Darkfall Devs: Eurogamer Sucks

[John Funk]

Darkfall Devs: Eurogamer Sucks

After long-delayed MMO Darkfall received a scathing 2/10 review from Eurogamer, the developers fired back, claiming that the reviewer had spent just under two hours logged in - not even playing the game.

Here's a quick recap to bring you up to speed if you've never heard of Darkfall Online [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkfall_Online]: The game, announced in 2001, was for a very long time the MMO equivalent of Team Fortress 2 or Duke Nukem Forever - vaporware, doomed never to come out. It was an overly ambitious project, people claimed, and would only collapse under its own weight. Then, this February, Darkfall came out, largely slipping beneath the radar - but making a decent-sized splash for an indie MMO. Go figure.

Yesterday, Eurogamer finally published their review [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/darkfall-online-review] of Darkfall Online - and reviewer Ed Zitron gave the game an abysmal 2/10, saying that the game was effectively broken in every respect:

[blockquote]While other MMOs have relied on their players to fill in the content to an extent - Star Wars Galaxies being the most notable example - few have abused the sandbox mentality so readily as Aventurine. It's the emperor's new clothes of 2009: such a marvellous game that only an idiot wouldn't realise the beauty of the gaping holes in its content, its wonky control system, and its seemingly decade-old engine.[/blockquote]

Harsh, eh? But hey, Zitron calls 'em like he sees 'em, so--

--wait, not so fast! Darkfall associate producer Tasos Flambouras responded [http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=185060] to the Eurogamer review, calling it fraud. Not only was the review full of factual inaccuracies, Flambouras claimed, but their own server logs show that, of the two Darkfall press accounts Aventurine had given to Eurogamer, one had logged on for only three minutes, and the other "had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions." Furthermore, said account wasn't actually playing the game most of the time: "Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator since during almost every one of the logins the reviewer spent the time creating a new character."

It doesn't end there, either. Eurogamer Editor Tom Bramwell posted a rebuttal [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/editors-blog-darkfall-aftermath-blog-entry] suggesting that a reviewer would have to put more than a hundred hours into Darkfall to do it justice, since it's an MMO.

Whew. How 'bout them apples? On the one hand, part of me sympathizes with Zitron, because as a reviewer it can be so inconsistent how much time you need to sink into a game in order to give it a proper review. Do you always need to beat it from start to finish? What if it's a fighting game - how many hours do you need to play Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/5767-Review-Street-Fighter-IV] for more than five, six hours, to understand that it's not a very good game?

But those aren't MMOs, and you don't want to know how much time I logged in, say, the Wrath of the Lich King beta for my review [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/5445-Review-World-of-Warcraft-Wrath-of-the-Lich-King]. Even if Zitron is telling the truth, and he played Darkfall for nine hours ... that might be enough for an offline game, but not an MMO. If Aventurine's server logs are correct, though ... well, that's another ballgame entirely.

In the meantime, though, we'll be content to pull up a chair, cook some popcorn, and watch the drama unfold.

(Thanks for the tip, WarCry [http://www.warcry.com/news/view/91509-Darkfall-Eurogamer-Slams-Game-with-2-10-Review]!)

Permalink

 

[Cousin_IT]

true or not, theres a lesson here for other potential lazy reviewers. If you arnt gonna play the game ur reviewing, be sure to not be playing one where they can track your activity.

 

[Tech Team FTW!]

Do you always need to beat it from start to finish?

You need to get beyond the character creation screen. That much is clear.

I will be interrested in seeing how the second opinion review rates the game.

 

[Booze Zombie]

True or not, I have a bias against Darkfall and aplaud any insult made towards it. The forum dwelling monkeys they kept around did not impress me.

 

[Sevre]

How strange that I never heard of this MMO before. 2/10 is a bit harsh for a professional review. Is it a gaming journalist or a child reviewing it?

 

[Frybird]

Meanwhile, the actual target group just waits for other reviews to see if it's even worth arguing about all that...

Nothing against Eurogamer, but when in doubt, i just look what others have to say about the game.

EDIT: Don't understand the poster above...IF the Game IS broken, wouldn't it deserve a 2/10, or is the number generally forbidden for "professional reviewers"?

 

[Eagle Est1986]

Wow, that's great, good on the developers for speaking out.

 

[Abedeus]

I've heard about this game, but... it was released? Woah.

 

[dnadns]

I am truly amazed that they just want another "unbiased" review.
There are enough articles that connect the dots between a review and sales figures.
If he really didn't do his job and punched out a review that is giving negative press without any facts backing it up, they could actually sue them.

Actually, I do like to see how this turns out as it often appears that a lot of so-called professional journalists out there turn into marketing tools of the publishers/developers.

For example, I am still waiting for some journalist to give Bethesda some serious heat for the patch debacle with Fallout on the PS3. I mean, this would even be something that a lot of consumers are interested in and whenever I see one of those "interviews", they just cheer at themselves for having the greatest community support on this planet.

Of course, every reviewer has his own opinion, but an article should always be objective and come with arguments based on facts for the good and the bad sides.

