Darkfall Day Seven
In Day Seven of his Darkfall adventures, David X. Messer thinks about thinking about the game.
Day seven and one week of playing Darkfall! It's customary at this point to have some self important waffle about week one and make some generalised sweeping statements about nothing at all. You'll be pleased to hear I'm saving that for Day 14, by which time I might be struggling for things to talk about other than "spent 2 hours fishing".
So I'd just arrived at the Clan hamlet, home away from home. As far as I can tell the idea is basically guild housing. There's a Clan hall, some crafting resources, a bank, one Merchant and more importantly for me a mine. I'd set my bind point to the chaos stone here so that if I died somewhere else in the world I'd return here. It's a relatively minor thing I guess, but it strangely did feel significant. This was where my support network was based, I'd hear of various incursions by PKs to the island and the hamlet so this was potentially where I'd be seeing my first real PVP action. If I've learned anything about Darkfall so far, as a new player, I'd say getting into a Clan early on was probably the most important thing I'd done.
I spent a couple of hours finding my way around the island, where the mining nodes where, where the best places to fish out of sight were. An hour or so taking advantage of the mine and just generally chilled out for a bit after the previous days efforts.
One thing I'd noticed previously, but checking back I'd not mentioned so far, is the System tab. Basically it's a combat log, but more importantly if you can't see what's hitting you, it *tells you*. The window the System tab appears in also has other tabs, for example the Monster tab which I discovered the other day. I'd never noticed before that mobs will taunt you! Very cool, but sadly I'm always going to be using the System tab and will never see this text until it's too late as I value my screen real estate too much even assuming it's possible to bring the tab out into a new window. The System tab is my new best friend. On day six when I was wandering around on my travels I'd get hit by something. It's incredibly frustrating being hit by something you can't see, but the system window gave me enough of a hint that I might have a chance of
reacting.
The end of day seven, a bit more sedate than day six.
Errata, number two in an occasional series
* I'd previous mentioned combat and how I'd not worked out what the finer points about mob combat. After a tip from a previous comment (thanks Frostbyte) and some hunting around in the forums it seems the done thing is to back away from your foe and there's a chance they'll miss their attack but basically spamming your attack button is the way forward.
* Also previously mentioned, my comments on dodging projectiles, commenter Tiak pointed out that it's difficult to avoid projectiles that have already been fired, but that you can trick mobs into missing if you strafe around left/right a bit as they'll always slighty lead you if you're moving around.
Posted by Drew Shiel at November 16, 2009 2:12 PM
