Originally posted by fixif

its interesting how little armor do female characters have :)..that suppose to "protect" them from sword and fireballs? :D

Oh yea! have you ever heard about protective magic? I know its not shown in the ss, but i know it very well because my Shilien knight in L2 was really very well protected with a little metal bikini. Really it was a lot smaller than these armors in Aion.  

Originally posted by GrayGhost79

Originally posted by Briansho

I don't know....friendly fire might be moving toward carebearism and I thought the entire idea for this game is supposed to be non-carebear.

 

I don't really see it as carebearism lol. I like it myself. Will add more challeng and thats my main focus. The challeng from the PvE, the challeng from the PvP, the challeng of playing an Alfar, the challeng of the collision detection, the challengs brought with the friendly fire, the challeng of the combat system with its no auto attack or lock ons.

 

All together = Huge challenge = I am looking forward to it lol.

 

I mean correct me if I am wrong but aren't most Zerg guilds considerd Carebear? This hurts them lol not the smaller organised groups.

Probably you are right and Darkfall will be a huge challenge. We will see very soon.

But I can’t agree about what you said about Zergs and the smaller organized groups.
Big clan (is it your concept of Zerg?) doesn’t mean no organization. Why you (not just you, a lot of people here) always suppose it? That’s not going to be true.

In any MMORPG there are very big clans (Zergs?) perfectly organized that rule.
If Darkfalls delivers, you will see very big clans full of players as skilled as the players in small groups, organized by intelligent and clever people with great leadership skills. They play as cooperative groups with collective aims. Their avatars will be very specialized; they rely on the group for the survivability; they will protect their crafters, their healers (if there are healers in Darkfall) in battle; collision detection and the other combat mechanics will play a big role on this, making things easier for organized “Zergs”. They will control the strategic resources just fighting against equals. Small groups have no opportunities against them. Well … if you plan to live as a group of outlaws hidden in the forest or in a remote island and try to take on lonely players or small groups, as far as you don’t disturb the activity of the “big ones”, probably you will be able to do it, but not much more. Its ok anyone play as they want.

May be you ever got to play in one of these great guilds but I’m sure that you have seen them in the field. As more open the world is, I mean no instancing; no limits, numbers andorganization will count more. Cannot understand how some experienced MMORPG players don’t see it.
At the end few big guilds will rule the world.

Its too early to talk about tactics and so, but not going into much detail on it friendly fire are not going to hurt more the “Zergs”. If your group of 10 face a group of 40, may be you will be able to kill 20 (remember they are as skilled and organized as you) but at the end your corpses will be looted and the remaining 20 will watch the corpses of their defeated comrades till they get there to recover their belongings. That’s all, no other penalties in Darkfall. Why not sacrifice some players blocking your movements while the mages AoE the full group to make the numbers count? I have seen people go to a certain death; I have done it too, lots of times for the good of the group when the death penalty counted a lot more than a walk back to my corpse.
 

Originally posted by popinjay

It really is amazing how each character is very different looking the the previous. Shouldn't be much mistaking people here lol.

Yeah! Customizations and graphics look pretty good and from the game play videos i have watched the game play is not affected in any way. Big PvP battles seems to run very smoothly.
 

Originally posted by xzyax

The healing part of Friendly Fire seems like it will add a different twist to combat as well.

 

If you happen to miss your group-member and accidentally heal the NPC instead... probably a good chance that your group-member will die; since they didn't get the heal and you instead added hp to the enemy.

 

I wonder what the percentage of heals that are single-target (have to aim and hit the right target) to ones that are area-effect (just throw it at their feet, and whoever gets it.. get it)?

 

The area-effect will undoubtedly help out the NPC as well, but at least it will most likely hit your group-member as well.  I wonder if they will make the area-effect heals be roughly the same effective healing as the single-target, or if it will be less?

A lot of times the area-effect is less effective because it can heal multiple members.  With DarkFall's Friendly Fire they wouldn't necessarily have to make AoE's be less effective healing because of the danger of healing your enemies as well.

 

Anyone have any ideas or thoughts on that aspect of it?  Meaning if they think that the AoEs should be less effective or about the same as their single-target counter-part? 

 

As i said in my post before I'm very interested on the healing thing.
 

After i posted i did again a research in Darkfall boards, here and in other boards around. May be i have been unlucky again, but i found nothing real but that all characters starts with a low self healing skill with a long cooldown and that you have to wield a staff to cast it (source Noob5). Rest are just, as always, imagination, guesses, suppositions and so.

