Kind of off topic but every single sandbox out there is made from indie devs and each one of them didn't have a good start, it just makes me wonder how sandbox games would be the next big thing if a developer like blizzard would make one...sigh, here's to hope.
UO was created by EA/Origin both of which were far from indie developers. Back on topic, having played both DF was in way better shape at the current point MO is at. Lets hope MO will improve quite a bit more before they launch.
Cheers!
Origin was indie, EA bought them out later.
You are indeed correct, but EA bought them out 3 years before UO was released meaning that Ultima Online was developed under the EA tag. Origin did not have the means or funds to do UO without EA and development started once they got the green light from EA Games. Pretty well documented actually if ya wanted to actually do any research on the development of UO and EA actually being responsible for its creation.
UO is hard to compare because at that time the only MMO out was Meridian 59 (depending on your definition of MMO).
With regard to DF v MO, the one thing that is unarguable is that Darkfall in its current state is a more finished / complete product than MO is. As mentioned before, much of this is due to the fact that they are in different states of development. The fairest comparison can't be made until the developers decide that it is ready for release.
You could try to make a comparison based on the state of Darkfalll at a comparable stage of its beta, but the two companies have taken drastically different approaches to their MMO development.
Darkfall Beta announced launch date: summer 2007 revised to: Q4 2008 "feature complete" April 2008
Beta initially announced July 2006 Beta opens August 2008, NDA lifted February 18, 2009, Launch February 25, 2009
Mortal online: Announced launch date July,2009 revised to:Q4 2009 "feature complete" they've never claimed it
Beta initially announced May/June 2009 Beta opens: July 2009, NDA lifted November 2009, Launch TBA
ALOT more of MO's development is being done where we can see it, so it looks alot messier. It remains to be seen whether that means anything for the game itself. Especially take note that Darkfall had 1 week between NDA lift and launch, MO has had 3 months. Unless MO releases next week, it's fair to say the devs don't think its finished enough to compare to a released product. Doing a lot of testing in beta means showing the game in its current stage, warts and all. The extent to which beta should be a showcase vs. a means of testing is a judgement call.
Neither Darkfall or Mortal Online compete with WoW. If MO is going to get subs, it's going to come at the expense of DF.
MO (and DF) subscription numbers will have more to do with quality of game, not competition. There is also EvE - which offers non-consensual PvP and sandbox environment.
Besides we don't play UO or SWG because there are newer, better games out there - but because developers decided to break them beyond repair.
The Darkfall fans are doing everything they can to bash on this game while it's in BETA, LoL. I think this is because they are scared of Mortal Online. I play EVE also and I see some of this coming from there.. but the Darkfall fans are the worst, and it's pathetic. It's to bad that we don't have more people that want to see all these types of games succeed. Continue on with your little crusade against Mortal Online Darkfall fannies, but I think you have already lost.
Eve fans don't give a rats ass about MO when it comes to sandbox competition. Hell if anything we want MO to be good considering most of us play more than just Eve due to its hands off nature.
Now I can see why the DF fans are doing it since the games are similar.
Same thing will happen when Earthrise releases all the Fallen Earth fans will give it shit.
The Darkfall fans are doing everything they can to bash on this game while it's in BETA, LoL. I think this is because they are scared of Mortal Online. I play EVE also and I see some of this coming from there.. but the Darkfall fans are the worst, and it's pathetic. It's to bad that we don't have more people that want to see all these types of games succeed. Continue on with your little crusade against Mortal Online Darkfall fannies, but I think you have already lost.
Darkfall fans should encourage people to play MO, because after they see how poorly made it is, DF's sub numbers will only go up.
There isn't a need for a crusade against MO -- it's going to fail well on its own. Some of us are just here for the trainwreck.
Well I will not disagree there are some haters. I logged into MO Beta and it is 3 years from ready to launch lol. Maybe then it will be better than Darkfall. If you want to see all games succeed, then play the one that works atm and wait for the other to be finished. Some of you are hating on MO and some on DF, I am sure they both have strong qualities. $1 dollar trial for DF, now who wants to start crying about that? Thanks for your time.
