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Marketing blurb: ”The Devs” posted:Das Tal is a fast-paced Sandbox MMORPG that focuses on player interaction. Full Loot and Open PvP create a game of risk vs. reward where you weigh up your options before engaging others. PvP is never restricted but cooperation is always rewarded. Each world is unique in its feature set and geography - and you pick those features! Time-boxed servers create winners and losers and allow you to regularly start anew. A class-less character system allows you to shape your character to fit your playstyle. You fight for resources to craft your equipment and construct your settlement. PvP combat is 100 percent skill-based, common and quick to be found. Both small-scale raids and large-scale sieges are available for all players at any time. tl;dr me. An in-development isometric sandbox MMO. Pretty much all PvP based, pretty much no PvE, quests. Open PvP/Full loot. Limited grind and anti poopsocking. Designed for people with Lives(TM). Classless, with gear type determining skills. No tab targeting, with everything like a skillshot or an AOE. Friendly fire and enemy healing. Everything player-crafted, including the towns. Vote on server settings. The server blows up every month or three. What does the name mean? It means 'The Valley' in German. The devs are a small, mostly German team. What does it look like? A little like this: This guy made some good pre-alpha gameplay footage if you can stand his music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUJ-rB7LTZc What was that about the server exploding? The devs call it 'time-boxing', and its probably the most controversial feature in the game. It's essentially seasonal servers. Each server is intended to have a progression 'arc', like a server-wide beginning, middle, and endgame. After a predetermined amount of time (like one or three months), a big end-of-the-world event happens and the server wipes. Its kind of a divisive choice, but it lets the game do a few things: One is it helps new players into the game. Most open-pvp full-loot games involve new players getting one-shot by max-capped sperg-gods until they quit. This game is meant to have several small servers, with server resets staggered, so if you join after launch, or rejoin after a break, there should always be a new one starting up for that new server smell. It also lets the game do some interesting things with player levels. Level-cap for characters slowly increases over the first month of server time. This means you can't poopsock your way to maxcap ahead of everyone else, and the game isn't a race to maxcap in order to get to 'the real game'. It also means that you can keep up with everyone else's level while playing casually. I repeat, someone is making a full loot open PvP sandbox MMO for casuals. That's got to be worth something. Anyway, town building/resource control is also supposed to be a big aspect of clan stuff. Town building also tends to get pretty boring once you've already built everything. Blowing it all up resets the power balance/keeps building relevant. The devs also want players to be able to vote on map and server configuration before each restart. This means they can try out a bunch of experimental map types and balance things without making GBS threads up the servers already there. But I'll loose all my stuff! Its full loot. You were going to loose it anyway. As a PvP game, your level only really matters in comparison to everyone else's, and they reset with you. Cosmetics are also probably persistant. Isn't full loot a dumb outdated mechanic? Maybe! But they're trying to make it workable here. There's meant to be separate tiers of equipment, but instead of higher tiers having strictly better stats, they're supposed to have a have more specialized stats. Higher tier gear would have better bonuses in some things, but greater penalties in others. So gear upgrades are more about min-maxing your stat spread than getting a strict numerical advantage. If that actually happens, it means even starting gear could be viable at max level, so getting your poo poo stolen isn't that big of a loss. Is friendly fire with pubbies as hilarious as it sounds? Yes, it is exactly as hilarious as it sounds. How do I give them my money? This whole thing sounds janky and awful. The game is setting out to to do a lot of things differently, so it will either be really cool and unique, or crash and burn spectacularly. Possibly both. Fingers crossed. Links: Official Site Official Forums Dev Youtube Pavlov fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Jun 12, 2015 |
# ? Feb 6, 2015 00:23 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:40 |
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drat it goons I am going to hype you on this game whether you like it or not. So there's a big test happening tomorrow (Feb 8th) at 8:00 PM CET (German time). That's 2:00 PM if you're in EST. Supposedly you can get in without an alpha key for the 24 hours after that starts. Download the stuff Here. They've set up a little micro-scale map for people to gently caress around with and murder each other in. If you're even a little bit interested, you can pop in and get a really rough idea of what the game's trying to be. Some of the devs will also be hanging out in the Teamspeak given in the above link. You can sign on to
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# ? Feb 7, 2015 20:34 |
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I'll check this out tomorrow. I like the idea of slowly increasing the level cap to counter poopsocking and the resets. Hoping to get into the alpha!
