Unholy Wars - Darkfall 2.0, Release November 20th

[Callsign_Vega]

For those of you like me that do not care for the shallow fluff that is MMORPG releases these days (Rift, SWTOR, GW2), a new version of Darkfall will be releasing. A complete wipe and fresh start of the current game server for the new game. If you like a little "hard" in your core PvP MMORPG game-play, give it a look.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=KG40NPkI4rA

http://darkfallonline.com/uw/



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T8FuVGXEMw


**Visual Updates**
- New motion-capture animations
- New character models
- Revamped world, new textures
- New dynamic light system
- Plethora of new and revamped item skins

* New sound system
* New Crafting System (including recycling system)
* Introduction of market (auction house)
* Newbies start the game cut-off from the world during their tutorial while they familiarize themselves with the game.

**Character Development**
- Role System - You can pick (and change whenever you want) a basic role for your character, for example, Warrior, Mage, Skirmisher. These "roles" will define what armor you will be allowed to wear. Different roles will provide different bonuses or penalties towards different armor types (heavy, medium, light).

- Specialization System - You can no longer be jack of all trades, master of everything. You will have to specialize in certain discipline, or disciplines. For example, you can choose to specialize in Water Magic as your primary and Earth magic as your secondary discipline. This is different then having Earth as your primary and water as secondary.

Furthermore, opposite schools will lock one another, so if you pick Fire, you can not pick Water at the same time, or if you pick earth, you can not pick air at the same time.

There are many specs to chose from, including a "healer" spec for example.

It's important to note that you can switch between specs by talking to NPCs. This also means that you can still master/level everything in the game, but you can only use certain amount of abilities at any one time. This will make it so new players can quickly and easily develop their character in a certain spec and be just as effective as every veteran, while at the same time, veterans that put more time into developing their character can switch back and forth the specs if the chose to develop more than a single spec.

**PVP**
- Resource Monoliths, where people get rare materials for controlling an area
- Momentum mechanics
- Wobble mechanics

* Territory control by linking player villages and player Cities.
* Features to make battle preparation easy and intuitive
* More features that reduce downtime after death, including limbo system.

* New GUI!

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- New network code (no load lag)
- New crafting system
- Market place trading hubs added to racial citys
- Ship combat improved
- Citys/Hamlets/Villages redesigned, relocated and renamed.
- Full world redesign NPC/Chaos Citys included (based off the shape Darkfall 1 map had)
- Market trade hubs will be local only (you can see all items globally, but you'll need to go to the right one to pick up the items)
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- Land Fortresses
- New epic world boss mobs
- Revamped dungeons, traps, tierd system where you unlock new levels inside eventually leading to a boss
- Multi-core support
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The armor system has been totally revamped..
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Orginal posts from darkfall online forums (added few points from the comments)
Source:
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=327136


http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/325598_287523738023365_440078179_o.jpg

[Voodoo Hoodoo]

I was a forum mod for Aventurine before DFO came out, and played until about 3 months after the NA server came out. It was an ambitious project and was a lot of fun if you could party around with friends.

Might have to give it a look when it comes out.

Thanks for the heads up.

[Callsign_Vega]

THE WIPE
Darkfall: Unholy Wars is a new game, and upon its release, Darkfall 1.0 will be shut down. Characters will not be transferred over. Everyone will start over with a brand new character.

DFUW CLIENT FEE
Players who have ever purchased a Darkfall account will not have to purchase a client for Unholy Wars. They will simply pay their subscription fee.

BUNNY-JUMPING
Fall damage has been increased to reach the cap of the game, and if a player takes enough fall damage to kill them, that player becomes incapacitated. The 'Slow Fall' spell is a great utility added to the game to counteract this, but it is on a long cooldown. People can become incapacitated from bunny hopping.