Don't been into MO or the beta so you want hear anything about how the gameplay is.
What i wanted toi say is that all people who was bashing Darkfall back then and didn't wanted to hear the answer about "Why it took AV so long to develop DF ?" maybe have learned to appreciate it now. And AV made their engine themselvs..
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE-------------------------------------------------- $OE - eternal enemy of online gaming -We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
[Quote=HerculesSAS] I am here to apologise to a lot of you guys for the behavior I've probably exhibited in many places (not here often). I was registered with the DF Forums since November of 2002, and followed the game since then. Every so often I'd check back with any juicy updates, and with any new information I would spam them to my guild, my friends in real life (some of whom played WoW or whatever), and on different forums. And for my spamming and pushing of this game, I am sorry.
Why am I sorry, you might ask? Well for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which was my entry into beta. I am part of the reason that trolls for this game reason even exist. If I hadn't pushed it to everybody, there wouldn't be such a backlash. I pushed the game before I knew what it was about, and how it really worked. And to whom did I push it? First to my guild -- who are mostly ex UO players and were all ready for a good PvP game now that UO was patched into uselessness. Some more were other MMO players, whom were looking for something different. And a lot more, and from where the trolls spawn, are people that didn't care, or had more realistic expectations of what the game would be. Some of these folks went on to enjoy Darkfall as it was in beta, and others hated it. And the folks who didn't get into beta and read about it from fanboys like me just got annoyed and irritated, and rooted for the game's failure.
Beta was a mixed bag. I got into beta early January of 09, and immediately began downloading the patches, going crazy installing, eagerly waiting my chance to play. I had waited for 7 years for this game, and I wasn't about to let another second pass me by. After finally patching and launching, and the servers being up -- I launched the game to find it completely unplayable because of the lag. I was informed to turn off shadows (which I did), and the game state changed to something drastically usable and reasonably stable as well. Then again, my system was pretty good to run it as well. I was getting good FPS and ping around 100, which was not too bad. And then began my journey to find out about the PvP game I had waited so long for.
I played for a few hours the first day until the servers crashed and was really enthralled with the goblin AI, the first person point of view for archery and magic, and more. By the second day when I got home from work, I logged in again, having read all day at the forums at work I came home expecting to kick some serious butt since we were all pretty new at the game. I was on IRC throughout the day earlier too, telling my guild that the game was awesome, and I was having a blast. They were all intrigued too, and some started more eagerly awaiting their beta receipts. I logged on again, and now with a fresh look and tons of forum information, I started to play. And then I started to realize the things that made me a little uneasy. The animations were bad. Really bad. The sound effects were worse than Starcraft. Still though, a game wasn't made by graphics, or sound, was it? I found that when I ran up a hill I'd often "float" in the middle of the air. Beta problems, I assumed. They will be fixed. Then I got to kill some more goblins and after they got low on health, they started running away... here comes that awesome AI I thought, and then I stood watch as the goblin ran around in a retarded circle with no rhyme or reason. It was starting to settle in, that the game wasn't very polished.
Days came and went, and daily I'd submit bug reports, go into the forums and post about what needed fixing -- things like adding hotkeys for the map and backpack, or making the UI a little more utilitarian and less awkward. Things like how the towns didn't have finished content and that you'd run up stairs only to be tossed into a WALL, and would have to run back down to get off. And all this time, I came to defend the game when it was being ridiculed, when the early beta leaks came out and showed some poorly done feature. It's in beta guys I said, they have it in debug mode and the monsters aren't all turned on. And it hit me, that who was I lying to? Them, or myself? I am by profession an IT manager, dealing with systems and software deployments in a financial firm. "Debug mode"? What did that mean to me? And I would think about it -- debug mode means we turn on verbose logging. When we are beta testing, the features are all there because the end user needs to see the full product. And slowly I resolved to be a harsher tester than I was before, and giving the harsh feedback that needed to be given.