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# ? Feb 7, 2015 23:12 |
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Patching the alpha client now. This looks fun! Edit: Oh, I need a key. Oh, they want $79.99. Oh.. Flavor Truck fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Feb 8, 2015 |
# ? Feb 8, 2015 00:00 |
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Helmholz posted:Patching the alpha client now. This looks fun! It's still really unfinished, but I think it could become fun. The 24 hour thing doesn't start until tomorrow though. The launcher bugs out sometimes and won't finish. If that happens to you, just wait until after the servers have started tomorrow (so you're sure the new patch is out) and download the client directly from the download page. Edit: Yeah don't buy into the alpha right now unless you got money to burn (It's the 50$ one that gets you in on current alpha sessions). Just try it out tomorrow and sign up for the key-lottery if you liked it. Pavlov fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Feb 8, 2015 |
# ? Feb 8, 2015 00:08 |
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I gave them my email, is that really all it takes to get into the key lottery? (jack squattery)
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 00:16 |
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Pavlov posted:It's still really unfinished, but I think it could become fun. The 24 hour thing doesn't start until tomorrow though. What is this 24 hour thing?
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 00:22 |
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Helmholz posted:I gave them my email, is that really all it takes to get into the key lottery? (jack squattery) There should be an email confirmation and maybe a short form, but otherwise yeah that's it. If there's a box that asks why you'd be a good tester, don't leave it blank. Apparently they look at that. Helmholz posted:What is this 24 hour thing? It's related to this blog post. They're trying for a larger scale stress test. What they didn't advertise is they didn't care to generate a bunch of one-time keys, so during the test they're just letting anyone connect to the server if they leave the key field blank.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 00:25 |
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Das Tal posted:§2 Griefing: Counter-productive but not Prohibited - Remember however, that this is a niche game with tiny game worlds and a small player population. A completely new player that gets ganked, clean-looted and mocked repeatedly has a big chance of leaving the game forever - before he can turn into a worthy opponent. But again: We as the developers won't stop this. Oh hell yes.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 00:32 |
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I can check this out for a little bit during the open stress test tomorrow
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 01:13 |
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Will take a look but I don't founder/kickstart anything after being burned by Mortal Online and the original FF14
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 01:29 |
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Jackard posted:Will take a look but I don't founder/kickstart anything after being burned by Mortal Online and the original FF14 I feel you mate. I only got in because I got a discount, and because the devs really seem to listen to the people playing so far.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 01:32 |
well since there is an open stress test tomororw, no real reason not to try it i guess
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 01:46 |
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http://www.das-tal-game.com/RPGReadMe I don't think they had this linked publicly, but this page explains some of the mechanics from the last test, most of which probably still apply. I think its currently still arena-ish style maps. You hold strategic points which generate resources, and periodically go up for contention. Stick a bunch of mats into a town to claim it/build it up. Use the town to upgrade skills, or with more mats to build gear. Kill pubbies repeat. It's all really rough around the edges and the server will probably reset a few times, but if you can get a handful of people to square off the combat can be pretty fun.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 02:05 |
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If you end up getting a few extra testing keys before they begin handing them out via roulette, I'd appreciate a PM.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 03:16 |
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I understand that they're putting a lot of emphasis on developing PvP in this stage of the game's development, but I've got a new nagging questions about how everything is going to work out in the long run. I noticed that "PvP in a small world" is a reoccurring theme on the forums in topics posted by dev's. I've also noticed the ever-present minimap in all of the game's footage. Do they plan on expanding the world to fit the expectation of a typical MMO, and is this small arena-like area only being used for testing purposes? I'm not 100% sure I'd still be as interested as I am now if I were to hear that the game is going the way of a MOBA with basebuilding and resource-collecting elements. Not to say that the idea wouldn't be novel, just that it wouldn't appeal to me the same way if marketed as an MMO.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 03:23 |
