Developer Quotes

Please understand that some/most of these Dev quotes may or may not be accurate now.

We will be updating the quotes as soon as we can.

Thank you and Enjoy

We wont drop this game no matter what. Even if we have to work 168 hours/week and receive payment in noodles donated by suspicious strangers on the street.

So far only Direct3D will be supported. Glide is totally out of the question (for one thing 3Dfx doesn't exist anymore). For maximum performance & stability from your GFX card, *ALWAYS* make sure you have the latest drivers.

We all like Linux here, but I would like to quote from a John Carmack comment on slash dot:
-"It has been pretty clearly demonstrated that the mac market is barely viable and the linux market is not viable for game developers to pursue. Linux ports will be done out of good will, not profit motives. From an economic standpoint, a developer is not making a bad call if they ignore the existence of all platforms but windows."
We do not have the resources to make a Unix/Linux port at the moment, but you can maybe feel satisfied in knowing that our server clusters will run on a Unix flavoured farm.

I will give a _very_ brief description of the physics system in Darkfall.
The physics control will include every object in Darkfall. You can't do anything to an object without having the physics be a part of it. That means you can throw barrels down somewhere (if you are strong enough to lift them). The weather will be controlled by physics. The swaying of the trees and grass and other stuff depends on the wind direction and strength in that particular area. You can alter the physics in a local area by using environmental spells. Could be bad for a guy who's using a levitating spell or something, that just neutralizes the 'normal' gravity, if you've altered the gravity there so that he falls dead to the ground. But if you alter the physics at a local area, then you will also see the result on the normal objects in that area, so it could give a hint to players that something strange is going on there. These are just a few examples, but you get the point. You, as a player, will be able to take advantage of the physics in creative ways. It's going to be fun.

A few notes: The DF engine uses DX 8.1 now. That means that it will run on Win98+. When it comes to GFX cards, you are right. There are only 2 major companies left in the 3D-GFX card consumer marked, and that is, as you say, NVidia and ATI. Both make grrrreat cards these days.
There will mainly be 2 major rendering pipelines. One for cards that don't support Vertex and Pixel shaders and one for cards that do support that.
Currently I am developing the Rendering Module of the engine on GeForce1 & 2 cards, and also test in on pre-Radeon 8500 cards.
All the screenshots so far is taken on a GeForce1 card, to show the engine in it's "lowest" state. The purpose is to make all the basic functionality work smoothly on a card like that. Example: If we define that "live" vegetation is a game play feature, it must work on all classes of cards. This is so that e.g. if you're playing a dwarf, you are small and might be able to hide in dense vegetation, waiting for your prey. My vegetation module will function and work properly on a low class hardware, but it will look better if you have a GeForce42. To get back to your question: It won't be optimized for a specific GPU, since I am using DirectX, and DirectX has a Hardware Abstraction Layer. You could rather say that it is being optimized for different hardware classes.

A comment to the user interface: The user interface in our engine is totally customizable. You can move, drag around, set transparency, resize etc.etc. as much as you want to. We provide you with the basic tools, so that you can, if you want to, customize how you view the information available to you in the game. You are bit weird and want the chat window to cover 90% of the game area, well go ahead and do it You want your Health indicator in the middle of the screen? No problem. etc.etc. By the way, the UI in the old screenshots is not the one we will provide you with.

No saving??? and no undo function??? That's it. I'm NEVER going to try this Real Life thing. Man, who was the n00b that designed that garbage?

Don't worry. I have already made an mp3 player for the client. You may now listen freely to your favourite Britney Spears album.

The map is not prerendered, but it is pre-made. We are not making a random map on the fly, as we could get quite interesting "features" from doing something insane like this. The polygon count is far from all that matters anymore. Something that is just as important nowadays is the fillrate. This means that depending on the shader on the object that is being drawn, the time to render it can vary quite a lot while the polygon count stays the same. And there are more factors than this that has a saying when it comes to rendering speed, so to give a number purely based on polycount wouldn't make much sense in this context. The number of polys that a tree consists of is also varying heavily based on the actual tree, but I can tell you that it will look good and that is all that matters in the end. We are using 3DS Max for the modeling, but the world is being built in our own in-house developed World Builder. We have our own in-house developed graphics-engine. I hope this clarified a bit what you were curious about, but as you see things are not black and white regarding polycount and such anymore. There are so many factors that make a contribution to the total rendering speed, that isolating just one of them and tell you how many polys that can be drawn onscreen isn't of any practical use (and even then it will depend on the size of the model and the layout of the polys, as one tries to get as many vertices as possible stuffed into the cache on the GFX card). However the engine is aware of all of this and will do it's part combined from all of these factors to keep a steady frame rate when the view gets occluded by many players/models (So you can run around and slay your enemies even when there is a very complex scenery)

You will get grass and other environmental things in the 3D-Engine that Darkfall runs on top of. I will try to make the environment that you walk around in as convincing as possible. You will, as a player, get the chance also to influence the way things look around you. I.e.: You cast some sort of environmental spell that might modify the way the wind blows. This will then reflect back on how the grass under your feet are moving and how the environment around you are looking.

To just set up a standard dual monitor system, just buy an off the shelf GFX card with an extra DVI-out and hook them up. It's dead easy and really cool. As for the advantage part: It's not meant to give players with an expensive system a big advantage. It's more so that you can use all of you hard earned gear if you want to.
The engine is designed so that it works on a GeForce1 (and similar). It will look better on a GeForce3+/Radeon 8500+ since those cards are a huge technological leap compared to the previous cards. But the difference lies in the pure eye candy things. All the functional things that has anything to do with game play will work on all cards supported: e.g. Tall grass has to be the same on all cards, since you might use that to hide in, and that is then an integrated part of the functional game play. The grass might look better on a newer card, but the 'functional' part is the same.

Full 3D Sound is already in the engine. Soon I will add full support for Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound (if you have the hardware to support such a wonderful beast). As for 3 monitors and other tech goodies. I will try to support as much 'cooooool' ™ hardware stuff as possible. I just need to get my hands on the different 'cooooool' ™ equipment out there , so I can test it out. (I now use a dual monitor system...)

In short, multiple connections on a private network behind a router will be supported, if this router supports NAT of UDP traffic. E.g. linux/freebsd set up as routers support this "out of the box" (I use this at home), and most dedicated routers can be configured to support it.

My *goals* for the server is to handle maybe two thousand users per computer (top specs) in the server cluster. The design lays no limit whatsoever on the number of computers that can participate in the cluster, and in theory it can be scaled without limits. In practice I assume the approx 250 MB/sec data limit on the internal buses on a motherboard will limit how much traffic a cluster can handle, and thus also limit the number of total users. The amount of internal network traffic (*not* related to the internet network traffic) an active user generates is obviously not known so far, but an educated guess would be maybe 4k/sec on average, which gives me a limit of 62.500 users in one cluster. So, as it looks now, the absolute maximum number of users in a world, assuming perfect conditions and correct guesswork, will be approx 60k. The internet bandwidth required to handle this and the actual efficiency of the networking hardware used to build the cluster will most likely reduce this number, so a more realistic guess might be 40-50k active users at once. That's how I'm evaluating this, but be aware that so far this is mostly guesswork, nothing more. We might end up on 20k max, or maybe 200k... We'll see.

My part, the server, is being developed on FreeBSD in c++, using gnu tools. It might be moved to linux or some other BSD later on, but it will definitely be some sort of Unix. For the graphics and the game logics, you better ask Kjetil and Ricki.

Again, to clarify... Software design limitations can be handled, OS limitations can be fixed, and hardware resources can be added as needed as this is a totally distributed/parallel system. But, there is a specific hardware limit on the amount of data that can pass a main board bridge that sets the first absolute limit on how much data traffic the cluster can handle, and in some wild guesswork I earlier mapped that to a 60k user limit. I could work around this too by giving up on the design goal of making zone transfers transparent to the users. But, for now, I look at 250 MB/sec (2 GBit) as the maximum total data transfer rate of the cluster, and rather work to present a world lacking zones to the users. Of course, we'll need some rather fast machines to handle this amount of data, but by the time we get to release I expect we can easily get e.g. boxes with 4 2-3 GHz CPUs. If main board manufacturers up this limit, there already are cluster networking hardware handling up to 8 GBit/sec data transfer rates (e.g. Dolphinics cluster cards, those guys informed me of this limitation as they keep hitting it on test clusters), so as of today the absolute limit of simultaneous users is set by a specific hardware limitation.

You're on the right track Zakath, we're simply trying to reduce the need for bandwidth. It will be very hard (nothing is impossible) to fool the game into generating so much traffic that you lag other players. If you think about e.g. trying to pass a couple K/sec as in game chat, that will be throttled, and so will other specific types of data that the user could make the game client generate. But I doubt that any raw data rate throttling will be put in, except maybe set a "sanity" max value of accepted bytes/second. That said, if someones client generates "weird" data, which exceeds expected limits, the servers will log and report this to admins, letting them decide whether this is an attempt to cheat in any way. And as soon as we see an attempted cheat, the weakness will be fixed.

Xetro, zones will not make any difference to the users required connection speed. There will be what you could call a "bubble" around each player, and relevant info within this bubble will be passed on to the players, zones or no zones. A ISDN should be fine, I hope to get bandwidth usage down so far that dialup users can play without noticeable lag, both to extend customer base and to cut our bandwidth costs.

