Fix Error 14001

I noticed that some players are still getting an "Error 14001" while starting Darkfall Online client and don't know how to solve it. In fact, the solution for 14001 error problem is a very easy since all you have to do is install the Visual C++ Redistributable (vcredist_x86.exe) that handily comes with your Darkfall install:

Start > Programs > Darkfall > Install VC Redistributable

The vcredist_x86.exe file is official software from Microsoft that installs runtime components of Visual C++ Libraries required to run applications developed with Visual C++... Such as Darkfall Online, apparently. It's absolutely safe and should cause no problems with your computer. Seriously, I think this should either be installed automatically together with Darkfall, or at least on the official FAQ for everyone to see.

Darkfall Review - First Impressions

I guess I should post some of my impressions of the game now that I've played it for a bit. Note that this is just that and not a full-fledged review by any means, since not only I haven't tried some aspects of Darkfall yet, I'm also playing the game on my old PC for now which means I can't judge the graphics objectively. That being said, let's dive in.

Gameplay and Combat

The combat system of Darkfall is completely different from all other MMOs that I've tried, and similar to that of FPS games. Instead of selecting a target and using various skills strategically, here you have to aim your attacks, predict your enemy's moves, and evade their strikes. I am not saying that Darkfall doesn't have a lot of skills to choose from, but right now most people only use simple melee attacks. The strategy involves trying to hit your opponent in the back and pelt him with Mana Missiles or arrows if he tries to run away. If you are the one doing the running, make sure you're not going in a straight line because if you do, you'll become a perfect target for your enemies' projectiles. Chases, by the way, take the longest time since everyone has a lot of stamina and can run/sprint around for minutes. Overall, the combat gives you a lot of freedom and is very different from other MMOs; FPS gamers will surely find a good application for their skills in Darkfall.

The full loot PvP ruleset adds a lot of excitement and sense of danger to the game. It also adds a lot of annoyance sometimes and naked people ganking everyone and some spawnpoints. I haven't ever played UO and the other MMORPG that I'm subscribed to - Age of Conan - has a pretty much non-existand death penalty, so this is all new for me. I rather like it so far: it never made much sense to me when in AoC the death penalty was so light that people used to kill themselves as means of transport.

There are a lot of skills, including ones like Running, Swimming, or even Resting. The system definitely reminds me of Morrowind, and it's a lot of fun to get "skill ups" no matter what action you take. Combat skills are harder to level up though, and might take a long while to master since the higher you get, the slower you learn.

The World

The world is huge and seamless, except for a little HDD trashing at the beginning of each invisible "zone" (might be just my 1 GB of RAM though). Regrettably, it also feels very empty. Don't get me wrong: it is very detailed and full of landmarks such as mountains, rivers, meadows, trees (some giant ones), lakes, lava fields, and so on. However, there are very little mobs around (they're concentrated in a few small camps), the world is so big that the few thousands of players who bought the game aren't enough to fill it (run from Alfar to Mirdain starting town for 30 minutes and you'll likely meet no one), and finally, there are precious few NPCs. Only the starting and the main towns have NPCs in them; while exploring, I've come across many very nice and detailed looking towns, which were completely devoid of life. I do hope this only means that Aventurine hadn't had the time to populate them with NPCs, and not that the server wouldn't handle the load of they did.

The Graphics

I said I wouldn't be able to really review the graphics, and that's true. I'll just say the game runs reasonably well on my old box (Athlon XP 3000+, Radeon x800GTO, 1 GB RAM). RAM is a problem though and I think having more would really help. I'll definitely post about Darkfall's performance on my new "rig" once I get it back from repairs.

The graphics look better than I expected, but there are some glitches and weird things that need fixing. While the sky looks great, the sun looks strange and changes in size depending on the position of your crosshair. It is also sometimes shining in front of the moon. The day/night cycle changes almost instantly. There are some really bad animations and effects, spell effects probably being #1. The list goes on; I don't want to sound all negative though, since like I said, the game still looks much better than I've thought before.

The Sound

The sound in Darkfall definitely needs a lot of work. Some effects (OK, most of them) are pretty much terrible. I guarantee you'll cringe after hearing all those mana missiles skill grinders shoot off in towns. However my biggest problem is the 3D effects. While I'm able to tell the position of the enemy by listening to the fighting sounds, I can't tell the distance with any accuracy because it sounds nearly the same: it doesn't matter if the players are fighting 1 or 100 meters away.

The best part of Darkfall soundtrack is probably the music you hear on the login screen. The ambient soundtracks - there's only one for each race's teritory, I believe - are unintrusive and silent, but far from the wonderful soundtracks in World of Wacraft by Jason Hayes, or Age of Conan by Knut Avenstroup Haugen. I guess I shouldn't even bring this up since Aventurine is much smaller than Blizzard or even Funcom, but it would be nice to have some awesome fantasy/medieval music in the game.