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Helmholz posted:I understand that they're putting a lot of emphasis on developing PvP in this stage of the game's development, but I've got a new nagging questions about how everything is going to work out in the long run. I noticed that "PvP in a small world" is a reoccurring theme on the forums in topics posted by dev's. I've also noticed the ever-present minimap in all of the game's footage. Do they plan on expanding the world to fit the expectation of a typical MMO, and is this small arena-like area only being used for testing purposes? I'm not 100% sure I'd still be as interested as I am now if I were to hear that the game is going the way of a MOBA with basebuilding and resource-collecting elements. Not to say that the idea wouldn't be novel, just that it wouldn't appeal to me the same way if marketed as an MMO. The current map size is for testing yes. The devs have said they want the release maps to take 'about 15 minutes' to run from one side of the map to the other. That's small for an MMO, but this game isn't quest/pve focused. If you took out all the open fields full of wandering mobs out of your average MMO, it would be a lot smaller as well. A lot of MMOs have big sprawling vistas filled with nothing really important. If you're looking for that, you probably won't find it here. The devs seem to be leaning towards having an average of about 200 people logged in per server, with as many servers as they need to support the playerbase. They've said that 200 players online needs about 2000 active players to support it, plus however many infrequents. This is also small for an MMO. But it also means it will be harder for giant, consolidated powerbases to form, which might be a good thing. If this ever took off as a goon game it would need a bunch of smaller guilds across server instead of a giant goonswarm.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 03:37 |
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Hmmmmmmm.... 1. I love the idea of frequent wipes. I've been saying forever that the only way to make a UO server that would last would be to have wipes every 3 months with leaderboards to track players between seasons. 2. I've also said that during each of the seasons you could tweak PvP rules or change them up completely, and it sounds like they're going to do that. Did these guys read my blog? 3. The game will need some kind of resource gathering if full loot PvP is going to matter at all. PvE would be preferable to making players go click rocks to mine them or whatever. 4. If they're going to have city building then they should make different locations be more valuable and the way you do that is by having some resources that people fight over. There needs to be SOME motivation for the PvP if this is an MMO and not just an arena game, and there has to be some kind of resource pipeline for that to happen. 5. Deserts are really ugly and boring to look at.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 17:21 |
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Rabbi posted:Hmmmmmmm.... For clans at least, resources are supposed to be generated over time in production facilities that you have to capture and keep. The devs seem kind of up in the air about what you do without a clan, but I've heard something about "treasure chest" things that might spawn randomly around the map for anyone to grab. There are going to be some wandering mobs, but they're supposed to drop little EXP 'trinkets', not crafting resources. They want to have 3 biomes for release. I think the two we haven't seen yet are 'toxic-swamp' and something mountainous and rockey. I seem to recall one of them saying they want different resources to be more prevalent in different areas, but I can't find the source for that.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 17:50 |
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First time I started the patcher it did nothing, had to restart, just a heads upRabbi posted:5. Deserts are really ugly and boring to look at.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 18:03 |
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Yeah launcher breaks for some people (It does for me). I'd recommend just getting the laucherless client from the downloads page. Alternatively if you download the standalone client, and the laucher, you can put the 'client' folder inside the 'launcher' folder, and sometimes that works. Anyway, when you get in and make a character, it'll ask you for your starting weapon/armor. You can swap out later or make a new character if you want. Almost any combination works, but here are some tips: - Scythe/Leather is good for chasing. - Scythe/Splint is good for holding points. - Totem/Leather lets you kite forever. - Staff/Robes gives the most AoE. - Scythe/Robes is good for breaking stacks. - Bow/Anything gets the best range. Also if you shoot a staff blast point blank it will damage you too. If anyone wants to group up, I'm seeing if I can get a room on the dev's teamspeak. Otherwise we could use camping the stairs. Anyone care?
