Darkfall had the best gameplay I’ve ever experienced, graphics were fine, aim to hit, watch some of the pvp videos and the naval combat it was exceptional.
They screwed up the rest of the game though and that’s why it failed:
Super grindy, when you were done playing you setup your character to afk swim all night, took a year to max your stats.
Rampant cheating for roughly the first year it was out, totally screws a full loot game. The devs could never react fast enough. There was a paid cheat program for like $10/mo specific to that game which thousands of players used for a year before they found a way to detect it and did a mass ban wave.
Lots of launch exploits that created massive imbalance between those that got to use them, and those that came after the nerfs. They never nerfed the players that exploited.
No safe area for new players to skill up, high level players would camp newbie areas griefing, dry looting, etc. even selective looting would be a fair compromise (take 1 item or even just resources/loot but not weapon/armor). A game of sheep and wolves needs sheep, you gotta treat your sheep right.
They also fell into the everyone does everything dilemma. Everyone hordes their resources to raise their own crafting skills, etc rather than dedicated crafters that buy resources from players and sell gear.
UO:
Ultima Online added insurance so you could keep your armor/weapons from being looted at the cost of losing gold when you died. Other items weren’t insurable, resources and loot, so you banked often. Some things were blessed and couldn’t be looted like your spell book, runebook, etc.
They had a mark spell and a recall spell where you could mark runestones with mark, then use recall to teleport to that location instantly. This allowed you to bank and be right back to where you were farming in a minute, there were ways to not get killed and looted, having a recall macro to a hotkey could avoid being murdered 95% of the time. If you didn’t have magery, you could carry a recall scroll (cheap, low level spell) and it allowed you to cast without having magery skill points.
UO didn’t send your body back to a spawn point, when you were killed you became a ghost at that location, respectable pks would rez you after murdering you and looting anything they wanted from your corpse, many would often open a portal so you could get back to town to re-gear if you were in a dungeon or the wilderness. The other funny thing was you could carry a trapped chest trapped by a tinker, as well as mislabeled runes, so you might have a rune saying “house” but it really led to a guarded area where the murderer would be instantly killed if they recalled to it, or they’d instantly die if they opened the trapped chest. Or you’d mark the rune to the middle of a dragon spawn where they’d instantly kill anyone who used that rune lol
Housing was anywhere a house would fit in the environment. Never seen that in another MMO, if you found a flat area near a dungeon, near a mining area, near anything of importance, you could place a house. If you were a murderer originally you couldn’t go into town, you had to base out of your house. You could play a whole lot of non combat roles in the game and have a ton of fun. Houses decayed over time, if a player didn’t return for 2 weeks the house would collapse but all the items in it would hit the ground, lootable by anyone there. This created entire guilds dedicated to fighting over fallen houses. Even as a solo you could create a character with stealth, sneak right through a crowd of people and drop the house before they did, sniping the spot out from under them as they’re grabbing loot. Was a blast and the most lucrative thing in game.
Murderers had disincentives, the entire game was risk vs reward, if you were killed and your bounty collected, you received 10% stat loss permanently!! If you died a few times you had to delete the character and re-roll because trying to skill back up as a red murderer would just lead to being killed by other players.
Darkfall gameplay with UO sandbox would be the most epic game created. Albion is barely better graphics than the original UO, still isometric, all people want is a 3d aim to hit pvp game.
The other part of the formula modern games screw up is 1 character does everything. With UO and the 5 characters and limit of 7 skills per character you’d have a dexxer (warrior), a crafter or gatherer, a mage, a tamer, maybe a pk murderer. Crafting was a lot harder to raise so most people did not bother making a blacksmith, carpenter, etc. and the people who did make a maxed crafter had a lot of demand from players, and they bought resources gathered by players, that was one of the easiest ways to get gold to jump start yourself on a new server, chopping trees or mining ore and selling to crafters in bulk. The economy was 1000x better than this game.
The 7 skill limitation created dozens of viable templates from the same set of skills, you had healer mage (bandages and magery), alchemy mage, tank mage (weapon + magery), poison mage (magery + poisoning skill), archer mage. And your stats varied depending on the build, a tank mage expended points to dexterity to increase swing speed while other builds maxed str and int.
For warriors there were pure weapon builds, there was a warrior + magery but it didn’t have enough skill points to add the intensify magery so their offensive spells were worthless but they could use utility spells as part of their gameplay (heal, teleport, invisibility spell, etc) along with bandages to heal, it was a really robust build but all their offensive damage was from a weapon. They could also spec poisoning and apply poison to weapons and play that style.
UO is still live running since 1997, but they never updated the graphics so its dead. I don’t see albion as an alternative because it’s the same issue of wanting 3d aim to hit like darkfall.