Buying Darkfall is hard

Apparently buying a copy of Darkfall, the recently released MMO from Adventurine, is harder than finding a frog’s teeth. After hearing about the numerous complaints on this subject, I went ahead and took a look for myself. Well, the first thing I noticed is that a visible e-store is no where to be seen on the Darkfall Online website. I’m not sure whether or not that’s intentional or just a result of bad design. I sort of suspect the latter. What game developer wouldn’t want an accessible way to sell their games?

So after searching around, I discovered that the online shop is buried in the account creation screen. Yes, you need to create an account first to get a shot at buying the game. Adventurine says that it only releases a handful of copies for sale per day so it doesn’t overload their server capacity or form long queues to get into the game. They also only make the game available on 7 PM GMT (or 11 AM Pacific time). That sort of stinks if you say happen to need to go to work. The store is open pretty much for only 15 minutes as literally thousands of players all vie for the limited amount of copies. Read more

Darkfall launch memorable

The highly anticipated opening day for Darkfall provided for one of the most memorable launches in MMO history.  Gamers eager to enter the the game flooded both the game servers and the forums in a vain attempt to logon to the game, and subsequently crashed both. Players had also been flooding the site in order to be among the few that could still purchase one of the limited quantities of the game still available (only 10,000 copies were available…a tiny number for a MMO).  Stories of players opening multiple browsers and tabs in order to grab a last minute copy were rampant. On launch day, Darkfall servers were down, first because the development team said they were processing late pre-order purchases and then second because of a bug they found, which delayed the game for a number of hours again. Read more

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. Read more