Weekly Q&A Issue #5
Another week has come and gone in our wait for beta and its time for another Q&A. Starting in the coming weeks this Q&A will be reposted to the Darkfall Official Site on the following Mondays after it posted here to get the most benefit out of the dev teams time.
Moving right along …….
1. How does clanstone protection work? Is there a limit on the number of buildings a clanstone can protect? Is there a protection radius around the clanstone or does the protection cover the whole province?
As far as this question goes I’ll say that walls are not protected by the clanstone – if anything.
In discussing whether we should answer this questions with Claus and other developers we decided that answering this and other Q&A questions habitually asked by the community, might ruin some of the discovery process you need to experience as Darkfall players. It’s more than just another game mechanic to figure out before you start playing. So forgive me for purposely being vague here.
2. Even though the ingame world will be flat, will players still be able to circumnavigate it and go around the world by sailing?
It actually IS a round world: The landmass is a small group of islands on an impossibly huge round ocean world. Unfortunately it would take you forever to circumnavigate it 🙂 Seriously, we could have implemented something along these lines but the large technical investment required would have yielded very little gameplay value, in fact it would come at a cost. We played around with concepts of a spherical world, a cylindrical world, and while cool, it wasn’t worth the resource commitment which we put into more important features like boat navigation. Darkfall has a huge list of unique features that set it apart already…there are some things that we decided we shouldn’t have to innovate on.
3. How will resurrection work in game with the incapacitated feature? Also will you be able to Resurrect with Band-Aids as in UO, or will it be by magic only?
There’s a timer when your character is incapacitated. In that time you can be finished off by enemies, tap out and release, or be resurrected by your friends. You’re resurrected only by magic. It’s a very cool feature, there will be battle turning tactics associated with finishing off incapacitated enemies and resurrecting your teammates, players in charge of making sure their enemies don’t get up, and making sure that their friends do.
4. What sort of visual/physical effects will drinking have ingame?
I assume you mean drinking alcoholic beverages. We consider this to be fluff, so we haven’t done anything with it yet, and we might not before launch. Right now our animators are going down their priority list, and are working on some special combat animations that we feel are infinitely more important.
5. Since there are cannons, is there gunpowder? Will there be old school one shot pistols? (Question from Phiendish1)
There is in fact no gunpowder in the game, just the cannons. No pistols or other personal firearms are planned. We put cannons in the game because ballistae and catapults on ships just weren’t as cool or as much fun as the cannons are. Some may think that cannons in the game could ruin the immersion but they really don’t. If it helps, cannons were invented way before personal firearms were, around the 11th century by the Song Dynasty Chinese and came to Europe in the 14th century. As the medieval fantasy game concept goes, I think we’re chronologically covered 😉
6. You mentioned before Dwarves are neutral. Can you explain your reasoning or your goal with this change?
Dwarves are neutral to Humans and Mirdain only. Nobody knows why this is.
This status quo precedes the recorded history of the world.
7. Since most people agree that FPV holds no advantage over TPV will there be a toggle to allow people in melee combat to stay in 1st person view if they prefer it?
This is something we’re considering.
8. It was said that you could create a farm to produce reagents… Can you go into some detail in what all is involved?
Farms aren’t implemented and may not be before launch. As things stand, you can buy reagents from NPC merchants, find them using herbalism, hunting, mining, woodcutting, fishing, etc. Some can be created using various tradeskills.
9. Are all trees susceptible to being chopped down? If so will there be sprouts taking their place?
Trees won’t be visibly chopped down. It would be nice to have the time and resources to throw at this, but it would cost too much to implement for very little return. There are so many things in Darkfall that enhance the immersion that I believe we can safely skip woodcutting if we need to.
That does it for another week, please drop by our forums, and check out GameGoddesses poll on our frontpage. Remember to head over to www.darkfallonline.com for the latest in everything Darkfall and I will see you on the forums.
Ara Brightheart
