Overly Positive

Those of you who keep up in the know about MMO news may have heard about the whole Eurogamer situation regarding the review of the Darkfall MMO. Darkfall, the hardcore MMO that claims to take people back to the days of Ultima Online-old, has been out for a few months, and despite the bluster of both its developers and its community, may have suffered the same fate as many other MMOs that have released in the past year or so – an initial surge, followed by a decline in subscriptions due to core problems.

What made things worse was a Eurogamer review of the title that gave it a 2/10, which did not please Tasos Flambouras of developer Aventurine at all. In fact, it made him so angry that he cited server logs, where he immediately purported that the Eurogamer reviewer hadn’t played enough of the game. This led to a lot of calls of unfairness, after which Eurogamer promised to have someone else re-review the game. Said re-review just came out, with Darkfall scoring a 4/10. The slightly better, yet still poor score has not surprisingly drawn ire from the Darkfall community, with all kinds of attacks on the reviewer’s credibility, their methodology, and perhaps, their parents.

To be honest, while the re-review was a bit of a downer for Darkfall supporters, there is actually some good that can come out of the entire situation. First, the very fact that this even happened is at least a check on reviewers, a sort of warning that regardless of how unprofessional Aventurine might have sounded in their response, that as a CYA they’d better have played through enough of the game to craft a sufficient opinion of it. In MMOs, this is especially important, as realistically speaking you can’t create a comprehensive review of an MMO title when you haven’t experienced the full scope of its system. MMO reviews are limited to what boils down to first impressions, and it’s a matter of where the line is drawn between a good first impression and not having played enough. As dramatic as the situation is, it may have been worth it to ensure future MMO reviews are a bit more robust.

Second is the fact that Darkfall was re-reviewed at all. I see the Darkfall review situation much like the way the Firefly movie Serenity came about. Cancelled series are not supposed to be made into movies, and reviewed games are not supposed to get a do-over. Darkfall got a rare chance to be looked at twice by reviewers, getting a second chance to make a first impression on someone else. In MMOs this is even more of an opportunity considering that bugfixing and patching means that inevitably, a second review done after some time spent on the engine means it’s more stable – or at the very least, that the developers have had a chance to pore over and implement things based on user feedback. Darkfall may not have gotten the score players were looking for,but it did get another handshake from a major video gaming site. That’s more than most titles can say.

Lastly, there’s always the argument of “there’s no such thing as bad press”. The entire Darkfall situation with Eurogamer has probably given the game more publicity than it could have gotten without it. It’s also given a boost to the amount of people simply looking at the game itself – recently, the North American server has launched, and a major patch has come down the pipe that has looked at several large issues and fixed them. Even though the second review score was poor, you have to wonder how many people out there like myself are writing about Darkfall despite it not being on their radar normally. Of course, there are blogs like Hardcore Casual, who are up to date with the latest in Darkfall info, but even the ones who provide a rather cheeky evaluation of the Darkfall situation like Broken Toys are still giving Darkfall publicity it probably couldn’t hurt to have.

To be perfectly honest, to have Darkfall remain viable or at least operational is nothing but a good thing for the MMO market. The genre in general needs to have titles that can survive based on premises that are not World of Warcraft-ish in any way, and if Darkfall can provide part of that niche, then more power to them – even if it takes a bad review (or in this case, reviews) to do it.

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