Vyko

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=30778

This game is looking fantastic. A gameplay video is exactly what the community needed, and man did this video deliver. Yeah, I'm pretty much definitely making a mage-type now, because the limited and early functionality of the spell system we see here looks just phenomenal. Also, the ships gave me chills. Oh, the ships!

Looks like it's coming along beautifully.. there's some smoothing out to do, but man does this game look fun.

SmokingTarpan

Well, I didn't want to be the first person to say anything because I've only got negative comments, but it's been two days and no one else has responded, heh.

My desire to play the game has already been ratched down due to the constant delays and lack of information, and this video all but killed it off completely. Graphics are terrible, animations are buggy (we're going to ice skate everywhere in the game, eh?), and there's a bunch of lag considering the fact that they should have taken the video from a local connection. Other issues abound as well, like being able to hit a guy with your sword without actually being close to him (e.g. the two riders passing each other).

For a game that they've been working on for 6 years and claim to have a beta build for, it certainly looks like a waste of time. This gameplay video was posted a year ago:

http://media.pc.ign.com/media/016/016821/vids_1.html

Compare it to the "new" one that was released. Either the one we're seeing now is a video they've had from a year ago and just never showed us, or they've actually gone backwards in quality. I see no major improvements between the two, and in some ways the year old video looks better.

I'm sadly quite disappointed. This game had tons of promise, but every new "update" just makes me dislike it and helps to reaffirm the vaporware feel.

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Karkianman101

No, there's definately some improvement there. The old video was pretty much graphical, but this one shows a bit more variety, better models/animations, and some actual functionality.

SmokingTarpan

Honestly, I'm not seeing much, if any, improvement. Characters are moving around as if they're skating on ice. Overall the motion seems laggy, and hitbox detection looked terrible. And the naval battle? Ugh.

It's not drop-dead terrible, but I expected one hell of a lot more from a game this long in development and that claims to be in beta.

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"I am the prettiest african-american, vietnamese..cong..person." -SugarNCamo

Vyko

Heh, I was wondering why no one replied. Did I overhype it? :P

I think there's absolutely improvement over what we've seen in the past. The first gameplay video was a lot of walking around with a few scenes of sword slashing and a few spells casted into the sky, and even those basic activities didn't look as smooth they do in the new video. I think the graphical improvements are clear too - models look much more crisp and "alive", though the higher resolution the video is shot at may help there a bit. Compared to how other games look in their pre- open beta states, I think it's progressing very nicely.

The ship battle, admittedly, looked rough. The cannonballs and sinking ship animation looked terrible. However, I was more excited about the potential than the current functionality and visual aspects. Nothing like what they're showing has been offered in past MMO games - ship vs. ship combat (and even ship vs. man combat) may be nothing new, but the possibility of it happening anywhere you may go at any time is pretty exciting to me. The fact that it's just a single dynamic of a much larger game is very neat, and it's great to see it coming together.

On one level I am disappointed that it's not closer to launch than it is, but there have been games in open beta states that have looked a lot worse than this does.

SmokingTarpan

I think that's what gets me the most. It's taken roughly 6 years for this game to alledgedly hit super secret closed beta; and I say this with multiple grains of salt being taken because I don't trust the way the developers have been wording their information releases. It would not surprise me if their claimed "internal" beta didn't actually exist, or was little more than a demo in an attempt to get funding.

So, after 6-ish years, most of which they claim beta is Coming Soon(tm), they release their second video. If you hop on over to the DF forums, after getting past the first dozen or so pages of fanboy (I use this term lightly; it just seems that people overreact far too much on the positive side whenever Aventurine releases any info, likely because they do it so seldomly) responses, there's quite a few people that have the same complaints as I do. The graphics are aged, the animation is poor, functionality seems less than adequate. The lag alone in some of the fighting is inexcusable for an internal beta test, provided that this video is from that stage.

I just expect far more for a game that's been so long in the making. Gamespy lists the release date as December of this year, though I'm certain they're just guessing. However, if Aventurine plans to release this year at all, or even next year, they still have a ton of work to do as far as I'm concerned. I doubt they can do it, especially when they're on pause looking for people to provide them funding.

Sad, because I had quite high hopes for this game when I first heard about it.

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[squadl]
"I am the prettiest african-american, vietnamese..cong..person." -SugarNCamo