Darkfall: Unholy Wars Windows game

This was a misclick, my full review is together below

Large player vs player battles do happen. I myself have been in a number of 50 man fights and one massive 100+ person battle, and while fps does drop a little, say from 60 avg dipping to as low as 40 (On a basic gaming computer (I5-750 quad core with a HD 6800 series video card, 8 GB ram, Win7 64 bit), it is still very playable. Again, using mortal as a comparison, a 40 man battle in Mortal brought me down to under 5 fps, and my only use was to stand still and have people pull their mounts in front of me and tell me when to heal, as I could not even turn my toon to target. I had not issues fighting as normal in any of the darkfall battles.
Crafting is enjoyable, with a lot of craftable, useful items that must be gotten from players. Everyone can craft, it does not take a special build, but many don't. To achieve the high end crafting skills, a good investment of your "Prowess", the currency for buying and upgrading skills, must be used. 10k to be exact, and the investment pays off by returning large amounts of prowess to you by using your skill to make high end gear. There are enough crafters to get what is needed, and the "Workorder" function helps those in need, and those who craft. Those in need go to a workstation with all materials needed to make the items they want and they place an order, and the items are removed from pack, and areheld on the station until a crafter comes along to check and see if any are pending. The crafter can then craft them, and the completed items stay in stasis until the person who placed them come to pick them up. Crafters get full prowess and skill gains (if applicable, there is a window specific to each items of when you can get skill gains say between 50-74.9 of the specific skill), so are happy to complete them.

Ships have a purpose, instead of just being a novelty, and there is a substantial selection with various costs and purposes. From the basic wherry, no cannons and slow, up to the ship of the line a monster battleship. Ships that scrape the ocean floor for treasure and treasure maps, fishing vessels that drop nets catching rarer fish and give prowess to all in a group near the vessel, the speedy or offensive ships with many cannons, requiring gunpowder to fire. Water based Control points, gathering salvage from the ocean floor, and fishing yield rewards that offset the threat of pirating players. Players do also patrol the seas looking for those unable to fend them off, being over taken by faster ship or forces. Ships can be either captured or sunk.

Harvesting is gathered from various node, stone, metal, herb, tree, fishing, digging and skinning. Prowess can be used to speed up your process, and points put into digging increase your likelihood of finding items. There is regular materials, and their inferior counterparts, which is a low quality version. Gold and a crafting station can combine 3-5 inferiors into a full quality material, depending on the type. Tools are needed, axe to tree, pickaxe for stone and metal, etc and clicking on the node will start you harvesting until you choose to stop, run out of stamina, or the node runs out. Time refills the nodes. Harvesting can be done in the safe areas, but that blocks the rarer goods, such as "Essences" which are used to enhance materials, and these are used to craft the mastery items. You do, however, get more of the secondary materials needed to refine goods, such as coal to make iron ore into ingots. These drop in larger amounts in safe zones, or can be farmed off creatures that drop them. Special tools are required to get the higher end essences. A basic axe can only get the first level essence, but only at half of what the likelyhood is for the danger area you are in. So say you are chopping wood in a level 4 zone, and there is a 1 in 1000 chance of getting a selentine (level 1) essence, you chances are reduced to 1 in 2000. using a level 1 tool, a selentine axe gets you the full chances to get seletine essence, and then a 50% chance of the next level essence, veilron, but still no chance of getting level 3 essence. using a higher end tool increases you chance of loss, as the value of the higher end tools goes up quickly, but your reward increases fast.

Treasure maps, in 3 sizes are used like a game of hot and cold. If you are walking toward the location, they will flash green, red if heading
in the wrong direction. The flashes go faster the closer you get. Many end up in the middle of spawns, some right next to a town in a safe zone. They yield gold and resources, that increase with the size of the map.
There is 5 danger zone levels, plus the safe zone, with the highest rare drop rates off harvest nodes and creatures in 5, lowest in 1. There
is a number of transportation systems in place. mounts to increase travel speed, portal shards, that will transport a friend or clan mate to your location (1 hour cool down, which uses up the shard on completion), teleport runes which can be marked in advance to one location, such as a dungeon entrance or city, and the portal system, which are used to transport to other portals around the world. Gold is the currency, and when used will bring up a list of all other portals which you then choose and are sent instantly. These, however, get patrolled by player killers, and should be used with caution.

