Darkfall gameplay problems -- HC Board

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 13:08:54 02/04/09 Wed
Author: Mercenarey
Subject: Darkfall gameplay problems

Darkfall is still very rough around the edges. It can best be felt in the gameplay decisions they have taken so far.

Problems:
1: bars (health/mana/stamina) are far too big for newbies. This means, that beginning spells have almost no impact at all. You start with a beginning "Heal Self" spell, it takes about 2 seconds to cast and it has almost no impact on your health bar.
The good thing with big health bars, is that newbie chars are competitive, the bad thing is, that all newbie spells and powers aer almost useless.

2: Everything depends on the Stamina Bar
And I mean everything. When you swing a weapon, when you block, when sprint, when you cast a spell. Almost every action in the game takes stamina (even fishing and other resource gathering).
The stamina bar is huge, and it replenishes very slowly when resting. Besides that causes long downtimes, it has another unfortunate effect: When you run out of stamina in a fight, you are a SITTING DUCK! You cannot attack, you cannot block, you cannot shoot spells, you cannot run. You can just stand there and wait to die.
That makes fights "one-way streets to hell", where the fight continues until one or the other runs out of stamina (or dies before of course). There is no way to go "defensive" like in UO, where you could start healing and interrupting when low on mana, while waiting for mana to replenish. The stamina bar goes far too slow for that.

3: Too many attack types
What this means, is that you can be attacked on a number of fronts. Physical (melee), mind, acid, fire, holy... I counted up towards 8 different attack types and to each there are defensive spells.
Imagine the hell of having to first identify what type of attack a player may be using against you. Thereafter you have to sift through all your defensive spells in search of the one to defend with. All this in the middle of combat and while being under pressure.
It is a reactive, and there for a losing battle. I would have preferred just a 2 defensive spells: Physical (melee/arrows) and Magical (all spells regardless of attack types). A system they used in UO, and which would make defensive spells actually useful.
As it is now, I foresee that everyone will just ignore defensive spells and go for nuking power instead.
All attack types an attacker may deploy, will work fine against the defender, while the defender needs the exact spell to successfully defend. An attacker with 2-3 attack types can simply switch, and the defender will be unlikely to have another defense-spell, and if he happens to, he will be delayed in sifting through to find it, loading it onto his staff etc. The attacker won't wait for him!

4: Clumsy hotkey system
It is as if the client can do only ONE thing at a time. And that may be the explanation of the rather clumsy way you switch to spells (I described in my earlier post - you have to first equip, then arm, then load spell, THEN fire).
Once I sprinted and then tried to open the backpack at the same time. It couldn't.
They have to rewamp this system to make a much more fluent system, where actions can run next to each other, and where more advanced actions, consisting of several steps, can be carried out with a single keypress.

--------------------

This is closed beta, so of course there are issues still.
They have said, that they are working on a total rewamp of the stamina bar, so that will at least be solved.

As for the multiple attack types making it hard to defend, Im not sure they are on that one.

The hotkey thing is being complained about heftily on the beta board, so I guess they can't overhear that.
If they do, then I foresee many non-hardcore players, that are used to sleek interfaces from WoW and other games, will leave instantly, so they MUST do it.

Another little thing:
I saw a PvP video on the beta-leaks (I still haven't done any PvP (except killing a PK that jumped me, he didn't even hurt me, so that was hardly a fight)), and it seemed to be very glitchy on the network. The guy they hunted was suddenly in one location, then jumped 30 meters. That didn't look good. I hope that will improve, because that will certainly hurt a PvP system, that is so reliant on the network. FPS style is much more network sensitive than the WoW-clones.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]