Cheating is as you all know a pretty common problem in online games, and while I wont detail how, I'll mention a few of the ways we are planning on handling this. First of all, cheating will NOT be tolerated. The EULA will clearly state what actions will be taken against detected cheaters, and attempts to cheat will be at the users own risk.

We have designed the server in a way letting us insert cheat detection into every layer of the code, and are very aware of the fact that people will attempt to cheat. The basic idea simply is that the server decides what happens, and if the client and the server disagree, the server always wins. If you hack your client to e.g. move at twice the normal speed, it's your loss because the server will refuse to send information about the area you claim you are in, and in addition alert staff about susceptible behaviour. The advantage of creating an online only game is that we can and should make all decisions on the server, and use the client more or less to display what the server tells it. External applications watching and analyzing the virtual world will be used to detect bugs, and the design permits us to add new detection code or bug fixes without interrupting the game. By strictly limiting what information is sent to the clients, adding e.g. a "transparent walls" hack to a client wont do anything for you, you will still not see anything behind that wall because the server decides this info isn't visible and thus shouldn't be available to you.
Regarding encryption, it is very well possible to encrypt and compress UDP data, and this will also be done using mechanisms that will make your common network sniffer rather useless. You can of course write your own sniffer that is able to decode the games network traffic, and we can of course decide to change the encryption algorithms and keys whenever we feel like, without interrupting the game play

On the topic of faking users, we cant do much more than log which client serial # (and IP) attempts to login to which user account, and on reports of hacked accounts handle this according to the license agreement. It will of course be repeated to boredom that you should never ever give your password to *anyone at all*. On the subject of DOS, this is an area that I through experience feel competent to handle. There will be no ways that corrupted data from a client will be able to reach the virtual world simulation. In short, our design goals state that even with access to the clients full source code, users should not be able to cheat undetected, and we hope to reach this goal after some trial and failure (and lots of feedback from users of course.

In addition to handling stuff server side, a design with cheat detection in mind is required. We need to add validation to all code running on the server, and we need a system to report and handle abnormalities, tightly integrated into every part of the server. This will spend precious resources, and to some degree add to hardware costs. It is a lot simpler, and takes less time, to write a game with client-side authoritative decisions, but we chose very early that we needed to do it this way, planning to avoid too many cheaters ruining the game play for the users. Short story: We chose a more complex and resource/time-consuming design to minimize future problems with cheaters.

When we use the term "server" we really talk about a server farm appearing to the outside world as a single world. This is done using custom-written server clustering solutions. A server farm is in theory unlimited in size, but we hope to end up with the largest consisting of 40-50 machines interconnected with special clustering network adapters. Even with server clusters, hardware will limit how many machines we can put into it, so we're looking at a theoretical absolute max of about 60000 users per cluster. In the real world, we won't reach this number, a more likely absolute max is 30000, but if we in the end reach 15-20000 we will be very happy.

As Micah guessed, the "server" the players will know will in reality be a server cluster consisting of a number of fast computers all interconnected on a private network.
The way this cluster is designed, we will be able to present a single huge world to the players, making the actual server zone borders transparent in all regards. The design will also permit us to change the zone borders on the fly, when e.g. areas get crowded or we put a new computer into the cluster.

So, in theory, this can be scaled endlessly as the design doesnt put any maximum restrictions on anything. Certain hardware limits will however give us a maximum amount of network traffic that we can handle, and we will eventually get to a point where adding more computers to the cluster is useless.

I made some guesswork earlier estimating a theorethical max of 60k players on one server cluster, but that number is just guesswork. For now I can just say that we'll do our best to cram as many people into the world as possible, and some time later we might have some more real numbers for you.

Your post pretty well sums up the advantages an OODBMS traditionally have over a RDBMS for certain storage requirements. We have of course evaluated both of these two technologies, in addition to a few other options, and have reached our conclusions on how to implement the storage facilities to be used by the game. All I can say at the moment is that we will not settle on neither RDBMS only nor OODBMS only, but rather combine several of the available technologies, traditional DBMS's and some other concepts, to achieve a decent balance of reliability and performance for storage of the game data.

The dwarves in Darkfall will neither have guns nor steam engines. They will, however, possess rather advanced mining technology (including blast forges), and their engineering skills allow them to divert the flow of rivers, blast straight roads through mountains, and so forth. In other words: They are technologically advanced, but within a fantasy context. We're kind of conservative in this regard, and there will be no science-fantasy aspects to the world of Darkfall. No guns, no weird flying contraptions, no steam engines, etcetera.

The gnomes are a non-playable, fairly harmless and friendly race with two primary functions:

1) They farm the fertile river-valleys of Dvergheim, the dwarven nation. In return for access to surface-grown food, the dwarves of nearby clans protect gnomish villages with permanent detachments of guards.
2) They are skillful jewelcutters. Gnomish individuals run jewellery shops in large cities throughout Agon.

Possession will not be in the game. There are too many bad sides to it, to weigh up for the coolness the spell caster might feel ;P
Scrying might be in though

We might have some kind of ICQ-type system, where you can see when your friends are in game, and click on names to send messages. It depends on if this feature really is needed, or just clutters up the screen. We really want to have a functional but clean interface

In-game boards are something we have already planned on having, so yes it will be in.

Darkfall will be like a first person shooter in that you can strafe and use mouselook. Targeting will be a mix of aim-and-shoot, and select-target-and-shoot, depending on the weapon/spell you are using.

We aim to have a very advanced clan system, which should make being part of a clan very interesting. When it comes to chats, we will be trying to find a system that works for everyone. But, like Claus has said before, we have to balance what might cool with what is totally annoying. Most probably there will be an irc-like interface for chatting. What channels will be available aren't set in stone yet. Most probably we will not have an auction channel, since we have in game boards for that. There will also be allot of options for filtering and turning channels on or off, so you don't get distracted by information you don't want.

I think there would be more problems with a no-tell area than benefits. If a clan invades a no-tell area and is coordinating everything in irc or ICQ/MSN, then it could turn into a nightmare for the defenders. Especially if clan-chat is also turned off, and/or there are several clans defending the area that need to coordinate things to survive. The defenders could also use external chat-programs, but that would go against the point of having a no-tell area anyway. The idea would be good if there was no other way to communicate (externally) while in game. The problem is that people do use external communication, if we like it or not. And if we blocked alt-tab, most of the power-hungry players would find a way to disable it to gain an advantage in game. We are trying to level the playing field in such a way that power-gamers don't have much of an advantage in Darkfall, except for the obvious: learn everything you can and play enough to get an edge. We believe that the 10% of the players that do use external communications and/or other software shouldn't gain an advantage because of this. And that is why we aim to put most of the useful tools in game and make them easy to use. It might not make much role-playing sense until you factor in the real world, which sadly will always exist outside of the Darkfall world.

People using multiple accounts is a problem when it comes to spying. We are working on several ways to try to curb the effectiveness of this. One of these is in the clan-mechanics itself, where a clan can choose which members can actually see the in game clan-boards, and clan-chat. There is no way we can stop people from buying several accounts, but clans will be able to set options so that for example only clan members of a certain rank can see all of the private clan information. This means that a spy would have to work himself up to a certain rank before he gets sensitive information. This way it's up to the clan how much they want all the members to know, and means that a spy would actually have to work at getting useful info.

It's still difficult to find out who the spy is, but that is part of the fun as well. So...yes, we do bother. And we are trying to level the playing field. But doing that has to factor in the real world too if it is going to work. That doesn't mean that we are forgetting immersion though, and we are of course open to any good suggestions

PvP = Player versus Player

Seriously though. We are talking about competition here. Who is the best and who isn't. People don't sit down and compare stats and say "hey, I have 6 GM skills.. I am teh best!" .. No, they fight it out. It's the same with monsters. PvM isn't a "hello monster what stats do you have, cause I bet I am better than you" .. no, it's *whack* *bam* *crush* "haha, I rule!"

So..
PvP = Player versus Player Combat.
PvM = Player versus Monster Combat

We are talking about combat. Clan Vs Clan is also combat to a certain degree. Although having allot of land and/or resources helps too. I hope this clears up any misunderstandings

There is going to be allot of wilderness in Darkfall. But if a clan can claim an area, it most probably will. It looks nice on the political map to own allot of land. A claimed piece of land can be pretty big, with a city/town or resource, and allot of wilderness around it. So you should be able to find a nice quiet spot somewhere. Just don't expect to be too safe if you are outside of the protection of a city.

House burning is another one of those things that are not set in stone yet. But what we have in mind is that the clan that owns the area sets the burning rights. Most probably people will not be able to burn down anything as long as there is peace in the land. But if another clan takes over the land, then they might allow burning of houses for tactical reasons, or to make space for houses for their own clan members. So, yes burning will be in, but it's up to the owner of the land to allow or not. Houses cost in upkeep, and part of that upkeep might be taxed, so burning down too many houses in your land could lower your clans income.

Good graphics generally don't cause lag. Good graphics could cause bad frame rates though, and the Darkfall engine will be scaleable to handle less powerful machines. Lag can be caused by the servers being overloaded, or a bad internet connection between you and the server. There is always some lag because of the nature of the internet, but we are of course trying to minimize the effects of that.

