Darkfall

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Chokepoint...the bottom line here, and why people are writing off this game is due to the extremely long development cycle, the shady practices of the Dev company, and the flat out lies and half truths they keep telling the public.

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First off, there are no shady practises. That's just ignorant trolling. There are no convictions or pending indictments, there are no news headlines, etc.

Nothing wrong with a long development cycle if a great game comes out of it. In fact, I *wish* more games adopted the Darkfall approach so there would be less clueless trolls who judge every game through the eyes of having been subjected to so much big game company hype.

There are so many games that are just churned out and developed to a tried and true formula and end up sucking despite massive PR and hype. Obviously it's because they spent more on convincing gullible players (eg: most DF trolls) to buy their game and then those same players cry in forums about all games sucking.

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Basically..their PR sucks arse. This game has been in development for over 7 years. Beta was suppose to start a couple of years ago.
I think they simply bit off more than they could chew. Maybe they will release, maybe they won't.

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I don't think they expected to take this long, that much is clear. Pushed back release schedules are common in the industry though, and hardly restricted to DF. It's also part of the historical record that DF has considered releasing a couple of times in the past (same as eg: TF2), but then later decided not to, and to expand the scope of the game further, perhaps thanks to a new investor or large influx of new money.

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If you really read what the devs have been saying, over the course of a couple years, and drop the shiny aura of fanboi'ness so it can clearly be seen what they are saying..they often contradict themselves. They often brag with no facts to back it up, and they sidestep any actual information, generally putting a bunch of BS out.

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It's only BS if you've never worked in a product development company before. It's no crime to change your mind about your own game, even if it causes a bunch of teenage emo kids to cry about it. Sometimes features that sound great on paper don't work that great in the game. If Aventurine didn't have such massive balls they would've just taken the standard game company approach and never told us anything to avoid the possibility of retracting features.

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Yes, there is a lot of info out on this game..but how much of it came out in the last two years? Most of what's come out recently is garbage spacefiller half assed PR.
All the good info is several years old for the most part.
They may in fact release the game, but the rational player base has no faith in them until something concrete is shown, such as Beta or Release...not half ass half truths and vague promises.

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Well, the early design info is of course better, because that's the stage where features haven't been written, or are in an early or prototype stage. After implementation comes the testing stage, which takes AGES and of course there is no new info because all that's happening is people playing and testing parts of the game over and over and over and over.

As for vagueness, well you just never know when you might uncover some huge bug which takes 2 months out of your development schedule. It happens a lot, and is the main reason why games get pushed back. Lots of big features means lots of potential bugs, lots of pushed back schedules. It's just a simple fact of development that sometimes, shit happens.

Again, if you're some fairly clueless gamer (eg: about 90% of DF trolls) who's never been exposed to product development in a commercial environment, this is all likely to come off as BS. It's understandable, and easy to spot if you're familiar with the real, behind-the-scenes realities.

I can say all this as one who knows a lot about software development especially from working in a company that has a division that makes and sell software products and has been intimately exposed to a lot of info from programmer colleagues and drinking buddies.

So no, there's no conspiracy, yeah their PR sucks for a gamer cause they don't employ a professional market guy to spin stuff for them. From my perspective, their PR is awesome and closer to what you might hear from a software project manager at a company meeting or down at the pub on a friday night.

Their PR is refreshingly honest and straightforward in an industry that generally lies through its teeth constantly. I know this because I read my company's PR for our product, yet I know the full behind-the-scenes story as well, and I would MUCH rather have the inside story, even if it does come with more disappointment. I am desperate to play the game too.

Chokepoint, you greatly underestimate the backround and experience level of many of the "trolls" in this forum - which is far greater than your own.

And if you think you are getting truth from Tasos, I wonder what kind of koolaid you have been drinking.  Go to the DF forums, News Section, and start reading from 2002 onwards.  Tell me how frank they have been after reading a few pages of official news that has more spin than a top.  Public beta has been just around the corner for...6 years!  Yeah, refreshing, isnt it?
 

Oh really Theo? Cause all I hear from trolls is made-up accusations, assumptions and flat-out lies and misinformation. I've read all the interviews and IRC transcripts.

I say put up or shut up with your so-called evidence, I am backing up everything I say with links, you're not.

