Darkfall Interview & Screenshots
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Q: Your website states that your (crafting system is intuitive, non-repetitive, challenging, useful, fun - and profitable.) Can you explain what this means in practical terms?
A: Consider what potentially tide-turning magical weapons are worth to a besieged clan - who stand to lose their clanstone and everything they've worked for - and you'll realise the worth of craftsmen in a war-torn setting such as Agon. Darkfall is a combat oriented game, and there will never be a shortage of recently slain players who need to have their equipment replaced. As a result, master crafters will be highly sought after, both as clan members and as trading partners.
Crafting in Darkfall involves more than just toiling at the anvil or workbench. In order to create an item, you must first procure the required raw materials, and this can be much more complicated than just strolling down to the local mine with a pickaxe over your shoulder. If you want to create magical items, for example, you'll first need to obtain special ingredients which are only dropped by different kinds of monsters. Some of these resource monsters are hard to kill, others are rare, while yet others live in dangerous and/or enemy-controlled habitats. Even the more prosaic resources, such as iron and wood, must be harvested from a limited number of resource points, which can be brought under a restricting clan's control.
The crafting system is designed this way in order to encourage conflict, cooperation and trade between players. Here are just some of the things we hope to see players engaged in, as a result of incentives inherent in Darkfall's crafting system: 1) Clan conflict over the control of monster populations which yield valuable resource drops. 2) Stealth raids into the territories of enemy races in order to harvest rare ingredients. 3) Merchants specializing in buying and selling ingredients. 4) Players discovering and researching a new resource several months into the game. 5) Neighbors uniting against a powerful clan monopolizing a resource point. 6) Clans demanding a tax from anyone wishing to use their resource points. 7) Mercenary craftsmen offering their services to the highest bidder in a vicious clan war. 8) Flourishing black market resource trade in neutral cities such as Silvertown.
They've also published ten exclusive screenshots showing off mounted combat in the game.