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 19:18 |
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Might as well just use CTS Is this combat only right now?
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 19:27 |
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Jackard posted:Might as well just use CTS Pretty much. They're trying to get a feel for what it should be like for players when the servers are just starting up. That and tweaking all the weapon/armor combos.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 19:32 |
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poo poo did I just get tricked into a MOBA E: Which CTS channel will it be? Jackard fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Feb 8, 2015 |
# ? Feb 8, 2015 19:34 |
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oh hello Pavlov
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 19:43 |
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Ok, get on CTS if you didn't know how to already. We're in the Misc section at the bottom in a Das Tal room.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 19:47 |
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Hahahahahahahahahaha. In game screen shot. http://imgur.com/7QFbgeJ
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 22:14 |
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Checked back in three hours after it began... The resident zerg guild still owns all the points but hasn't built a single house and is still running around ganking randoms its a 20vs5 moba
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 23:11 |
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Jackard posted:Checked back in three hours after it began... Hehe yeah, it turned into a zergfest. There might be another open test next month. For that one the devs said they want a 4x size map, with some kind of neutral settlement to hold people off until settlements can get made. Should probably help some.
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 23:34 |
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I highly doubt it will ever be anything other than a zerg
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# ? Feb 8, 2015 23:47 |
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Seven hours in, much has been accomplished. The zerg finally has three shacks and whatever this is Jackard fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Feb 9, 2015 |
# ? Feb 9, 2015 03:13 |
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I guess they never put in that gate art asset.
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# ? Feb 9, 2015 03:15 |
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'Hovel' may be more appropriate than 'shack', help me out here
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# ? Feb 9, 2015 03:17 |
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Jackard posted:'Hovel' may be more appropriate than 'shack', help me out here I'm partial to 'shanty'.
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# ? Feb 9, 2015 03:48 |
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Do you need to be a guild member to use these? The map is currently split between Black Lotus in the west and Black Sheep in the east, which must be their offshoot or splinter None of the shanties were interactable. Everyone not in these guilds can go get hosed I guess?
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# ? Feb 9, 2015 04:12 |
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Jackard posted:Do you need to be a guild member to use these? The map is currently split between Black Lotus in the west and Black Sheep in the east, which must be their offshoot or splinter Sounds like a good system. I'm sure that in real game guilds don't abuse their ability to lock down whole map. But it's ok, if you are on a server where a guild has conquered everything, you can just change servers and hope that this time you happen to join the winning guild so that you can teabag everyone else until they jump to another server too.
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# ? Feb 9, 2015 13:30 |
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Hey let's stress test the server but not put in a hand sake system for putting people in guilds or the ability to easily leave them.
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# ? Feb 9, 2015 15:21 |
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Puistokemisti posted:Sounds like a good system. I'm sure that in real game guilds don't abuse their ability to lock down whole map. But it's ok, if you are on a server where a guild has conquered everything, you can just change servers and hope that this time you happen to join the winning guild so that you can teabag everyone else until they jump to another server too. The devs apparently don't even want mega-guilds to be a thing. There'll probably be capping max guild members. Of course, people could just make a bunch of allied splinter-guilds, but that makes it harder to fight as a team, and also increases the chances of power-grabs and in-fighting. I still think it needs something else though. I've been suggesting diminishing returns on resource points held by a single guild.
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# ? Feb 9, 2015 15:23 |
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Highlight of the two hours I played was being told i got "rekt" by eleven or so guys who took a whole 6 minutes to kill me and I still dropped two of them. The grouping damage is amazing and people kill their own team half the time.
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# ? Feb 9, 2015 15:26 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:40 |
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Sent them in-game feedback yesterday but wasn't expecting a reply let alone this soon.. wonder how much they were given.quote:
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# ? Feb 9, 2015 15:30 |