Quick disclaimer: I’m not a DF fanatic, I don’t read the boards, I don’t hang in their IRC, and I haven’t read the FAQ since the day I first heard about it back in early 2002. I wasn’t too concerned with every little detail so early in the game’s life, beta will bring those issues and questions to mind. After my initial research of the game I dropped it from my radar until they were ready for the attention. Following a game for years only lessens interest and wastes time. If you want detailed info about this game I suggest you check their web site because you won’t get it from this article. I wanted a fresh high-level perspective; it’s too early for anything else.
I was recently married on August 10th. For our honeymoon we decided to go to Greece; Athens, Santorini, and ending in Mykonos. At the time the honeymoon was planned the developers of Darkfall, Razorwax Studios, were located in Oslo, Norway. Razorwax was a small basement operation begun by hardcore gamers using their own funds and resources to create “amazingly addictive games” as they put it. The Combine had taken notice and it sounded like a game we’d want to play assuming it resembled the FAQ by release. But between then and the actual trip, Razorwax became a part of Aventurine SA, a publisher and developer based in Athens. As soon as I found out I’d be in their hometown I knew I couldn’t pass up the chance to meet them. My wife was thrilled we’d be getting such a bonus on our honeymoon. Really thrilled. An “I owe her more large jewelry” type of thrill.
Here’s the Aventurine team list so I don’t have to describe each person’s role as I go:
(People I Met)
- Bjorn Eirik Larsen – AI programmer
- BT Oren – Designer
- Claus Grovdal – Producer/Lead Designer
- Henning Ludvigsen – Art Director
- Jade Mehdawi – Executive Producer
- Kostas Pateras – 3D Artist
- Kjetil Helland – Lead Programmer
- Lars Erik Liljeback – Game Logic Programmer
- Spiros Iordanis – Business Management
- Tasos Flambouras – Associate Producer
(People I Didn’t Meet)
- Erik Johansen – Network Programmer
- George Ballas – Office Manager
- Giorgos Dionysopoulos – 3D Artist
- Kristian Vik – 3D Artist
- Rasmus Bording – Programmer
- Ricki Sickenger – Tools Programmer
- Roman Tassios – 3D artist
- Trond Evanger – Designer
- Yiannis Koumoutzelis – 3D Artist
Tasos Flambouras and Claus Grovdal picked us up from our hotel in the morning for a tour of the office and a chance to meet some of the team. This was a Sunday; they were working overtime to get ready for their beta and some had come in just to give me the tour. I hadn’t slept for 24 hours and I was slightly woozy from the 100 degree heat outside so the discussions were very general, no stat crunching. We drove out to their office located inside the city within sight of the new Olympic stadium. They have an entire floor of a commercial building sparsely furnished with desks, chairs, and computers. I saw various PC game boxes littered all over the place. The walls were covered with lists (like monster base types), charts, and maps (like the future beta world). Not a single foosball or ping-pong table in the place.
My first real impression was of the people themselves. They radiated competence and familiarity with their parts of the project. Everyone was eager to show off what they had. At the office I got to meet just about everyone in the list above except Jade and Ricki. I regret not having been able to spend more time with each of them. I was rushed, mainly because I had arrived a day later than expected in Athens because of the NYC blackout. My apologies. I probably missed half the tour they had planned for me. I didn’t even get a chance to have them autograph my wife’s breasts for the upcoming Gamers Gone Wild video.
Their list of monsters was long. I’m talking about base types only and it didn’t include the standard animal types like wolves, rats, etc. The animals will be in the game they just didn’t put them on that particular list. There will also be variations of the base types, red orc, hairy orc, polka dot orc, whatever.
Their art blew me away. The amount of art they already have is very hard to believe. Even my wife took a moment away from giving me dirty looks to comment on how amazed she was that they were able to do so much without a large team of artists. They had 50 of everything. Some of the trees were the size of mountains. An entire forest would be daunting. I’m pretty sure I saw marijuana plants. I’m not even going to try to list what they showed me and it was only a very small sampling at that. I asked if we could put enemy heads on pikes and although they do have something different planned (maybe putting enemy ears on a necklace) they broke out a whole array of premade models of skulls on pikes, skulls on the ground, skull pyramids, skulls laying around, etc. The detail of each piece was impressive. To balance the detail they have done a lot of polygon trimming to bring the counts down dramatically. Poly counts will range from 300 to 7000 depending on the monster and the rendering distance. Not coincidentally, a piece is loaded only once even if it’s used 2000 times in a world which saves on load time. The monster models I saw were ferocious. The black dragon and winged demon in particular had me grinning like a kid; they just felt good to look at.
They demonstrated how easily they could build art objects using prepared pieces. I saw a wicked fortress assembled in 1 minute from nothing. Each race has its own style theme. To start they will make prefab objects (housing, furnishings, etc.) available for sale to players. Later on I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we could design our own through some sort of stripped down in-game interface akin to what they use. In-game object placement by players will probably be something like UO’s from what I understood. Oddjobs’ Pimp Palace Bar & Grill will be open for business.
I was shown their world building tools and examples. Huge terrain maps. They can drag and drop to create worlds quickly. I wanted to get an idea of scale so they dropped a character-sized image on a mountain and we could barely see it.
They demonstrated monster animations. Ogres running, goblins attacking, things like that. It all looked like it should, smooth and realistic. They didn’t do any mocap (motion capture), everything was done by hand. Good enough for me. I’m sure if they wanted to delay the game an extra year just so we could flip someone off realistically they could. I’d rather they spend that saved money on wining and dining visiting guild leaders.
