much I crash to desktop in the released MMO that I've played most recently. How ready is it? I don't know! From what I can observe, assuming that it would play the same with thousands of people instead of hundreds, it's less buggy in beta of some games a month into release, but this is just an observation of what I can see, I have no idea if they are opening black holes and rips through time and space by mistake in their server room even if we don't notice.
3. Stealthing. I didn't mention (oops) that if you crouch and sneak up on people like that, while you don't go invisible, semi-transparent, etc., you advance silently. Having shadows turned off doesn't mean that you are particularly able to spot a guy who's using cover to sneak up on you and being clever about it, but you'll see it for yourselves when you start playing, it's something that has to be experienced and cannot be described.
4. "There's nothing new in these previews". Duh! Most people on the Darfkall forums could easily win University Challenge, Jeopardy, etc. etc. if the topic was Darkfall! Please consider that the previews are aimed mainly at the readers of my comic who may or may not know about the game and who may not have followed it with the same level of attention as you did. I hope you'll enjoy the screenshots, at least :)