Editor's blog: Darkfall aftermath Comments by Tom Bramwell

is this still going? i lol'd at this nonsense friday before i left work, and i find it hard to believe that this is still going on.

goes to show what happens if you upset people that don't have a life

http://www.clichequest.com/headquarters/...

You realise, EG_IS_BALLS that the comic you posted a link to is actually making fun of how utterly childish Tasos' response was, don't you?

It's a half-full/half-empty thing I think.

But if Tasos is now pulling the whole, "I WUZ JOKING LOL" argument, then that makes it even funnier. I'd be interested in seeing this second response, but if it's the one I've already seen, it was just more whining...

Bloody hell. This thread combined with the original review thread now stands at over 1500 posts.
A lot of fuss over a crap game caused by an immature dev having a hissy fit.

/sighs

Goes to show you can never have enough of Internetz lulz drama.

Personally, I would love to see a re-review of this by Kieron. I know Aventurine doesn't wan't that to happen, but how could they stop it? :-)

Personally, I would love to see a re-review of this by Kieron. I know Aventurine doesn't wan't that to happen, but how could they stop it? :-)

----

People PAYING to play the beta cod- I mean, "game" can't even get a look-in. I doubt Aventurine are going to actually allow another reviewer near Darkfall.

A shame, really, as it would - all joking aside - be nice to have a second opinion.

@iokthemonkey:

They would shoot themselves in the foot if they let EG's review be the only one floating around online.

You think they're capable of actually handing ANY form of PR? Clearly from their response here, they're not and at least if it's only one review they can dismiss it as such. The moment another 4 reviews appear at that same level, Metacritic will go from an "unrated" to a "20%"

Feh..

Even if he played it for 3 hours.. Everything he described is SPOT ON! I've been a beta tester since Sep 2008 and this game is a holy mess of cheaters, insecure packets, lag, server-side latency issues, errors, poor graphics and a morass of kids that are there with apparently nothing better to do than trying to find the newest and greatest exploit to piss everyone off.

That, my friends, sums up darkfall online completely.

And actually... I don't think I played it for 3 hours in the last year..

Playing it for 3 hours was painful enough. I can COMPLETELY see why this guy didn't want to go any further than 3 hours. Good god.

@floppylobster How would you know the movie sucked if you only watched half of it? Does that make sense in your head? Because it certainly doesn't make any sense in mine! A reviewer is expected to be impartial and professional enough to be able to PLAY the game no matter how bad it is.

Even if the reviewer is telling the truth 9h is a fucking shame for a MMORPG, if you can't get enough hours in just don't review it.

To Eurogamer, you guys were the only site around where scores still meant something to me, as it is, this will be the last hit you'll get from me.

I would like now to introduce a game superior to Darkfall. It is best mmorpg ever, Wurm Online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBxIex6M3SA

I know that my comments here will fall quietly among the deafening cacophany of outrage and bickering that comprises this frankly huge comments section but I feel I should lay my cards on the table.

Firstly, I find it incredibly hypocritical that so many of these 'fans' of Darkfall Online would complain about a score whilst simultaneously calling into disrepute the journalistic integrity of Eurogamer contributors. If you value the journalism then the score matters, if you don't then the score is irrelevant and shouldn't generate such outrage. You can't have it both ways.

Also these cries of protest only further diminish the integrity of the developers and the reputation of the game. Everyone and everything has its critics, both well-advised and ill-advised. The appropriate response to bad press is to disregard it because the opposite has a much more damaging effect. Retaliation in the media just makes the company look pathetic and petty. If the product is a quality one, it will stand on it's own merits despite a scathing review from one site.

Of the criticism that the reviewer didn't play the game for long enough, how do you think games reviews work? The reviewer is often unaware of the features & benefits of long-term play and this applies to all games. Reviews are intended to reflect a first few hours of play as this is long enough to ascertain the quality of the title based on impressions of graphics, sound, controls etc. A game may have long term benefits to reward players for 100+ hours of play. These are reached by players who have progressed through a lot of QUALITY GAMEPLAY. Ed progressed through 9 hours of awful tedium and unneccessary complexity before finishing his jaunt in the game. If those 9 hrs adhered to even the most basic rules of quality game creation he might have given it a deeper look. At the end of the day your game lives or dies on keeping players hooked from the go. You wouldn't criticise someone for walking out of a shitty film just because it had tits at the end.

Finally, the attitude of fans of the game, the underhanded and childish tactics used on this thread and the uninformed and repetitive bleating of the same complaints again and again make me never want to play this game because I wouldn't want to constantly encounter such a bunch of pathetic, whiny, obsessive jerks.

