Darkfall

Is this the price we must pay to have the other end of the spectrum- freedom, fun, PvP, and the risk/reward and nostalgia of UO?

I have never had as much fun and excitement as when I played UO pre-trammel... BUT...

1) I was young then. I had plenty of time to waste, and wasted time without caring.

Now, although part of me wants to experience classic pre-trammel UO, the other (more mature and intellectual) part of me keeps thinking "Why pay $15 a month to work for 3 hours getting gold, only to lose all of it because a Gank Squad of 15 men come by and kill me mercilessly- giving me no chance at all to win or fight back. Where is the fun in time-sinks? Where is the fun in losing hours of hard work? Where is the fun in having a great time in PvE only to have it end in anger and frustration that I couldnt do anything about the fact 10 professional PK's came up and killed my group of 3 WHILE we were already half dead?"

There is no fun, only frustration- in being ganked, PK'd, and looted. Especially when you have no chance of winning (already hurt by monster, overwhelming odds, etc.)

There IS fun in freedom, open PvP, attack-anyone, UO-type world.

This example is a lot like playing DAoC towards the end of its life. The sides were so unbalanced in the Zerg vs Zerg vs Zerg, that all I could do is run an 8-man, roaming around searching for something to fight. This resulted in a waste of time, and the end of my DAoC career.

I quickly realized, I wasnt really playing the game or having fun enough to constitute playing or paying. The gameplay consisted of working for 1 hour to get a full group going, roaming for 20 minutes only to find

a) Find a solo, which would be a 8v1 fight, which is boring bc they have no chance
b) Find a 2-3 man group, which again is a 8v3 fight, which is over before it began and thus boring.
c) Find the Zerg, running into 3 full groups of 24v8, which is over before it began and thus boring.
d) Find nothing, roaming again for 20 minutes.
e) The rare 1% chance of running into another full group and having a fair, fun battle of 8v8

And thus repeat, roam 20, a-e, roam 20, a-e, roam 20. So when I reailzed I had been playing for 4 hours, but actually only got to play for about 10 minutes, I quit. It was fun- but it was wasting away TONS of my time, and felt like a waste of life.

I am wondering if the risk/reward is going to be worth it? It has been many, many years since my pre-trammel UO days, and I will never play another MMO with time-sinks. Whether those time sinks are long travel times and grinding just to be able to have fun (most MMO's) or time sinks that consist of playing, only to be PK'd and have to start over from scratch.

A time sink is a time sink.
Frustration is frustration.
Unfair fights suck, and regardless if you're the winner or loser- they're boring.

Edit: There is a reason I dont play EQ1. Talk about a great game- but HUGE time sinks. There is a reason games like Vanguard added riftways, and future games are getting rid of death penalties and travelling. Time sinks are a thing of the past, and people honestly dont want to pay, play, or have fun if it means the majority of the time is going to be boring, frustrating, or draining.

Discuss.

In before flames.

I must admit it is an interesting mechanic and one I have not experienced before. I know that when (if?) I get around to playing DF I'll only ever run around with the crappiest stuff that I'm not afraid to lose. Nothing would piss me off more than losing some uber crafted sword after being ganked.

There is a fine line between risk vs. reward and hair-tearing frustration. My game time is more limited now than it ever was, and I want to be able to achieve something when I play, not lose a day's hard work in one bad fight.

Its a niche game, that'll have a niche audience.. will that be enough to run an mmo? maybe, maybe not.. we'll see

 I feel for your concerns and I think they represent the number one deterant to playing this game.

The price must be payed though.  The whole philosophy behind these kinds of games isn't necessarily freedom, but immersion.  Freedom is a means to that goal.  I think that if you just play the game without trying to achieve some meta-status, it might not be so bad.  What I mean by that is if you just play without trying to have a goal of building a house, putting a million gold in it, displaying all of your loot, etc. you might not even notice losing your stuff.

Overall, I think it can work.  If it can't, well that is just a shame.  Fortunately, there are MANY games out there for people who don't like what Darkfall provides, but that has an unfortunately bad effect on sandbox games.  SWG was a good example of a lot of freedom without open pvp (IMO), but if open PVP doesn't work in Darkfall, it might deter other sandbox developers (of which there are a few in development).

Edit:  I think players' mentality has a lot to do with this.  Everyone expects WoW nowadays.  People shouldn't go into this game thinking "I'll have uber gear" "I'll grind grind grind until I have the most stuff".  Of course, that is just my opinion though.

Hard Days work..

think about that..

when a game becomes WORK.. you are doing it wrong. (unless you are a pro sports player.. in which case you are over paid anyways..)

One thing you are leaving out is that there was a risk for PKing in UO. Thats what helped balance the world so well. When you went red it was much harder to get a res. You couldn't really go to any town, except bucs den which sucked anyways. Then when the bounty system came on it was even better. Those murderers would rarely be seen anywhere youd find more than a couple players.

As long as the consiquences for PKing are just as harsh as the gank penalty I think it can work out just fine.

Originally posted by Zayne3145

In before flames.

I must admit it is an interesting mechanic and one I have not experienced before. I know that when (if?) I get around to playing DF I'll only ever run around with the crappiest stuff that I'm not afraid to lose. Nothing would piss me off more than losing some uber crafted sword after being ganked.

There is a fine line between risk vs. reward and hair-tearing frustration. My game time is more limited now than it ever was, and I want to be able to achieve something when I play, not lose a day's hard work in one bad fight.

True. In UO, you kept everything in the bank, and only took what you absolutely needed. That was actually very fun.

Also, loot in UO was easy to obtain, and easy to lose.

I'd go out, spend 4000 gold on a full platemail suit of armor and a nice weapon, hunt with it, port back to the bank everytime I got a large amount of gold, go back and repeat until I die, lose the armor, and that's that.

The result? Most of the time I made more money than I lost, or at the very minimum broke even. Often I wouldnt die, and would be able to use the gear another day.

PK's werent so much a problem because of the ability to *HIDE*, Recall, and Run, and how many safe zones there were. If attacking a grey, I could run to the bank (not a safe zone) but atleast stuff as much as I could in the bank before I died.

There were many keys to the lack of frustration and fun of it though.

1) Everything was easy to get, easy to lose, and it didnt matter if you lost anything, you could just buy more.
2) You still made a profit in gold.
3) PK's werent that big of a problem in most areas.

I actually liked that. Every other MMO has been heavily gear-centric. In UO, all you needed was a GM (master-crafted) weapon, and that's it. You didnt even need armor. You'd take out a weapon (or reagents) from your bank, a stack of bandages, and off to battle. Armor was a luxury that you put on, depending on how much risk you wanted, or how much you needed the advantage. No one carried around gold.

Being interrpupted while you're working on something isn't exciting or fun, it's just annoying.

That's why you get the RvR game design. When you want to work on PvE, you can do that without getting ganked.

If you want a bit more excitement, you can go to the frontier, and you can still PvE, but you have the opportunity to fight other players.

Getting ganked over and over and over, while trying to do some simple PvE is more frustration than most players are willing to put up with.

Keep in mind DArkfall is not pure FFA PvP. There are consequeinces. If you kill everyone, then the guards will begin to kill you, and so forth.

Will this be enough to keep the ganking down to a level that is tolerable? No way to know without seeing the exact rules that are in place.

If you get ganked now and then, it might be tolerabe. Every 5 minutes, probably not. How do you write the rules so that players get ganked every now and then, and not every 5 minutes? I don't know, maybe Tasos does.