My experience with Silverfall

[phuncz]

I've been playing this game for a couple of days, it's the original approach to the technology and nature aspect that got my curiosity. I see there is VERY little information available for this game, it is also 3 patches further from the release, v1.13 being the latest. I haven't tested this one out, but with v1.12 I have the most experience.

First off, I found the game to be easy to begin with. Nothing fancy and getting to know the game is relatively fast. It looks good, it seems to handle nicely and until now it has never crashed, nice ! I choose an Elf with a dark look. I decided to go Crossbow, with a build in mind to solo the game. So I wanted to max the skills that deal the most damage in the fastest way possible. So I went with the Masteries for bow&arrow, along with fast shot, multiple shot, etc etc. I also noticed the "% chance of finding magical items" skill, which really seems to help A LOT. After some playin 'n' butcherin, I realised I had to get a melee skill along with a weapon because my character wasn't dealing enough damage yet. So I decided to go two-handed heavy axe type of mayhem. After a few levels I found out that also wasn't cutting it. So I went for the fast one-handed approach with double strike. That went a lot better when I also found a nice weapon. About the magical items: there are (until now) about 5 levels of "magical", being:

- basic quality: white, no special property
- good quality: yellow, one special property
- excellent quality: green, two special properties
- elite quality: blue, three special properties
- ultimate quality: orange, four special properties

An item also has some nice attribute bonuses from time to time. Extra points to Strength or Intelligence, for instance, which are found on all 5 item qualities. Requirements are about equal to other popular RPG games: player level, stats for the class it is ment to be and added: sometimes a requirement for Technology or Nature. About the last two: this isn't something you need to put points in, you get a percentage of "faith" to one of these by completing missions that deal with one of the two. So if you, for example, helped a scientist with a mission, you would get some percentage of "faith" in Technology, allowing you to invest points in Tech skills and wear Tech requirement items.

About the type of items: there are, next to the basic Diablo 2 types of equipment like helmets and weapons, you can also wear an earring, a backpack and two types of weapons (missile and melee). You can equip a bow and a sword + shield for example. Or a rifle and a two-handed axe. About the variance of the items, every item is part of a certain "set", resembling Guildwars. So you can have "Mechanics Armor" boots and helmet, along with "Archmages Robes" gloves and armor. Until now (lvl 34) I haven't discovered set bonuses except looking good.

You'd probably notice by now that I've been going heavy on the items aspect. In contrast with games like Guildwars where items are a lot less important, this game is a little less item-heavy than Diablo 2 for example.

With the added better chance of finding magical items 50% from skill, 33% from item), I seem to find a lot more special items. Bigger/harder creatures also drop better items. Creatures by the way, are level-based. So the more you advance (territory-wise), the higher a level the creatures will be. They will also drop items with levels according to the creatures. Chests and crates on the other hand don't.

After doing some Primary quests and Secondary quests, I found the storyline to be not entirely compelling, but that didn't stop other top rated RPG's from becoming a success. Most quests are very easily to understand what to do by just going to the waypoint, because I find the Quest Log to be to cryptic and tiresome. Your objective is explained in a transcript of the interaction with a NPC. Personally, this requires too much patience from me. Also, the Quest Log screen needs a lot of work. It can't fit enough information to easily overview, after completing about 5 primary quests, I already have about 10 pages with "expanded-tree" quest items. Why aren't these collapseable ? Good question. Why is the font not sharp even at 1680x1050 resolution ? Dunno too. Waypoints are also pretty frustrating sometimes. Why are there none with some quests and why don't they dissappear with others ? Clearly there is a lot to fix on this aspect.

Something this game is often associated with, is the specific graphical approach (which I soon turned off) of making the game look cartoony. Graphics-wise this game has a very nice offering. There are beatiful settings ranging from creepy sewers to a complete city floating in the clouds. The monsters also are very original with very few known creatures. The items also give your character a very distinctive look. They are displayed as 2D bitmaps in the inventory, but 3D outside of that. The sound and music is also very nicely done, giving the game the high quality feel you get from AAA-games. Creative-wise, the game is on par with the best games around in my opinion.

But there are also some frustrating quirks to the game that can be solved by patches.