@anduz

I think this situation has escalated much further than any sensible reaction to a video game review. I appreciate that a niche of gamers like this game, but from what I've seen from the standard of their posts, this isn't a niche that deserves consideration. Eurogamer provides reviews for any and all and unfortunately sometimes that means reviewing a game for the benefit of Joe Public and not to stroke the ego of a developer desperate for positive coverage.

The majority of mainstream gamers (mainstream, not casual) will appreciate the frankness of the review because in a game that requires, nay demands many hours of play to experience fully, it will save them from a lot of wasted hours waiting for the good bit to arrive. A competent MMORPG delivers both short term and long term rewards to keep the player hooked. If the former is absent as appears to be the case then it deserves a poor review.

Ultimately, if Darkfall was intended as a niche game then the developers should expect a small following of fans with a specific interest and not mass-market appeal. This is clearly what the game has achieved so I don't see how a poor review from this one site can do to damage it's reputation.

Regarding the criticism of how long the game was played for, you should realise that Eurogamer's editors and contributors only have a limited amount of time in the day like everyone else and I imagine no shortage of games to review. A big title will undoubtedly get more time devoted to it, more page space and therefore more advertising revenue for the site. A niche or independent title will probably get less time and less space.

As far as journalism goes, there will always be vast differences of opinion and factual errors. The best a publication, or in this case website, can do to rectify that is to investigate further with all facts to hand which is exactly what has been proposed here.

I thought there was going to be a re-review... did i miss it? Just interested to see if the other guy thought it sucked as much as the first guy.

While there is no proven concrete link between ability to string a sentence together without making mistakes and general intelligence, I personally believe it to be highly interconnected, especially as a scale for people's ability to relate to others (which is kind of significant in an MMO). I think it's pretty telling that exactly none of the rabidly anti-review posts by people who have obviously registered in order to rant about a bad review for the game they play are actually written with anything like a competent command of English. On the other hand, leaving aside the issue of the veracity of its facts, the review in question was well written. Based on what I read here, I'd not want to speak to any of the Darkfall fans, let alone trust their word over Ed Zitron's.

I don't always agree with EG, but I find them to be about as far beyond reproach as any corporate entity is capable of going. The idea we are being asked to swallow is that they would throw all of their credibility aside by employing a journalist who basically told lies, and thus expertly snipe themselves in the foot over a niche title relatively far from their core audience. This seems much less likely to me than a game developer massaging their own logfiles to try and pass off a negative review of their game, which happens to be their one and only source of income and the focus of years of their work, on a respected site as somehow inherently wrong.

If gaming is going to be taken seriously as an adult's pastime, developers need to be able to take criticism. If this sort of childish hissy fit (by which I mean the official response, not the million wailing fans) was pulled by every author, musician and director who got bad press, we'd all be neck deep in snotty letters saying "my work is good really, you're just not experiencing it right; you need to watch/read/listen to it for at least 30 hours solid before you can even begin to form an opinion!". That is a pathetic argument, and always has been. I usually have an idea inside 9 minutes whether I'm likely to enjoy a book, film, album or game or not, and I'll be fairly certain inside 90 minutes. 9 hours is more than enough to form first impressions.

@YourMessageHere
Your rant about anyone that felt the review was poorly done falls flat when you emphatically declare no argument was presented coherently. Countless people have done so, it seems you willfully ignored them or did not read through most comments before making your claim. The level of immaturity presented by rapid EG fans easily equals that of any of the immature posts from DF fans. A quick glance of the posts easily confirms this.

Your second point tries to compare the "word" of EG and that of Aventurine. It should however be comparing that of Ed vs Aventurine. Your whole argument relies on speculation that Ed would obviously not write something false ever so we shouldn't even begin to question the validity of the 'facts' he presents. This idea is ludicrous. He can and did present paragraph after paragraph of false information about the game. I'd be curious to here you or anyone actually try to defend the multiple falsities that have been shown in his article. It is mind boggling that anyone is trying to defend that. Surely you value honesty and integrity in journalism and published papers? Holding published articles to that standard is the norm, why should it not be applied here, like everywhere else?

Your next point attempts to say Aventurine should not have criticized this article. Consider what you're actually saying there for a second. Surely you'll admit there are situations when a company with a product should speak out about a review that simply does not present the product as it is. If a movie reviewer (especially one from a well know reviewer) writes a review of a movie, criticizing it for something that did not even happen in the movie, the movie company has the right and should challenge the review. It's a no-brainer. So why is this article still up? Presenting another review of the same game does not change the fact that EG will still be presenting and supporting a review filled with false 'facts' about the game.

