Of course, I haven't played it enough.

There is a history here, which would be foolish to pretend doesn't exist. When Darkfall was first reviewed on Eurogamer, it scored 2/10. The developer, Aventurine, was incensed. They'd checked their logs to discover the reviewer had a total logged-in time of a couple of hours. Eurogamer pressed their reviewer, who claimed their numbers must be wrong. He gave it at least nine hours. Eurogamer offered a re-review. Aventurine declined. Eurogamer bought an account anyway. And two months later, I'm here.

That's the short version. There's much more you can dig into, if you like. But from that brief precis, you know I could never have played it enough. The first review leaves a long shadow. I still haven't read it. Seemed beside the point.

Darkfall is a fantasy massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. Which seems an uncontroversial sentence, but conceals another slice of history. Darkfall has been in development forever. Since 2001. It's a game which has its own vision, one which manages to hark back and forward simultaneously. Rather than the class-based system which has dominated in contemporary times, where your abilities are linked to a choice of class and how you choose to progress it, it's a skill-based system. There's races, but their effect is relatively secondary. Like Ultima Online, it's a game where you primarily improve by doing whatever you want to do. Hit stuff to improve your sword-fighting. Chop wood to improve you chop-wooding. Sit down and have a nice rest to improve your sitting down and nice-resting.

Throw in full open player-versus-player combat (i.e. as many random assaults as a North London tube station at closing time) and full looting, and you've got a game which clearly believes something has been lost by mollycoddling players. If they could, you suspect they'd implement a way to give tiny electric shocks through your keyboard every time someone slides a blade into your back when you're fishing. It's good for you. It means everything means something.

This is me being a little over-greedy. I should have ran ages ago. But I was greedy. GREEDY FOR SCREENSHOTS.

I think they may be right, but I'll get back to that eventually.

Where Darkfall is more progressive is in its complete rejection of the usual timer-based combat, embracing an action implementation instead. When spell-casting or firing arrows - and remember that characters can excel in each of these areas as long as they practice in each - the game plays from a first-person perspective. If you use a melee weapon, it goes to third-person. Whatever you aim at, you hit.

The amount of damage you do is based upon your skills, but there's a direct use of player skill - even at the most basic level - which is almost absent in most MMOs. It's not a game where you stand toe-to-toe with a monster, trading blows, safe in the knowledge that your damage-per-second is slightly higher than his, so his health bar will exhaust before yours. Partially because of the aforementioned mechanics and partially because anyone passing and seeing you in such a vulnerable state is just going to leg it over, bash you on the head and take all your stuff. And call you a care bear. With constant friendly-fire on, you're just as likely to kill your friends as anyone else. It's brutal.

I wish the combat system was deadlier, but I'll get to that eventually too.

Okay. Bar the endgame - player-controlled cities and warring guilds and mass sieges, and enough to make this, no matter what the flaws, probably the closest there is to a terrestrial-set EVE Online in terms of player-politicking - that's the basics.

Let's take a detour.