RACES
No specific new races have been announced, and no races have been removed (as far as I've seen). Melee reach is supposed to be more normalized and balanced. For example, look at the Ork and Human pictures on facebook and compare the two. The Ork is definitely beefy but he isn't much larger than the human. It is probably safe to assume that a similar approach has been taken for the other races as well.

ROLES
Players will be able to switch between roles, but only have one selected at any given time.
Roles are not classes, but temporary specializations. The game will include four (4): Elementalist (mage), Primalist (priest), Warrior (fighter), and Skirmisher (ranger).

Warriors can wear heavy armor. Skirmishers can wear medium armor. Spellcasters can wear light armor or robes. There is evidence to believe that some robes will affect spellcasting.

A Warrior has access to a range of melee, defensive, and combat oriented skills. A Skirmisher has access to light weapon and bow skills. A Primalist has access to priestly magic. And an Elementalist to powerful magery.
The Warrior and the Skirmisher role will also offer a choice of 4 schools each which will be opposing in pairs exactly like the magic schools. The Warrior role is probably self explanatory but the Skirmisher is a medium armored role that can be either close combat oriented or use a bow to deliver deadly hits from a distance. There are quite a few things we believe you will find interesting that are related to this role system and we will present it in detail in the future.

MAGIC
*Insta-cast offensive ray spells have been removed from the game, due to their imbalance.
There are two types of magic: priest (primalist) and mage (elementalist).
The mage is intelligence based and can select two schools from Fire, Earth, Water, and Air. Fire blocks Water and vice versa. Earth blocks Air and vice versa. The mage will also select one school to be primary and the other to be secondary. This will further diversify mages. For example, a player who selects Fire as the primary school and Earth as the secondary school will have a considerably different playstyle and spell selection compared to someone who selected Earth as their primary and Fire as their secondary. Another example: Fire is supposed to be more useful for longer-ranged attacks against multiple targets, while Air will be more favorable for close combat in smaller numbers.
The priest is a wisdom based spellcaster and can select two schools from Life, Pain, Law, and Chaos. Simliar to the mage, Life blocks Pain and vice versa. Law blocks Chaos and vice versa.
New spells and spell effects have been added.
There are more robes, which can affect gameplay.
Minor Incantations is both intelligence and wisdom based. It is also available to all characters, no matter what they are wearing. There are five utility spells in this school, and none of them require reagents to cast.
Major Magic will also be available to anyone.
Mana Missile – Your typical low level damage dealing spell.
Heal Self – The standard self healing spell for all characters.
Light – Can be cast on enemies to illuminate them or on allies to illuminate dark areas. Our differed lighting system is what makes this possible.
Slow Fall – Falling damage is quite perilous in Darkfall 2.0. The cap for fall damage has been increased quite a bit and you will take such damage for shorter drops than in the current game. Also falling damage will leave you incapacitated if it exceeds your current hit point total. If you are out alone or with friends that is a minor inconvenience as you will either recover on your own or get revived. If you are being chased by an enemy though, a gank is more likely to follow. Slow fall will be life saving in such situations but it needs to be timed quite accurately to be effective.
Beacon – A spell for marking targets.
A lot of work has been done in balancing magic and making the effectiveness of spells make more sense.
The primary factor when determining spell effectiveness is the governing attribute. Intelligence and Wisdom levels will play a major role on how much of an impact you do while casting spells. Of course Intelligence based spells only take this attribute into consideration with Wisdom based ones doing the same.
Staves have been rebalanced and their rank now plays a more prominent role in the effectiveness of the spells you are casting.
No word has been spoken about Witchcraft, Necromancy, Spell Chanting, or Arcane magics. It is probably safe to assume that these schools have taken on new names and reworkings in the Priest role.

DEMI-GODS
Yes, there will be some more "boss" monsters, both roaming around and some guarding dungeons.
Also, most monster loot, namely high-end, has been rebalanced to better suit the risk vs. reward scenarios.