Darkfall is being built with localization issues in mind. We have put all the relevant text in separate language classes that can easily be exchanged. At the moment we have only created English files, since we don't feel like translating the pre-alpha. But yes, localization has been thought of, and is designed into the game. Actual text presentation rules (for differing grammar and key-word placement) is being looked at too.

With regard to players learning other players skills or spells, there are limits of course. You will always need to have a certain level of the skill before you can teach it to another player. You can only teach a person up to a degree of what you know. For example you might be able to teach another person up to 1/3 of the value you have in the skill. Skill or spells gained by special circumstances (like quests) will most likely not be able to be taught to other players. This might change during beta, but it's how it looks at the moment.

This means that yes there is an alignment system. And this will be tuned during beta to find out what works. The quote also clearly states that it is the players that set the rules for the cities they own. So if you are evil and want to enter a anti-pk town, then you probably wont be able to. At the moment, the only cities that are NPC driven, are the capitals. These are the starting points for the characters of each of the races, so they will not let people of evil alignment in. This is to make it hard for griefers to enter the city and kill all the newbies they find. But it is *possible* to round up a big army and raid a capital if that's what you want. The point is that griefers most probably will have a hard time in Darkfall because generally players do not like griefers, and will set up their cities do deny them access. Being a PK is what Darkfall is built for. But being a Player Killer (and not a griefer) means that you kill enemies of your clan or race, not just anyone you feel like.

Minigames is something we have thought about, and something we can implement in the game, based on our engine tech. But it isn't a prioritized part of the development as of yet. Minigames is a possibility though.

As it says in the quote, it will be possible to make an all-race clan, but it isn't easy. For example, being a good-aligned Alfar is an exception to the rule, and should be. Alfar are by nature evil, so anyone that sees an Alfar will think he is. If you have read the books about Drizzt (R.A. Salvatore's books about a darkelf who ends up being a good-aligned ranger), you will know that he had a pretty hard time, even after he found a few friends that trusted him.

Does this apply to insects too? We agree that monsters appearing out of the blue doesn't do much to immersivness. We are looking into making monster spawning more *cough* realistic. There will be a population control mechanism in game that regulates the numbers of any kind of spawnable thing, but this doesn't mean you will get to see any naughty breeding scenes behind bushes.

The thieves guild will already be in the game, along with a bunch of other guilds. You want an office in your city so people can join and/or train in related skills ? Build that office!

Guild = pre-made organization in DF
Clan = Player-made organization.

At the moment we don't have any plans for Players to become leaders of the guilds. Guilds are more of a static organization that you join and get certain (no I am not going to tell) benefits from. As for what functionality the Thieves Guild has, that is s3kr3t inf0rm4t10n~

There are no NPC citizens.
Citizens are other players.

The NPC's in a town will be as you said; Guards , hired Merchants, and Trainers / Guild Masters.

Yes, most NPC's will be player "made". If you create a guild-house for the Thieves Guild in your town, then a thief guild-master NPC will most probably appear.

There will be some cities/towns that are built from start, and special Points Of Interest that will contain NPCs. Special NPCs like quest-giving NPCs could be placed in these cities or POIs.

There will be options for turning off all the fancy graphics stuff if you want. The engine will also auto-downscale the graphics if needed, so you don't have to worry about having the beautiful grassy field lagging you down if a horde of orks come running over a nearby hill wanting to smash your head in. That said though, we are aiming at graphics cards with TnL capabilities. That means GeForce1+ or ATI Radeon 7200+. Most likely we will not support cards without TnL.

I don't think a quest-for-life or go-to-hell scenario would work very well in Darkfall. We generally don't want to implement mechanics that take players away from playing their character for too long. Like for example jails, forced trips to hell, quest-for-life , or being able to capture other players. These things are too exploitable.

What happens if one of the richest, biggest clans wants to take over another smaller clan's city? They could set a bounty on the most prominent members of the other clan, and then get an assassins guild to assassinate these people. They will be out of the game for a while... (a few minutes to a whole hour maybe). While those players are out of the game, the clan attacks the city and could gain an easy victory. If this works well it would be a standard tactic in warfare. It would also be game-mechanics assisted greifing

How would you like to be sent to hell or in some other way not be able to help defend your city every time it is attacked, just because you are the leader, or a prominent member? This will probably be used as a tactic in clan vs clan warfare, but if you respawn in your city again (with some kind of penalty), at least you can help defend the city. Sending players to hell sounds like a good idea in theory, but in practice we think it will be too much hassle, and very exploitable. I know I would absolutely hate logging in to the game wanting to play for a little while, and then getting sent to hell and having to fight/quest myself out of it. And when I get back, my city is taken over by clan PrimeEvil...That would suck.

I definitely see the point that being assassinated should carry some penalty. But then again assassination is just killing, and dieing does carry a penalty.
As we have said before, we are leaning towards losing everything in when you die. But this isn't yet set in stone. The special thing about assassination is who gets killed, what price is costs, and the ability to kill anonymously. ( Or rather: one of your fake identities takes the blame). The frustration at having a price on ones head, then being killed by some non-existing identity should be bad enough without having to be sent to hell as well. About the fact the you can't control who picks up the bounty and who kills the person first. We haven't actually decided how the bounty system will work yet, but in theory you could get a highly organized assassins guild to kill a good number of the people you want dead, within a reasonable time limit, with or without a bounty.

alt-tabbing will be allowed, for the simple fact that if we disable it, someone is going to make a hack that enables it and then power gamers will get an advantage over everyone else, because they are the players most likely to download and use such a hack. With regard to kill-listings, message logs and things like that, they will be built into the client, so you shouldn't really need much in the way of "helper" programs. Since we will be keeping alt-tab enabled, we can't forbid you running other programs. But any type of detected exploits, cheating or client-hacking will result in a banned account.

Basically you can't build a city anywhere. There are designated areas where you can build cities. There will be neutral cities already built that are controlled by npcs, and a clan can claim them. There might also be places you can build from scratch, but that isn't decided yet. A city most probably be the only place a clan can build or extend a clan-headquarters. A city will also have some kind of defense, i.e. a city wall /castle, so you can defend it against attackers. So no, you won't be able to build a castle anywhere. Only a clan will be able to build city structures, and only in a city-area. Nothing is final yet, so this may change. But that is what we are aiming for at the moment.

Yes a city can be attacked at any time. A player cannot own a city, a clan can. And if your clan is only one person for some reason, then you are in trouble. Normally the one or more clans that own a city will be quite a few people. And game mechanics will make the takeover of a city a non-trivial thing that takes time. This makes it easier to alert the people that belong to the city, so that they come to the defense. And as Claus said, the honorable thing is to declare war and a time-limit to respond to that declaration. If you attack without warning or before the time-limit, then the attacking clan(s) could suffer penalties, political or otherwise. These are major issues for balancing in beta, so expect changes if something isn't working as it should.

Lone wolves can do fine in Darkfall. It's a big world (map will be posted soon). You obviously won't dominate, but you can do great as a robber/murder type character.

There will be no hiding of stash in holes

So, yes there will be components. They will burn, but not near as fast as in AC. There will be special hard to get components too, for the more potent spells. About spell research: Nothing is finalized yet.

It wont be near as hard to get that kinda stuff in Darkfall. Don't get me wrong - we will have uber cool stuff like GSA, but it will be relatively easy to replace.
* Lost your Black Platemail of Ownage? Check the INGAME tradeboard.
* Contact that dwarven smith that can make them in a couple of hours.
* Buy a regular Suberb Platemail from the shop.
* Check your guild arsenal and borrow a set. (More on guild arsenals later)
* Go scout on the borders of an enemy kingdom, and kill someone in a nice platemail.
etc.
I am not saying it won't be really depressing to loose your newly acquired artifact, but we are trying to avoid people picking up alcoholism just because they lost some gear in an online game.

Yes, a good smith can make magical weapons comparable to those found on monsters. We are trying to make trade skills actually usable.
Binded items: Not decided yet. Its game balance, and it will be decided when we know exactly how it will influence the game. However I agree with you that loosing it all on death is the best way to deal with it. It worked fine in UO. It could never have worked in AC, simply because there are no housing, and no banking to stock up on backup stash. Obviously you could use mules in AC, but it just isn't the same.

Just a couple of weeks ago I worked on the "Player Crafted Non Magical Items List". This is a list of all non magical items that players can make using different trade skills such as carpentry, tailoring, blacksmithing, etc. It includes chests, beds, thrones, carts to be pulled by horses, houses, castles, weapon racks... and many more. As a matter of fact - give me more ideas to non magical player made items we should have. List them up. Consider this a challenge! Oh, and include which materials are needed to make the given item

I had 93.7 hide in UO. I loved it. I had a macro that when I hit it I said Kal Ort Por (recall, or does my memory fail me?), then hid, and everyone thought I recalled - I was still there snickering and reading my explosion potions. Priceless. So yes, we will have all those skills in Darkfall. And Ill be there, in the shadows, ready to kill you myrd

Sneak skills, stealth skills, invisibility spells, silence spells, hide in shadows... its all in there

It means that guards (and probably even players) will attack you. You can fight them though, or try to sneak past them, yes.

Dynamic quests will be explained in the FAQ. However our random quest generator is one of the design issues we do not want to discuss at this point, simply because we are very satisfied with it, and think its one of our best selling points.

