The Darkfall developers have come out of their hole long enough to release the following video showcasing various test locations in Darkfall such as clan cities and racial outposts.
You can check out our exclusive streaming flash version of the video here.
As a sidenote, one has to wonder what chances Darkfall really has as a hardcore PvP sandbox MMO assuming it ever ships, when stronger IP’s like Age of Conan are nearly ready for release to the same target player base?
While some graphics in the video do look stunning (dragon mount, player armor), but then much else of it is fairly standard and unimpressive looking beyond the DX10 style grass fields. There’s also a lot of questions to be answered about the game and it seems like whatever advantage they had when the title was announced years ago seems to be slipping away the longer they take to refine and polish it.
If there was ever a time for Darkfall to step up the community relations and PR push, it’s now.
About the Author
On the other hand, wasn’t one of the statements from GDC that niche games can be successful and profitable if, like AoC is doing, they admit that’s their goal rather than trying to topple WoW with a meager budget? Take a look at DDO — it’s much-maligned and has had population problems, prompting Turbine to merge servers — yet Turbine just said at GDC that DDO is, in fact, providing a substantial income.
That said, I watch the Darkfall videos and just think “meh… more fantasy, haven’t I seen this and done this countless times before?” Which concerns me about 38 Studios’ project as well, since I’m actually looking forward to seeing what they’re working on.
On the other hand, I am looking forward to Earthrise, which in once sense be seen as the sci-fi version of Darkfall: a skills-based, sandbox game with heavy focus on meaningful pvp.
Yeah, I’m tired… a few too many “other hands” in there… Oh well.
True, it has been shown with some MMO’s that they can be niche and profitable, an amazing story being Eve-Online if you look at it’s start and rise to where it is now.
Beyond that you do have other MMO’s that never quite took off, but managed to still pull in a respectable profit.
Still, there’s a lot of overlap in the market coming 2008 with PvP, and the fantasy genre.. They’re all pulling from the same pool of players that were once starved for a solid PvP game with most settling for WoW the last couple of years.
Upcoming MMO’s like Darkfall concern me that they’re likely to get passed by. At a minimum they will want to pull in around 100,000 subscribers, and that’s no small feat either.
I’m really curious to see what 38 Studios is up to as well, but they’ve got at least what? another 2 years easy to keep working on their title before release.
-DR / Scott
That Rappelz game has a better trailer.
Looks a hell of a lot more pleasing to the eyes.