For all those who do not know too much about Darkfall Online an interesting article about how a siege works in Darkfall can be found at Massively.

We were all down by the bank, grabbing the last minute stuff we would need. Then the call came in: enemies spotted coming up the ramp, heading towards the east side of the city. "The ramp," as it's affectionately called, is the main way up to the city. Our entire city is built on a rock cliff with only one way in our out -- the ramp. It makes it easy to find enemies coming towards the city, but the incoming troops almost always still attempt to circle around to the back and use a spell called telekinesis to push people up and over the walls.

But as they rounded the city and everyone unleashed a volley of arrows and spells, one of the guard towers exploded with a fire spell. Our defenders came running out -- on fire -- all trying to get away from being burnt to death. Out from the lunacy strode a member of Sinister, one of the best clans in the game. "Someone paid someone off," said one of the other defenders over Ventrilo.

More Sinister members appeared in Blackrock's ranks, as well as members of DIE. Outside of our walls, Necessary Evil showed up and began killing anyone who ran out of the city -- taking advantage of the situation by culling the weakened. Andruk was decending into chaos as our members were falling and we were being pushed back.

Despite Adventurine withdrawing their support for Eurogamer to re-review Darkfall after their controversial first critique, Kieron Gillen has gone ahead, anyway.  The result is a lengthy 4-page piece that includes some commentary on the overall situation.  Ultimately, Kieron finds some value in their concepts but the overall execution results in a 4/10:

The rules lead to openly silly places. Playing in the small clan I joined, I found myself defending against an interloper. Running back from my adventuring in armour, I glanced at my fellows and felt terribly over-dressed. Because - y'know - I was dressed. Everyone else had stripped down to their underpants.

It's logical enough. It's a relatively meaningless battle. As such, going into battle and risking someone dying and taking stuff you've carefully collected - or, even worse, actually crafted - would be foolish. Why risk taking a random shot, falling, the opponent nabbing it and legging off? Better not to risk anything other than your default, infinitely-respawnable weapons.

This is a world where, if you're expecting trouble, it's reasonable to strip down to your pants. This is stupid beyond all mortal belief.

A rather negative view on Darkfall Online, titled: Why Darkfall is made of fail by someone who wanted to love it, can be found on MMOCrunch.

Darkfall represents yet another great concept with bad implementation in the MMO space. It could have really worked had the cheating, hacking, and mass alliances not gotten together and decided it should be a numbers game instead of a skill game. Basically, it’s grindy as hell if you’re not in a massive guild with a massive city where you can macro your skills up to the top in no time flat without actually playing.

If you want to play legit, meanwhile, all your PVP encounters will be against macroers because, hey, the grindiness is just too insane to not take a shortcut around for most people. You will die every time you leave town to harvest, even by your own race (and if you’re Mahirim, ESPECIALLY by your own race). You’ll only be safe near the Ork cities on the other side of the map (because, oddly, the Orks seem to be the most honourable players), but once you leave the NPC cities you’re screwed because Hyperion alliance owns everything and they do roam their territory. Last I checked, Hyperion owned the whole eastern half of the map (they believe in quantity over quality, and while you may have five way more skilled players than any in their 500+ army, you will die instantly when they lag the map your on with their obscenely unskilled army).

They don't like 2/10.

While other MMOs have relied on their players to fill in the content to an extent - Star Wars Galaxies being the most notable example - few have abused the sandbox mentality so readily as Aventurine. It's the emperor's new clothes of 2009: such a marvellous game that only an idiot wouldn't realise the beauty of the gaping holes in its content, its wonky control system, and its seemingly decade-old engine.

Even if you were so inclined to take part in this painful experience, it's rather difficult to actually buy it. The subscription page is buried within the forums, apparently hidden from public view in the hopes that internet loud-mouths would leave it well alone (the few Darkfall servers Adventurine is running have been mystifyingly over-subscribed). In fact, the only clear description I could find was from an external site that linked to the subscription page - which was not available through the official site. We'll spare you the link. Use your credit card at your peril.

Tasos has an update on Darkfall's launch. You can read the whole post here.

Since Darkfall’s launch we have been dealing with issues round the clock, and we’ll continue to do so in order to improve your gameplay experience with every day that goes by. We read all the support requests and are aware of every issue that comes up and we want to thank you for your excellent feedback.

The queuing has been addressed and resolved. The lag and sync issues some players were experiencing have also been addressed and resolved. Random crashes have been all but eliminated. We will give all player accounts a total of 34 days free play included in their initial purchase to compensate for any inconveniences caused by downtime.