I saw some environment work, like grass waving in the breeze and a boat rocking on the waves. World physics will affect everything, including which direction the grass waves due to the wind. Your targeting reticle will shift around more strongly the worse the wind is blowing, someone on higher ground will have somewhat of an advantage. You have a targeting reticle for ranged attacks. If you cast a fireball or shoot an arrow and someone moves, you will miss. If the reticle is shaking from the wind or from the strain of a pulled bow and you release at the wrong moment, you will miss. Players will be able to control boats in a fashion similar to BF1942. Some boats will have ballista or catapults. Argh matey, piracy sounds like a possible playstyle maybe. The motion of the waves will affect your reticle as well. Environment and physics will matter.
There won’t be flight. The main reason is to prevent players from circumventing town defenses a la Shadowbane. We didn’t go too much into teleportation but I think they mentioned there will be various means of fast travel. There will be horses and we’ll be able to fight from horseback.
There will be many different types and themes of armor. Players will be able to color the various pieces and put their guild emblems on their cloaks and shields. I got to see some of it and it was easily interchangeable across many themes.
Stealth in DF won’t equal invisibility. One thing I really hated in some previous games was that someone could successfully stealth right in front of me. If I can see you and know where you are, you shouldn’t be able to hide. The devs agree with that interpretation. Invisibility will be balanced by see invisibility. We can only hope that neither ability gets unbalanced.
They’re planning to make guild size more difficult to maintain as size increases. The idea is to try to keep guilds to a manageable size while not explicitly enforcing a limitation.
You’ll be able to have NPC retainers like guards, vendors, and hirelings to follow you around and do things for you like carry stuff, heal you, or attack targets.
Their customer support program will include in-house, external, and volunteers. The quality of customer support can’t be judged until we try and use it. This is definitely one of the pillars of a solid game.
The game interface will allow for hotkeys and macros. There’s also radar. They’ve put a lot of thought into their guild management interface. The guild interface version shown to me was the functional rough, not the pretty and intuitive version everyone will get to see later. It was without a doubt the most functional I’ve seen to date. It included just about every useful feature we’ve seen from UO to SB and in between. Claus treated this thing like his baby, something he had obviously spent a lot of time on. I think I heard him cackle at least once while showing it to me and I definitely heard him call it his “preciousssss.” He is Norwegian so we must make allowances.
PvP is the basis of this game. Player conflict. Murder death kill. Although there will be crafters, the majority of players will be there to compete with other players in the best way. No safe areas. This game is designed from the ground up to promote combat and warfare. How they will actually do that remains to be seen.
They expect each world to be able to handle 10,000 players simultaneously thanks to some clever dynamic grid clustering. I can’t wait to see what will happen when 9,000 people all show up in the same town though.
After the office tour they dropped my wife and I off to go sightsee and catch a nap. After dinner they picked us up again to go drinking at a trendy lounge along the water on the outskirts of town. The music was loud, the rum was chilled. I got to meet Jade there (pronounced Zod). He was walking with a cane which I think he uses to beat stubborn devs (he hurt his leg recently but still came out to hang.)
We all had a good laugh over the Abuse of Moderation article. We discussed the various mistakes of their predecessors. We touched on customer service and support, being forthcoming with plans and mistakes, and patching frequently. I honestly believe they “get it.” Gamers are willing to forgive quite a bit when they’re treated well.
Tasos spent a while explaining how sieging and town warfare will work. Mature towns will take months to build. In turn, they will be very hard to take out. Details aside, it has to do with building everything you need, transporting it to where you want to use it, setting up there, then attacking. During all that time the attackers are very vulnerable. They’re aiming to discourage ninja tactics. How it works in practice we will see soon enough. They’ve put in SMS messaging from in-game so you can get a message on your cell phone at any time. I’m hoping there’ll be no reason to message me at 4am on a Tuesday.
Later on in Mykonos, Jade and his gf plus my wife and I met up one last time for dinner and drinks. Over drinks we ended up giving an informal seminar to some other people there on what MMOG’s are, what they mean to society, and what gamers get from the games we play. As Jade and I took turns preaching it occurred to me that we were both coming from the same place saying the same things. We had a lot in common, that’s encouraging. MMOG’s are going to be the basis for much more than gaming in the future and some gaming company will be the one to make that leap. Maybe it’ll be these guys if they can weather their first game successfully.
In summary, I’ve reaffirmed Combine’s interest in this game from what I saw and heard. We’ve been burned before so I’m not going to profess undying love for a game we haven’t even tried yet but I will say that these guys have as good a chance at making a hit as I’ve ever seen. They’re all gamers (even their CFO games), they have skilled and motivated resources, they’re still unspoiled by greed, and the management have an eye towards the future which in part means keeping the customers on their side. They are very much aware of the community. They’re not in a rush, no premature marketing, no undue pressure to release before DF is ready. Quite smart. When they start beta we’ll find out if they’ve thought through their balance well, if the framerate can handle the battles, if their servers can handle the strain, if their interfaces are intuitive and easy to use, if the game is fun, and if they can adjust and adapt as needs dictate.
A big thanks to Aventurine for their impeccable hospitality. It was a pleasure hanging out with them all and I appreciate all the time they took from their own lives to spend with me. I hope their game does well and we all hope they don’t succumb to the dark side. Remember your customers! You make a lot more money when we don’t have reason to dispute the charges.
I’ve put up pictures but I’ve cut out non-gamers to protect their privacy. You can view the gallery here.
If you have any additional questions, don’t email me. Use the message board thread linked below.
Discuss: Ask questions here!
Deyth, as well as being one of our featured writers is also the guildmaster for the well known guild, “The Combine.” Many of his older articles are available for reading, and are considered recommended for any MMO Gamer.
About The Author
