Oh Darkfall…

Darkfall holds this bizarre place in my heart. On one hand the game itself is mostly terrible. The company that made it is also mostly terrible. The people who play it are — you guessed it — terrible. Yet at the same time, Darkfall is the game where I met some of my best friends. Darkfall is where our gaming community had the most fun playing together.

The reason for our enjoyment rests solely on one of the only things Aventurine got right: They created a game where players had to rely on each other. That’s the magic right there.

So why am I writing about Darkfall of all games? I saw a post on Reddit from a Darkfall dev asking (unofficially) if people are interested in bringing back Darkfall 1.0.  No, I’m not interested. The only way I would be interested in playing Darkfall ever again, 1.0 or otherwise, would be to cut Aventurine out of the equation, turn development over to a team of people who know what they’re doing, and give me (or someone sane) full power and authority to ban just about everyone who currently or previous played, and retain that power to protect the community.

I would try a player-run server of Darkfall if operated in a similar fashion to P99 or SWGEmu. A team of people who are passionate about the game, remove what sucks, bring back what works, and continue to develop more things the game needs.  Otherwise, nah.

  • Also remove the hard limited, preplaced cities, villages, and hamlets. Whether it was a tech restriction or an artificial reason for PvP both reasons are terrible. Players need to be able to build wherever they want.

    Devs need to stop marketing their games as 24/7 Quake arena death matches and more like worlds. (Star Citizen!) You will fill the game with death match arena players but those death match games end. Worlds persist. And you’ll still get a healthy amount of PvP.

  • Game would have been 100% better if they had just stuck with the original idea of skillpoint caps and skill decay.

  • @Gringar: I would include those in the “remove what sucked” category. And yes, 100% agreed.

    @Rawblin: Yeah, amen to that.

  • @Hatch

    Seems like it is basically a webpage so far. Quite a lot of their ideas and goals will change between now and launch. If it ever does launch.

    Pretty sure their “big announcement” in May will be “Hey you can pay us money to get “involved” in development and play the pre-alpha!”