An issue we are facing now is with more Darkfall availability. The reason we had throttled the availability in the first place was to avoid queuing. At some point we hit the threshold where queuing began and we needed to increase capacity. Now that we know more, we’re working in advance so that queuing doesn’t become much of an issue again. We hope to be able to open up for more sales sometime this coming week; again it will have to be a limited amount of copies to allow a smooth integration of new players into the game. We will announce when this is ahead of time.


We are also working on opening up new servers to meet the demand. This is not as simple as some forum posts suggest. Darkfall has a huge and very complex infrastructure. There will be announcements when this is nearing completion.

Slashdot is reporting that after some last minute delays, Darkfall is now all set to go.  I'd link to the original forum announcements but they seem to be down...

Tasos' latest update includes the lifting of the NDA, subscription prices and system requirements.

Players in North America are welcome to participate in the European Launch. The plans for US servers aren’t finalized at the time of this announcement. We will offer the option for character migration to US servers for N. American players who wish to use it. We have had people playing without problem from all over the US and Canada. That being said, our servers are located in Germany and distance does affect ping-time.
If the pre-orders are sold out, more Darkfall copies will become available on the launch date February the 25th. If they are also sold out, we will offer more copies every few days as we upgrade our capacity.

The initial system requirements for Darkfall are as follows:
Operating System: Windows XP, Vista
Processor: 2.5GHz Pentium 4, or equivalent
RAM: 1GB for Windows XP, 2GB for Windows Vista
Graphics Card: 128MB PixelShader 2.0 support
Hard Drive Space: 12 GB Free Space Minimum

With the NDA lifted, there will be a lot of information out in the next few days both official and unofficial. There is a lot of passion surrounding Darkfall, both positive and negative. Some views, unsubstantiated by evidence, have become almost tenets of faith at both extremes. Now you can finally judge for yourselves and make up your own mind, through player testimonials and game footage. Be cautious of what is said however, by whom, and based on what experience. The beta has been through several phases, and it’s still a beta. The main purpose of beta is to provide the developers with testing data, and not provide players with a fun experience. Even during this process however the game has been extremely playable and while many consider it to be their best MMOG experience to date, others see the potential, some had something else in mind, and few don’t like it at all. Darkfall isn’t for everyone.

Tasos updates on the current DF trial.

The NDA is still in effect, because this remains a testing period. Even though this is the release candidate client, previews based on this experience may not be indicative of the release quality of the game, especially not while you're consciously trying to break the game during stress testing. The game is still in debug mode so that we can deal with any issues that arise. Other than that, we are trying to simulate the launch, in order to better prepare for it. The testers in-game so far have been sending us very positive reports on their gameplay experience, even so, the NDA will be in effect while there's still testing going on. As soon as we're out of debug, the stress test is over, we'll lift the NDA.

The Offical website states that the first invites, for testing, have been sent out. Although, Darkfall remains under NDA.

This is an update about what is happening today:

We have sent out the first wave of invites to clans and individual testers. We will send more waves of invites within a few hours. Invited players will be able to download the Darkfall installer.

We are applying the latest patch, and players will be able to start patching soon, and entering the game.

The release of Darkfall Online has been delayed with one month and is now set to February 25th. Oh well, what's another month after all those years of development.

We know that the community has been speculating and wondering about the Darkfall release for some time. We haven’t replied until now because there were several complex issues to plan and work out. We also needed to get authorization before we could proceed with this official announcement:

Starting on January 22nd there will be a Darkfall trial with the distribution of the release candidate client allowing thousands of players to sample the game for free, help us stress test our servers and test the final features of the game.

It’s important to understand that there are well over 200 thousand applications by players wanting to get into Darkfall. This number makes it unrealistic to distribute the client and to open up our servers to everyone. We’ll try to accommodate as many players as are possible for us to manage at this stage. Even so, the demand exceeds our current capacity. Interest in Darkfall has surpassed all our expectations to the point that we may need to manage our release differently.

The date of the Darkfall European commercial release has been pushed back to February 25th, 2009. A pre-order will be made available mid-February. The pre-orders will get priority for early access to the game. The pre-orders will also get priority for the game launch if we have to go to a staged release. We’ll go to a staged release only in the case we have more demand than we can handle properly, and until we can upgrade our capacity. The pre-orders are necessary so that we can have some measure of the demand.