MOMENTUM AND CROSSHAIR WOBBLE
They have been implemented but should only very slightly affect gameplay. It will definitely hinder the "squirrely-ness" of some people engaged in melee combat.
Movement affects the amount of crosshair wobble.
NPC CITIES
Most cities have been reworked to be easier to navigate by sorting them into districts. For example: cities now have a magic district or a crafting district, etc.
There will be four NPC cities per racial area, three faction cities, and one capital.

PLAYER CITIES
Teleportation chambers have been removed.
Many cities that were previously accessible via a mountain or other terrain have been reworked to require either spells or the provided entrances. All cities have at least two entrances now.

SEA AND WATER
A lot of the empty areas of the map that were filled with water have been removed, or brought closer together.

SURGING
Pre-suring is supposed to be removed.

CRAFTING
When crafting, as you skill up to new levels, you'll stop gaining from lower levels items. In order to gain up to higher levels, you'll need to make items close to or at your current level.
Failures are also handled in a different way. While the failure rate has been increased a bit, the closer you are to a recipe not giving you skill gains, the more likely you are to succeed in crafting that recipe. Additionally, failing will not mean that you lose all of your materials every time, but there will be a chance to loose all, some or no materials at all.
To give you an example of all of the above, a weaponsmith starting at skill level 1 will be able to create, among many other items, a Crude Militant Greataxe. This is a rank 0 Greataxe of the Militant style. As his skill increases, he will be failing less and less and at skill level 25 he will have an almost guaranteed success at crafting this item as well as all other items of this rank. Once he hits 25 he will need to switch to a rank 1 recipe to continue increasing his skill.
All crafting skills now have a mastery to go with them. Some new skills have been introduced as well. Shields will be crafted with the shield crafting skill. Staves will be crafted with the staff crafting skill. Tailoring is used for cloth items, such as robes and bags. Leatherworking is the skill used to make leather armor.
Tools for crafting no longer exist. You simply need to be at the appropriate crafting station and have the required resources.
Rare ore plays a major role in a variety of crafting skills. In addition to being used in crafting weapons and armor, it can also be used to infuse other materials like wood and leather. Higher ranks of items require an infused variant of the specific material. Woodcutting can be used to infuse wood with rare ore to produce materials like selentine wood, furthering the depth of crafting.
Tanning and weaving are two new conversion skills. Skinning some creatures produces raw hides instead of leather. These hides need to be cured to become usable leather. You can combine raw hides with rare ore to make materials like neithal leather. Cloth, which can now be crafted, will be made with the weaving profession. Herb gathering nodes can now produce cotton, which can be processed into cloth, or infused with rare or to produce materials like leenspar cloth.
This system spreads the rare materials across all professions.

INCAPACITATED
When a player becomes incapacitated, he slowly regains hit points until he is above zero, at which point he can press the spacebar key to revive himself. If the player fails to press the spacebar in the alloted time, he will be returned to his bindstone. This change makes ganking enemies more crucial in fights, and allows a little more room for error in some situations that aren't related to PvP. It also makes higher-end monsters more dangerous, because if a damaging hit would take you below -10 hit points, it kills you outright.

LIMBO
The limbo state is one that has been in discussion for a while. Basically when a character is ganked, he is able to quickly re-equip himself, hopefully with an already prepared bag, from his bank and return to an area relative to his corpse. There isn't much time granted to do this so players have to be prepared. Also, this feature has a gold cost related to the value of the items you decide to equip during this limbo (the re-equipping). This is aimed at reducing a players downtime so they can continue to play, should they decide to risk more of their gear to re-enter the fight. The limbo feature will have a sensible cooldown. The gold cost increases for using the limbo feature successive times. There is a limit on how many times someone can use this feature in any given 24-hour period. Again, the respawn location is fairly large and completely random, so the player takes a chance at spawning right in the middle of his enemies after using this feature.

USER INTERFACE AND GRAPHICS
There will be a new chat system, offering more flexibility and customization, while being less intrusive and more user friendly.
There is a ton of work being done to graphics, world-building, lighting, GUI, etc.
Some dedicated item hot bars have been added for items such as weapons and reagents.

