My gamer tag is Xipos, and I'm an experienced MMO gamer. Growing up, I played stuff like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Shadowbane, before eventually WoW came out, and I played that actively until the end of WoTLK. As many of you, I still regard Vanilla WoW as the best iteration of WoW yet.

However, after a long time of WoW, I got bored of the stale playstyle. It was all just a mindless grind that reset with every expansion, forming an evil circle of pointlessness (my opinion, no offense to hardcore wow fans). I wanted an MMO where things weren't so easy, and where grinding did not substitute difficulty. So I went searching on the internet, for a few weeks. I wanted to find a new game to try, anything quite frankly. I tried some strange asian grinders, but they were even worse than WoW. Then one day, in 2008, I found a gem, hidden under meters of dirt in the internet. It had a surprisingly active and vibrant community. At this stage, the game was in it's alpha, and people were speaking of rumors about great battles occuring in-game already, with the most exciting and adrenaline rush-inducing combat ever experienced in a game... That game was no other than:

Darkfall Online

General game information

What was so amazing about this game? Let me tell you what Darkfall Online is:

Darkfall Online is a sandbox MMORPG, heavily focused on PvP-gameplay. The game features full loot FFA-PvP with FPS combat mechanics, meaning that for every skill and spell in the game you have to manually aim, and you are able to kill anyone anywhere on the map, and loot their items. The original developers were heavily inspired by Ultima Online, and strived to make the game as hardcore as possible. As a sandbox MMORPG, player freedom is the very core of Darkfall.

In Darkfall, player owned clans can take control over cities, and through the conflict over control for scarce resources, the intricate sandbox politics are born. Massive alliances form, and wage war against each other. The original Darkfall saw multiple world wars, some of them spanning over the duration of several months. Are you a mercenary for hire? Are you and your friends a group of strong, kind-hearted protectors of the weak? Or would you rather destroy anyone and anything in your path? In Darkfall, you control your fate.

Regarded by many as the best MMORPG ever made, it actually never got that great of attention by the worldwide gaming community. As the previous developers failed to keep the game alive, two independent companies has risen from the Darkfall community to bring it back, and fulfill Darkfall's fate to become the King of all MMORPGs.

As already mentioned, you can kill anyone, anywhere. Keep in mind however, that there are pseudo-safe areas, such as the racial NPC cities. Guard towers protect positively aligned players by preventing negatively aligned players from entering. Theoretically, it is still possible to attack others inside cities, though you would most probably die before achieving anything meaningful.

Sieges and macro-politics are a major part of Darkfall. Clans can take control over cities, and can contest the control over villages where players can own their own houses. The villages once controlled by a clan, yields hourly tax incomes to the clan-bank.

As there are rare resources that are sought after by every player, some cities are better situated than others. This can spark wars between clans and even alliances between clans. Sometimes it just happens out of pure spite for the other players/clans, and you just want to stomp their face in. Fair game, it is all allowable in Darkfall, in fact, hardcore PvP is the foundation the game was built upon. The only other game that has something similar to this scale of sandbox politics and warfare, has to be Eve online. That said, Darkfall also went through 3 different world wars while it was originally up and running. Take it from someone who experienced all 3 of them; It's a gaming experience that will never be topped. All the out-of-game planning, preparations, diplomacy, spying on other teamspeaks/ventrilos, hiring mercenary clans, cutting off supply lines, blackmailing neutral clans, planning siege strategies, practicing tactical formations, and much much more.

About Darkfall's Combat: The game is based around FPS combat, meaning you have to aim everything; heals for other players, spells, melee swings, archery. It is also FFA, meaning that you can also hit your allies with offensive spells, or heal enemies! So be careful where you swing your sword... On death, players leave behind a tombstone, that contains their whole inventory. Everything you had on you, or in your inventory gets dropped for anybody to loot. It sucks if you die, but it is damn pleasing when you're the one standing over a defeated enemy's grave, taking his stuff

So what happened?