The reasons for the new release date follow:

• At this stage, everything is connected: Hundreds of elements need to come together. When one thing falls behind, everything else tends to follow.
• Demand for Darkfall at launch could be much higher than expected. If this is the case, we need a different process to better handle the demand.
• Darkfall’s partners (distribution, billing, account management, support, etc.) entered into the game at a late date and we needed more time than expected to integrate properly.
• We fell behind on a couple of weeks of beta testing progress and we need to make this time up. We need more playtesting data on several features we haven’t had much chance to test externally.
• We’ll use this extra time to implement updates based on tester feedback and also make some enhancements we were saving for after release.
• We want as many players as possible in the game before the launch and we haven’t had the chance to stress test our servers with live players yet.
• We underestimated the effect the holidays would have on our preparations. While we worked through them, the world around us seemed to stop.
• We don’t want to rush things more than needed. An extra month may not seem like a lot of time, but it’s enough to allow us to take care of any compounded delays.

Our hope for Darkfall is to have a good game with a tight player base that we can nurture and steadily build up. Hype surrounding Darkfall is huge right now, despite our best efforts. We’re not sure how this will translate on launch day but we have to make allowances for the possibility that demand could be more than we anticipate.

Announcements will follow with more information on Darkfall pricing, pre-ordering information, North American player access, and system specifications.

Over at MMOCrunch you can find an editorial explaining why Darkfall Online is an important game according to the author.

Sandbox games have traditionally offered their players freedom, something that most of the more recent games have been lacking and some newer-school players may have never experienced. The freedom is yours to go anywhere without being boxed in by mountains that always seem to mysteriously bottleneck into a loading screen. The freedom is yours to pick a character that is yours to shape, instead of being pigeon-holed into some specific role where for some reason can figure out how to use a single type of weapon. These are the promises that a sandbox game makes, but unfortunately there has not been a successful one made since Asheron’s Call.

Game Banshee have the announcement.

January 22nd 2009 Launch Date Announced for Darkfall Online.

Athens, Greece – December 5th, 2008 - Audio Visual Enterprises SA and Aventurine SA in a joint statement today announced that their highly anticipated MMORPG title Darkfall Online will launch across Europe on January 22nd, 2009. North American players are also welcome to participate in the European launch of Darkfall which will precede a North American launch.

More details to be announced as they become available.

Gianna Masetti, creator of The Noob comic, got her NDA lifted to talk about Darkfall online.

Which leads me to another thing, that I quite like… combat is NOISY. Not in the sense that you need to lower the volume of your speakers, but that it can be heard from quite a distance. This means that you have to watch your health and stamina when you are fighting monsters, because the racket that you’re making is broadcasting to everyone within a hundred yards radius or more, “HELLO! I AM HERE! YES, LOOK! HERE! I AM FACING AWAY FROM YOU, I'M FIGHTING A MONSTER, AND DID YOU NOTICE HOW MY HEALTH IS QUITE LOW? WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO WEAR A TARGET SIGN ON MY BACK? WOULD IT HELP?”. It’s a really cool feature because combat should not be silent, and for people out and about pking it’s quite exciting to hear all this “victim over there ---> ” noise and sneak up on them.

Just to conclude on a negative note in true beta tester tradition, I don’t like most spell sound effects. The first time I heard a spell’s “fizzz” while visiting the Alfar capital I thought that my speakers had broken, or that some tit was broadcasting static in vent. I almost sent a bug report, “there’s a really horrible, shrill sound like a thousand banshees tuning their TV sets at once, at location x y z” before I realised what it was. But then again, badass sounds are not at the top of my wish list right now.

Darkfall developer, Tasos, has made a forum announcement concerning the ongoing beta disclosing that on November 10th more testers will be accepted into the beta testing process:

Moving along, and we’re about two weeks behind schedule announcing this, but we’re going to start opening up the beta to more and more testers on or around November 10th to coincide with the next phases of our server deployment. We will be enabling a lot of the features we currently have disabled – as needed and dictated by our testing needs. Again I must stress that this beta period’s purpose is for us to get Darkfall ready for release so we’ve been operating under strict directives. Having said that, I can’t help mentioning, that even in this current stage of testing, the game is a lot of fun and we hope to see all of you enjoying it while helping us test during these next phases. 

More details.

A new trailer released and beta signing here.

We've released an extensive Darkfall Online gameplay trailer which shows a multitude of Darkfall's unique features in action.

