Darkfall Online

Darkfall's control system is, to be polite, a mess. It is, to be less polite, a bloody infuriating graceless mess.

It manages to be so on such a fundamental level that when I explain it it's going to sound as confusing as it actually is in play. Even simple tasks like swapping weapons manage to become potentially disastrous. As a Dwarf Fortress veteran, wrestling with oblique control systems isn't the problem - it's marrying these sorts of controls with a real-time action game that demands fluidity. If you're stuck trying to remember which exact combination of buttons are required to do the task in hand, it's not exactly conducive playing the bally thing.

The idea is that you can have a weapon sheathed or unsheathed. You select the weapon from the toolbar to move it into your "weapon to use" slot. You can then draw or sheathe it. If you've already got a weapon unsheathed, changing the weapon in the slot automatically unsheathes the new one, so you can go from wand-out to sword-out in a button press. That's as good as the system gets (i.e. what you'd want it to do). Except if you're in the melee-weapon third-person, where if you've got your bow or magical staff out, and aren't actually doing anything with it, it's not really visible. So you've no idea whether you've got a weapon equipped or not at a glance, forcing you remember what your last action was. What's the weapon in my slot? Is it the one I want? I think I've got something else, so I press the one I want. Except - oh no - it actually was the one I wanted, so now I've unequipped it. I only discover this when I try to unsheathe it and nothing happens.

Really, the problem is the control system married to a lack of feedback to the player. Any of these actions result in no feedback except tiny rows of letters in one of the windows - which, of course, you're not reading during combat. When "Do I have a magical staff in my hand?" becomes a matter of gnomic mystery, something has gone drastically wrong.

For magic, double all the confusion. You need to select the staff, unsheathe the staff, select the spell you want, and then cast it. There's no way I could find to have a default spell. I mean, I have the staff out. It's clear I want some manner of spell. Just having it do nothing seems bloody perverse. Oh - and the chances for confusion are increased constantly by the fact you have to unsheathe your weapons to examine corpses. Being forced to move between all these states, each demanding an exact response where any other response will move your character into an even worse setup is hilariously fiddly.

It's worth stressing, in light of the previous paragraph, that there may be a way of setting a default spell. I just couldn't find it. The game is incredibly bad about documenting itself. I understand entirely why there were apparently factual errors in the original review. It speaks primarily not of the character of the review, but the character of Darkfall.

This annoys all the more because this additional worry distracts you from the actual real kick to the game's difficulty. Putting aside player-versus-player combat, the action-based combat system entirely changes battles against even the most humble of creatures. Compared to the lethargic denizens of anywhere-Azeroth-like, Darkfall's are rabid psychopaths and/or cowards. Fight one, and anyone within a seeming half-mile comes running in to help out. Get one almost dead, and he'll run - of course, with his mates piling on your vulnerable back if you chase him. It's very easy to get out of your depth. Most combat ends with you running away, returning to loot the bodies after you've healed - if you can get near enough the body to collect the stuff at all. It's a game where even killing the common-or-garden orc can feel like a huge achievement. (Which is the main reason why the controls frustrate. You have other things on your mind. Dying due to a tactical error is worthwhile. Dying due to control system confusion is worthless.)

The game is an enormous grind - progress is slow, and requiring other grinding tasks besides the actual interesting combat (i.e. chopping wood to make arrows for real competitiveness in PvP) - but at the most basal level, it's more engaging than any of the games where you stand there pressing 1 then 2 then 3 then 1 again until a sprite falls over. In my time in Darkfall, when going player-versus-environment, I fought far fewer enemy types than I would in any other major recent MMO... but I didn't care. The variety in the conflict based around situational elements - luring people out with arrow-fire, using the terrain to separate members from the pack, whatever - kept it as entertaining.

Mostly. While good against MMOs, the problem is, compared to almost any action game, Darkfall is anemic. Its strengths show exactly how limited almost all the traditional MMO approaches have been in terms of actually offering meaningful gameplay of this sort. Of course, as a step in a worthwhile direction, I feel I have to applaud Darkfall. But by attracting a player who wants this type of game, its failings ring all the more loud. Chasing down an injured foe to only have the game reset his position to miles ago is rubbish on about every level conceivable.