It started almost two weeks later that I came to that point -- playing a few hours a day I never really thought much about the combat because it was almost an afterthought. But seeing players macroing ingame on a regular basis, and how I lagged behind I was reminded of the worst parts of UO. And I realized then that this game makes you macro because there's really no way to earn it "by playing the game". The combat I finally realized, was bland and lifeless, the real skill in the game being 'organized' rather than anything else. A well organized group would lead others into hitting each other and killing themselves. The game mechanics like the rogue system were poor, and magic was a humungous grind. Not to say I couldn't macro it up like everybody else... I just felt it was a poorly implemented system. The one thing that really led me to quit was when a guildmate got into beta and asked, "How's the PvP compared to UO?", and I couldn't at that point sell out what I believe to still be the best PvP in ANY game. I told him flatly, "it sucks". The game would be fun for a while if you had a guild, but the lifeless PvP really ruined the game. A sandbox game is great, and DF has the elements it needs there -- but PvP is useless and boring and if it's not immediately, it will soon become stale. I'm not much of a "city sieger" because Shadowbane taught me early that I have to give up my social life in order to defend the town, so I didn't care much for that. I wanted open world PvP, duels, guild fights, etc. This game would simply not support it.
Now on launch day (or launch+1 at this point), I reflect back to think about how much I trolled the folks who were not looking to be trolled by a game I didn't even know that much about. Sure, some people will enjoy it, and those people largely come from anything OTHER than UO, and the ones who liked it in UO are usually part of a large guild (SUN comes to mind during the beta) because they are organized and do well. I can understand that. I am here to apologize for all the stupidity I let out in defending the game before I knew what it was, but a good lesson to be learned here is that I need to have far lower expectations for a game, and be untrusting and biased AGAINST the developer if I want to see a game actually try to appease the end user. I won't even go into how bad the PR or communication has been with AV, I think we all know it. I'm just here to say I learned my lesson and now as I turn my sights to Mortal Online I'll keep a bias that I didn't have with DF, lest I be disappointed or dishonest with myself, or become a troll and an annoyance to others. [/Quote]
If anyone, Darkfall fans should be giving Mortal online lots of time to work out their beta.
Nice job trolling Domesto, but it seems you didn't even read the post.
I said in that post that I didn't want to let developers get a slide just because they are making a game I might like. I said that after turning off shadows (my only issue) the game was stable, and ran perfectly well. No lag either, and 100+ FPS. The combat was bland and lifeless, and the PvP sucked. That's why I didn't like the game. But for other people, that were in big groups, I saw how the game *could* be fun for them.
MO doesn't even come close. It crashes every day for lots of people. Their patcher STILL doesn't work properly, and it wasn't even written by them. The game lags constantly, the desync issues are ridiculous, the combat is worse than Darkfall and magic is worse too. And most of the systems that are in have severe problems like thievery.
I can at least look back at DF and say well, the game was playable -- just not a lot of fun. MO isn't even PLAYABLE. Everything is broken, there's lots of crashes, patching problems, and a lot more, and on top of all that, it's STILL not fun. See, DF hyped itself to be the next UO back then too -- and when I actually played it I found that DF's PvP sucked, but it was good in group play even if I didn't enjoy it. MO's PvP sucks even worse, their group play is horrible, and they are still hyping it to be the next UO.
If anything, if you're going to spend the time digging up posts in order to troll me, you'd be best advised to actually READ THEM FIRST.
I think the only thing I like about Mortal Online is that it will attract more and new players to come over to Darkfall.
I Was in Block C beta and wow was it extremely bad. In a year from now it may be better but honestly it will never catch up to darkfall. Darkfalls development is only speeding up and not slowing down. They are hiring developers like crazy making the game insanely good.
I got locked into the 6month subscription deal of 10$ per month. I probably wont subscribe to mortal unless I get a similar deal.