There are a large number of skills, that can be combined to make your role. They fall under the Headings Warrior, Skirmisher, elementalist and primalist. Warrior skills use strength and mainly bladed weapons, skirmishers are Dexterity and uses bows and often daggers. Elementalists are mages using intelligence, fire, water/ice, and lightning based skills, and primalists use wisdom and have healing, buffing, and chaos based damage spells. Armor types are up to you, and have their own benefits, such as leather increases attack speed, elementalist cloth increases damage. You can assign which of your stats are keyed to each, so you can use Intelligence as you control for heavy plate armor. The stat you use, is used to unlock the type of armor you use, as they have limits set, 40 for one level, 80 for another, etc. There are 4 "Boosters" which are relatively cheap prowess usage to increase stats. there are 4 levels of each, giving up to a max 40 into a stat, in 10 point increments, and can be used in any combination, totaling 40 points. So lets say you have them all purchased. you can put all 40 into wisdom, increasing just that stat, or 20 into Wis, 20 into Int. You create your own "roles" which is a saved blueprint of 16 purchased skills, 1 ultimate purchased skill and 8 common skills, which everyone shares. You also set which armor used which stat as a control, and which boosters you want activated. 10 blueprints can be saved, and need to be activated. there is a 10 minute cooldown between role switching, unless you speak to a Sage, a NPC in the
safe zone cities. This resets the timer, every time you speak to him.

There are a number of holdings for clans to control, Hamlets, villages, and cities. The cities have each workbench and vendor, unless damaged. Each can be disabled if attacked, and need to be repaired. Cities also have special harvesting nodes, like Groves (For Wood) mines (For iron ore) and they respawn much faster, do not drop inferior materials, and increased essence drops, as your control area will increase you gains in prowess, rare items and gold. They also reduce the time and cost of crafting on the workstations, and also increase the stats of crafted items. These holdings are highly sought after and require defense against "Sieges". The attacking force must drop "Siege Stones" , put up an appropriate amount of gold and a 22 hour timer starts. Once the timer ends, fighting begins. The defending force attempts to destroy the attacking forces stones, while the attacking force attempts to destroy the city control point. If stones are destroyed, the city is defended and the owning clan, keeps ownership, if the control point is destroyed, the new owners take control. Each control point has a requisition stone, which collects a small percentage of materials from all those farmed in the area, and slowly increase to 100 percent full. When full, someone with some level of requisition gauntlet (there are various types that increase speed of gather) and 100 "Globule of greed" can siphon off the goods, bringing it back down to 0 percent to build again. Salvage, gold, harvested materials, gear and many other items types can be a part of this, to the point a single player can be overloaded by treasure. Any players in that players party will get an even share of goods, so it is recommended you not go alone. Getting your own, and stealing others is a common activity. The percentage of all req's can be seen on the world map by all, and when one is full, a global message is released.

There are dungeons, world bosses like dragons, many mobs to fight and farm for goods. Everything looted has some value. Pvp is common, and at times constant. If you are looking to hunt players, rarely is there not some to find. The world is large, and at times seems empty, except when

you don't want to be found. There are many hotspots player killers patrol, to find those hunting mobs, effectively being hunted themselves.
Aventurine has recently made some changes to the gaining of prowess. There is a diminishing returns system, when as you get higher in prowess, you get less prowess for feats than when you started. Now it is much easier to get to a level where you are viable than before, where the returns used to drop off at around 5000 prowess, when now it is 50000. It makes it easier to compete with those in the hundreds of thousands. After 3 months, I am at 90000, so the going is not slow, but not excessive. Being a part of a clan can make you a functional part of a team as low as 25000, but don't expect to be the lead hunter. Teamwork is what will make you functional. Not much soloing at that level.
I highly recommend this game to any that enjoy the full loot niche. It is not as hard core as mortal online, but that is not a bad thing. It is also far more polished. There are ways new players can make headway here that often can't in that game.