Scott Jennings makes a great point about why Darkfall won’t make it in the end:
…people enjoy hardcore PvP in the abstract. Or, to put another way, many more people believe they are “hardc0re” then actually are. And they dislike being proved wrong pretty powerfully… The Mordred problem is simply that a great majority of the people who believe they are hardcore are not, and after being violently disabused of the notion, will leave.
Many people want PvP, and we’ve even stated in the past how it’s the PvP element that can make many MMOGs not get stale when characters reach the end-game. However, the industry still hasn’t gotten it perfectly right. World of Warcraft (WoW) ignores PvP for the most part, relegating it to a novelty or distraction from the “true” end-game: raiding. Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR) makes PvE just another way to get to the PvP end-game, but in WAR’s implementation, PvP can quickly get old, in that the end-game is effectively and truly the end of the game as far as new experiences are concerned.
Only EVE arguably has PvP done right, as it strikes a fair balance between true, impact PvP (“the hardcore”) and a casual advancement game. Still, if Ultima Online (UO) managed to achieve success in its day, can we realistically argue that its success was based purely on the fact that there weren’t any other graphical MMOGs to attract gamers? Or was there actually something other than time investment that kept players of UO from immediately jumping ship to Meridian 59 or Everquest? More than likely, there’s a powerful, but niche market for real impact PvP, so even if Darkfall’s numbers drop significantly after a few months, it’s likely that subscriptions will level out and slowly begin to climb again.
Certainly, a game like Darkfall won’t become a viable threat to WoW’s market share, but we don’t think anyone’s claiming otherwise. Some gamers, particularly legacy MMOG players who were introduced to the genre with UO, will adore games like Darkfall. The important take-away, though, is whether there are enough “hardcore” gamers to make Darkfall’s development pay off monetarily, and that’s not something we’ll know for another year or so.