Hey guys, check out this game Darkfall Unholy Wars streamed by Ragey It's a really cool MMO with full loot, Elder.
Darkfall: Unholy Wars is releasing Tuesday 4/16. It has come a long way in six months of beta but still needs a lot of work.The sound system in general is one step forwards and two steps back. Environmental sound brings a lot to the game world but it apparently came at the cost of directional sound. I can’t tell where sounds are coming from and the sound drop off is way too quick. AV hasn’t officially commented on the sound issues.AV’s new UI is hit or miss. It looks a lot cleaner than the old UI but its only marginally more user friendly. You’re stuck with microscopic icons that can’t be resized and an overall design that feels straight out of a console game.
The radial menu system might be easier for a new player to step into but an experienced player will see it as two fancy hot bars with two separate action triggers. The original game had ten hot bars with ten ability slots each and one action trigger. Why do two, eight slot hot bars need individual action triggers? With that said the game is completely playable now without using external scripts which really couldn’t be said for the original Darkfall. You can put your sword and shield in the same quick slot, there is a new sprint lock toggle (wowee!), and there aren’t 100 different mandatory abilities that require a maze of scripts to use.Unholy Wars is releasing with substantially less content than the original game. No sea towers (objectives for ship combat), only one craftable ship, no warhulks (siege tanks), no cannons (siege), no enchanting (the best craft from the original game), and no dungeons (maybe?). They are also missing promised content like an auction house, half of the intended player roles, resource monoliths and epic PvE monsters.
All of this stuff is slated for “shortly after launch”. Class balance issues are present and will be difficult to properly adjust since half of the roles aren’t in game yet.The best addition to the game is the prowess system. Think of it like Borderlands badass ranks. Kill 10 goblins and get prowess that can be used to raise your base stats, increase weapon skills, or purchase new abilities. With this addition and the removal of practical skill gain from using your weapons, AV has effectively eliminated macroing.DFUW still has its massive and seamless game world, FPS combat, and full loot mechanics. If you’re looking for more than that you should wait.
Hopefully all of this stuff is cleaned up before the Steam release. I don’t understand why there is such high level of “don’t get it” with DF developers. Target audience of this game cares very little for fancy graphics, most will set everything to minimum so they never ever graphic lag even in 100-man battles. Graphics are extremely unimportant.What important is game play.
In that front only substantial change (that I am aware of) is drastic reduction of the grind. Beta testers report that you can have combat-ready character in 1-2 weeks of grinding or 1-2 months of just playing. “On another topic and to give you some insight on what’s happening around Aventurine, today we had a discussion on cheating, exploiting etc. In Darkfall Online while we banned more than a couple of thousand accounts we detected cheating, we never revealed names. We made a decision today to be brutal where it comes to cheating and do it “wall of shame” style, no exceptions and no appeals, besides the banning of all associated accounts, we will post the character names - we don’t care if it’s the account of a leader of the largest Alliance in the game with thousands of players associated with it - he should have known better.
Darkfall Unholy Wars is a competitive game and we cannot be lenient with anyone trying to cheat their fellow players.”I applaud this. Seeing how GW2 played out and there is absolutely nothing else that doesn’t involve spaceships that would let me satisfy my PvP addiction I decided to give DF:UW a whirl.So far after 5 hours of playing my impressions are mixed, I expected the absolutely worst and was mildly plesantly surprised.Good:. Graphics are better, they moved past EQ1 into SB-AC2 territory. Textures were significantly improved but models and animations are very dated for 2013 title.
Probably underlying engine limitation. The impossible grind was largely solved - feat system (think achievements) awards you points for doing about anything, with bonuses for X of the same activity. You spend points to improve your character. It is still takes time to build up your character but it doesn’t feel like a chore nearly as much. Roles (think classes) were implemented - so no longer your character can access all game abilities at once.
I liked it, despite not being a huge fan of classes. Unlike class system you can swap between roles, just not while in combat. Starting zones and tutorial - new players no longer dumped into the world of griefers. Good, detailed tutorial (but no story) and safe zones make new player expirience maBad:.
Still occasionally crashes. I had to patch various MS things to get it running well. So installed fails in this way. Radial UI - very hard to get used to and feel clunky. Radial menus is failed exercise in trying to innovate MMO GUIs. At the same time it is a step up from awful, awful, horrible DF1 UI.
Buttons and menus UI - awful. Tiny tiny buttons and inconsistent drop-down menus. Get used to Googling how-to-‘basic function’ for at least first couple hours.
Monster AI is still awful - at least ‘group spawns’ (monsters spawn and attack in groups) masks it a bit. Better than DF1 but still decades behind other MMOs.Overall - I didn’t hated it enough to ragequit and cancel so far.