Yes, we have tons of quests and story stuff. Personally I am not a big fan of it, I am all about pvp and conquest, but the rest of the team here loves quests and background stories, puzzles etc, so expect allot of this.

You can eventually learn all schools: EXCEPT the elemental schools, they have clashing schools. So u gotta pick 2 elemental schools. Water and Fire don't mix, air and earth don't mix. We may make necro and spell singing (bard like spells) clashing too, but this is undecided atm. And you are getting warmer on the necromancy - some necro spells make u take an alignment hit, cause .. well some of those spells are just plain 3V1L

We are planning to implement a dynamic economy, yes. Our elves are tall because they spend all day reaching for fruit in trees.

You can swim in Darkfall, and Dive - we even have a few underwater dungeons and cities planned out. And flying is no biggie. We are flying around in the pre-alpha as we speak (if u study the screenshots carefully, you can see that some of them are taken from several feet up in the air

You will be able to pick from about 95% of the skills, and there is no limit to how many skills you can learn. The exact cost of learning skills is yet to be determined (obviously a game balance issue), but we expect to make skills cost money. Some skills will require you to solve quests, some will only be tough to you by NPCs in remote and hard to find places, etc. And the 5% skills you wont be able to learn is race specific skills, and prestige class skills. Ok I said too much already, don't be asking me about prestige classes please - I know we said no classes =P

If you ever played Warlords, a turn based strategy game from Australian SSG, they had a small editor that you could use to create your customized Clan shield. We are planning something along those lines... So yes, you can design your Clan shield, and yes, they will be represented on the official Clan clothes, banners and armor

Well point is all clans that own property can issue clan uniforms (complete with clan colors and symbols) to their NPCs and player members, so we sorta have this already...I understand your point about each race having a uniquely dressed army though, and yes, we do have this also. Each capital has their own guards, that kinda work like a race army I guess. But good idea about letting players join these guards as a prestige class. It will be considered.

Clothing and armor can be dyed yes. Clan symbols will also be represented on shields and armor.

In theory a single player could rule a city. However it would probably take 5 minutes before a clan came and tried to conquer his city though...Obviously if this single player was EXTREMELY wealthy, he could hire tons of NPC guards to guard his city so it became hard to conquer. He could possibly also hire a player clan of mercenaries to help him rule the city as well. Maybe he could even ally himself with his neighbouring cities/kingdoms, and have them come help defend if he was attacked...The possibilities are endless, if we can only get all this implemented correctly

Player-run clans owning kingdoms is one of our key features, yes.

Our orcs are called Orks cause they messed up the spelling when they applied to become a player race in Darkfall. Not our fault they cant spell

Yes, you may customize, and assign spells and skills to the keys or key combinations you desire.

We got them both. We got a toolbar with 10 slots (keys 0-9), and 10 different toolbars (alt+0-9). In addition, you can set shortcuts to just about anything in the game, like casting spells and performing skills. Pretty much like UO, were you can decide that alt+h is a heal spell. We also got a belt system, where you can have potions, torches, scrolls and weapons.

There will be no limits on how far a character can advance, however all skills stop at 100, so it sorta limit itself. And yes, a mage with 100 in each skill and spell can easily pick up sword. About components and research: Nothing is finalized yet. Your ideas has been noted though

We never said 1 character per account, we said 1 race per account. However we are starting to really like the idea about just 1 char period.

Maps are updated in game, and in real-time. Meaning the second a Kingdom is conquered, the shield changes to the new owners shield.

We have both skills and spells that cover this. Polymorph, disguise, change self, etc. Change your name, alignment, race...on the other hand we have skills and spells that counter those, so...

We have been discussing the possibility of destroying houses etc with huge siege engines, and at first we thought it sounded kinda neat. However it probably wont work too well. I would be really pissed if I woke up after a good night sleep, logged into Darkfall and found my House burned down while I was sleeping. This would probably make me quit the game in disgust (at least for a few days, hehe). So no, destroying houses and structures probably wont happen.

Dwarves WILL be allot better at smithing than any other race - they have access to some smithing techniques (skills) that others can't learn.

We are carefully trying to balance developing the actual game and building the site, with developing the game as top priority.

I can confirm that Ritual Magic is cast by several mages and ritualists working together. Yes, there will be chanting, candles and waving of arms involved, and it is one of the most powerful magical schools.

We are working on a load-balancing scheme, where the individual servers do not have a predetermined area to keep track of. The server software will make several servers balance the load if allot is going on in one place.

Personally I would rather have elves tall and skinny, than small and cuddly. Its something about that tall weird looking guy sneaking in the forest with a longbow aiming at me that scares me. I like being scared. Small cuddly elves don't scare me at all...

As already stated in our FAQ, we only allow you 1 race on each account. We haven't really thought much about how many actually characters you can have on an account though. There are strong points both for and against a 1 char limit on each account.

For:
Obviously having only 1 char means less griefers, cause you cant just create a char named Abcdefgh, be an ass to everyone, then make a new char once you are done being an ass.

Against:
Some people share accounts with their brother or sister, and they have 1 char each. This would be bad for them.

About trade skills: Please keep in mind that we have a totally open class system - meaning No classes. There is no problem in having a character that is both a PvP god, and also a great carpenter, making arrows and high quality bows when he needs a break from the fighting.

It is totally impossible to "gimp" your character in Darkfall. No rerolling cause you didn't know missile defense was useless, and spent 8 valuable skill points on it. No rerolling cause you are sick of playing a melee type character and want to try a mage instead. Here is how it works (and this is definitely inspired by UO: You start out and want to be good with a sword, so you use your sword to kill stuff. Then you pick up some more sword related skills along the way, such as disarming, parrying, critical strike, etc. Then you decide some magic to help you would be nice, so you pick up Lesser Magic and start casting minor spells such as magic missile, light, create food etc. You also need some trade skills, cause you are killing War Bears, and they drop some pretty neat hides that you have heard can make you nice leather armor. Wouldn't it be cool to make some War Bear Leather Armors and sell them? Just pick up Leather Crafting. No big deal. We are yet not 100% sure about how you pick up new skills, but it will probably be possible to buy most common skills from NPC trainers for in game money. Point is, you cant possibly screw up your character, so 1 character will be enough for whatever you want to do - unless you have a brother or sister that wants to share the account.

One race/server is what we have found best so far. It seemed to work pretty well for DAoC too, so it has kinda been tested already.

Yes, we plan to have a name filter in there. We don't wanna see those names either.

Oh btw its the combination of names that are unique, and not only the lastname or first name, so there could be me "Claus Grovdal", some guy named "Claus Roxxor" and a totally different guy named "Roxxor Grovdal".

-------------------------------------

Because maybe my brother wanted to be BrotherofClaus Grovdal, or a friend of Airius Droc wanted to play XX Droc etc. And if I named myself Marse to try to impersonate you.. well it wouldnt make too much difference, would it? I understand what you are saying tho... But this is most likely how its gonna be.

---------------------------------------------

Every player can pick ONE race on EACH server they want to play on. Race may be different from server to server. Every player has 5 characters on each server. All charcaters are of the same race. Every player picks a Family Name for ALL his characters, on each server. This name follows all his characters on this server.

For example, I would pick "Grovdal" as my family name, and then the names "Claus", "Roxxor" and "Soxxor". I would have the following characters on this server:

Claus Grovdal
Roxxor Grovdal
Soxxor Grovdal

Family Name may be different from server to server. Why? To prevent spying, griefing, etc. While at the same time not limiting players to only 1 player character on each server. I think its gonna work.

We will have all kinds of traps. Traps are just awesome. There are several different trap related skills, and a player that has them all can make some pretty nasty traps. I am talking about traps that when you open them, you get paralyzed, you become poisoned, a fireball blasts up in your face, and the trap summons a gargoyle to attack you. Expect those kind of combos on traps, so you better work that detect trap skill

NPC guards are both killable, lootable and hireable. Guilds that own cities will have to hire guards, and pay them for their services.

Most of the dev team played AC on Darktide (I still do, but haven't got much time for it lately), so we are well aware of most of the issues you talk about here. I don't know if you ever played UO, but we have a skill based system much like them, so you wont ever see the typical lvl 10 vs a lvl 60 mismatch happening in Darkfall. In AC a level 50 can wipe the floor with 200 lvl 1 newbies without loosing a single hit point. In Darkfall 3-4 newbies should be able to kill, or at least chase off the Darkfall veteran (unless the veteran has some mad pvp skillz). We want to make it more player skill, and less template/level dependant. You can help us out by playing the pre-alpha, and help us get that balance just right.

As for wielding 2 weapons: yes its in there, and yes then you loose the benefit of a shield.

Trade skills/player made items: We got tons of them - real useful ones too.

Some of your other suggestions we cant really comment on right now... it's a bit early. The pre-alpha is out soon, and we want to get as many of you guys posting here on our boards into it as possible - then we can start discussing the rest of your ideas

Ok an estimate of the world size: Absolutely huge!
Dungeons: No idea at this time. As many as we can get in there.

We could easily make the world round. It is not a problem from a technical point of view. However, we plan on keep expanding the world long after release, and with a round world, we *may* end up without any space for our expansions...So for now.. its flat, simply because we don't want to limit ourselves in anyway.

Everything mentioned in this thread are being considered by us, and some of it (like cutting down/planting trees) will make it in for sure. The rest we are still considering. Deformating the terrain is one of Kjetils little pet projects... who knows.. maybe?

