Traveling in Darkfall Online

By Blackwings

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For those of you not in the game yet, I know there are still lots of you out there, I thought I’d throw you a little bone about what life is like in the game. Today I’m going to chronicle a little bit about my first day’s experience after all my bugs were worked out and try to describe what it’s been like. First let me say, the world is ginormous. There is no such thing as fast travel (i.e., teleporting) in this game with the exception of being able to recall to your bindstone (/bindstone_recall). The amount of time it takes to get anywhere in this game is immersive and just feels right, but it’s also easy to forget how far you’ve gone when traveling and how easy it would be to erase any momentum you’ve made in the game with but a blink of the eye.

I started the game as a Human in the village of Monkfield, which is near the Southeast corner of Agon. Keep in mind, my guild was looking at first to possibly build in the human lands but realistically I wanted to roll human anyway. By the time I got all my technical difficulties sorted out the guild had already established a hamlet in the Dwarf lands to the North. I first decided to get some basic game experience in before I made the trek across Agon with only my starter weapons – on foot. So I went to the nearest nest of baddies and started to kill and loot. It wasn’t long before one of my fellow newbies decided to try to kill me while I was resting, which made me realize the brutal reality of this game. After a short fight, I was better geared with a little gold in my pocket to make the trip, in hindsight I should have stopped at the bank first. But oh well, thanks newbie for attacking me – I needed your gear.

Off I went on my travels to find my guild’s hamlet – the first thing I did was to get the map coordinates from a fellow guildmate off of vent. I’m going to tell you now, make sure to mark the map coordinates down accurately. My trip to my hamlet took me nearly twice as long as it should have because I went to the West of Agon when I should have went East. The map by itself is not very descriptive. Anyway, I began traveling North and quickly came to a very high peak of a mountain. I started to work my way around and then I remembered, this is not like other MMO’s out there – I can climb that mountain! So I did, I wish I took a screenshot because it was one of the coolest sites I’d seen.

Traveling up a mountain slows your speed down to a crawl, this is where I started to use my sprint to try to speed things up. Coming from games where sprint just doesn’t last long I was holding it in reserve, but thankfully it lasts quite awhile or as long as you have stamina anyway which bled off slow. But knowing it isn’t a good idea to lose all my stamina in case I got in a fight, I always held about 75% of it in reserve so I did a lot of slower running without the sprint. Coming down the mountain was a bit faster to say the least, I fell. Falling in Darkfall does do damage but as for now it can not kill you. I fell almost all the way down the mountain and got within an inch of my life so I stopped to rest and recover but it was faster than walking the winding slope down.

After making my way across the center of Agon to the West, I realized my mistake and turned East toward Haven’s hamlet. I had already been traveling for over an hour now, stopping here and there to rest up my stamina I had to use to run from the occasional NPC or to hide from what looked like hunting parties of other humans. After my experience being attacked by another human in the starter area, I wasn’t taking chances.

I made my way from West to East making a bee-line toward our hamlet. On the way I passed the time by listening in to my guildmates on vent, they were warning me of continual attacks on the hamlet by a guild called Covenant of the Phoenix. After a while of traveling, I drew to within about a 5 minute run of the Haven hamlet. At this point I decided to take one last rest to get my stamina up to 100% just in case I made my way into town as an attack was going on. I after all was still grossly under-geared and was still bound in Monkfield. I didn’t want to get all the way to the Haven hamlet just to die and make the run again.

I found a good spot to rest on the shoreline, the slope of the ground was steep enough to offer me cover from everywhere but the ocean, so I wouldn’t be easily spotted. I rested myself back up to full stamina and had just walked out of cover when I saw three riders bearing down on me. I put my cursor over the lead rider, praying that I saw Haven in the name – I didn’t. It was a rider from Covenant of the Phoenix and he was closing on me fast, my heart sank.

Much to my surprise, when the Covenant rider saw me he shifted directions to try to avoid me. The other two followed, I knew I wasn’t that intimidating so I decided to investigate further and sprinted after them to get a better look at what was going on. It turns out the other two rider’s were pursuing him. They managed to corner him off to the shoreline, corralling him toward me. The Covenant rider immediately dismounted and began to recall his mount – I can only assume he was planning on going for a swim. Unfortunately for him, he dismounted way to close to me – I ran in for the steal. With my weapon drawn I ran up and took a swipe at him just as I was getting ready to jump on his mount! Ha-ha, I was giddy with excitement already thinking about his face while I rode away with his ride.

Wait a minute, what’s wrong here. I’m hitting the ‘F’ key over and over but I’m not climbing on! Doh, I have my weapon out. Without a moment to spare and the other two riders just arriving for the attack I sheathed my sword and jumped on his horse. Away I went, he got one small swipe on me before I rode out of his range. I didn’t stop to watch him meet his fate as I rode on toward Haven’s hamlet, but I did take a glance back to chuckle and saw him swimming out to sea with arrows stuck in his back. I can only imagine he didn’t make it far. Thanks for the ride Covenant guy! Shame I didn’t meet you hours ago!