In 2012, after a long time of silence from the developers, the game got shut down in favor of a re-release. The re-release, Darkfall: Unholy Wars, was a disaster to put it mildly. The very core of what made Darkfall the most unique game in the world had been compromised, and they sold out in favor of getting more casual and carebear players in. Player freedom had been ultimately removed, or atleast degraded to an unnoticable level. Many of the Darkfall 1 veterans had been scammed, and enraged by the developers' lack of insight, we left, never to return.

What now?

UB3RGAMES was formed from the ashes of the Darkfall 1 community. We stood up against the tyranny of the incompetent Darkfall developers, and took matters in our own hands. Darkfall was too good to let go off. After nearly 4 years away from Darkfall, nothing could substitute the greatness and the potential it had. 2 Community made companies were made, each with their own vision of Darkfall's future. They got their own license deals, that allowed them to independently develop Darkfall 1 further. Darkfall: New Dawn represents a more developed form of Darkfall, that will appeal to a greater audience. We have had several months of InDev period, with amazing progress already, and with a few more months remaining before the ultimate release of the game.

The reason I write this now, is because Darkfall: New Dawn has a free trial period from 15.-29. November. If this sounds even remotely interesting to you, do yourself a favor and potentially discover your new favorite game. Also, the graphics are not that bad... Take a look yourself! I strongly advise you to go for Darkfall: New Dawn, instead of Darkfall: Rise of Agon, seeing as you most probably are new to this MMORPG genre. New Dawn is deffinitely more friendly towards new players, and will have more balanced content! Also, the game is nowhere near what it will be like at launch, however it is still very much enjoyable. Definitely better than anything else on the market, which says alot about how the launch will be!

Most of the graphics/animations are dated, so don't be scared. The first world war was revolved around Hyperion getting greedy and expanding further north. They were taken by surprise when 2-3 smaller alliances joined forces into the big Coalition of the Chilling (COTC), marked by the big purple area in the video. That marked the end of world war 1, where Hyperion was crushed. Somebody had to stand up against COTC however, and that happened to be The Mercs, with some other allies. Once the map was stabilized again, the political scene was mostly smaller alliance wars on the sub-continents for over a year.

Then the large SUN guild started to get expansionistic aswell, in much larger scale than any previous clan. The whole server joined forces to fight the tyranny of SUN. At the forefront leading the coalition, was ZzZzZ and Agenda, the remnants of The Mercs, who had long gone disappeared from the game after claiming a "win" on the server (as in winning the game). The largest battle took place in Kvitstein, with hundreds of combatants on each side fighting.

After this siege, the fight was taken to the sub-continent Cairn, where SUN's capital city of Calfardar, an nearly impenetrable fortress on top of a large cliff was sieged. The attackers were unsuccessful. After this, smaller skirmishes followed, some cities had their ownerships swapped, and ultimately the game shut down with the majority of territory still belonging to SUN, ZzZzZ and Agenda, or various other small alliances around the map.

Now, the political scene is fresh, and there is no telling what will happen this time. Will you join the game world's history in the making?

This is a siege from last night's InDev server, was good to get some large scale action again Try the game for free until the end of November! If you buy the game during November, your remaining period in InDev will be for free, and whatever gametime you bought will only be activated at launch.

VeloxBanks wrote:As much as I like the look of it I just can't shake the feeling that it's gonna fail. It's not the first ambitious MMO to fail and it won't be the last (if it does). I suppose only time will tell.

Maybe I'll feel a bit different about it once I play it a bit while it's free.

The hardcore veteran memberbase will always stay with it. And many have tried to surpass DFO lately, but all have failed. They only managed to market it better (looking at you, Crowfall and Albion). That said, there will always be people who are put off by it, but once you got a thing for Darkfall, you can't get enough! Give it a try, you never know if it's something for you.

Just a heads-up, many of the hardcore vets are gamers from very diverse backgrounds, and we all regard Darkfall as the best game we ever played, especially in terms of the MMO genre. Inevitable Enyx, multiple championship winner in Quake plays it, and Pronax the CS:GO celeb used to play it aswell. The combat is so crisp and adrenaline-inducing, with an almost infinite skill-ceiling; your player skill matters the most!

The siege I played in yesterday, the 2 videos above, was a siege where we were outnumbered almost 2:1, yet against all odds we won against a siege force double our size due to supreme tactics and player skill. You won't experience this in any other MMO