No details, really nothing about which kind of heal skills and how they work. Worse, nothing about if healing will be something or may be nothing important. 

it's hard, probably impossible, right now to guess how the life of a healer will be in Darkfall. I know someone will disagree but this game is an appealing mystery, but still a mystery. IMHO General design, "bones" give you a whole idea about the game, details make the game play. 

Thanks a lot Stayontarget. Nice ss.

Originally posted by Soundbyte

from this Q&A:

Community: If a player of a friendly race attacks you and in defending yourself you have
to kill him, do you take an alignment hit?
Tasos Flambouras: I'm assuming in this answer that everyone involved is of the same
alignment. When attacked you'll get some time to attack and kill your attacker without
the penalty. If you're with friends and they help you, they won't take the hit. If a
bystander sees you getting attacked and kills the attacker, he won't get the hit. You
could say that the attacker "goes gray" to everyone of a positive alignment. In order to
negate this effect in accidents we've removed it from clanmates and people in the same
group. So if you accidentally swing into your clanmate or someone in your group, you
won't be open game to everyone. As you can probably deduce from this, you can spar
freely with clanmates or with people that you're grouped up with because there's no
alignment penalty.

ie: you won't take an alignment hit for hitting group members. moral of the story: be wary who you group with.

 

More or less same as Lineage II. Good to me.
 

About friendly fire, I'm very interested in to see how healing is going to play on this.

I always play healers as my mains in games. Yes...Yes... I know.. no classes  but i hope it will be the possibility to build a healer picking the convenient skills and may be few others to spice a bit and surprise someone

No targeting...... area heals....aiming as rangers?, friendly fire .... unfriendly heal? 

A lot of questions come up in my mind.

Just as an example. If I'm going to heal by area (no target) and heal any alive being in the area including enemies (unfriendly heal) Is it like to say no possible efficient heals on melee combats?   

I have been unable to find any information about this, really i didn't have read a word about healing in Darkfall.

May be as many other things we need to wait till launch but I'm worried about it.

Any links, comments or ideas will be really welcome.

Edited: Don't loose your time. I read Noob5 about magic and a thread in the official boards with "comments" about heals based on Noob5. Its clear to me  people know nothing about healing in Darkfall. As with several other things just wait and see when we allowed to play the game.

What we do know for certain about the FFA PvP is the following:

1 - Outnumbering will be the normal PvP situation.
2 - You will get kills free of consequences only in your enemy factions.
3 - Any other kills (non-consensual PvP I guess but not sure) will get some consequences. The impact of these consequences is what is going to define how the game play is.
We do know nothing right now about this because we do know almost nothing about details and most important we haven’t played the game.
Then right now is totally pointless to try to imagine if Darkfall is going to be like Darktide or like any other PvP FFA game/server.
Don’t loose your time; January 22th hopefully we will start to get all the answers.

Anyway interesting reads in this thread
 

Thanks for your comments and ss.

Nice to see you like the game.

52 from Spain, not bad.

Originally posted by Pezhead

"Next Gen" can be put into several catagories.  The first of which is a simple time frame- Lineage was made in the late 90's, and Aion is made in the late 2000's, therefore, Aion is the next generation(think Star Trek) .  Or Graphics, Starcraft uses 2D sprites while Homeworld uses a 3D graphic engine, therefore, even though Homeworld came out a mere year and a half after SC, Homeworld is next gen(was).  WoW has a skill based combat system, Age of Conan uses directional attacks, therefore AoC is next gen.  Does a game need every single one of these to be next gen?  I wouldn't think so, and yet those of you crying about the lack of quality MMOs, and singing about your "tactical skill" in shooters, have you considered RTS? Would not a MMORTS be totally awesome with hundreds of thousands of troops controlled by several hundred players fighting it out on the battlefield?  OH WAIT! There's no twitch involved, sorry, despite the fact that you must use strategy, tactics and teamwork, it CAN'T be a skill game because there's no TWITCH! 

As far as i'm concerned, you FPS junkies can suck my FPS balls, because when it comes down to it, you're no match for an RTS player in terms of strategic intelligence, innovation and micromanagement.

 

THERE, just had to get my FPS rant out.

I agree with you. Lately it seems that when people talk about skill it's fast fingers the only thing that matters. I think MMORPGs are a lot more than this.