I know what the reviewer means. I spent some 18 minutes on the game World of Warcraft on a friends recommendation and found it was a waste of time too. When I died, I became a ghost and could not get back again. Stupid game.

I am so glad sites like this can invest the time to try out products so that I don't have to before I make the mistake of paying for them. In fact, I rarely do anything in life on my own now without Eurogamers trusted opinion there to back me up. It's like having a second, better brain that never puts a cerebral foot wrong.

In fact, before you smile instinctively at something next time, why not just have a quick check with Eurogamer just to make sure it's okay. What button do I push now?? ahhh the "speak your brain" quippybutton. (chuckling) That's Eurogamer!

I agree with people, 9 hours is usually enough time to make up your mind if a game is going to pull you in or not. Actually, this can be forumlated in a couple of hours.

Perhaps the point being missed is a review, officially endorsed by EG or Reader Review, is the opinion of one person. I could try Darkfall, I've been playing MMO's both release, beta and alpha since 2000 - I have a very high tolerance threshold, perhaps too great to be a totally fair viewpoint but so far Darkfall seems to be everything I hate about where MMORPG's are headed.

Let us put it this way. Freedom is fine and dandy in single-player. You put a person in a sandbox map with lots of tools at their disposal and the first instinct is usually to wreck the place but others may jump right into the actual story. But that is fine, because you're not treading on the toes of other people in your enjoyment. In an MMO - be it Darkfall or Age of Conan's woeful initial addition of PvP - freedom is overrated. Everyone is different, and having people tread on other peoples enjoyment of the game by accident or design is a bad thing. Everyone is in the game for fun, not to end up being molested or have all their hard work and loot stolen in a heartbeat by some callous player - and when there is no mechanic there to punish the hecklers, you have a real REAL issue on your hands.

The Darkfall review by Ed to me seemed perfectly fair. He played it for as long as he could stomach it and came away feeling it was a wasted effort. That is his opinion. He gets paid to do this and as was said in the Damnation review, reviewers do try and see the good in everything - it's probably how you cope with games all day every day, otherwise you'd be carted off to the nearest mental hospital. When a reviewer can't find the fun, they will tell you. Some may enjoy Darkfall, and that's great, but it doesn't need to come to this kind of warfare - Darkfall seems to be doing fine.

I mean, no publicity is bad publicity, right? Come on, it's got me itching to find out if Darkfall is really that bad!

@Kami
I would disagree as to the definition of a review. It's not just an opinion of the reviewer. I would call it: the opinion of the reviewer based on facts and knowledge about the product. Most people who read this review haven't played the game, so of course it will seem fine to them. However, stop and consider this one example to try and understand what many of us are saying is wrong with the article.

"As much as this might sound like Diablo II, Darkfall's combat is rather more similar to a Quake mod circa 1997. The lack of hit detection saps the combat of any weight or skill, and makes it incredibly frustrating to fight enemies during PVE or PVP combat. Judging the distance that one needs to be at to fight a foe is largely guesswork, and, worse still, your combat skills affect how often you actually connect. It isn't even an issue of timing your clicks based on the connection with your sword - it's nigh-on random. Using spells or arrows is somewhat less exhausting, but usually ends messily when an enemy decides to run at you, leaving you with the choice of changing weapon (a ten-second operation - five if you're particularly nimble) or running backwards in the vain hope of not dying."

See that entire paragraph from the review? Everything in it about the game is false. And that's just one example. So how is this 'review' fair? It is a normal standard to expect a paid professional writer to present only accurate information in a published article. Otherwise, what is the point of the article at all. A review's main goal is to help potential customers decide about buying said product. How is presenting tons of false information about any product ever a good thing?

The Daily Dorkfail

All I can say, is this review is as accurate as the Darkfall home web site. In fact, the review is probably more accurate. I feel it's(the review) a fair warning to anyone interested in playing Darkfall, that they had better ask plenty of questions before purchasing. Because they will be sorely disappointed if they use the "Features" page of the DFO web site as a gauge.

As for Tasos and his temper-tantrum, "oh yeah!, duel my main!!", diatribe? Just another proof positive(negative) as to Aventurine's mentality as far as dealing in the MMORPG industry goes.

So is there any sign of a new review yet ?
It's Monday and I need a laugh.

.