I walked into a fairly well-lit office space filled with approximately 20 or so employees huddled over their monitors. The walls were mostly bare with the exception of a Star Wars, Darkfall and Quake poster. I didn't see anyone idling or chit-chatting at a water cooler. Everyone was hard at work, practically on fire, fighting to meet their deadline.
This made it all the more amazing that 5 out of the 20 people pulled away from their desks (more like cafeteria tables) to sit in a conference room with me for a good 4 hours or so to talk about their game.
Sitting across from me was Lead Game Designer Claus Grovdal, Lead World Designer BT Oren, Lead Programmer Kjetil Helland, and Tools Programmer Rikki Sickenger.
You would think by their names that I might be somewhere in Norway, but actually I was in Athens, Greece. They moved the office to Greece due to the high cost of living in Norway and haven't looked back. The company, Aventurine, is one of the few places in Greece where they make commercial quality games. For the past 3 years, these guys have been hard at work developing a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) called Darkfall.
They've kept their game fairly low on the PR radar until this year. "Too many MMOs are released before they're ready to go to market," said Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras. "We want the beta to be almost finished before we show it to the world."
When I asked how far along they were with their game, they seemed pretty confident that the engine was almost ready. "We're spending a lot of our efforts tuning the graphics and art assets right now," explained Flambournas. This was particularly encouraging since I was concerned that the screenshots on their web site looked a bit dated.
As I listened to the plans of these developers, one thing become increasingly apparent. These guys are hardcore guild-oriented PVPers (or people who enjoy player-vs-player style combat). Consequently, the MMO they're developing is designed for players like them. The difference between playing other mass-market MMOs and Darkfall will be like having a "McDonald's meal vs the special burger" explains Grovdal.
For example, you will be able to PVP anywhere on the map. As I've seen in other MMOs, this concept can be a scary one for those who get frustrated when "ganked" or attacked unexpectedly. To add to your fears, when you die your body can be completely looted by your opponent.
How does Darkfall plan on keeping your adrenaline high without leaving you too terribly frustrated? With a very sophisticated notoriety system. Darkfall might just generate an elf quest rewarding the person who kills the most notorious elf killer. The developers were hesitant to give too much detail on this point, only that there would be some sort of a bounty system in place to get back at offenders.
You won't need to worry about portal or zone camping since there is no zoning between areas in Darkfall. Travelling the lands is also aided by mounts and the use of runes that can teleport you to pre-marked locations.
Guilds will play an important part. Although they did say there will be neutral cities available for lone wolf players, I got the distinct impression that unguilded players won't get very far in this game. Guilds can own cities, bind stones and resources (like mines) that will charge outsiders taxes for using them.
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