[DanaC]

I don't play single player games much at all. But I do like me a good MMO. Mainly I prefer the sandbox ffa pvp type games, though I recently did a stint in WoW. Gave it up tho after a couple of months. Was good, but the levelling style pissed me off after a bit. I've tried many MMOs but by far the best and to my mind the king of all MMOs was the original Ultima Online. Happy days: played it for about 4 years; was a member of three guilds in that time, and ran one of them (a RP PVP guild). Apart from UO most of the MMOs I've played have been in beta (e.g Anarchy, Shadowbane, Irth), and they all were great but lacked the depth and freedom of UO. Irth came close but they totally buggered up the in-game economy and skewed the whole thing too far towards the character building players: just kept adding new levels of stuff rather than allowing people to complete their character and then play the game with that fully built character. No end game.

I'm pretty excited about the prospect of playing Darkfall Online. It's the first big MMO in years that seems to have the same kind of ethos as UO. Make the world as real as possible. In one Youtube clip I saw, the players had to take a raft ride to get to an island they were raiding. It took them 30 minutes to cross the water and reach their destination. Awesome.

I'll stop now, because if i start to go on in depth about why I think MMO makers have usually taken the wrong lessons from UO and EQ, I'll be here all night and this post will be three pages long :P

My best friend is in the process of starting up a games company and they've just begun coding their MMO (small-scale - hopefully to support up to 20k players, though with the option to build in greater capacity at a later date if it took off). They have an investor, which is great, but they are mainly part-time coders. I think one of them is coding full time. I'm really hoping they can pull it off: J has come up with a fantastic idea and it would be wonderful if he could get to implement it. It's something he's been thinking about for a long time (the game, not the company), so the setting and ruleset is pretty refined now. They're hoping to have a basic beta game within three years.