Blizzard got my vote. Through years this company has show the ability to deliver polished and well done games able to catch the attention and give fun to a lot of people. In my opinion this is the goal for a game company and they have been the most successful in achieve it. It doesn’t matter WoW is not my game.

NCSoft could have got my vote, they developed Lineage II and it is still my best experience in the MMORPG’s world, but it’s just one game (I can't consider GW as a NCSoft developped game it was developped by Arena.net before the merge same for TS/ Richard Garriot or CoH developped by Cryptic Studios). Then second place for NCSoft.
 

Originally posted by DarthRaiden

 

Well, sorry to have a server mentioned in need for a defense to qualify differences between Call of Duty type of games and DarkFall type of games...

Because you are right about graphic being rendered on the client , what do you think , will it matter if  we are 200 or 2 people on a spot on the server  fighting each other graphic wise ? will it matter  if  Aventurine then has put large complex meshs models or simple models  to render on us ? Will it matter if there 20 armor pieces slots on a char to render  or  just 4 slots ?

Of course all of it matters. But if it is causing problems or not will depend on several things (in a given span of computer levels), like the skill of the programmers, how far they are pushing the technology and what the game design requires and some more i'm probably missing. I’m sorry but I think is pointless right now to try to get conclusions about how is it going in Darkfall. I don’t see any reason to adopt this defensive position. I have hopes about Darkfall delivering a good compromise.

Where do you think comes the server into play if it doesn't has any impact on the client graphic wise ?

I'm not sure if i understand right your question. As you have yet noticed i'm a non native english speaker and probably i'm missing something. But as far as i know, and you posted some information about it coming from and independent and expert source, really the impact of the server on graphics in the client is probably nule.

I said before that I have hopes on a good compromise game play - graphics in Darkfall. If the compromise is good for someone will be a question of tastes. Not just graphics technology is important about the visual experience. A good artwork, care for the detail,... can make miracles.

I have not seen recently any game that could be comparable to Darkfall in massive game play and delivers a good compromise.

But it was done at least once, really the only one I had experienced and it was 5 years ago. In October 2003 (April 2004 Europe/NA) NCSoft launched Lineage II. The client program was using the Unreal 2 (FPS game launched in 2002) graphic engine the rest was developed by NCSoft.

At that time the visual impact was really amazing comparing it with any other MMORPG around. You can like or not the style but cannot be denied that it was at very high level of quality and polish (always talking about graphics). With this graphic setup Lineage II was able to run really massive sieges. With some problems server side in the first occasions but it was fixed very soon. In the client side you just need to disable some things to play the siege in smooth way, and when the siege finished you got back to the good graphics. If you got a good computer no needs for adjustments but hiding names and it was more for confusion and targeting.
I don't see why the same success can't be attained by a game developed these days.

Then I’m not sure at all that what you and some other people said about the impossibility to have a good game play and good graphics is really true or not. I hope not.
 

Originally posted by DarthRaiden

Originally posted by Trissa

Originally posted by DarthRaiden

Originally posted by Greek_Matt

 

 

 

96 players in a seamless world , with weather forecasting and planetary movements or just multiplayer maps and instances?Can you build a city in CoD ? You know that in MMORPG chars data get saved on the server and not on the client ? You also know that the server handle any action and for any spell and skill used rather then the client for 50k - 100k people?  you know that even you not online the server has to manage your house placed somewhere  or the guard  you hired ? 

btw we are past to the point here that people who prefer better graphics over  gameplay are idiots

 

Just to clarify because right now people is giving missleading info.

All the text in red have nothing to do with graphics. Graphics are managed in the client program not in the server.  It's true that massive presence of characters in a given area is a difficult situation in the server side  but it has nothing to do with graphics.

There is plenty of information about how MMORPGS work.

Here http://radoff.com/blog/2008/08/22/anatomy-of-an-mmorpg/ is a good place to start.

 

And just to clarify because people like to give misleading info..

Text in green has everything to do with game performance..

 Let you 96 CoD players build a city and grow wheeds and have 50k of offline data of users managed and lets see if they can smoothly battle each other

I’m sorry you get it that way.

1. Let me say that I’m waiting to play Darkfall. And I have hopes it will be a very good game. I said it a lot of times in these boards you can check it very easily.
Not was my intention and still is not to attack Darkfall. I can’t say anything about it, I haven’t played it. Few low quality videos and screenshots are not enough to form my opinion about the visual experience in this game. If you think I’m trying to troll or attack Darkfall or whatever you are wrong. I don’t like misleading anyone.