For example, maneuvering. It works like this: you can turn around using the keys or the edge of your screen (my advice: turn that off), which in turn changes the direction of your arrow in the minimap. Nothing wrong about that ey ?Indeed. Maybe it's me but I have a lot of problems following a waypoint through the minimap, because actually you aren't rotating, but the map is. So if you needed to go East and your minimap arrow is pointed South, you need to go to the left. going up on your screen actually means going the direction of the arrow. I found this way abnormally frustrating to navigate. This can be circumvented by always pointing the arrow North, that way it is pretty clear which way you need to go. But this leads to another issue. If something gets in the way of your view (tree, wall,...), it goes transparant as with most RPG games. But it seems most of the time it doesn't become transparant in time (when moving) so that your character will try to get on the tree or wall. Which is also quite frustrating. This also brings me to something else: pathing. Sometimes things like chests are impossible to open, because your character is trying to get there but can't. He stands next to the chest, like an arms length ingame away and when you click it, your char will go along a way around "something", making a circle around it. And it fails in reaching it. I also got stuck a few times, where I had to visit a town and walk back.

I came across quite a lot of small bugs that should have been filtered out in a beta process, but this seems to not be the case. I came across maybe twenty different bugs that seem to be very simple to solve, but are for a reason missed. I hope that most of these are solved with patch 1.13 that is available since December 22nd.

[phuncz]

After another 4 hours of play I'm level 40 and I just finished the game. Starting the game just means reentering the world I "conquered". So what's next, as the level limit seems to be 99 and I'm not gonna pound on creatures for months on end to reach that just for the sake of it. Is there any more challenge ?

[[BFs]GBesaw]

Thanks for your inputs on your experiences. We are very interested in seeing more posts like these. As to the game content, I look forward to seeing the final release, whats new and multiplayer game play.

[12Volt]

Oh my god you just made me cancel my WoW subscription. I can't freaking wait. I officially have 70$ on reserve for launch. Pre-order ASAP.

It sounds ****ing nuts. I cannot wait. I already know what my characters gonna be. lol, A goblin with a cool looking backback, a rifle, and a dagger and shield. Then my nature dudes obviously gonna be a troll shapeshifter. Weapons undecided.

Mind you this is all in pending and I will shape my ideas to the fullest.

Grats SF forums, you officially have your first regular poster. Blogs on homepage, forums on bookmark.

CAN'T WAIT!

[zerojjc]

Thanks for the input on the game Phuncz, sounds like alot of fun. Can you give us a little insight on some of the abilities you can learn? Is the game relatively large? are they alot of monsters, and are monsters designed the same in different areas but have different levels, or do the different species and lvls look different? I hate when lets say you fighting a lvl 1 worm and its like brown, then later in the game you fight some lvl 25 worms on a different continent and they look the same lol.

[phuncz]

The game is quite large surface-wise but the enemy density is a lot lower than for example Diablo 2. I think I got through the entire game on the Normal difficulty level (Normal, Hard, Very Hard) in about 20 to 24 hours of play. Monsters differ in each "chapter", although you can encounter one or two enemies you already saw somewere else but they'll probably be a lot tougher.

Abilities are varried a lot between races, most are quite standard in RPG-country though. I made a bow-shooting elf dude and I liked his bow skills although at level 40 his energy depletes like crazy with some skills. I've also created a new char (lvl 10) pure magic, but he dies more than anything else. I don't know what I did wrong...

[margo]

I have had to take Silverfall off my computer. It has a glitch and most of the time my character is walking in the sky and not all of the game shows. Also I have emailed the company about five days ago and have heard nothing from them.

Margo

[Frostburn]

Glad to see some input on the final game. I look forward to something other then WoW to hold my attention for a bit. Seems like a good game that could become great with a few tweaks and bug fixes. Thanks for the post.

[StargateGuy]

Originally Posted by phuncz

I've also created a new char (lvl 10) pure magic, but he dies more than anything else. I don't know what I did wrong...

I've done that, try running away.

I haven't died once :P

[-Aerows-]

Originally Posted by StargateGuy

I've done that, try running away.

I haven't died once :P

It's not exactly heroic to flee, but it gets the job done!

[margo]

HI-

Does anyone have any idea when Silverfall bugs will be fixed by a patch, I can't download the french one?????


Thanks

Margo