Darkfall Online - Beta Preview @ The Noob Comic

Which leads me to another thing, that I quite like… combat is NOISY. Not in the sense that you need to lower the volume of your speakers, but that it can be heard from quite a distance. This means that you have to watch your health and stamina when you are fighting monsters, because the racket that you’re making is broadcasting to everyone within a hundred yards radius or more, “HELLO! I AM HERE! YES, LOOK! HERE! I AM FACING AWAY FROM YOU, I'M FIGHTING A MONSTER, AND DID YOU NOTICE HOW MY HEALTH IS QUITE LOW? WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO WEAR A TARGET SIGN ON MY BACK? WOULD IT HELP?”. It’s a really cool feature because combat should not be silent, and for people out and about pking it’s quite exciting to hear all this “victim over there ---> ” noise and sneak up on them.

Just to conclude on a negative note in true beta tester tradition, I don’t like most spell sound effects. The first time I heard a spell’s “fizzz” while visiting the Alfar capital I thought that my speakers had broken, or that some tit was broadcasting static in vent. I almost sent a bug report, “there’s a really horrible, shrill sound like a thousand banshees tuning their TV sets at once, at location x y z” before I realised what it was. But then again, badass sounds are not at the top of my wish list right now.

Click to expand...

Otherwise, once I got over the first trauma of “OMG! What happened to my right mouse button?!? Where’s mouselook? Aaah!”, I really warmed up to the fact that you actually need to look around you, because it brings a whole new element of player skill to sneaking up behind someone. From what I’ve seen there are no such skills as stealth, vanish, hide in plain sight behind a twig, disapparate, and so on. I haven’t checked all the magic schools and I don’t know if there’s anything in there of this kind, but otherwise if you want to creep up on a guy, you have to do it in the old fashioned way of moving from cover to cover, shadow to shadow, behind his back, until you’re on him. This is made possible by two things:

1. You don’t get a big ass name on your head, so it’s quite possible to hide behind trees and rocks (not like in other games where some poor sap is trying to ambush you from behind a tree and you can see the end bits of his <really, really, really long guild name right here> tag sticking on the sides. In order to see your name a guy needs to hover on you with the mouse and you have to be close-ish (not sure of the distance, but if you see a moving figure far away on the horizon, you have to get closer to see who/what it is).

2.People and monsters aren’t particularly visible. It’s quite realistic in this sense. If you don’t know that they are there you really have to look. If it’s night, and you are in a forest, they’d have a much easier time jumping you than if you are in a plain in dayligh

Click to expand...