2. I prefer game play over graphics, may be with some limits. I’ll love to have the opportunity to play again Asheron’s Call 2 and I’m sure Darkfall graphics will be way better than these ones.

3 I made my post because as you can easily see this thread, and not just this one, is full of wrong information about how an MMORPG works, people merge things that have nothing to do (sometimes I doubt about if it is on purpose or not), stand with misconceptions and so. I’m sorry you win my lottery. There is a post following yours full of wrong information. I’m not going to answer it. It’s pointless.

4 I understand that the fanbois of Darkfall (take it in the positive meaning) are tired of trolls coming here to bash his game. But I think the overreactions and the defence going over what is reasonably and true concepts is not the best way to deal with the trolls. Moreover gives to the rest of the MMORPG community the feeling that Darkfall community is not the best. Right now, Darkfall fanbois and trolls are the same thing in the eyes of a lot of people.

All this said, I’m back to the details.

This thread is about graphics and game play. Graphics don’t exist in the servers, objects are just vectors, positions and characteristics. Servers don’t process graphic information. Polygons, textures, particles, animation frames and so are in the client and managed only by the client.
The unique impact that graphics have in the performance of the servers is about the need to deal with the different delays coming from different clients. (When the client is sending the information too late because of bad performance caused by graphics processing) but it’s just an indirect impact that merges with the delay caused by communications and other things normally with bigger impact.
The problem with graphics happens in the client, happens in your computer not in the server. You merged things and this is misleading, sorry to say. That was the meaning of my post, the sentences I put in red were all talking about problems in the server side when we are talking here about graphics.

Yes I agree, high level graphics could compromise the situations of massive game play but only in the client side. Massive game play puts load in the servers, yes, but not due to graphic reasons. You can believe me or not, it’s not my problem.

Edit: i saw your last post too late. Is there any contradiction about what i said? You see graphics in client side not in server side.

Originally posted by DarthRaiden

Originally posted by Greek_Matt

 

 

 

96 players in a seamless world , with weather forecasting and planetary movements or just multiplayer maps and instances?Can you build a city in CoD ? You know that in MMORPG chars data get saved on the server and not on the client ? You also know that the server handle any action and for any spell and skill used rather then the client for 50k - 100k people?  you know that even you not online the server has to manage your house placed somewhere  or the guard  you hired ? 

btw we are past to the point here that people who prefer better graphics over  gameplay are idiots

Just to clarify because right now people is giving missleading info.

All the text in red have nothing to do with graphics. Graphics are managed in the client program not in the server.  It's true that massive presence of characters in a given area is a difficult situation in the server side  but it has nothing to do with graphics.

There is plenty of information about how MMORPGS work.

Here http://radoff.com/blog/2008/08/22/anatomy-of-an-mmorpg/ is a good place to start.

Originally posted by Ihmotepp

Here's the link to Clan Naked.

 

Let me know if it works.

Yes, it works.

I'm sure you will be succesfull. It has been said many times that equipment is not important in Darkfall.

Originally posted by Gyrus

You know, it's really hard to sort through all the BS associated with this game to figure out what is real and what isn't?

Sure i'm not so clever because i got to give up on it.  

About the video there is a thing i cannot understand and that is why Aventurine allowed to release a video like that?.

They are so careful about the information allowed to be published, they said that this is for the good of the game, i can understand it. But now this video is here .

Originally posted by corpusc

as usual, the majority always talks about graphics, and don't give a crap about gameplay. 

If you take a look in these boards and at www.aionsource.com you will find plenty of KOBT reviews and videos talking about gameplay. Both mechanics and core design. If you don't know too much about the game you can start at the sticky FAQ in aionsource, good info.

I agree with what you said but why not to post it in the original thread? just a thought.

Originally posted by charlizd

Originally posted by Archillez

...

So, tell me, why would i play this game over wow.war. or AOC

... 

From what i have experienced First hand with Aion is that it is going back to the Rotts of MMO's back to the Days when team mate's mattered, where Strategy is what determine's if you Survive or Not, where the World you are playing in is Alive and Thriving with Good and Bad.

 ...

 

I'm glad to read it. It is what i hope from Aion the most.

I started to think that i could be right after watching a couple of videos from KOBT. Now you come with it at first hand. Thank you.

My excitement is growing day by day.

Thanks for the update