NEW PLAYERS
The training areas consist of a series of chambers where the players can train before they move on. Training works like a gauntlet tutorial, beginning with movement and scaling all the way up to spellcasting and combat. This is sure to be a fun experience, and well worth the wait, even for veterans, because the training process has an epic ending! After training, the player is transported to the actual world. The entire system is to enhance the new player experience and lessen the learning curve at the beginning of the game.
Mount ownership is being reworked to fit the alignment system. When a player dismounts, the mount will remember its owner for a brief period of time. If a different player jumps onto the mount, that player will be flagged a criminal and anyone can attack them without penalty. Guard towers will also attack players flagged criminal from this. This is a simple implementation to lower the risk of dismounting in crowded areas or NPC cities. This also helps newer players out, because they are usually the ones unaware of Darkfall's mount thieves when they first get a mount.

"THE GRIND"
The grind is theoretically lessened, due to the player's ability to become viable more quickly within his chosen role.

MARKET
The initial market plan: The market exists in all racial capitals and chaos cities. Players can buy and sell any item in the game here, but also place orders to buy and sell. If an item was not placed onto the market at the market you are buying it from, you can pay a courier cost to have it delivered to you, or you can travel to the market it is located at and pay the listed price.
Player concerns have made the implementation of the market delayed, due to the nature of Darkfall. It will not be implemented at launch.

SHIPS
There are some new ships to be crafted, as well as a mastery version of the skill. This mastery skill will open up new ships aimed at naval warfare. Speed, armor, layout, and maneuverability are all features giving each ship it's own area of expertise. All ships will be craftable using all NPC holding workbenches.
There is a Fishing Trawler, which is used strictly for fishing. The ship has only one cannon at the back. You can only fish with this particular ship and all fishing equipment has been removed from other ships (Not sure how this affects fishing poles without a ship).
The Launch ship is a smaller ship that can be used by smaller parties to participate in naval combat.
The Coastal Runner has no cannons but is easily the fastest ship on the seas. This ship is useful for transporting goods or people across the water as fast as possible. This ship will have a very low amount of hit points.
Another ship is the Sea Scraper. This ships act like an underwater submarine, scraping across the bottom of the ocean. This ship moves slowly, but can uncover hidden treasures and bring them to the surface.
Siege equipment and mount crafting are receiving similar reworkings.
Some thought is going into whether or not larger ships can push smaller ones.

POINT SYSTEM
There will be a point system implemented. This point system is a way for players and clans to monitor their progress and provide more gameplay options.
The first points are player points. PvP, PvE, harvesting, crafting, etc. grant player points. These points can be used to perform other actions within the game. There is also an achievement system, which is linked to the point system.
Clans can also gain points. Clan members gain points for themselves and their clan while participating in related activities. This also comes with an achievement system.

TERRITORY AND RESOURCES
Villages will essentially belong to player holdings around them but not just to one holding. There will be an ownership overlap for all villages and clans that own a holding will need to secure the villages that correspond to it if they want to reap the rewards. Clans that do not own a holding or want to profit from a village that is not within their holdings influence can still do so as there is a pillaging mechanic that serves exactly that purpose.
Essentially, a clan holding gives to the clan that owns it potential sovereignty over specific villages. Neighboring holdings will also have potential sovereignty over these villages. There will be a constant struggle between neighbors for control of villages and in turn resources generated by them. Add to this the occasional pillaging clan that will try to profit from poorly defended villages and you can hopefully see why we are so excited about this feature.
Clan holding resources nodes will remain within city walls, but won't perform as well or yield as much if the surrounding villages aren't in that particular clan's control. The nearby villages have a direct effect on what the resource nodes provide.
Areas that have a higher risk to gather from potentially have a greater reward or yield.
Resource Monoliths are control points scattered across Agon which can be used as a more profitable way to harvest crafting resources, creating a PvP hotspot. Any player can capture a monolith by grabbing the ownership mark from it if it isn't already captured. The current capture holder of the monolith will have resources added to his bank and backpack, similar to how Villages work with gold now. The player can lose control of the monolith if he logs off, leaves the control area, or is killed. When someone loses control, the ownership mark returns to the monolith, becoming free to grab for anyone else.
Clan cities are no longer the almost-exclusive way of getting rare resources, such as ingots. Sea Fortresses, player villages, and resource monoliths, all being outside the relative safely of player holdings, will provide the bulk of materials for crafters to create the best equipment with. This will create many more PvP hotspots.