The Wishlist

• Chat bubbles - right now, everyone is asocial in the game. The chat system pretty much sucks and if you say anything to people around you, there's a high chance they won't see it. I believe text bubbles  above your character's head with messages that you post to Public or Race channels would be great and help the community feeling. Before you start screaming that it would break stealth or whatever, consider that you don't need to talk while sneaking, and party/guild chat or /tell text wouldn't be visible anyway.
• Improved chat system: right now you have to switch between the chat channels in order to see what people are saying in them. Like I mentioned before, no one ever uses Public since they won't see miss Race or Party otherwise. There's no "All" channel that would have all the messages in one place. It would be best to have fully customizable channels like in Age of Conan, where you can choose everything from what channels should be visible to what combat messages you want to receive.
  
• Tradehouses: some people might think spamming the chat with WTB/WTS for hours is cool, but let's get real. It's 2009 and modern MMOs must have a way to sell your stuff easier. It could be auction houses, AoC-like tradehouses, NPC vendors that you hire, or, heck, even player stalls/shops like the ones you see in Asian MMORPGs. To improve realism, the trade houses could even be local for each city instead of universal. Anything that makes trading easier and more fun.
• Proper party controls - some people might think it's "hardcore" and cool to have to invite players into their party by typing /party_invite First Last every time. I don't. Darkfall needs a proper Party window for creating, inviting or leaving parties.
  

State of the Game

Darkfall needs a massive amount of polishing. The GUI is awkward (although usable) and incomplete: it says gui_window_chat_toggle in the Input Bindings, for example, and not Toggle Chat.  All hotkey descriptions are like that and it just screams "beta test!". When pointing at objects, the status window also happily informs you that you're in fact looking at a r_Alfar_Female_Robed model and not an Alfar Female that would make more sense in this stage of the game. These are all small things, but they add to the overall "unfinished" impression.

Despite all the flaws, Darkfall does have a lot of potential. Right now the biggest problems I see is the Aventurine's failure to meet the demand for the game, the lack of proper customer support, and abundant macroing or even hacking. However, they seem to be aware and working on all of this problems. If the company keeps improving DFO they could turn it into a truly great MMORPG, so I wish Aventurine developers the very best.

Aventurine Working on New Servers

A new update on Darkfall sales, account management, customer support and servers has just been posted on DFO forums. Read it below:

We’ve been letting people buy the game in groups every day. This is done mainly so that we don’t have too many people trying to enter the game at the same time thus creating very long queue times. Our capacity is limited, and we’re working to increase it. Starting next week, the groups being allowed in the game will be larger. We’re also working on getting new servers up. We’re basically doing all we can to improve this situation as quickly as possible.

This was not helped at all by the account management system which hasn’t lived up to anyone’s expectations. This is not software that we’ve created, and since day 1 of its operation we’ve been working to get it replaced with something better.

It also needs to be said that we read all your support requests and we’re prioritizing and working on everything you’re reporting to us.

The sales will open up again around 7pm GMT until sold out, same will happen tomorrow Friday. There will be no sales over the weekend but they will resume on Monday around the same time.

This is some of the best Darkfall news that I've heard in a while. Why, because they've confirmed that they're actually working on adding new servers! I have been wanting to start fresh on a new server for more than one reason, so I'm glad that I'll soon have that chance. Not to mention, a lot of people still want to get in the game, and a single EU-1 server can't possibly hold them all.

Aventurine's Stance on Macroing

Let's talk about macroing in Darkfall. I haven't been in beta so I don't know whether that was an issue back then or not, but it surely is now. A macro will do your fishing, mining, logging, or any other gathering skill just as fine as you would sitting behind your PC and clicking the left mouse button every ~10 seconds. Similarly it will level up your Mana Missile and Lesser Magic by shooting the spell in the air while you'e AFK eating pie. I don't like it much, although some people seem to think that macroing is OK (I don't). I wasn't very happy to read the thoughts of Brannoc (official Darkfall forums moderator) in his little IRC interview that he gave a few days ago, either:

Kompressor: Is macroing a bannable offence?
<@Brannoc> not my place to state the official stance on macro'ing
<@Brannoc> but that's common sense, not an official stance
<@Brannoc> I'd say a common sense answer would be that...if you're not macro'ing to exploit the system or for commercial gain...you'll be left alone

As you can see, Brannoc's answer is quite ambiguous and leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Does the part about macroing for commercial gain mean that as long as you don't sell your stuff for real money, it's alright to use macros? Thankfully, there has been a more clear official stance posted by Tasos yesterday:

To address an issue reported by players: We generally frown on unattended macroing and if you use macros you do so at your own risk, but it should be mentioned that spamming spells and any macroing WITHIN the protective radius of the guard towers in the starting areas will result in a kick, and repeated offenses could result in a ban.

