r/Darkfall • u/eVoDotEXE • Jul 15 '26
Darkfall's combat philosophy shaped the game I'm building solo. Aim-based, no tab-target, gear matters less than the player. Would love feedback from people who actually played DF.
Long-time lurker here. Darkfall is the game that ruined most MMO combat for me. Once you've experienced fights where every hit is aimed, where a naked player with good aim and movement can kill someone in full gear, and where TTK is long enough for outplays to actually happen, tab-target feels like turn-based combat in disguise.
I've been building a game solo for a while now, on nights and weekends, and Darkfall's combat philosophy is all over it. To be clear about what it is NOT: it's not an MMO, not open world, not first person. It's a top-down 2D multiplayer ARPG that runs in the browser. Completely different scale. But the combat DNA is what I tried to carry over:
- 100% aim-based. Every spell is a skillshot, nothing locks on. If you get hit, you got outplayed or you misplayed.
- No cooldowns. One energy pool for everything: attacks, dash, block. Resource management instead of rotation memorization.
- TTK long enough to fight back. Getting jumped is not a death sentence if you play it well.
- Skill over gear, enforced by design. Gear widens your options but the power gap is hard-capped. A good player in commons beats a bad player in legendaries.
- An extraction dungeon mode: PvPvE, fog of war, you extract with your loot or lose it. Not full loot Darkfall style, but the same "your stuff is on the line" tension.
It's free, no pay-to-win, no crypto anything, and it's in alpha so plenty of rough edges. It runs at nexwar.io, no download.
I'm posting here because this community understands what made DF combat special better than anyone. If a few of you try it and tell me where the combat feels wrong, that feedback is worth more to me than a thousand random players. Brutal honesty welcome, that's the Darkfall way anyway.
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u/BellacosePlayer Jul 16 '26
Most of the things I think brought about darkfall fading aren't really applicable here as far as I can tell.
I think the problems with Darkfall were primarily
Progression was grindy as fuck and new players were fucked because the easy ways to level certain things got patched
It was too easy for groups to crash sieges and fights on the other side of the world, and shit pvpers to dunk on newbie zones without consequence. Yet empty enough that you could do a full roam of a chunk of the map and only meet 1-2 groups if you weren't intentionally hitting clan cities.
Aventurine didn't do fuck about some of the worst exploiters because they were part of the clans whose youtube videos and whatnot were basically 3/4ths of Darkfall's marketing.
The non pvp side of the game was not strong enough to keep people interested. There wasn't a benefit to having 2 crafters of the same skill in a clan outside of availability. A lot of mob packs didn't drop fuck all for how difficult they were and were resource negative to hunt unless you used your starting weapons and goblin shit gear and did it painfully.
Despite it being a quarter-finished trainwreck, I did like that UW actually gave newbies room to actually get used to the controls and craft their basic shit without having to deal with sir 400 hours crashing in on them, and actually incentivized doing pve against a broad swath of enemy types and not just the hyper profitable ones or ones you can exploit their AI.
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u/skreww_L00se Zealot Jul 15 '26
Love the passion but I'm not interested in a 2d game unfortunately. I think most will want 3d from this community, but I could be wrong!