Deux EX had rats and pigeons that would run away from you if you got too close.. it was really cool. We plan on having something like this in the game too. We file it under "ambience"

We will have some sort of rune system like UO, because its a very good idea - also very logical (in a world full of magic, how long would it take before the mages start researching travel spells?) <--- this is how we approach the design of spells in Darkfall: What would the magic users NEED researched? Then we apply game balancing issues --> recalling will take some time.. probably in the 6-15 sec range - and they can be interrupted by attack.

What we are looking at, is a rune system like UO (go to a place, cast a spell that marks a rune at this very location, you can now teleport here by casting a teleport spell on this exact rune).

However:
- runes will be rare and expensive
- casting Mark on a rune will take 10-12 minutes
- moving while casting Mark will break the spell
- areas can be protected from Marking runes
- casting teleportation on a rune takes 40-50 seconds
- the rune has to be in your backpack when teleporting

So to the "why".

Why will runes be rare and expensive? Because we don't want too many players with runes to everywhere in the world. At least it should be hard to get a huge set, and a valuable property so other players may pay you for teleporting them places.

Why so long to mark a rune? Because we don't want attackers running into a city, mark a rune real quick, then teleport away so everyone in their clan can teleport in later. They will die before they have marked the rune
Why can areas be protected from mark? Because if you want to protect your city from Marking magic, you can. Expensive, but you can. Nothing will prevent an enemy from Marking a rune 5 minutes away from your city, but at least you know that noone will appear out of thin air in your castle.

Why will casting teleportation take 40-50 seconds? Because we don't want people escaping death too easily.

Why does the rune have to be in my backpack? So you cant have your bankbox full of runes, and never risk loosing them. Using a rune should be risky (since it may be looted when you die), and your enemies should have a chance at taking the rune that teleports you into their town square from you.

Like I said, nothing is final. But this post should tell you a little bit about what we are considering, and our main concerns with teleportation.

There will be some kind of delay when you log. We don't like people logging out of danger either. Implementing this is easy though, and changing it somewhat is easy too, so this is something we can play test some...

All races can ride horses. In addition all races have 1 special mount each. Alfar has spiders...

We will have NPC hirelings in Darkfall, yes. However getting them fairly intelligent is a really hard task, so we cant promise armies of NPCs under your control, scaling walls and using siege weapons. Actually there is a 99% chance they wont be very clever at all. First hirelings in the game will probably just follow you around, and attack those targets you attack. Then we will try to add more options and finesse to them, but don't expect too much...

About polygons: Yes we have a fairly good idea about how many polygons we can handle on the screen at once, and how many polygons each character will be made up of.

Don't expect having 50 NPCs in your army. Having 3-4 NPC warriors walking around protecting you is probably closer to what we can allow.

To be honest, I don't care much for emotes myself. However we are serious about giving the players what the players want, so if you keep asking for it, you are gonna get it. If we can get our animation system as good as we want, it will be a five minute scripting job to add a new emote...

Ok I think I said this in another post, but ill say it again:
Our goal is to make Darkfall MORE FUN, LESS WORK
By that we mean less leveling (no levels in Darkfall), less buffing (well you can buff if you want to, but it wont be like in AC were buffs mean everything + they last a whole lot longer in Darkfall). This is our plan anyways. Its gonna take allot of play testing to balance all this and to get it right. About learning spells: All low level spells will be available in shops. Some mid level ones will too. Some of the more powerful spells you will have to quest for.

Basically (hope this doesn't scare you off Drotryx) magic is important. But not necessarily in the form of a mage. A dwarf for instance, is great at smithing, and can make himself some pretty nice magical armor or weapons, that counter or even mimic some of the spells cast by mages.
Another important thing is obviously that we don't have any traditional classes in Darkfall, so you don't have to reroll if you find that you need some spells to be more successful - just go out and learn some spells, and practice your casting skills.

We have most traditional fantasy monsters, like goblins, dragons, ogres, trolls, etc. In addition Bjorn Tore has designed tons of new and exciting monsters, that will kill you in a new way. And yes: We have a "tame animal/tame monster" skill. It works in the same way as having NPC hirelings.

We have a spawn system like this designed. In addition to the types you mention, we also have civilization builders (when x goblins meet up, they start setting up a village), and special quest-type spawns like a really strong Wolfman type NPC that starts attracting wolves as followers, and wreck havoc in the countryside. (goblins and wolfman are examples). If you guys got ideas on special spawns like the wolfman, let us know.. we are compiling a list of specials. Please keep in mind that any special features you give the special monsters should be reusable on other monsters, and easy to combine with other special features to create a totally different type of special monster.

The reason we are considering 1 char only is basically because we want to make the game harder for griefers. Your idea might work fine though, allowing family members to play, and at the same time minimizing the risk for typical "griefers for a day" players. It will definitely be considered.

Ok this is a rather important question:

Hairstyles: No problem, we will have them.

Tattoos: Some races, like the Mahirim and Orks use tattoos and war paint as a form of magical enhancement (check the race descs when they are up). However we cant let the players create their own, simply because of the extra texture load this would generate...and there is always the possible griefers tattooing "scr3w j00 n00b" on their back (or worse).. that's something we really don't want. So, there will be some tattoos and war paint, but they will all be premade by us.

Inventory isn't implemented yet, but we will be going for a more UOish system, with floating objects (so no inventory slots).

In a PvP game, recalling instantly away from a fight really should not be an option. Although this has to be tested extensively, casting a recall spell should take some time (10+ secs), you would have to stand completely still, and it should be interrupted if you are attacked. We will most likely make it pretty costly to recall (both mana and reags), and it will be extremely costly to bind to a spot. Again: all this will be tested really well, and it will be perfect.

Reagents are needed for many reasons:

1) For character balance - it is hardly fair that a melee type player needs armor, weapons, shields, arrows that will wear out and needs replacement while the mage type player can shoot fireballs all day without ever having to swing by the town.

2) World Economy 1 - if you need reagents, you need in game cash. Meaning: In game money is more important to players.

3) World Economy 2 - you need reagents, so the farmer growing reagents and selling them at the market is useful to you.

4) For game balance 1 - you need reagents, so you should keep an eye on how many reagents you have - as the archer type has to watch her arrows and the melee guy has to look for great equipment.

5) For game balance 2 - if we add an incredibly powerful spell, it takes an incredibly reagent to cast it

Etc.. I am sure you all agree reagents are useful, huh? We would never add something to the game, or take something out without considering it really really carefully. I guess you just have to trust us on this one.

We will have in game messaging. Half of the point of being in a Massive *Multiplayer* Online Role Playing Game is being able to socialize with other people.
And mock them after you beat them in a fight.

We will not have different languages for different races. While it may be realistic with different languages, it is not very realistic to rely on people not to communicate outside of the game. The only thing a language barrier is going to do is give power gamers an edge over everyone that doesn't use 3rd-party chat programs (i.e. irc) for communication. Inter-racial talk will be allowed through tells and clan/party chat. Not sure about public talk, though it is most likely. People like the ability to taunt each other...

Chat and tells are definitely in the game. However, for you diehard hardcore role-players... we do listen, and since you don't seem to like chats and tells, we will make you a deal:
There will be an option to turn off chats and tells in game. That way, if you feel it kills the immersion, you can turn it all off, and go old school.

In a perfect world, we could take away chat channels altogether, so that players have to run around and meet the people and friends they want to talk to face to face. However, hardcore players, and large clans that pre-exist Darkfall, will quickly use IRC, ICQ, MSN, Roger Wilco and whatnot to communicate with their friends and clan members. Then we would end up with another unfair advantage for the hardcore players, and the ones loosing out would be the casual gamers and newbies. We don't want that. We want to try and level the playing field as much as we can, but still make an awesome game for both the casual players and the seasoned hardcore players. I think we have the solution, but only testing will reveal if we got it just right.

I am not a big fan of unlimited chatting either. Clan chat is definitely in, sub-division chat is in, and group chat is in. We have a pretty neat looking chat system mapped out... I think I mentioned it to Carver in IRC yesterday. Free "Zone" and "dungeon" chats (as seen in EQ, AO and DaoC) are not going to make it in though, as we feel it kills allot of the immersion, and we think it takes away more game play than it adds.

Zak is right. Our "Symbol Editor" (we make awesome tool names huh?) allows several customization options, like rotating symbols, mirroring them, grouping several symbols together, and changing colors. o yea, to a certain extent, you can make your own clan symbols.

Well about encumbrance, that's one of the departments we will totally disregard realism. So you can carry around all kinds of junk in your backpack. There will be a limit though (based on str and some skills + race.. dwarves and Orks aren't too bothered with encumbrance), but it wont be a realistic limit - it will be a limit that's good for game play, without making it realistically dull.

Again, I cant say too much about how our advancement system works. However I can make a brief statement:
"Everyone on the Darkfall development team absolutely and totally HATE the need for power-leveling to compete in PvP."
There you go. I really cant see why some guy that spent 200 hours killing monsters while I spent 200 hours fighting other players, should be able to kill me with 1 spell, or 1 hit with his axe. It doesn't make sense. I think that's pretty dumb actually.

