LAGWAR | GAMING'S BEST IN TOP NOTCH MEDIOCRITY

Me, after a tour of the theme park

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had the opportunity to pop back and forth between a lot of games. I’ll admit, most of these are theme park games, so I’m just trading in my ticket for a different set of rides. Every so often, however, there’s a good sandbox that begs to be played in. For me, that’s most recently been Darkfall.

It’s a stark contrast to my other game of choice, World of Warcraft. Where WoW gives you a set of golden exclamation points, Darkfall gives you non-descript NPCs. Where WoW gives you 10 rats who snort and rear, Darkfall gives you a tribe of goblins who will run, circle, and hunt you just as you hunt them. Even crafting is starkly different. WoW hands you a node that a single click and three seconds empties out. Darkfall leaves you harvesting for twenty minutes and isn’t afraid to let you fail if your skill isn’t up to snuff.

When I first heard of Darkfall in February of last year, I was also playing WoW. This was back in the days of the European launch. It was an interesting time. In the evening, I’d happily pick away at heroics and collect my badges, all the while wishing for something more. Darkfall was that something. It called out to my inner grinder, the grizzled vet that relished full-loot PvP. It offered a world, alive and breathing, where most other MMOs simply gave you a thinly veiled excuse to kill 10 more boars, slightly larger and slightly reskinned than the last.

I used my lunch breaks for a solid week trying to buy the game. If there was anything the “limited release” did, it was give the impression of high demand. Trying to buy the game was a game in itself. I’d rush to the computer, eager to make the 20 minute daily window, and frantically refresh my account page hoping for it to load. So many people hit the servers that each page would drag and time out. On three separate days, I got up to the last step before the final copy had sold and I was met with a picture of a sad goblin. I was that sad goblin, I imagine, as I returned back to my class of third graders. Let down, again.

And then, on the last day of the week, I got it. I was in.

The spoils of self-made adventure (click to enlarge)

I joined my friends and had some of the best times I’ve ever had in my MMO career. PvE was difficult – you couldn’t do it alone, which meant that you were always grouping. As someone who only played theme park games, and solo’d most of them at that, this was my first connection with an older way of thinking, an older way of design that Darkfall and Aventurine whole-heartedly embrace.

I was in love. Progress was slow but it didn’t matter. With no levels and no classes, you could hop in and join people who’d been grinding since the beginning. It was wide open, a new playing field.

And then, members of my clan slowly left. We got a hamlet, and lost a hamlet. We discovered that, even though you could contribute to PvE from the start, PvP was another matter entirely. People felt beat, defeated, and, worst, useless. So, they quit. With no one left to share my game time with, I quit as well.

But this past week, a friend convinced me to come back and join him. It was rough at first but so much has changed! Newbie gear drops like rain from goblins who are easier to kill. Quests and gold are plentiful. PvE is soloable and PvP gear is attainable by players in their first week. It was like stepping into a whole different game.

Yet, so much that gives Darkfall its unique charm remains. It is the definitive sandbox game of this generation of MMOs. Where Fallen Earth gives players an introduction to the subset, Darkfall is the 101 course in living a true fantasy life. There is action, adventure, risk, reward, and utter betrayal. You are truly free to do anything and, for once, player defined action supersedes anything the game’s designers have written into a quest. What may start as a lowly plan to find a metal node can turn into a sprawling adventure that defines why we embraced the genre in the first place.

Ready for war

I had an experience like that myself recently. A friend and I began the night by looking for mobs to farm. We moved and expanded until we found ourselves in enemy lands, searching for unsuspecting prey (not that we were much beyond newbies ourselves). As we approached a dungeon we were curious about, a dark elf sprang from behind some monuments and killed us both. I told him we were new and he surprised us. Here, a devoted member of a community known to be one of the worst in the industry, stepped up and emptied his bank to us. The game needs new players like you, he said. And filled our bags with weapons and armor beyond anything we’d dreamed of having – more than what we could have gotten in months playing on our own. Then, he gives us two black dragons to ride and he invites us to join his guild on a late night raid. It was truly an epic night.

When you make the jump from theme-park to sandbox, it can be a little intimidating. In many ways, it’s like stepping into the past. Darkfall, for all intents, is much like a re-imagined UO. Underneath that “hardcore” sheen is the heart of innovation, the very reason why so many of us find theme-parks temporary diversions: a system entirely dependent on the players. The developers give players the tools to make their own fun. For a WoW devotee like me, it can be a challenge to set my own goal and pursue it. But, once you learn to break that barrier and turn yourself over to the virtual world of sand, you find something other games only hint at.

In the world of education, we teach with a certain philosophy in mind: If you tell, they will repeat. If you show, they will see. If you equip them for discovery, they’ll remember what they learned forever. Those lines apply to games as much as they do to students. For the first time, come feel the tools placed in your hands.

Come build the memories you’ll keep when gaming has faded away into the rest of your life. Play in the sand.

Happy Friday, everyone.