Comments
UO was created by EA/Origin both of which were far from indie developers. Back on topic, having played both DF was in way better shape at the current point MO is at. Lets hope MO will improve quite a bit more before they launch.
Cheers!
Origin was indie, EA bought them out later.
You are indeed correct, but EA bought them out 3 years before UO was released meaning that Ultima Online was developed under the EA tag. Origin did not have the means or funds to do UO without EA and development started once they got the green light from EA Games. Pretty well documented actually if ya wanted to actually do any research on the development of UO and EA actually being responsible for its creation.
UO is hard to compare because at that time the only MMO out was Meridian 59 (depending on your definition of MMO).
With regard to DF v MO, the one thing that is unarguable is that Darkfall in its current state is a more finished / complete product than MO is. As mentioned before, much of this is due to the fact that they are in different states of development. The fairest comparison can't be made until the developers decide that it is ready for release.
You could try to make a comparison based on the state of Darkfalll at a comparable stage of its beta, but the two companies have taken drastically different approaches to their MMO development.
Darkfall Beta announced launch date: summer 2007 revised to: Q4 2008 "feature complete" April 2008
Beta initially announced July 2006 Beta opens August 2008, NDA lifted February 18, 2009, Launch February 25, 2009
Mortal online: Announced launch date July,2009 revised to:Q4 2009 "feature complete" they've never claimed it
Beta initially announced May/June 2009 Beta opens: July 2009, NDA lifted November 2009, Launch TBA
ALOT more of MO's development is being done where we can see it, so it looks alot messier. It remains to be seen whether that means anything for the game itself. Especially take note that Darkfall had 1 week between NDA lift and launch, MO has had 3 months. Unless MO releases next week, it's fair to say the devs don't think its finished enough to compare to a released product. Doing a lot of testing in beta means showing the game in its current stage, warts and all. The extent to which beta should be a showcase vs. a means of testing is a judgement call.
Neither Darkfall or Mortal Online compete with WoW.
If MO is going to get subs, it's going to come at the expense of DF.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
And they'll both suffer when Shadowbane gets rolling again.
I win!!! LOL@U
MO (and DF) subscription numbers will have more to do with quality of game, not competition. There is also EvE - which offers non-consensual PvP and sandbox environment.
Besides we don't play UO or SWG because there are newer, better games out there - but because developers decided to break them beyond repair.
The Darkfall fans are doing everything they can to bash on this game while it's in BETA, LoL.
I think this is because they are scared of Mortal Online.
I play EVE also and I see some of this coming from there..
but the Darkfall fans are the worst, and it's pathetic.
It's to bad that we don't have more people that want to see all these types of games succeed.
Continue on with your little crusade against Mortal Online Darkfall fannies, but I think you have already lost.
Eve fans don't give a rats ass about MO when it comes to sandbox competition. Hell if anything we want MO to be good considering most of us play more than just Eve due to its hands off nature.
Now I can see why the DF fans are doing it since the games are similar.
Same thing will happen when Earthrise releases all the Fallen Earth fans will give it shit.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
Oh my, what a thread...
You can burn me, but i wont die.
Darkfall fans should encourage people to play MO, because after they see how poorly made it is, DF's sub numbers will only go up.
There isn't a need for a crusade against MO -- it's going to fail well on its own. Some of us are just here for the trainwreck.
Well I will not disagree there are some haters. I logged into MO Beta and it is 3 years from ready to launch lol. Maybe then it will be better than Darkfall. If you want to see all games succeed, then play the one that works atm and wait for the other to be finished. Some of you are hating on MO and some on DF, I am sure they both have strong qualities. $1 dollar trial for DF, now who wants to start crying about that? Thanks for your time.
I play them both and it's not even worth a discussion. DFO is far superior to MO. DF in beta was far superior to MO.
I hope SV can make MO worth playing but I'm starting to have my doubts
Don't been into MO or the beta so you want hear anything about how the gameplay is.
