The UI has a learning curve. If you have played other recent MMOs, you can pretty much just forget everything you have seen. The cookie-cutter interface from WoW, EQ2, WAR, AOC is completely gone. I think people are going to struggle with it the first time they sit down and it could turn some people off. Luckily, there is a small tutorial to help you get your bearings. Right clicking the mouse turns the game into UI/Menu mode, much of what you would expect if you pressed the "ESC" key in any other MMO

When in this mode, you will see that this is the only time you have a mouse cursor on your screen. This means when you are in play mode, there is no clicking on your hotbar to active abilities, you just press the numerically assigned button on your keyboard. The UI is completely customizable as you can move and resize any window to fit your personal preference. The in-game help pretty much tells you that controls will feel better to FPS players over MMO players. The "F" key is the default use button and works just like it would in Call of Duty, as does spacebar with jumping, and "C" for crouching. The "R" key draws your weapon, and will put you into 3rd person if you have a melee weapon equipped

One of the first things you might want to do is to arrange the interface to your liking, and maybe try out different video settings

You bring up the GUI-mode by RIGHT-CLICKING your mouse. You close it again with another RIGHT-CLICK

In your backpack you will have three different starting weapons - a club, a sword and an axe. You equip one of them by either double clicking it or dragging it to the weapon slot of your paperdoll. You will always respawn with these three weapons. They can not be sold, destroyed or lost

Everything else on your character will be left on your grave when you die, and can be looted by anyone

Always make sure to keep your bank vault well stocked with equipment or gold. You will never lose items in your bank vault

To perform any attacks, you need to unsheathe your weapon. This is done by pressing R. Pressing R again will sheathe your weapon

When your weapon is sheathed, you are in 1st person view. When your weapon is unsheathed (i.e. when you are in combat mode), your view changes to 3rd person view if you are holding a melee weapon, and stays in 1st person (but with hands and weapon visible) if you are using a ranged weapon, such as a bow or a magic staff to cast spells

To cast a spell you need a staff. You can either find a staff on a monster, or buy it from an NPC vendor

Most active skills in Darkfall follow the load and fire principle. You select the skill of spell you want to perform (drag the ones you use more often to the hotbar for convenience), then press the LEFT mouse-button to perform the action

You can't loot a target with your weapon drawn. When monster or players die, they leave a tombstone which can be looted by pressing the use key. When the loot box open, this will put you into UI mode, so you will not be able to move or do anything. You also need to open your backpack (Default "B" button) and manually drag and drop the items from their corpse to your bag one at a time. This will definitely be perceived by many as clunky, but at the same time there is a case to be made by others that looting should not be fast to prevent people from cleaning out bodies quickly in the middle of a heated battle. After playing for a while, I think it has grown on me a lot because the time associated with cleaning someone out adds a risk when you are in a heated situation

My main beef with UI is the chat box. The chat box has multiple tabs that correspond to the different channels, such as group, clan, local, tells, and alliance. The problem with this is that it is becomes easy to miss messages. Let's say you are in your group chat tab running around looking for trouble, and you run across another player and kill them. Unfortunately, that player asked if he could join you and wanted to provide you with some valuable information, but you missed it because his text was under the local tab that you were not looking at because you were talking in group. Unless you are paying careful attention to the various tabs, you are bound to miss a tell or message in another channel. You can however click and drag those tabs out to create new chat windows for that channel. This also means that having a different chat box for each channel can start to clutter up your screen. I think the chat would be better served with multiple channels in the same tab, and leaving it up to the user to decide which channels they want to see in each tab. Aventurine has stated that further revamping of chat is already in the works and will arrive shortly, so there is a good chance that this will be less of an issue very soon