Darkfall Day 16
David X. Messer investigates the mechanics of mounts in Darkfall, using an unsuspecting PK as a tutor.
Having logged out on the previous evening in Deep Yishku I decided to do some exploring while taking screenshots as I went. Suddenly the logic of Av's controls for the mount made sense. You move your mount with WASD as you'd expect, but the mouse freely pans around you. This enables you to get a fantasic view of what is around you and gives you the ability, if you're quick enough, to spot other players or mobs which might be lurking.
I won't bore you with the details of what I saw until I get my screenshots sorted out. I realise it's deeply annoying to harp on about some amazing thing I saw without screenshots so I'll save those for a future post.
Needless to say, all this traveling around on a mount took a bit of time. I got most of the way around the map before deciding to port back to the Clan hamlet to see what was going on there. By this time there was talk of a Clan outing to kill some mobs, farm some gold etc. I managed to port back to the Clan hamlet in time for some PKs to arrive. I may have been slightly guilty of not rushing to help fight them off, but rather to bank my stuff first. Then go help out. At this point my Clan mates had already fled on their mounts so I was left standing around with the default blade while another PK spent some time on his mount killing me repeatedly.
This isn't as bad as it sounds. I'd never actually seen mounted combat before so I used this as an opportunity to see what was invovled in fighting someone on a mount. I worked out that if I moved quickly enough I could actually avoid his blows at certain points. I also learned that some (maybe all?) mounts have some kind of back kick which you need to avoid. And also I learned a bit about landing blows on my opponent. Sadly though the PK I was playing with soon clocked on to what I was doing and ran off to pwn some other n00b elsewhere.
Some time later my Clan mates reeappeared and we went off to hunt some mobs. There followed a less than spectacular bit of mount handling where I got dismounted while riding past a group of mobs and then the mobs managed kill my mount before I could get back on it. It's one of those things where once you know this kind of thing can happen, then you know to look out for it in the future. It's a bit of a shock to the system for a new player like me though. I ended up running the rest of the way, which was fine and we arrived at our destination.
We were three people (including me) and the combat was mostly archery with some close quarters fighting thrown in for good measure. By this point I've worked out that if a friendly player moves in front of me for some reason I can quickly move so the blow doesn't land on them. The same also goes for when the mob is moving around, quick reactions to move in the direction of the mob all pay dividends. I was actually getting quite good at this sort of thing. Practice was starting to pay off and I was starting to feel good about it.
Of course, I got over confident, and when we accidentally pulled a pack of three mobs I started getting low on health so I ran around a building to lose the mob that was tailing me. When I got back around to the other two mobs I thought I'd lost the third but it eventually found me and ran up behind and killed me. There endeth my evenings mob killing.
While getting ready to log off for the night there was some talk about the Clan alliance. We'd been asked if we wanted to move from our hamlet to join the nearby alliance at the nearby city. So when I log in tomorrow the outlook for the Clan I'm in could be really quite different!
Posted by Drew Shiel at November 28, 2009 11:22 AM
