"Any Darkwind players here? " Topic

I discovered Darkwind because of a post here on TMP about two years ago, and was wondering if there are any TMPers playing.

For those of you who haven't heard of it, Darkwind is an indy developed post apocalypse vehicle combat game. I'd say its a blend of Car Wars, Mad Max, Deathrace, and maybe some Damnation Alley tossed in for good measure. The thing that sets it apart from other games from this genre is that it is turn-based, so it feels like a wargame. You can control multiple cars, buy ferocious weapons, and hire numerous guys that skill up over time.

Some other things that set it apart are permanent death and real strategy- there's nothing that can't kill you, unlike gmaes where your characters can walk by creatures you've 'leveled' past… Darkwind is dirty and bloody. My handle is DrMathias, look me up!

Looks interesting. I noticed you have the lowest reputation score there: -2957. Is that good or bad?

Is it a free game?

Funny you should ask that question!

I spend most of my time hunting NPC trade convoys, which translates to low rep. The downside is I have a bounty, and the bounty hunters are constantly ambushing me at the town gates…the positive is I can sometimes truce other (NPC) pirates. Theres a lot of flexibility in how you play.

As for cost, you can experience most of the game for free- town events (Races, Deathraces, Arena Combats), and now I believe you can even rent cars and scout in the wilderness. I'm not sure what you can't do as a non-subscriber- maybe buy cars in the market, enter Pro events, send guys to other towns and stuff like that.

Sub fee is around $10 USD a month I think.

How does it compare to say Auto Assault?

I'm not familiar with Auto Assault…

I'll need to rectify that.

Okay, I looked into Auto Assault, and while I can't say I got a great feel for how it played I guess the biggest difference is that in DW you play a whole group of characters, and if you slip up they're injured or worse. There's really no factions per se. For some reason many of the people that play DW now, that had expereince with Auto Assault, found it disappointing. I'm not sure why, maybe it didn't feel enough like Car Wars for them.

I'd also say DW is more indy/low budget just by looking at the appearance of the websites and graphics, but that's fine with me. Darkwind plays like a wargame.

Auto Assault was a (now defunct) car-combat based MMO that was almost legendary it it's awfulness: Missions were your standard MMO-issue 'kill X number of monster Y/ collect X number of item Y/ travel to location X and talk to person Y' stuff, the control of the cars was horrid, and if you actually got out of your can and entered a city, the games framerate dropped went from Frames-per-second to literally seconds-per-frame. It was a shame really: We wanted 'Car Wars Online' and what we got was 'everquest on wheels'.