A Painful Exercise

Last week I promised to write a little about Darkfall: Unholy Wars. I purchased the game with 30 days of game time for $40 last week (the recurring subscription goes for $15 monthly). DUW is the launch title for Steam’s new subscription service. From what I can tell, the service works great. It was simple and easy to immediately cancel my DUW subscription after I spent 30 minutes playing the game.

What attracted me to DUW? I read a number of MMO blogs, most of which are EVE-focused. But a one of them has been writing about DUW lately. It’s a massive, open, sandbox game with full-loot PVP and few, very limited safe areas in a fantasy (sword and shield) setting. I’m into that sort of thing, so I decided to check it out.

My list of complains begins presently.

• No sound is played when your weapon strikes an opponent. A simple sound effect alone makes all the difference in the world in terms of player feedback. Simply put, I don’t know when I hit something in this game without looking for the stupid floating damage numbers. It’s absolutely appalling. The audio is terrible overall, but this issue alone is just unforgivable.
• WoW has better graphics in every single category. Not kidding.
• Movement is freaking slow and the world is immense. Mounts don’t help much.
• No in-game voice chat. Everyone uses Mumble or whatever.
• Targeting is crap and the field of view is so messed up you never really know when you’re close enough to a target to hit them. Exception: bows work pretty well, and are fun to use mounted.
• There’s no good way to find a guild. EVE has a corporation search function with adverts and such, but this game has nada.
• The basic monsters in the starting safe area are ridiculously overpowered. They have insane health and can kill you in a few hits. Watch out.
• All items are player-crafted - that’s not my complaint; in fact it’s a compliment - but materials are an absolute bore to gather. If you want iron ore, for example, you have to hunt out an ore vein, click on it, and sit there staring at the ore vein (you can’t even look around) while your character pounds away with the pickaxe. Somehow, Minecraft makes this fun. Why can’t other games manage that?
• There doesn’t seem to be a comprehensive player market for items and materials. Stuff is sold view ad hoc conversations in chat (a la the original Guild Wars). In an MMO these days that just doesn’t do it for me.

Like I mentioned, I cancelled the automatically recurring subscription after about 30 minutes of gameplay. I feel cheated out of $40. This game has a great concept and some cool ideas, but it’s nowhere near ready. Oh how I wish they offered a free trial - but that which should attract customers, in this case, would quickly ward them away.