Just read an article over at mmocrunch.com about the Darkfall alliance battles between guilds. The system to attack and defend a city seems to need some tweaking but the size of the battles looks promising. What was interesting though was that the article showed a map made by some Darkfall players which details the alliances and guild locations on Darkfall’s continent map (at the end of the post).

This map shows where each guild is located, the size of the guild (visually) and which guilds are allied with one another. From looking at the map it reminds me of Planetside which was an MMOFPS that had three main factions fighting over hotspots across multiple continents. Like a game of risk, you can see on the Darkfall map where certain alliances have been trying to expel other guilds from islands or surrounding territory.

What pains me is that the community had to build this map. Darkfall only has so many locations to build a city upon. These locations should be displayed on in-game maps and should display which guilds control them (along with other information such as resources, buildings or other guild information). I’ve written about the need to build political and social tools into games before, especially MMOs. Right now the Darkfall map only seems to be useful to figure out where your enemies are but in the future maybe it will lead to other forms of conflict resolutions. Guilds may find that they cannot push everyone out from their surround land meaning negotiations and mediation will have to become a part of the game’s politics. In-game political tools can help achieve this intricate gameplay that will make the game much richer.

Hopefully the developers are watching what the community is doing and will respond with more integrated solutions.

Some reviews of Darkfall came out and they didn’t seem to shine a very good light on the game. Now Darkfall is taking a different approach than other MMOs and it seems they want to focus on the hardcore demographic. But it’s one thing to say they want a game that is niche but another to build a game that becomes niche because of problems.

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A month ago I read an interesting article on Massively.com, which I read daily now, that covered the crafting system in Everquest 2. What is interesting about EQ2’s crafting system is that it is not just a “push button to make” system. There are random events that occur through out the building process and players have to counter-act those events, doing something similar to guitar hero. Basically throughout the crafting process random events pop up, like in the picture below, and you have to press a button, one of your Tradeskill Arts (a spell), to counter-act the event. If you do not counter the event then your item suffers and affects the two qualities of an item, the Durability and Power.

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