Aventurine the Darkfall development team stormed the MMO world yesterday with both a beta signup and a 18 minute video available at www.darkfallonline.com.
The Darkfall community in general has been terribly excited to see this game finally come to fruition and also to see a confirmed release date of 2008.
However, there have been some complaints about the animations, low rez spells, and general graphical quality. I wanted to address some of those concerns.
In regards to animation quality, I believe this is the only concern that is valid. The run animations are poor and the building and ship destruction is lacking. However, I believe that this is because of a reason (performance) that I will address in my next two statements.
Regarding low resolution spells that look like bolts or balls of light. Player need to understand how revolutionary Darkfall truly is. These are not auto targeted spells. We won't ever see "Fire from the Heavens" or "lightening from the Sky" the way that people expect to see spell casting in an MMO. The reason being is that in Darkfall everything is First Person Shooter with regards to the combat system. The spells have to be able to be dodged by that players. Additionally, the lower resolution quality of the spells will allow combat with hundreds of players to not bog down our systems. Darkfall cannot look like Age of Conan and fulfill it's primary purpose as a siege based pvp game.
Graphical quality. How much fun is it to log into a game and have to turn down the graphics? Doesn't that break your immersion right away? Who cares if Age of Conan has these unbelievable graphics. Just like Vanguard no one but those with 10,000 dollar systems can run Age of Conan in a mass battle on high graphics. Graphics should be good enough so that they don't break your immersion, poor enough so that they don't break your performance. Darkfall achieves this.
Full loot, Free unrestricted PVP, All player crafted items, farming, player housing, player cities, resource control points, FPS type combat.
No other game has to offer what Darkfall does.