And feel free to describe your real-life experience, I'm listening.

Originally posted by chokepoint

Oh really Theo? Cause all I hear from trolls is made-up accusations, assumptions and flat-out lies and misinformation. I've read all the interviews and IRC transcripts.

 

I say put up or shut up with your so-called evidence, I am backing up everything I say with links, you're not.

 

And feel free to describe your real-life experience, I'm listening.

 

First, let me say there ARE  trolls.  Typically, they pop in and post a line or two, but they are not representative of the skeptics or critics that post here frequently.

What links do you want?  Check my posting history and you will find copious use of linkage.

My own relevant history:  EDIT - n/m, no good can come from this.

Interesting thread. I can remember  waiting ages for Half-Life to release but man when it did it was worth the wait. Starting to feel like maybe DF is the half-life of MMOs... please god let me be right........

Originally posted by Silvarch

None, all those dev studios had previous experience and had shipped titles, all of them. Some of them are/were even famous for taking long with their games (Blizzard, Valve). There's also a bigger list of games that didn't materialize, but since they didn't people tend to forget about them. With such different standards, how can you hope to make these an argument for or against Darkfall or Aventurine? At this point you must accept that the only thing that can conclusively dispel the doubts in the the mind of most people is nothing short of release or a radical and sudden change of policy in Aventurine's PR. The games you mentioned were said to be vaporware during the middle of the development process, not 5 or 6 months before release, because of the wealth of information available on them by that time.

Actually no. Half-Life was Valve's first game. Unreal was Epic's first title. Valve and Epic were noones before they released their respective games.

Regardless, there is more info available on Darkfall than there was for Unreal and Half-Life combined. Some of us are old enough to have witnessed it all.

It's no coincidence that each of the listed games have made Wired's vapourware list, some of them for several years in a row, while Darkfall has never been listed.

Originally posted by Silvarch

Originally posted by Theodgrim

As I have mentioned before, I was really looking forward to TF2.  I was playing OGL and competetive stuff like that.  But I am 10 years older, and dont play those games anymore.  To me, it matters little that it finally released.  Might as well have been vapor forever.   I hope DF releases before I finally start doing something useful with my spare time.  

BTW, which one of those titles was the first game, let alone first MMO, for the dev team?  Any indie dev teams on that list? 

 

None, all those dev studios had previous experience and had shipped titles, all of them. Some of them are/were even famous for taking long with their games (Blizzard, Valve).

Wrong wrong wrong wrong! Sing it with me! Vale's very first game was Half Life 1. I watched an entire video on the making of it. These guys split from Microsoft and started making a game that was way too ambitious. Their first attempt wasn't that great, and they totally redid the game from the bottom up because it just wasn't "fun". Other developers thought the game would ever come out the door.

The only other thing is they had a side project going on at the same time that wasn't very successful, some fantasy based game.

SO, in conclussion, Valve had absolutely no experience at all making games on their own, and they took forever to do it. Sure they all knew how to program things, but isn't that sort of a prerequisit for the field?

You know, the point here is that some of the people here, take the game as granted and take the little "evidence" that -does- exist as a sign that the game will be as it is promised.

Others however, me included, are not so easily convinced. Why? Well, i would say, that's personal opinion of what is "enough" facts. Who knows, maybe I would have been just as skeptical of Half Life back in the day (if I had been interested in shooters at the time).

You all need to realize, I and many others, do not -hate- Darkfall. In fact, if it ever comes out with all the features promised, we will probably LOVE it and likely play it even! That does not change that I am extremely skeptical towards the whole thing. What we have -seen- of the game is a bunch of videos and screenshots and that's it. The videos were never of people actually -playing- the game, but they were meshed together videos which can just as well have been pre-programmed. The screenshots show nothing except a mediocre graphics engine. None of the features promised has been adequately demonstrated so far. On top of that, the information forthcoming has so far been mostly in text, promises made by one man.

So, if Darkfall releases and it holds up to all these promises, YAY! I'll be among the first to download the Playtesting Client and see what it has to offer.

Until then though, there's just not enough hard evidence that could convince me that the game will actually be what the Developers promise it to be.

And before anyone points at my history with AoC, yes, I trusted FC. See where it got me?