In update #6 I said that I’d talk about city building, but I’ve decided to leave that for another update and instead talk about reputation and its consequences.
I’ve been reading the forums after each update to see where I failed to explain things clearly, and in the case of #6 it was definitely the part about the consequences of going red (i.e. being flagged as a murderer by your own race and friendly races). Many people have interpreted the mention of small camps with banks in the wilderness as a free lunch for reds, which isn’t accurate. Actually, going red without the support of a clan city is an easily avoidable pain in the ass.
What follows is based on what I observed while exploring and it may be completely wrong for what I know, Aventurine doesn’t provide me with any sort of information or spoiler about the land layout.
While there is a small number of camps with merchants and banks, all those that I’ve seen until now were in relatively close proximity of the NPC guarded towns. When you go red, you are automatically re-bound to a chaos stone (I don’t know if a random one or the closest one), and all the chaos stones that I’ve seen so far were in the middle of nowhere. I spent hours running around a couple of them to see if there were services of any kind (bank, stores), and I couldn’t find anything within convenient distance. Maybe there are well hidden chaos stones close to the starter towns as well, I just haven’t seen any or heard of anyone finding one.
As you know, the main continental mass in Darkfall is roughly round. The central area doesn’t belong to any race. Here I’ve seen one city clanstone (claimable) and one chaos bindstone (unclaimable but you can bind there) but I haven’t explored it thoroughly, I’ve only seen a small part of it. It’s a long run to anywhere and I haven’t seen any bank/vendor camps.
Towards the coast, the land is occupied by the player races. Starting from the North, clockwise: Dwarves, Orks, Humans, Alfar, Mirdain, Mahirim, so that everyone has two unfriendly neighbours on both sides. For readers who are unfamiliar with Darkfall, here’s a short list of racial enmities: Dwarves, Humans and Mirdain (elves) are friendly to each other, at war with the others; Mahirim (wolf people) and Orks, ditto; Alfar (dark elves) are enemies with everyone.
In the area that belongs to the various races I’ve seen the following:
- Starter cities (three per race, you can choose one at character creation) and capital city, guarded, pretty close to each other.
- Several fully serviced, unguarded public cities, without a bindstone.
- Very few bank/vendor camps not far from the starter cities. I’ve played mahirim, humans and orks for several days each and found two camps for the humans (one with no bank), two camps for the orks and one camp for the mahirim, all within a five minute run from a starter town, so as you can see they aren’t all over the place.
- Hamlet clanstones, which can be claimed. There are several of these and most are in easily accessible (i.e. hard to defend) locations – plains, roadsides, etc.
- City clanstones, which can be claimed, much more rare than the hamlets. These are in easily defensible locations (e.g. plateaus or craters reached from only one direction) and have a lot of rubble on the ground, which is flagged as either “rubble” or “(race) wall” when you hover on it with the mouse, and that – I assume – can be repaired to become walls, buildings etc. A fully rebuilt city would be quite an imposing sight, and some of them look already amazing even now that they’re still a pile of ruins.
Finally, there are hundreds of small islands as well as four smaller continents – which I haven’t explored. Reading general chat, though, I had the impression that the type of structures found in these areas consists mostly of claimable clanstones and chaos bindstones, but no vendor/bank camps – with one exception: Silvertown, which is a potential candidate to become the DF’s version of Bucaneer’s Den: a fully serviced neutral city on an island, complete with a bindstone. There may be more, but this one was the only one that I’ve heard mentioned again and again (I haven’t yet visited it).
I’ve heard talk of very well hidden bindpoints, such as in dungeons or underwater, but I don’t know of any beta tester who’s found one yet.
At the moment, and possibly also in release, banks and vendors built by clans can be used by anyone (consider though that nobody’s built guard towers in player towns yet). Some testers shed tears of joy when they raided a player town, killed the people that they found there, then used their enemies’ bank and vendor to dispose of the loot. As they say in the Mastercard ads, priceless.
If you hit someone of your faction you go grey for a few minutes, and people can kill you without getting an alignment hit. You have to be careful where you’re aiming with your arrows and spells when you're fighting near strangers of your faction, since people can jump in front to make you go grey and kill you with impunity.
As for murder status, currently reputation with your own race can go from -100 to +100 and you start with +10. If you go under 0 you become red, i.e. you’re flagged as murderer and cannot go to formerly friendly guarded NPC cities without being attacked. If you kill someone of your own race, or of a friendly race, you lose 8 points. If you kill someone of an enemy race, you gain 2 points. The exception is someone of a clan that your clan is at war with – you can attack and kill each other anywhere, including in any guarded town, without reputation consequences regardless of faction .
I’m not going to write down my deductions of what thousands of people will do given this ruleset because I don’t have a crystal ball and I think that anyone can draw their own conclusions, but I find that it’s a reasonable system that gives a good incentive on not going red right from the start, since you can still kill your enemy neighbours and clans at war with yours, while at the same time it doesn’t make going red some sort of permanent exile sentence (unless you just don’t care and drop to -100 rep without ever trying to raise it), since you just need to kill enough faction enemies to go back to blue.
Click on the image above to see the whole screenshot and have a look at the greataxe skill that I have slotted in position 5 of the hotbar. It's knockback, the first special attack that I was able to purchase from a Fighter NPC when I reached 25 skill with my weapon. It's great, and knocks people back (or up) a long distance. Too bad that these humans have it too, and the girl just sent me flying...
Thanks for the patience in waiting for this update. I wish you all a happy New Year and hope to see you in game soon!
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- A quick clarification about knockback after reading the forums: it doesn't do a lot of damage, it has a short cooldown (maybe 30 seconds) and the animation is a forward thrust. It doesn't do splash damage. I haven't checked how much stamina it uses.
- I didn't write about player cities because I felt that it was more important to dispel false impressions that I'd created about alignement in the previous update, but I still plan to talk about them soon. Sorry if you were looking forward to it.
Finally, something that I've meant to say for a while: you don't need to thank me. It's actually a pleasure and a privilege to write these updates, and it brings more readers to my website (I'd do them anyway, but it's a very nice side effect!). Also, another reminder not to email me questions about the game. I can only answer that I cannot speak about it at all outside these previews and I feel a bit of a dick every time, but that's the only thing I can write back.