What i wanted toi say is that all people who was bashing Darkfall back then and didn't wanted to hear the answer about "Why it took AV so long to develop DF ?" maybe have learned to appreciate it now. And AV made their engine themselvs..
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE--------------------------------------------------
$OE - eternal enemy of online gaming
-We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
And the Darkfall fans are watching this forum like Hawks, heheh
It's funny to see these guys try and say something bad about a beta...
Darkfalls beta was horrible...
Don't believe me? Here is HerculesSAS back in 2/26/09 talking about Darkfall..
www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/2673009#2673009
[Quote=HerculesSAS] I am here to apologise to a lot of you guys for the behavior I've probably exhibited in many places (not here often). I was registered with the DF Forums since November of 2002, and followed the game since then. Every so often I'd check back with any juicy updates, and with any new information I would spam them to my guild, my friends in real life (some of whom played WoW or whatever), and on different forums. And for my spamming and pushing of this game, I am sorry.
Why am I sorry, you might ask? Well for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which was my entry into beta. I am part of the reason that trolls for this game reason even exist. If I hadn't pushed it to everybody, there wouldn't be such a backlash. I pushed the game before I knew what it was about, and how it really worked. And to whom did I push it? First to my guild -- who are mostly ex UO players and were all ready for a good PvP game now that UO was patched into uselessness. Some more were other MMO players, whom were looking for something different. And a lot more, and from where the trolls spawn, are people that didn't care, or had more realistic expectations of what the game would be. Some of these folks went on to enjoy Darkfall as it was in beta, and others hated it. And the folks who didn't get into beta and read about it from fanboys like me just got annoyed and irritated, and rooted for the game's failure.
Beta was a mixed bag. I got into beta early January of 09, and immediately began downloading the patches, going crazy installing, eagerly waiting my chance to play. I had waited for 7 years for this game, and I wasn't about to let another second pass me by. After finally patching and launching, and the servers being up -- I launched the game to find it completely unplayable because of the lag. I was informed to turn off shadows (which I did), and the game state changed to something drastically usable and reasonably stable as well. Then again, my system was pretty good to run it as well. I was getting good FPS and ping around 100, which was not too bad. And then began my journey to find out about the PvP game I had waited so long for.
I played for a few hours the first day until the servers crashed and was really enthralled with the goblin AI, the first person point of view for archery and magic, and more. By the second day when I got home from work, I logged in again, having read all day at the forums at work I came home expecting to kick some serious butt since we were all pretty new at the game. I was on IRC throughout the day earlier too, telling my guild that the game was awesome, and I was having a blast. They were all intrigued too, and some started more eagerly awaiting their beta receipts. I logged on again, and now with a fresh look and tons of forum information, I started to play. And then I started to realize the things that made me a little uneasy. The animations were bad. Really bad. The sound effects were worse than Starcraft. Still though, a game wasn't made by graphics, or sound, was it? I found that when I ran up a hill I'd often "float" in the middle of the air. Beta problems, I assumed. They will be fixed. Then I got to kill some more goblins and after they got low on health, they started running away... here comes that awesome AI I thought, and then I stood watch as the goblin ran around in a retarded circle with no rhyme or reason. It was starting to settle in, that the game wasn't very polished.
Days came and went, and daily I'd submit bug reports, go into the forums and post about what needed fixing -- things like adding hotkeys for the map and backpack, or making the UI a little more utilitarian and less awkward. Things like how the towns didn't have finished content and that you'd run up stairs only to be tossed into a WALL, and would have to run back down to get off. And all this time, I came to defend the game when it was being ridiculed, when the early beta leaks came out and showed some poorly done feature. It's in beta guys I said, they have it in debug mode and the monsters aren't all turned on. And it hit me, that who was I lying to? Them, or myself? I am by profession an IT manager, dealing with systems and software deployments in a financial firm. "Debug mode"? What did that mean to me? And I would think about it -- debug mode means we turn on verbose logging. When we are beta testing, the features are all there because the end user needs to see the full product. And slowly I resolved to be a harsher tester than I was before, and giving the harsh feedback that needed to be given.