So, even though macroing is "frowned upon" oficially, it seems Aventurine won't bother to try and catch you, as long as you leave your character in some secluded location and not the starting towns. I guess I have to be thankful for that too, since the sounds of Mana Missiles in newbie towns are killing my speakers right now. However, I expect that in the future the majority of players will use macros for gathering at the very least, unless Aventurine makes drastic changes to the game system or their stance towards macroers.

You can read the whole news post on the Darkfall forums.

Sync Issues - Servers Still Down

If you have been sitting at your PC for the larger part of the day like I did, then you know that Darkfall servers had been down ever since the maintenance started, then went back up for about 20 minutes and were promptly shut down again. There has been a new update regarding this on the Darkfall forums:

3.00 PM GMT

We didn’t manage to completely eliminate the sync issue affecting players in the game earlier today. Our real-time monitor alerted us of this as soon as we brought up the server and players started entering the game. We need to take more time to address this. There is no ETA as of yet. We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

So, the devs are still fighting the sync issue and there's no ETA. Maybe I'll get to play tomorrow. Technically, I shouldn't complain about losing my play time since they gave us 3 additional days, but it's still annoying.

There's an interesting post regarding these problems on the cool gaming blog by Keen and Graev that I like to read. It explains the synching problem in detail and how it made exploiting the game possible. See below:

The biggest issue facing the servers today is something being refered to as “synching”. The servers are not synced right now at all - when I say servers I’m referring to how these games have a “mob AI server” and a “loot server” and a “combat server” - I don’t know why it’s called that, but it’s a habit from the old days. Right now the mob AI server is extremely out of synch. Invisible mobs are hitting people, people swinging at visible mobs are seeing nothing happen, and sometimes you’ll even swing at the air and hit a real player who you can’t see. It’s a mess, and it’s having ramifications on the game beyond being simply frustrating.

Some clans have decided to take advantage of this syncing problem by going to the higher level areas and killing mobs, somehow, that don’t fight back. As you can imagine, the result is that they’re getting money and items they should not be able to acquire at this stage of the game. Guilds have already formed (2,000g), clan stones have already been claimed (10,000g), and people are already gearing out beyond their means. It’s… it just plain sucks.

The fact that some guilds already claimed clan stones by farming mobs which do not fight back does not bother me as much as Aventurine's stance on exploiters. First I hear that AFK macroing is, in fact, a legal way to increase your skills, and now we'll probably see no action whatsoever taken against the cheaters.

It's understandable that right now Aventurine has much more important problems at hand (such as actually making the game work), but I hope that they will not tolerate any form of cheating or exploiting in the future. It's especially important for a game focused on PvP and player competition such as Darkfall.

Darkfall Scheduled Maintenance Downtime

There has been a new Darkfall update on the official forums. Of course, the forum itself is still disabled since it's server can't handle the load, so the update was posted in place of the maintenance mode message. You can read it below:

Update 5.49pm GMT

After addressing a couple of early issues the servers have been running very stable for several hours and we have a large number of players in-game right now.

It’s normal to expect more issues to surface in the next couple of days. We postponed our scheduled maintenance of 10 AM GMT for later until we can gather some more data and address anything that comes up in a patch later tonight.

We’re aware that some areas are experiencing sync issues for some players. This is a high priority issue that we are working to address as soon as possible. We know the cause for it so it shouldn’t take very long. We will keep the servers up while this is being fixed and we will bring them down for a patch later tonight. For now, players can move away from starting areas to improve their experience.

We have processed the problematic accounts that were never charged but received a successful pre-order notification. Only a small percentage of these were successful and we found out that this is because most of them contain incomplete or incorrect account information. We will try this one last time again tomorrow morning European time, and we’ll open up account management later tonight for these accounts to be able to correct their account data and credit information before we reprocess them. If anyone does not want the pre-order to be processed, they should remove their credit card information from their account. After this is concluded we should be able to open up sales for more Darkfall copies.

I have been experiencing something that I believe is related to those "sync issues", so I'm glad Aventurine is on to it. Sometimes after swinging my weapon the hits are delayed, or not delivered at all. Some players are "teleporting" or moving jumpily as if it's lagging, even though my ping is usually around a respectable 70 ms. Problems like these are very annoying so I hope they will be fixed soon.

Hitler vs Darkfall Launch Problems

If you read Forumfall you might remember the hilarious video about how Hitler wanted to get into Darkfall beta. Now the same author Placebo came up with one more funny short clip that you can watch below. I stumbled upon it in MMORPG.com forums and laughed my butt off at how they portrayed Aventurine HQ "handling preorders" or two women friends of Hitler complaining about missing a WoW raid. It's a parody of the german movie Downfall; probably won't be as funny if you know the language, but otherwise, lulz are guaranteed:

The launch was pretty terrible indeed, but the servers are working fine right now (and have been for some time) so hopefully things will take a turn for the better and we'll be able to enjoy Darkfall for months to come.