1) It WILL be hard to have 100 in all skills

2) Having 100 in all skills doesn't necessarily mean you are un-killable by other players. Actual player skill (the skill of the guy controlling your character) will have allot to say. So will numbers. A group of 3-4 newbies may be able to kill a Uber guy with 100 in all skills, especially if the Uber guy has no pvp practice, and the newbs are really good at PvP.

Don't get me wrong. Actually having 100 in all skills will help allot, but it wont be totally necessarily, like in other MMORPGs. Darkfall is No levels - More player skill. In fact Darkfall is more like a cross between UO and Quake than it is a EQ/AC/DAC/AO.

Personally I think there should at least be a % chance that a spell can be interrupted.. maybe even skill based, were a caster has a skill called Concentration, and the melee have a skill called Interrupt Spell (or something). Chance of interrupting a spell would then be something like:
Concentration skill minus Interrupt Spell skill (+/- randomness) = chance of interrupt.
I dunno I just like it.. but then again I always liked playing melee better than playing mage, and at least having a small chance to stop that lvl 7 war spell is better than 0.

You will be fine both in PvP and PvM without buffs in Darkfall. Buffs will give you an edge though. Just to drop a little hint about what kind of buffs you can expect in Darkfall:

In UO they had this magic reflect spell that you cast on yourself. It would reflect an offensive spell cast on you back at the attacker. It had no duration. You could have it on for hours, but as soon as someone cast a spell on you, it reflected, and was gone. I loved that spell, and the duration. Expect quite a few like that in Darkfall. Like.. a spell that gives you, say 30 extra max hit points. They are there till you loose them, then they are gone for good. No duration. They stay till they are lost, like the UO reflect spell. Or triggered spells, such as a damage shield that will damage everyone that attack you with a melee range weapon. Once you are attacked, it has a duration of, say 20 secs, then its gone. This doesn't mean we wont have the standard duration buffs though, we have tons of those too.. we are just trying to add as many types of spells and skills as possible, so everyone can find a personal favourite set of spells and skills.

The Capitols cant be conquered, and they will be full of guards - these guards can be killed though. New players spawn in the Capitols, and they should be relatively safe there.

Yes you can cast spells and perform melee attacks while running. Yes you will then take a small penalty to your skills since you are moving, also a penalty to your run skill (cant run like Carl Lewis while casting a fireball). This penalty can be reduced through skills such as...Run-casting skills.

You all seem to forget that we do not have classes in Darkfall, so a melee type guy chasing a mage type guy would probably mean the melee type guy being sick of running after the mage, and casting paralyze on him, then whacking him with his axe. When we say that you may run while casting, we don't mean run at 100% speed.. more like run at 10% speed when casting.. possibly 25% run speed if you happen to have some neat runcasting skill. And all this will be tested EXTENSIVELY, so don't stay up at night worrying too much.

Yes, you get in game titles. Pretty nice ones too Like over your head:

Lord Mathrim [Red Empire]

When identified:

Lord Mathrim of the Red Empire Clan. High Warlock of Red Empire. The Bane of Clan Slitherin. Six times Grand Master, and slayer of Grooxith The Dragon.
Now you figure out what all that means.

Bad language policy is definitely something that a potential publisher will want to have some influence on, so it is not entirely up to Razorwax. Personally I swear quite allot, and I seriously cant see the problem with it. Razorwax is a norwegian company, and in norway we have no filtering of cussing on TV, Radio, movies, magazines or anything, so basically we don't give a f*** if someone cusses. Seriously though: We will most definitely have a bad language filter that can be turned on/off by each individual player. And we really like Lord Ciinders idea about having a client side l33t sp34k filter that you can edit as you please.
R0xx0r: 0WN3D YOU N00B!
You hear: (whatever u wanna hear)
eg:
R0xx0r: Kiss me I am elite!

How about this:
When wandering band of goblin meet other band of goblins --> 10% chance of spawning named goblin hero.
If spawned goblin hero --> 10% chance of goblins building a village every 60 minutes unattacked.
If goblin village --> spawn more and tougher goblins, with better loot.

It is a bit too early to discuss the AI right now, as that is one of the things that has yet to be implemented and tested. The design on paper is aiming extremely high, so if we can just get half of that in, it will be really awesome. Kidnapping players is definitely out though, as it would truly suck to be the kidnapped one, especially if noone comes to rescue you.

Max hit points has not been determined yet, but we will keep it rather low and somewhat realistic. Armor will definitely mean allot. Expect armor to reduce both melee and ranged weapons damage, but also to reduce the damage of spells. One-hit kills is also something we want to avoid, but it is hard to balance all this. The combat system is still a long way from being fully implemented, but as soon as we have it up and working, we will start adjusting values to get it as balanced as possible before release.

Magic is very important in Darkfall, but since everyone can pretty much learn any skills or spells they want, this should balance itself out. An Ork with a 2-hand axe vs. a mage in his underpants will probably mean that the Ork walks off with a brand new pair of underpants though.

Text above the heads is kinda cool, but unfortunately it doesn't work very well in 1st person view. We have already tested it, and it is real confusing having to run after someone, or turn around when they run past you, just cause you didn't finish reading what they just said

When it comes to balancing stuff, we kinda cheated by making it a totally classless system. This means that if some skill or spell is overpowered, or underpowered for that matter, then its bad, but its not totally screwing up the game. Why? Cause anyone can learn this skill or spell, and this evens things out a bit. We wont have complaints from everyone playing mages that magic is too weak, or melees that maces don't do enough damage, or from everyone that bows are too powerful. Well I guess dreaming about 0 complaints is kinda naive...Anyways, we are working really hard to try and get everything balanced, and you guys will help us test it all, and find out what needs changing, so it will actually be YOUR fault if something is messed up.

At the start of the game, most kingdoms are run by NPCs, yes. The ones that aren't controlled by NPCs are mostly undeveloped wilderness kingdoms (that you can claim and start building).

Yes we have pets in Darkfall. Most notably is probably our Necromancer skills and spells that allow you to raise an army (yes, an army) of skeletons and other undead creatures to wreck havoc with.

Yes, you can tame most animals and SOME monsters in Darkfall. Yes, you can teach them some pretty neat stuff, including guarding you. Summoned monsters are automatically tame when they appear. No, a dragon cant be fooled into sitting around all day, guarding a city. She would get bored pretty fast, and destroy the city instead.. you know, just for fun. Dragons cant be trusted.

Well...in games such as Asherons Call, Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, there are hundreds of cool sites to check out. However, I have noticed that people tend to explore less in these games than in, say Ultima Online. I can only speculate, and I think that too many players get caught up in the leveling threadmill fast, and are afraid to be out leveled, so they spend 95% of their in game time leveling, and less time exploring. Like UO, we have no levels in Darkfall, so I suspect more players will take the time to go out and explore. And don't be afraid, we have plenty of exciting places to check out (some hints are dropped in the race descs).

We went with one single currency. And in our most creative moment, we named it "gold". So say a Battle Axe, can be cost "120 gold" in a shop. We may change it before release, and add more currencies, racial currencies, find a better name or whatever, but don't count on it.

We hope to have something for everyone here actually, but we think that most of our players will be people that like the idea about living in a fantasy world that the players themselves get to own and rule as they see fit. We are trying to put as few game restrictions as possible into Darkfall, and let the players themselves decide how they want the political map to look like. We are also hoping to limit the random PKing, as you point out, and we hope that we can make most of the PVP come from clans fighting other clans over actual in game resources, territories and kingdoms. Deja Vu.. I think I just wrote this in the general forum.. I am getting tired.. should head home to bed soon.

The way this could work:
When you go below 0 hit points, you are mortally wounded.
If the final blow put you below say -10 hit points, you die instantly - no mortally wounded state.
When mortally wounded you fall to the ground, and can not move, heal, speak or cast spells.
You stay in this state for 10 seconds, loosing 1 hp/sec, unless a friend heal you back to life, or the monster or enemy player continues to attack you until you go below -10 hp.
If no healing or attacks occur, you keep loosing 1 hp/sec till you go below -10. When below -10 you die.
A monster or enemy player can loot you when you are mortally wounded - they do not have to finish you off before they can loot.
(Dwarves and Orks are tougher than other races, so maybe they should stay mortally wounded a little bit longer than others.. say they stay mortally wounded till they are at -15).
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Anyways, this is in no way final, but I certainly like it. It would obviously need some testing and balancing, but I think it adds a bit of extra strategy, cooperation, and even a little bit of role-playing may happen in these situations. All in all, not a bad idea

I think AC handles death fairly well:
When you die in pvp, you become "white", and can not attack other players, or be attacked for a few minutes. This gives you enough time to clear out of the area if your llifestone/spawn point is camped by other players out to kill you again.
We will probably do something similar to AC

We are planning to make it so that you keep all your base gear (the stuff you spawn with the very first time you enter Darkfall - basic armor, basic weapons, basic scrolls and potions, etc) for xx hours, no matter how many times you die. To prevent exploiting, you will still loose all other gear given to you, bought, stolen or looted during this timeframe (typical exploit would be your buddies giving you uber stuff so you could pvp completely safe from loosing anything for xx hours. We don't want that).

You will not be able to walk through other players. Blocking a doorway will be a viable PvP tactic. However: We have both skills and several spells for pushing players away, so again it all boils down to actual player skill. Scenario:

You play an Ork. You are in a dungeon. Two Alfar players comes along and attacks you. You run away. The sneaky little buggers have a friend blocking the hallway ahead of you. Orks have a head ramming attack, you lower your head, ram the little Alfar in the hallway, and send him screaming into the wall. Hallway is now clear. You get away.