That's one of the main reason why I really stick to the Escapist. I don't agree with every article, but I can almost always follow the argument and see where somebody is coming from to get a different perspective from my own.

But I am afraid that this is a general problem when it comes to "journalism" and monetary interests in any kind of media.

 

[Delmar Wynn]

While fowl play on the part of the reviewer may be at hand, most of the review is pretty much spot on.

Darkfall is broken and shouldn't have been released in its current state. Tasos also is very quick to bash anyone that says a negative word about the game.

To give you an idea of how bad the state of the game was at launch, Vanguard launched in better shape.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

Doesn't it say a lot about the game if a person didn't even want to play past the character creation screen? I appreciate the need to log in more hours before dropping a review but the fact that this fiasco is even occurring says a lot.

 

[KDR_11k]

Who needs to play hundreds of hours to determine if a game is fun? Play 2-3 hours, if it's no fun you can just quit (a good game would give you fun within the first hour or so and that's already a very lenient standard, it should start practically immediately), if you really want to strain it maybe 5 hours. If that's no fun, well, guess what, noone's going to give a shit if the game becomes fun later on because it has already wasted hours of your time providing no fun whatsoever. Who'd bother playing further after that much rejection?

There are enough articles that connect the dots between a review and sales figures.

All I recall is a study finding no correlation between sales and reviews.

 

[boblobaw]

Why would someone lie about a meager 9 hours? why doesn't AV use an unbiased 3rd party to maintain server stats? Isn't Tasos known as a liar on darkfall's own forums?

 

[cainx10a]

While fowl play on the part of the reviewer may be at hand, most of the review is pretty much spot on.

Darkfall is broken and shouldn't have been released in its current state. Tasos also is very quick to bash anyone that says a negative word about the game.

To give you an idea of how bad the state of the game was at launch, Vanguard launched in better shape.

Oh, so happy to hear this. Suck on this, uh, my beloved Warhammer-ragequitters-guildies

 

[LeonLethality]

Heh at least Escapists reviewers are not lazy

 

[calvinbox]

MMO reviews should take at least 1 month of gameplay to be accepted.

Remember the Age of Conan fiasco... the reviews were great at the beginning because the lazy rewviewrs just have played in the NOOB island. After that inicial zone the game was a complete garbage.

 

[Susan Arendt]

Heh at least Escapists reviewers are not lazy

Can you tell my mom that? She still wants me to go do something more productive than just talk about games all day.

 

[TsunamiWombat]

What!? Some random internet review site owned by corporate hosebeasts is lying do us!? THIS IS SHOCKING! RIOT! RIOT!

MMO reviews should take at least 1 month of gameplay to be accepted.

Remember the Age of Conan fiasco... the reviews were great at the beginning because the lazy rewviewrs just have played in the NOOB island. After that inicial zone the game was a complete garbage.

An interesting and poignant example of how the inverse of this situation can be a bad thing.

While fowl play on the part of the reviewer may be at hand, most of the review is pretty much spot on.

Darkfall is broken and shouldn't have been released in its current state. Tasos also is very quick to bash anyone that says a negative word about the game.

To give you an idea of how bad the state of the game was at launch, Vanguard launched in better shape.

I'm curious now. What exactly IS this game like?

 

[Phyleron]

I'm curious now. What exactly IS this game like?

Having actually played the game for more than 2 hours, I can address most of the inaccuracies in the Eurogamer review and give you an idea of what it is actually like. Considering the number of mistakes and falsehoods in the review, it is tantamount to slander. I wouldn't have bothered with such a long post if this review wasn't so absurd that it's almost unbelievable - I consider it to be equivalent to IGN posting a /b/ thread from 4chan as a professional review (it's okay if you didn't understand that comment). There are aspect of Darkfall that need work, but the Eurogamer review has no connection at all to the actual game.

-- Response to Eurogamer Review --

Unbelievably, to do anything that involves any interaction at all, you have to stop still - this includes any and all inventory management, looting, chatting - anything interactive.

1. You can move while doing chatting and inventory management. Corpses and NPCs are stationary, so you have to stop anyway for interacting.

you open your bag, and physically drag the items from one pouch to the other. There are no inventory 'blocks,' and thus your inventory quickly becomes a horrid mess of vague icons left on top of each other.

2. Items are managed UO-style. Inventory management is quite easy if you actually place items instead of randomly throwing them in, and this style allows you to keep a backpack organized even with hundreds of items in it, an impossible feat with block-style inventory.

This gets particularly thrilling when you ? try to loot something from a corpse in a particularly dangerous area

Comment: Does it not seem obvious that it should be dangerous to loot a corpse while in combat or in a *dangerous* area?

You have a crosshair, and your hits are dependent on whether or not this crosses the enemy at any given time - like an FPS, except with little to no reference point

3. All melee weapons have a swing arc that is quite obvious, especially since melee is done in third-person (no crosshair). Only archery and magic use the crosshair, and both hit based on projectile path (arrows arc, magic moves slower).

considering how slow and floaty the controls tend to be

4. This is only true if you have mouse smoothing enabled and set to a high level ? the vast majority of players simply turn off mouse smoothing, which gives very quick and responsive controls.