It started almost two weeks later that I came to that point -- playing a few hours a day I never really thought much about the combat because it was almost an afterthought. But seeing players macroing ingame on a regular basis, and how I lagged behind I was reminded of the worst parts of UO. And I realized then that this game makes you macro because there's really no way to earn it "by playing the game". The combat I finally realized, was bland and lifeless, the real skill in the game being 'organized' rather than anything else. A well organized group would lead others into hitting each other and killing themselves. The game mechanics like the rogue system were poor, and magic was a humungous grind. Not to say I couldn't macro it up like everybody else... I just felt it was a poorly implemented system. The one thing that really led me to quit was when a guildmate got into beta and asked, "How's the PvP compared to UO?", and I couldn't at that point sell out what I believe to still be the best PvP in ANY game. I told him flatly, "it sucks". The game would be fun for a while if you had a guild, but the lifeless PvP really ruined the game. A sandbox game is great, and DF has the elements it needs there -- but PvP is useless and boring and if it's not immediately, it will soon become stale. I'm not much of a "city sieger" because Shadowbane taught me early that I have to give up my social life in order to defend the town, so I didn't care much for that. I wanted open world PvP, duels, guild fights, etc. This game would simply not support it.
Now on launch day (or launch+1 at this point), I reflect back to think about how much I trolled the folks who were not looking to be trolled by a game I didn't even know that much about. Sure, some people will enjoy it, and those people largely come from anything OTHER than UO, and the ones who liked it in UO are usually part of a large guild (SUN comes to mind during the beta) because they are organized and do well. I can understand that. I am here to apologize for all the stupidity I let out in defending the game before I knew what it was, but a good lesson to be learned here is that I need to have far lower expectations for a game, and be untrusting and biased AGAINST the developer if I want to see a game actually try to appease the end user. I won't even go into how bad the PR or communication has been with AV, I think we all know it. I'm just here to say I learned my lesson and now as I turn my sights to Mortal Online I'll keep a bias that I didn't have with DF, lest I be disappointed or dishonest with myself, or become a troll and an annoyance to others. [/Quote]
If anyone, Darkfall fans should be giving Mortal online lots of time to work out their beta.
See ya.
Nice job trolling Domesto, but it seems you didn't even read the post.
I said in that post that I didn't want to let developers get a slide just because they are making a game I might like. I said that after turning off shadows (my only issue) the game was stable, and ran perfectly well. No lag either, and 100+ FPS. The combat was bland and lifeless, and the PvP sucked. That's why I didn't like the game. But for other people, that were in big groups, I saw how the game *could* be fun for them.
MO doesn't even come close. It crashes every day for lots of people. Their patcher STILL doesn't work properly, and it wasn't even written by them. The game lags constantly, the desync issues are ridiculous, the combat is worse than Darkfall and magic is worse too. And most of the systems that are in have severe problems like thievery.
I can at least look back at DF and say well, the game was playable -- just not a lot of fun. MO isn't even PLAYABLE. Everything is broken, there's lots of crashes, patching problems, and a lot more, and on top of all that, it's STILL not fun. See, DF hyped itself to be the next UO back then too -- and when I actually played it I found that DF's PvP sucked, but it was good in group play even if I didn't enjoy it. MO's PvP sucks even worse, their group play is horrible, and they are still hyping it to be the next UO.
If anything, if you're going to spend the time digging up posts in order to troll me, you'd be best advised to actually READ THEM FIRST.
I think the only thing I like about Mortal Online is that it will attract more and new players to come over to Darkfall.
I Was in Block C beta and wow was it extremely bad. In a year from now it may be better but honestly it will never catch up to darkfall. Darkfalls development is only speeding up and not slowing down. They are hiring developers like crazy making the game insanely good.
I got locked into the 6month subscription deal of 10$ per month. I probably wont subscribe to mortal unless I get a similar deal.
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