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I have read the comments about the previous update, and I saw that there was some perplexity about the change of tone in the preview – i.e. from fairly positive to gushing enthousiastic.
What happened? The answer is simple: PVP. When the number of testers was in the low hundreds, fights were few and far between. While the game looked solid, it was still just a promise of good things to come. Now - with many more players -finding someone to fight is not hard anymore and, as I already described last week, it’s a lot of fun.
I posted the poll screenshot in preview 8 to give you an idea of the overall reception of Darkfall by the other testers. Do not assume that everyone is happy with everything in the game. The beta forums are full of discussions about game features with opinions both positive and negative. However, the majority of the beta testers is happy with what they’ve seen so far, even when it’s followed by a “but I would like to see these changes…” caveat. Since there are some serious issues of reading comprehension, let me make this as clear as possible one more time: “majority” does not mean “all”. “The game is fun” does not mean “the game is 100% ready”.
Anyway, player cities. I cannot give credit where it’s due because of the NDA (I will once it lifts), but a clan has done a huge work of research in city building with the scant resources available in a short time to limited numbers of people and has been cool enough to share their findings. I had the pleasure to help them for a bit in an earlier build and learn what little I know about player cities.
You cannot build a city wherever you like, but you must find a location with a city clanstone or hamlet clanstone and claim it as your own. To claim it, you need to purchase a shard at a capital city vendor and use it when you reach the city. Everyone in game gets a message which says “(clan name) are the proud new owners of (city name)”. I don’t know if this happens for hamlets or just for cities, but since at the moment there are enough city clanstones for everyone I assume that people prefer claiming cities. In release things may get interesting when all the clanstones are taken, since at that point they will need to be taken from other clans.
Once the clanstone is taken, a limited number of people can bind to it (subject to increase as construction proceeds). Structures are built in preset spots - starting with a bank - and they unlock more available structures. You cannot drop whatever you want wherever you want. When you go in build mode you see the area from above and see where the selected building can be put in preset locations. Right now most clans are still at the stage “clanstone + bank”, so I cried a river until a dev kindly used her mad hax skillz to give us some screenshots of some relatively more advanced city building in a Mirdain clan city. Enjoy.
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What can be built in any given city location varies. As far as I understood, some places will allow you to build mines, for example, but no farms, or viceversa; others will have no harbour. With the exception of harbour and wall placeholders (i.e. ruined harbours and crumbled walls), you cannot tell from the beginning what can be built in a given city until you’ve started unlocking the buildings tree, and in my personal opinion this is a poor feature. I would hate to be in the guild that spent weeks gathering a ton of resources just to discover that the building they really need can’t be built at their location of choice. The dev answer is that they are welcome to conquer their neighbours’ city if it’s more attractive – but in my opinion it’s still bad because all the time and effort that a guild put into their city goes down the drain. It favors blind luck over careful planning, unless there’s a fool-proof way to gauge what a city may become from looking at the area. I guess that if you want mines you should choose a mountain town or a cave town, and if you want farms maybe the desert is not the best place to live, but I don’t know. Oh well, we’ll see how it goes! Maybe it will be a non-issue once guilds get busy with conquest.
What else?
Note on houses: this is not instanced player housing. These are house structures in which anyone can enter. They can provide good perching spots in a battle but there’s no magic invisible barrier to hide behind. Wherever you can go, so can your enemy.
Speaking of which, do you want to go pirating but your clan has no harbour? Or no clan city altogether? Welcome to ninja crafting. You can go in anyone’s city and use their vendors, bank, crafting stations, etc. if they don’t bother to defend them in person or with guard towers.
Mind you, all the members of the city’s clan get a message when you enter in their area and every time you use their stuff and they’ll have the huge advantage of respawning right there even if you kill them the first time. At present people respawn at full stamina and health, and this means that currently fighting someone at their clanstone is a Bad Idea, no matter how much they suck, because you’ll get immediately bindrushed while you’re still low on stam/health after the fight. I don’t know how it will work in sieges, or if it’s subject to change in release.
I doubt that I’ll write any more previews – so I’ll take the opportunity to say that it’s been a great pleasure to share what information I could with you – or at least those of you who didn’t email me to say that I am a lying cunt and that Darkfall doesn’t exist.
See you in game and I hope that you’ll love it as much as I do.