Darkfall

Graphics or gameplay? Which one is it? You can't have it both ways.

Some people say you can have both. They are wrong. What people consider "good graphics" nowadays is something like what Age of Conan has. The problem is that with todays technology it's just not going to happen. There are no 300vs300 epic battles in AoC, or not even 100vs100. You know why? Because the engine, servers and users computers can't handle it. There would be huge lag and crashes, it would be unplayable.

Seeing people here complain about DF graphics really pisses me off. I've seen many here say how they prefer gameplay over graphic but once we see a new video what is the first thing they complain about? Yes, graphics. This is so dumb.

I do agree with most people that Aventurine needs to work on the animations. I hate it when in the videos all the characters had this "bounce" in their running. Hope they can fix that.

If you want to see what happens when an MMO is all graphics and no gameplay, I suggest you go subscribe to Age of Conan. Sure the game looks pretty but is mostly a boring, instanced, single player game which has no soul. You really want that?

We don't know much about the gameplay in DF but if they can make it fluid and fun, graphics are acceptable. At least for me.

Im just looking for a sandbox MMO. I dont play themepark games.

So i must say gameplay. Either Darkfall, Fallen Earth or Earthrise.

I think most of the people who bash the graphic of Darkfall ain't thinking in the term of "a whole game" when they bash it. They look at the graphics without thinking about what's needed to be able to play the game without problems and comments on that alone.

And yes, if we look at the graphic alone we've all seen better :)

IMO most people who post here and complain about graphics are trolls who simply like to throw shit at DarkFall  and using graphics just as excuse for doing this...

They started as Vaportrolls and now changed to talk shit about graphics, tomorow they will pick  on something else...

Don't take them seriously ...

I agree with you.

Sure the graphics are a bit dated looking, but they look like that for a reason and the Devs have not been shy telling you why that is.

Busting on the games graphics when its pretty much always been known that the graphics wont be top notch is a bit futile i think.

Im fine with the graphics Darkfall has as long as its a good game that runs well.
Im really interested with this automatic graphic setting changes to prevent lag that the devs were talking about. That sounds like an excellent idea to me, i just dont see how they can make it work.

Originally posted by Scaredgirl

Graphics or gameplay? Which one is it? You can't have it both ways.

Some people say you can have both. They are wrong. What people consider "good graphics" nowadays is something like what Age of Conan has. The problem is that with todays technology it's just not going to happen. There are no 300vs300 epic battles in AoC, or not even 100vs100. You know why? Because the engine, servers and users computers can't handle it. There would be huge lag and crashes, it would be unplayable.

Seeing people here complain about DF graphics really pisses me off. I've seen many here say how they prefer gameplay over graphic but once we see a new video what is the first thing they complain about? Yes, graphics. This is so dumb.

I do agree with most people that Aventurine needs to work on the animations. I hate it when in the videos all the characters had this "bounce" in their running. Hope they can fix that.

If you want to see what happens when an MMO is all graphics and no gameplay, I suggest you go subscribe to Age of Conan. Sure the game looks pretty but is mostly a boring, instanced, single player game which has no soul. You really want that?

We don't know much about the gameplay in DF but if they can make it fluid and fun, graphics are acceptable. At least for me.

Just what we needed, yet another apologist thread for why it's ok that Darkfall looks so sub-par. The reason the graphics are ugly in this game has less to do with the "physical impossibility" of having both decent quality art and decent quality fluidity with large numbers of players, and more to do with the fact that Aventurine is a small dev team with no MMO experience working with the old, clunky code they wrote eight years ago on an indie game designed to appeal to UO fans who'd be happy with 8bit sprites and flashing lights so long as they're still allowed to loot, skin, rape and dance gleefully on the corpse of the guy they just ganked.

AoC took MMO graphics to the extreme, presumably in an attempt to make a game that would stand the test of time visually and thus continue to hold appeal for potential new players for some time to come. They failed for a variety of reasons, and misread the processing power of contemporary gaming machines (which they would have been trying to predict some years in advance when writing their code). But there's no reason why some satisfactory middle ground can't be found without having to look quite as B-grade as Darkfall currently seems to.

The real tragedy here is that most DF fans seem willing to sacrifice visual appeal so long as it guarantees that gameplay will be smooth with these mass 300+ vs 300+ (or whatever) battles everyone keeps talking about, and while that's not my personal preference it's certainly a legitimate choice to make. Yet while we've seen plenty of evidence of the graphics and animation being low-poly and dated, we have yet to see anything that might suggest that the promised mass battles will in fact be smooth, or even possible. On the contrary, the amount of skipping and glitching on display from that Italian vid of the beta with just one player fighting against one NPC mob in a completely empty zone presumably across an internal network is most certainly cause for concern.

This is absurd, graphics are quite good. What needs to be improved are the animations and that woman's ass!

Yeah, the graphics were all right. I was skeptical after seeing the 17 min trailer that the landscape would be too barren - there are some areas in the trailer that just seemed lifeless. I like the forests shown in this new vid though, the view distances were respectable and it seemed packed with flora.

The abundant grass and dynamic shadows changed it from mediocre to decent in my eyes. WAR has sad little patches of grass dotted about and no dynamic shadows apart from on your own character, so getting full fields of grass and dynamic shadows on everything is a real selling point for Darkfall (not least of all because they affect the stealth portion of the game dramatically). Cut those two out though and I think the lower res textures and low poly meshes wouldn't be up to scratch today.

The animations of the women running was terrible, of course. The rest of the movements seemed fluid enough, if not particularily realistic. Blood decals were crap too - some floating in air after a hit had been delt. Ugh.

But overall, gameplay wins out. I think the longest I've played an MMO before setting all the graphics sliders to 'low' was EVE, after one week. There those settings stayed for the next 3 years. All MMOs look like ass to me, because they're always at lowest settings.

I wonder if we'll be seeing threads like this once people have actually played the game and aren't basing their opinions on Darkfalls graphics on screenshots and a few low-quality videos? I doubt it very much.