CLAN MEMBER PERMISSIONS
Permissions for access to clan features can now be individually assigned to members, they are no longer grouped into arbitrary and inflexible ranks. Permissions are organized into “categories” like Membership, Politics, Conquest etc. For each category there is also a management option that allows any member with it to assign or remove permissions of that specific category to other members. There is also a Master permission that is automatically assigned to the clan leader and allows him to edit any and all member permissions.
Also to make things simpler, permissions are linked. That means that if for example someone is assigned the “Edit Recruits” permission, they automatically receive the “View Recruits” permission. If a management permission is assigned to a member, that member automatically receives all permissions in their category.
Each permission will have an associated title, the clan member can chose one of the titles from their assigned permissions to display as their clan role. For example, being assigned the “Edit Recruits” permission will give that member the option to display the “Recruiter” title.
Military Ranks still exist but are now related to PvP related performance and they are granted automatically upon achieving specific goals. The do not however grant any clan related permissions.
This will provide a lot more flexibility to Clan Leaderships as well as a way to let specific members handle tasks they are good at.

MERCENARIES IN SIEGES
Apart from that, work is also being done on a new contract system. At this moment this system is being developed to be quite open ended so that it can be used in various ways if we so choose. The first application of it however has to do with mercenary like contracts. We feel that sieges is an activity that even small clans that do not own a holding must experience as it’s a quite unique feature of Darkfall.
To that end we are implementing this contract system to serve as an organized and structured way for such clans to participate, contribute and even profit from siege related activities. Of course our aim is for the system to be also usable by clans that want to have mercenary work as their primary source of income.

[Kallenator]

Good news indeed! I had been following DarkFall lousily from early development until it's release a couple of years back. Tried for a couple of months as well.
And I do see out from this text that they are really trying to improve on the huge amount of mistakes that this game had.


- New network code (no load lag)
I will believe it when I see it. I still remember the slide show nature of large battles which was supposed to be a large part of this game. Totally unplayable. The lagg was not cool even without any action.


Lastly, even though this game was supposed to be game where focus was driven away from grinding, it was still present, just in other ways.

[Callsign_Vega]

Good news indeed! I had been following DarkFall lousily from early development until it's release a couple of years back. Tried for a couple of months as well.
And I do see out from this text that they are really trying to improve on the huge amount of mistakes that this game had.


- New network code (no load lag)
I will believe it when I see it. I still remember the slide show nature of large battles which was supposed to be a large part of this game. Totally unplayable. The lagg was not cool even without any action.


Lastly, even though this game was supposed to be game where focus was driven away from grinding, it was still present, just in other ways.

Ya, a lot of fixes going into the new game.


130507

[Callsign_Vega]

Darkfall Online for Free

Today we stopped charging for Darkfall Online since we’re going to shut down the Darkfall Online service in a month, on November 15th, to make more room for Darkfall Unholy Wars.

We would like to thank our players, past and present, with a small token of our appreciation, by opening up our game servers. The game will be free for all players, of good standing, who ever bought the game.

We hope to see you in-game as we all enjoy our final month of Darkfall Online.

http://www.darkfallonline.com/blog/?p=3326

[Callsign_Vega]

http://sphotos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/135695_294391377336601_368857123_o.jpg


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=KG40NPkI4rA