Around Agon: Skills and Spells

Skills and spells are the very lifeblood of a mmorpg. We have seen them go from the very basic of Ultima Online which had if I remember right 8 magic spells to now the dev team is telling us DarkFall will open with 200 spells and the plan is to have 500. The game is supposed to go live with 300 skills and again the plan is to have 500.

As a player that normally has both crafters and magic users this is exciting to me. It has been asked of the devs “why so many?” and the answer was “we want the players to have variety”. There wont be the normal combat routine of player A does this and player B counters with that. There will be a great number of things to counter with.

It’s always fun to see in a new game how skills and spells will be learned. In DarkFall the devs have told us that we will be able to learn them and purchase them from both npcs and from other players, and also from questing. I’m sure there will be the normal hard ones to find and hopefully the rare ones that can only be learned from other players. It’s nice for the rarity to have some of those as a player to keep some things that people will still pay for. There will also be some skills and spells that will be race specific and class specific as well as some that you can only get if you make a prestige class. It seems only logical that a Dwarf smithy would be much better than say a Elfish type of character. Likewise an Elfish character should be better at something like crafting a magic item. Having everyone equal is not only not logical but boring.

It has been asked of the devs if there will be a skill cap. The answer was yes. It will be 100. We have seen this in many other games. I haven’t seen the question asked of how many skills we will be able to have. I’m sure its been asked, I just haven’t found it yet. Normally what takes place as time goes on in a game is that the skill base is slowly raised. This happens in a variety of ways, either just outright or with special things received in questing.