New Player Experience – MMO Fallout

Darkfall's New Player Experience: Safe Zones

As someone who enjoys playing video games even more than I do writing about them, I am sympathetic to the plight of the newbie. After all, I’ve played enough of other games to have gotten a good feel for Darkfall when it released a few years ago, but I understand that there are plenty of others who will have a harder time getting attuned, not only to twitch controls in an MMO but the overall idea of free for all combat in an open world environment and full loot rules.

While I’m sure at least one person will object to the idea of a new player experience being something other than a mace to the face by a fully geared veteran, Aventurine has laid out some plans for the new new player experience.

The training areas consist of a series of chambers where new players can train before they move on. Training starts with basic movement and progresses all the way up to spellcasting and combat. This training process is actually a nice adventure with an epic ending, before new players earn their pass and are transported to the actual world. The goal is to ensure that, before entering Agon, new players become familiar with the basic mechanics, as well as the essence of Darkfall, and they can do this at their own pace.

Additionally, it will become a lot harder to steal someone else’s mount as the creature will remember its owner for a short period after dismounting, leaving enough time to de-summon the mount without having to worry about another player running in and riding off. There are a few other new game systems revealed in the blog post, which you can check out at the link below.

(Source: Darkfall Epic Blog)

Darkfall’s New Player Experience: Safe Zones

The training areas consist of a series of chambers where new players can train before they move on. Training starts with basic movement and progresses all the way up to spellcasting and combat. This training process is actually a nice adventure with an epic ending, before new players earn their pass and are transported to the actual world. The goal is to ensure that, before entering Agon, new players become familiar with the basic mechanics, as well as the essence of Darkfall, and they can do this at their own pace.

(Source: Darkfall Epic Blog)

Darkfall De-Trammels With Latest Expansion, Still Helping Newbies

The recent release of Darkfall’s “Darkfall 2010” expansion brought along an overhaul to the world of Agon, from the terrain to the dungeons, the villages, ships, and monsters (some of them level up now), and everything in between. A big change, yes, but warranting an article? Probably not. Today, the focus is on changes to the Newbie Protection Program. New players will now be protected for only one hour after creating their characters, as Aventurine found that newbies were becoming too complacent in their previous protection.

Aventurine is still set on making newbies feel as welcome as possible, however, and the expansion brought in a couple new features new players will like. Racial capitals now feature dungeons to get players acquainted, and the default view is now third person by default, toggled by F12. Third person is not available when wielding a bow, grenade, or staff.

Back in April, Aventurine launched the Newbie Protection Program, offering 24 hours of…protection. New players are incapable of attacking other players, or using certain features of the game (teleports, Runestones, portals, clans, mounts). Aventurine has been working diligently this year on reducing certain symptoms of player grief. Declaring war takes time and costs more to deter griefing, balancing health differences, and more.

Darkfall: Newbie Protection Program

Last month I talked about Aventurine’s plans for Darkfall this year, more specifically the focus on making the new player experience much more of a soft palm and not a bronze-knuckled fist. I also raised concern that this is creating speculation in the Darkfall community that this will bring updates along the lines of the New Game Enhancements, Ultima Online’s Trammel, and Runescape’s trade restrictions. The fact that those updates went through with as cryptic a notice, and Star Wars Galaxies did a lot of damage to developer-customer trust, doesn’t help the situation. I noted that more information would be coming in the near future.

I can say what I want, but with a recent announcement by Aventurine, the usual group just got another reason to call care-bear on the title. In a message to the community earlier today, Tasos announced the specifics of the previously mentioned new player experience. With it brings a very limited protection program, where new accounts have what is called newbie protection, that protects them from other players. Lasting for only a few hours, newbie protection will only allow for combat against monsters, inside of the new player zone. You can not damage other players, nor can you use structures that cause damage to other players. Teleports, Runestones, portals, clans, mounts, and skilling up on other players is also disabled while Newbie Mode is active.

The NPE is optional, and can be turned off at any point. Luckily the Darkfall community as a whole is backing up this protection, and Tasos’ confirmation that it was implemented specifically “without softening the game.” Despite the outcry of the normal vocal minority, who still believe this to be a ‘slippery slop’ towards a Trammel-esque update, Aventurine is showing that they know who they are advertising to, but that those players should be helped as they get used to the game, not punished.