Like I have said before, we want as few limits placed by the designers in the game as possible. So, a clan can have members of multiple races if they want to. About structures.. they will probably follow the race of the clan leader. So if she is human, all structures built by her clan is in human design. I honestly have to admit that this is something we haven't even thought about yet though =) Obviously, some races wont mix well. You could form a clan and have members from all races in it. You could probably scare all other clans around you into not going to war with you over this. However, you would never get to hire any NPC guards or NPC vendors (alfar NPCs wont like the goodies in the clan/elven NPCs wont like the baddies in the clan, etc)... So, if you are hellbent on allowing all sorts into your clan... best of luck! Point is.. we don't wanna make any silly rules.. the game makes the rules for us by reacting in a logical and rational way. This means that very little is impossible in Darkfall, but allot of things will be extremely hard even though it is possible.

We have target only spells, such as casting heal on a specific person or item, we have group spells, such as casting invisibility on everyone in your group of adventurers, and we have area spells such as Fireball. If you shoot a fireball into a group of players/monsters fighting, you will damage your own friends if they are within the area of effect of the fireball.

Kingdoms are blocks of land, varying greatly in size and shape, much like territories in board games such as Risk and Axis & Allies, with random resources. Resources can be stuff like:
Mines (ranging from Iron to typical fantasy ones such as "Adamantium" mines), Grassland (farms), Forest area w/timbermill (wood), Harbour (fish & trade), Lake (fish), Mountain (stone), etc.
The kingdoms close to a race capital will be pretty developed, with a city and maybe a couple of villages and mines (resources) already. Kingdoms in the wilderness will be allot less developed, and some will only have a small village, and just sites were mines/mills/farms etc can be constructed. There will probably be quite allot of kingdoms with nothing - everything has to be built from scratch.
All kingdoms can be conquered, claimed and owned by player clans (except the capital of each race - we need a relatively safe area for new players to spawn) - and when a clan owns a kingdom, they can build anything they want, and destroy whatever they don't want. We will probably NOT allow anyone to destroy anything in a kingdom until they own the kingdom. This is to limit potential griefing. But obviously a clan can conquer a kingdom from another clan, burn everything, and then leave the kingdom laughing -> this is still harder than just waiting till someone is logged out, and then burn their house down though. We are still unsure how many kingdoms we can put in there before release, but we are aiming for A LOT.

Very little in Darkfall is hardcoded, so in most cases, it is just a matter of switching numbers around. Allowing completely free razing of building is a matter of setting global house conditions to e.g. "Razing: Always", or "Razing: On Sundays Only", or "Razing: If Sweden ever takes more gold medals than Norway in the winter olympics (in other words never)", etc. ...it is all a part of our evil plan to make the best MMORPG ever! Muhaha!

Agreed, and we have various diseases and curses in the game already.

A Good Ork killing a Good Human, makes the Ork even gooder in the eyes of the Orks.
A Good Ork killing a Evil Human, also makes the Ork even gooder in the eyes of the Orks.
An Ork, if he is good, evil or neutral, will always look evil to a human.
Alignment is race specific, but some races share alignment to a certain extent, such as dwarves, humans and elves.
Well... an evil elf will look evil to a human. A good elf will look neutral to a dwarf (dwarves only tolerate elves, they don't love them).

Well, you don't pick an alignment when you first create your character. It is not a pull down menu that says "evil, good or neutral". You start out as a neutral player. If you do evil stuff, you become evil, and if you do good stuff, you become good. Alignment is not a state of mind, its a result of actions.

Well call me crazy, but I always found it kinda weird when a rat dropped a chainmail armor, or a mud golem gave you a great bow. Or how about a gem on a wasp, or a longsword on a bear? Our loot system will be something completely different, and you will know what to kill to get this and that.

In Darkfall - If you kill a lizardman wearing leather armor, a longsword and a shield, then you will find these things on him when you loot him.

Guards will wear what they are given by the clan owning the kingdom they are protecting. So a rich clan would probably outfit their NPC guards with platemail, while a poor clan may only afford cheap leather. Guards also come with varying skills and AI, so a rich clan may afford to hire master guards, with great combat AI, while a poor clan may only afford weak guards, that are somewhat poor at fighting, and fight like freshmen (low AI). I think you will enjoy this little feature.

If a clan officially declares another clan war, and gives the other clan a reasonable time to prepare, the attacking clan can be regarded as honorable. I believe we will see all sorts of clans in Darkfall. Some will just plain out attack without any kind of warning (maybe for a city, for a resource, for fun, who knows), while others will choose a more honorable way, and declare a war 24 hours in advance, before they attack. Since there will be so many clans and alliances in Darkfall, I predict that honorable clans may get less trouble with other clans, since they aren't just flat out attacking anyone without declaring it first. While the more chaotic clans that doesn't bother to declare anyone war before they attack, may find themselves at war with all their neighbouring clans pretty fast. Other clans may find the chaotic clans.. well untrustworthy, and decide to ally against them to wipe them out. I am not saying that the chaotic clans cant be successful, just that it will be very interesting to see how it will all work out.

Cant say too much about how Clan wars will work just yet I am afraid. But yea, a Clan can declare war on any Clan, and they can set a time (eg. 2 hrs, 5 hrs, 10 hrs, etc) to when the war is in effect. A honorable Clan will give their enemies reasonable time to prepare, while the Stinkin' Bastards Clan will only give a 5 minute warning. We will probably set the honorable preparation time to 4 hours or so. Anything less, and the Clan that declared war takes a small alignment penalty.

The prestige classes are something you have an option of becoming, after certain requirements have been met. The requirements may be completing a certain quest, or having a certain level of fame or proficiency. We have a few other ideas too, and are looking for input on what would be cool requirements (except for the obvious skill-lvl X ..) There wouldn't be much prestige in prestige-classes if you could just select them from the beginning.

Clans can own cities, kingdoms and resources. Clans get income from taxing players living in their kingdom. Clans can allow anyone to live in their kingdom: Other Clans (clans that are mercenaries, smiths, tradesmen - or Clans that simply don't want to get too involved in warfare, conquest and politics), or even solo players, not in any Clan. The Clan that owns the kingdom will provide its inhabitants (both NPCs and players) with basic protection and a healthy range of shops and services. Kingdoms that does not supply their inhabitants with decent protection and services, will quickly see their inhabitants move to other kingdoms. Less inhabitants = less tax income = lesser riches and chances for success for the ruling Clan. Some rogue Clans will definitely kill everyone they see, and not allow anyone not in their Clan to live in their kingdom. I predict these Clans will quickly finding themselves struggling, unless they can make more money by looting and pillaging, than they make from trade with other Clans and a good tax income from their inhabitants (this is quite hard though, but possible in theory - we aim at making almost anything possible in theory in Darkfall, since we want the players to shape their own world). I hope this answered your questions, and maybe shed some light on how the ownership dynamics work in Darkfall.

Well, if he builds his house in no mans land, outside of any clan-owned territory, then he is taking a risk. Most probably, houses in unclaimed lands will be able to be burned to the ground. Sooner or later most of the land is going to be claimed buy clans, and then it depends on the clan that owns the land. *But* we might limit the burn-switch to a certain radius around the cities, since if you really want protection, you should stay close to a city.

We will have banks, and IF we make houses pick able, we will have a few secure chests in the houses with limited space. It really is all up to you guys once you get to playtest it yourself...

Housing is a big thing for us. You can expect more information about it in the FAQ within short. But yes, you can lock the door. You can store items there, and you can hire guards to guard it. You can even set out traps. About lockpicking: Still undecided. We are leaning towards no, but we may make it pickable, and have (limited) secure non-pickable chests inside the houses instead, to make things a little more interesting.

This is a pretty common bug for most 3D graphics games, and we are obviously hoping that we wont have it in Darkfall. Of course I cant guarantee that Darkfall wont have bugs (in fact, I can probably guarantee that we will have bugs), but rest assured that we will always do our best to fix bugs as fast as possible. As a part of our evil Take-Over-The-World plan, almost nothing in Darkfall is hardcoded, so we can fix most balancing issues and bugs faster than you can say "RAZORWAX SUX!"

No, your armor wont rust if you swim in water. Its one of those things that would probably be more annoying than cool over time, so we decided that it wasn't worth having in the game...swimming in acid on the other hand...

Displaying numbers over the mobs and players when they get hit, does not cause lag. We will probably do it, but it hasn't been implemented yet. And yes, you can toggle just about anything on/off in the chat window.

The way it is right now, is that you pick a first name and a last name for your first character. Then when you make a new character, you pick a new first name, but the last name sticks. Last names are kept locked to limit griefing. This may change though.

Stats, skills and spells in Darkfall raise when being used. So if you use your sword all day to kill monsters, chances are your sword skill will raise. Sword is related to STR and DEX, so there is a small chance that these stats may raise too. If you go around shooting monsters or players with the spell Fireball, chances are that you get better at casting the Fireball spell. Improving a spell may give you stuff like doing more damage, improved duration, improved range, etc. Most wizard spells are related to INT, so casting wizard spells may improve your INT. Clerical spells are related to WIS. All skills and spells can be raised from 1 to 100.