The difference in feedback between a sword hitting or missing is negligible

5. Not only do hits make impact noises, blood splashes, and enemy grunts, but you can also enable "hit sounds", which gives a very distinct sound on every successful hit with any weapon.

Judging the distance that one needs to be at to fight a foe is largely guesswork

6. Not only is the range visually apparent, but it is uniform across every weapon within a weapon type, so you only need to learn the range once for a weapon type. (i.e. every Great Sword has the same range).

your combat skills affect how often you actually connect

7. Hitting opponents is 100% player based. Combat skills only affect how much damage you deal (or take) on successful hits.

choice of changing weapon (a ten-second operation - five if you're particularly nimble

8. Most players just put their weapons of choice on their hotbars, so you can change weapons, use potions, eat food, etc. by pressing 1-9. The actual switch time is about 300 milliseconds.

And so hit those bloody [goblins] I did, not enjoying one second of it.

9. It may not have been clear to the reviewer, but the player was clearly commenting on him, as a player, having very poor aim. Successful hits is entirely based on the player, and I have often sent newbies that I am training to do PVE as practice for aiming and combat before attempting PVP.

old-school EverQuest - which was actually graphically superior

10. I consider the graphics on Darkfall to be quite impressive, especially the landscapes and character detail. However, it is optimized for higher resolutions ? I play at 1680x1050. The reviewer was clearly playing on what I would term ?a shitty resolution for anything?.

random placement of flora with little in the way of lore to tie it together

11. Resources have clear patterns based on terrain types and regions, though I'm not sure why he expects a backstory for trees. Darkfall has quite a bit of lore, and many players stick to the lore surprisingly closely. (i.e. there's quite a lot of anti-Dwarf and anti-Human sentiment on the Race Alliance for Mahirim and Orks, even though quite a few clans are All-Races, and we often crack jokes about the enemy races).

It may also be tied to the fact that there's very little to see

12. There's an enormous amount of stuff to see. It probably would have helped the reviewer to actually open his map or check the Sinister wiki map (which virtually every player uses). It also sounds like the reviewer was walking the whole time (and didn't use either sprint or a mount, which everyone uses for long distance travel).

On one such jaunt, I walked for around six minutes

13. The game map is quite large. Six minutes walking is a negligible distance. Even mounted, the central continent takes over an hour to cross.

Players can build "camps" and "towns", and fight each other in "epic" wars.

14. Guilds can own and build up Hamlets or Cities (which takes a huge amount of work, but has huge benefits). There are no ?camps? or ?towns? as he suggests. Also, there most definitely is an epic war going on right now, a World War of sorts involving several thousand players as the COTC, DUSK, SB, and Death Alliances are fighting against the Hyperion alliance. Over a hundred separate guilds are involved in this war, and dozens more are indirectly involved. I have personally been to Sieges involving hundreds of players, and when you're riding in to assault the enemy with 80 mounted warriors, it definitely feels pretty epic.

You see, anyone can kill anyone.

15. Races that are at war with one another can kill each other freely (as the Mahirim apparently killed him, a Dwarf). Players within the same Race Alliance can only afford to kill 1 friendly without going Red, which makes them hostile to all Race-aligned NPC cities and KOS for everyone of their Race Alliance. Most clan alliances don't allow killing of allied members, either, but any player should still be considered a potential hostile. Most of the random PKs are simply looking for easy loot against newbies, and clans tend to ignore them. Clans do often raid each other, though, which much more serious fighting.

The quests are repetitive kill-X-of-Y monstrosities

16. The starter quests (the only quests) are very clearly meant to teach newbies how to play. It is very unusual for anyone to do the starter quests more than once. Most people just ignore them. Quests are not at all the focus of Darkfall.

The world is bland in the extreme, with no definition in areas

17. This is simply untrue. There is a vast amount of variation between the different regions and I've seen so many unique and interesting things while scouting that I know he didn't do any real travelling at all.

It doesn't even have ? a simple experience system, or some form of tutorial.

18. There is a tutorial and starter quests. Having a UO-style skill system is one of the key selling points of Darkfall (which makes this comment from him seriously confusing).

There hasn't even been an attempt to construct a faux-story

19. The reviewer obviously didn't read *any* of the quest information. There's actually a surprisingly large amount of lore written into the game, especially considering that lore isn't on the priority list for the vast majority of players.

this is just an excuse for Aventurine's inability to create a balanced, playable game

20. The game is fairly well balanced at this point, and entirely playable. Some crafting skills could use buffs, though. However, the reviewer is obviously in no position to make any such claims, as he didn't even get into any real PVP, PVE, or even crafting.

Its skill system is like a twisted version of EVE Online's

21. There's no real relation. Darkfall's skill system is almost directly inherited from Ultima Online.

few have abused the sandbox mentality so readily as Aventurine

22. There is a ton of content in Darkfall. However, I suspect the reviewer never took the time to actually do anything. For example, it probably didn't occur to him that he had to actually *purchase* most crafting and others skills before he could use them ? and so he assumed the short list of skills he had was everything, which it most definitely is not.

 

[Nurb]

all the more reason not to take online game reviewers too seriously.