Darkfall: how hardcore are you?

Scott Jennings on his blog, Broken Toys, brought up an interesting observation about the new MMO, Darkfall. Darkfall is an unrestricted PvP MMO set in a fantasy world based on medieval Europe. The game boasts a PvP rule set that is harsh by any standard: free-for-all PvP with full looting. This means not only can you attack anyone at anytime but also when you die, the entire contents of what you are wearing and carrying drops to the ground and can grabbed by anyone. Not only that, but the game will require quite a bit of skill since your attacks have to be manually aimed. The game provides no auto select of your nearest opponent.

There’s definitely an audience that crave this sort of game play. The idea that player skill, death and losing have real consequences is something that many players have clamored for.  In addition, when you die in Darkfall, you could potentially lose everything since it only allows for a single character slot per server. Darkfall even includes an option of taunting your opponent before he leaves the field of battle:

Probably one of my favorite aspects of PvP combat that makes Darkfall unique is the incapacitation of a player when they reach zero life (excluding the rare and freakish decapitation). This starts a 60 second or so window where you get to decide the fate of the fallen player, or have some choice words with them. There are no revive spells in Darkfall, but when someone is in this state, anyone can help them back up without need of any spell or item. If the person lays there for too long, they will bleed to death and expire. The option is also your to deliver the final blow to send the fallen player back to their bind point naked, and ironically this is called the “Gank” skill by the game. Incapacitated players will yell out “HELP ME!” when reaching zero life, which can be heard from quite a distance away.

That not only sounds harsh, but mean.

Scott contends that while the harshness of the Darkfall rule set will create a ground swell of excitement, the popularity of this PvP-centric MMO will collapse in three months:

Why this curve? Because every PvP-centric MMO released to date has seen this. Even PvP-specific servers, released to great fanfare with their users, see this curve. And the reason is pretty simple - because people enjoy hardcore PvP in the abstract. Or, to put another way, many more people believe they are ‘hardc0re’ then actually are. And they dislike being proved wrong pretty powerfully.

I agree. And it’s not because I feel that players who like PvP are really closet carebears who hide behind rules that protect players from losing everything. Starting a new character on a free-for-all PvP server is not really a lot of fun. It can be an exercise in frustration for losing to players who win on the basis of a) being there longer than you b) having more time to play or c) just having more online friends. For as much as Darkfall boasts that it is a skill based MMO, having the time to play is the single greatest determinant of how good your character will be compared to anyone else. That’s not just true for Darkfall but for MMOs in general. However, a free-for-all PvP game exacerbates the disparity on time spent online more than any other gaming medium.

There's none of that 'carebear' stuff in Darkfall that you get in other MMOs. No running to your dead corpse to retrieve your stuff. Most likely, your opponent has already taken it.

I’ve heard arguments that hardcore PvP MMOs quickly establish a meta game where relationships and alliances become key to a player’s survival. They point to games like Dark Age of Camelot and EVE Online, two PvP-centric games in which online alliances have become the dominant focus of the game. However, what differentiates both Dark Age of Camelot and EVE from Darkfall are the built-in incentives for befriending new players. Helping out that newbie could help your realm or corporation out in the long run, so both games had some good in-game reasons as to why that level 1 character wouldn’t be ganked as soon as they left the beginning area.

I don’t see any equivalent of this in Darkfall. And it’s easy to see how the game will become a virtualization of the Lord of the Flies. I wish the developers of Darkfall success in their endeavors, but this gamer, for one, will pick something a lot less harsh that won’t have me tearing my hair out in frustration.

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