I Feel Guilty.

Does anyone that has played Darkfall, and quit feel guilty for doing so? I know I do. It was touted as the savior sandbox game for all of MMORPG eternity. I spent over 8 years reading about it, and how exciting it seemed, spent many hours forumfalling, telling my friends about it, getting my guild invovled so we could get into a clan beta. A new MMORPG would come out, it would suck, but we always had the rallying cry of “Darkfall is soon.” As a couple of years turned into many years it got harder and harder to rally to the game, and I even sank into the vaporware argument. I think the biggest issue was they should not have released they were working on the game so early, because them basically restarting the game over about halfway through development really hurt the time frame.

I remember when beta sign up came out. I registered my whole guild, and had us set up as a group on the forums. We posted lots (non spam), and were very active in the community. Clan beta announcements came and went, we didn’t get in. Finally about a month from “scheduled release” I got into the beta. I remember my heart pounding and shaking trying to input all the information they needed, and seeming the client took forever to download. I finally got everything setup and installed, then logged into the game. After about 3 hours of running around, I was very disappointed with the game. There was really nothing to it. There wasn’t even a squirrel or rabbit running across the ground. The combat was meh at best *click click click click* I just couldn’t get into the game. So I gave up that day. I logged in a few more times, but I just could not even find remote joy in the game. My heart was broken.

Queue NA1 release. I’m bored out of my mind, with nothing to do. I go to the Darkfall website and eventually talk myself into buying retail game and giving it another shot. After I get into game, I don’t know what if anything changed (maybe my sheer boredom to tears) but I started really enjoying the game. I did all the starter quests, I spent time harvesting, I started crafting, I worked on my combat skills, I made arrows, I PvP’d and PK’d, I did everything that I wanted to do. I spent a good 7 or 8 weeks in the game. The first couple of weeks I joined a large clan and experienced siege warfare, clan drama, and alliance drama. I really had a good time, but it started getting stale and old. It was the same thing everyday. Log in, harvest, wait till some people are on, go farm mobs, then as evening comes try to find some PvP other than ganking bloodwallers. Yes, I even played post skill gain patch and that did nothing for me, but make it easy to catch up to all the macroers. Even then it was becoming Darkmeh. Here was this game I had 5 weeks of pure bliss, oldschool feeling fun, but then after that mark it all started to degrade and the silk curtains began to fall from my eyes. I saw the game for what it was: a bugged out, exploitable, boring, repetitive mess. I thought this was the savior of sandbox MMORPGs, but it turned out to be a rotted box, filled with 1 10lb bag of sand, and a broken Tonka truck knockoff with no wheels. Sure it’s a sandbox and you make your own game, but it was nothing like a real sandbox. It was CS dust with mounts and boring crafting. There was no immersion, no good PvE, the PvP was repetitive (stand far off in the distance and lob fireballs at the speck way far away) sometimes you could get a few arrows off, crafting was boring (you could get your weapons off mobs easier/cheaper/faster), no policing of the game (hacks/exploits/cheaters), support was shit at best, no GM interaction with the players, and the community was one of the worst i’ve seen since WoW. The game was nothing like it should have been, especially after all those years. Again, my heart was in a million pieces.

I do not want Darkfall to fail, I want it to succeed so other companies can see that you can make “that type of game,” and be profitable. Hopefully an investor with some balls will give a development team some money that wants to bring back the true sandbox, and have the money to make it a reality. Until then i’m back to WoW, I think this is what I feel most guilty about, and i’m actually enjoying myself. I love the dungeons, and the PvE, and the PvP isn’t terrible either, I just wish it was more in the world like 2004.

Will anyone save the MMORPG genre from it’s downward spiral?