Darkfall has deep rivers and oceans you can swim in, complete with underwater dungeons and cities. Spells and skills such as Swimming, Diving, Water Breathing, Polymorph (into a fish), Free Action, etc will help you on your underwater adventures. We have considered making an underwater player race, but that is not decided yet.

Killing monsters will be very important in Darkfall. To make magical items, you need components. Most of these components are monster parts. An example: (I am just making things up as an example) To give an armor a +5 resistance vs fire based attacks, you need lets say "a red dragon scale". This component is imbued into the armor to give it a +5 vs fire. To make say a "ring of invisibility", you need "The heart of a stalker", and "a goblin ear". etc. So killing monsters will be very important. Not for xp, but for components to make magical stuff, or for components you can sell for nice $$$ to makers of magical stuff. So in a sense, you could say that monsters are resources much in the same way as iron and wood. Darkfall isn't JUST about pvp, we got all the traditional MMORPG content (and then some) as well. Otherwise we would just be making a Quake clone, wouldn't we?

As for whether he get's a second chance or not: That is entirely up to the person that puts out the bounty. If a clan/person REALLY don't like a specific person, they can have a "standing" bounty on that person. In practice that means that they pay for each kill of that person as long as the bounty stands. Or they can choose to remove the bounty once the first kill has been commenced. What it all boils down to, is that these are decisions that is up to you, the players, to make.

We have several minigames/ingame games planned, including gambling and casino-like stuff. Its pretty low on our priorities list right now though, but definitely something we want in there.

Well actually we do have an attribute named "Noisiness" in the game. It is an attribute much like STR, DEX, HP, MANA etc. So you figure out who is the most noisy

Yes, we will have both male and female characters in Darkfall. There wont be any difference between male and female, other than the character model.

No, you don't have to research clans on external web sites, because Darkfall has built-in clan web sites, that interested players can check out, read the clans charter, rules, goals, mission statement, other information, whatever, and find out if they want to join or not.

Yes, we do indeed support this. A Clan leader can set up sub-divisions of players within the Clan, and appoint one or more leaders to each sub-division. They may even be given names, much like what you described in your example:

Clan name:
Silverlords

Sub-divisions:
Silverlords - Griffon Knights
Silverlords - Faithbringers
etc

Yes we will have more than one server, but we will probably not have servers with different rules (such as a role-playing server, or a hardcore permadeath server). At least not the first few months after release.

Absolutely. The sun comes up in the morning, and goes down in the evening just like in real life. The exact time cycle is not set yet, but the current total night/day cycle is about 4 hours long.

Well we have tons of mez-like stuff in Darkfall: Sleep, Paralyze, Hold Person, Entagle, Root, etc. But we will make sure it is balanced. Most of these spells are expensive to cast, they have long casting time, they break if target takes damage, etc. Not to mention reflect-type protection, that reflects spells like this back at the caster, so the caster has to cast some minor spell at you first, just to make sure. This should give the melee type players time to close in on the fragile-robe-wearing-guy. Rest assured that balancing skills and spells is one of our prime concerns.

Don't take my word for it - go read the pre-alpha report on Darkfall Stratics, or talk to the mods here on our boards (they are all testers, and have logged in and played the game). I would be the first to admit that we should be updating the site more often, upload screenshots, do more interviews, have open beta testings and whatnot. But obviously we aren't doing a very good job at posting new stuff. One reason is that we do not have a PR department - hell, we don't even have one single PR guy. We are just a small group of programmers, artists and designers, trying to compete with development teams 10 times the size of ours.

The absolute TOP priority at Razorwax is shipping the game. And if that means we have to sacrifice updating the site more often, then so be it. Trust me when I say we are all working as hard as we can on the game. Now about having a publisher. No, we don't have a publisher for Darkfall. And luckily we don't need one either. We could definitely use more funding so we could hire more people (including a PR/Community guy), but since it hasn't happened yet, we will have to do without. It is NOT a make or break for Darkfall if we have a publisher or not. It would certainly help, but it doesn't kill either Razorwax or Darkfall.

The Darkfall Community is simply amazing. We are extremely grateful for all the support we get from you guys. The discussions here on our boards, the affiliate sites, the fan sites... it is simply amazing, and it makes it allot more fun to be slaving away on this game of ours. But please don't let Darkfall become your entire life. And please don't sit around pressing refresh on our pages waiting for new updates. If you find yourself frustrated with the lack of updates, don't take it out on us, the community or the game. Take a Darkfall/Razorwax break for a couple of weeks. Play other games, Go to the movies with your girlfriend/boyfriend - just do something else.

Darkfall will happen, and we will make it a great game, taking the time needed to make it great. But we don't want to be responsible for any of you getting frustrated with the lack of updates. So pretty please, with sugar on top: If you are frustrated waiting for Darkfall updates, take a break from the Darkfall Community.

Extremely hard to answer this question - at least so it makes any sense without you guys worrying yourself dead about the actual speed of Darkfall. This message is a minefield, but I'll have a go anyway, because I am fearless! Currently Darkfall Pre-Alpha is about the same speed as Battlefield 1942/Counterstrike, but we are tweaking this on a day to day basis, and testing different options. Someone with a Haste spell, a Run Like Wind spell, a high Run skill + high Sprint skill is pretty damned fast though, but all movement buffs are currently canceled out as soon as you attack someone, or are attacked - for obvious balancing issues. Darkfall will never be as fast as Q3 or UT2003.

Item degeneration is in the game, and so is various skills to repair the items. The reason for this, is that it is very healthy for the game economy, and promotes the need for characters with trade skills in clans. Personally I hate fixing items, so I'll make sure it isn't extremely boring and time consuming, but instead a nice little feature that adds to the whole Darkfall experience ;)

We hope to have most skills/spells and world economics balanced straight out of the box, but we all know that noone has been able to do this yet, so chances are we might have some problems too.

The way it works right now (in the Alpha version) is that you have a list of spells and skills on a menu bar. If you click Lightning Bolt, then this is the spell you have ready. Now all you have to do is aim, and press the left mouse button, and a deadly lightning bolt is released at your victim. Obviously you can configure the setup as you want, so if you are more comfortable with having the "fire spell" button assigned to another key, you can do that. The left mouse button is by default set to "target object/monster/player". So if you target your friend and press the left mouse button, he is set as target. Now you can choose the healing spell, and press the right mouse button to heal your friend. Keep clicking the right mouse button, and you heal him again. Now you probably wonder why you need a button to pick target, when the lightning bolt example clearly showed that you can just aim and fire without setting a target. The answer is that sure, you can choose healing and aim at your friend, but if he moves, or another player or monster comes in the way, you will heal them instead of him. Targeting is therefore a safer way to cast some spells. Targeting is also required for some spells and skills. Pretty straightforward in other words. We are pretty happy with this setup, and this is probably what we will use for the full version of Darkfall.

There is no hardcap on clan size. However - There is a cap on how many people (and NPCs) that can bind in each individual clan city. Meaning that the really big clans may need several cities (clan stones) to support their members with a place to bind. This will be explained in detail soon.

Yea. We plan to make anyone picking up the skill "Thrown Weapon" wear silly multicolored hats, and wear small shoes with tiny bells on them. They will be referred to as "jokers". No seriously.. if you plan to make Thrown Weapons your attack skill of choice, you wont dish out as much damage as the guy going for double-bladed war axe, but you can use your weapon from a distance, and if you are good at playing, you may even be able to beat the heavy melee guy. So in short: Thrown Weapons WONT be the best choice of attacking, but it will work, and it wont be a joke...Nothing we implement will be a joke, or "suck". If so, then we wouldn't implement it you know

Healing Skill (bandages)
Healing Spells
Healing Potions
Healing Herbs

A trophy is something u take off a fallen enemy. Like, you chop him/her up, and take an ear or a skull or whatever...

Nerfs will happen. Saying it wont, is lying. However, Darkfall has no traditional classes, so if we nerf something, the risk of us totally screwing up your character is pretty low. Darkfall has no levels either, so you don't risk your level 120 character that you spent two years leveling being completely useless just because we decided that one of your favourite skills was unbalanced. Lets try an example:

You have played a fighter-type character in Darkfall for a year, and your favourite weapon is Longsword. We nerf it - badly, so it becomes useless. Now all you have to do is start using an axe, and you should be back to your old killing machine self within a few days of practicing the axe. Doesn't sound too bad, does it?

About the combat engine: We are trying to make a system that let actual player skill shine through. Think of it as something in between AC and Quake, with lots of UO and Diablo added in. Oh and a healthy dose of Magestorm, if anyone played that game. Personally I think UO had the best pvp system to date (before the horrible patches). If you were quick on the keyboard, quick in the head and had decent tactical understanding, you could beat a stronger character, or even 3-4 other players at once if you were really really good. In AC it's basically character and buffing. We want to try to take it one or two steps further. That said, you do not have to be a Quake/Counterstrike god to have fun in Darkfall. Teaming up with friends, and being good at team coordination can lead to success on the battlefield. How do you think Norway beat Brasil 2 times in a row at football (that's soccer for you americans)? All of the Brasilian players had better individual skills than the Norwegians, but Norway worked better as a team. You don't even have to fight much. If you are a good politician or diplomat, you can be a successful leader of a guild or a kingdom. If you are a good businessman you can set up a healthy trade operation, and gain financial power (hire mercenaries and take over a kingdom for instance).