The trailer consists of 100% in-game footage and features real-time massive naval and land combat, battle tactics,  city sieges, mounts, siege weapons, vehicles, adventure areas, clan cities, spell mechanics, highlights of the grand scale of the Darkfall world, and much more. The trailer is made of playtesting footage with no scripting, no simulations, or post- processing. It's the Darkfall team playing the game as the players would.

 Tasos posts the latest update for Darkfall.

We're working on two fronts, development and publishing.
Development is mainly focused around testing and fixing bugs. We're also optimizing client and servers. We're playtesting a lot, we've also logged many hours of large battles and we're very excited with what we're experiencing. While playtesting we're getting a lot of video footage that's going to end up in a video we'll be releasing next month so you'll get an idea of what we've been talking about.

As far as publishing activities go, we're working on the servers, customer and technical support, billing, and distribution solutions along with our partners.

We've been hiring people in all departments, and we have eight new team members.

 The promised fan Q&A is up, here's a snip.

Is a staff/wand and reagents needed for healing spells as well?

You always need a wand or staff to cast, but some spells don’t require reagents. Other than spells for healing you can use potions, food, and resting to recover hit points.

In a war is it possible for me as a lone wolf, to hide in the city about to be sieged, and then kill whoever I want, or will the city be closed apart from to those involved?

I said earlier in the Q&A that we try to move away from MMOG half-measures. So you’re free to do what you asked if you could do. We don’t lock any players out of events or locations like sieges, quests, dungeons, etc.

Will there be sabotage that can be performed against enemy towns which doesn't involve siege warfare?

You can destroy buildings at the rate of one per day without a siege. You can disable buildings without any limits. By ‘disable’ I mean that you can bring their structural integrity down to zero which negates all bonuses the building may give out, and functions that it may perform.

 Tasos posts on the Darkfall forums about the recent happenings on the development side of the game. I'll quote in entirety as I don't post so much news for this title.

Things are going well with the game testing and with the publishing activities. There are no serious problems to speak of, and we’re on schedule with our milestones.

A couple of things that have us excited: The Darkfall world has been up in its entirety and seeing it all together we have to say that it’s a truly massive world, it’s larger than some countries. You can spend many hours just running through it, and there are so many amazing locations to explore.

There's a focus on optimizing our massive battles capability; we want them to run as smoothly as possible with as many players as possible. We’ve been simulating massive battles and sieges with more than two hundred characters and getting a good 30-60 fps on average machines so far. Under normal loads we typically get over 150 fps and there are still several optimizations to be made so we expect these figures to improve quite a bit.

A little on what’s going on here other than development and business:

We've started collecting in-game footage for a video update which is taking a while being low in the immediate priorities list, but moving along. There have been a couple of magazine interviews; we’ll let you know which ones when they come out. There are a couple of requests for online interviews which we’re doing as well.

We made a Darkfall presentation at a local college with a videogame development program while there to recruit some junior QA personnel. Kjetil and I went there and we were happy to meet a lot of friendly and capable people. We were very pleased with the reception and the reaction to the game.

We’re expecting some community members here in early-mid July, people who will be passing through or vacationing in Greece. These are people we’ve never met before that sent us emails on the occasion of their visit. We hope to be in a position to receive them properly; we really can’t plan that far ahead at this stage but we’ll do our best. Over the years we’ve received several visitors that just popped by, a recent one being Asp from the Lords of Death who wrote a piece about Darkfall
and another being Bakatron who also wrote about his visit.

There are a couple of updates that are forthcoming, and we’ll try for a Q&A a journal, or something along those lines for next week.

New screenshots of Darkfall Online have been released at the official website.

The Darkfall developer journal series at WarCry reaches entry #25. This entry touches, among other things, beta testing:

Darkfall is feature complete and we're doing beta testing using professional testers as we've said before. Our policy on testing has always been that it's to aid the developers in making Darkfall as stable as possible, and not to aid some artificial goal like investor relations, or public relations. We don't care about that and the effectiveness of testing based on these goals is very questionable judging by the beta leaks everyone is accustomed to and which have been hurting the games in question. It's also not good for the players because they usually don't enjoy the experience. We don't expect playtesting to sort out major problems, other than getting reports on hardware configurations and further testing out some gameplay features.

Another Darkfall Online dev journal has been published at WarCry. It is quite lengthy, but here is an excerpt on the world size:

The size of the world: From the ones we know about, It's at least more than twice the land area size of the largest announced or released MMO out there. This world is also seamless and zoneless. You won't see people popping up everywhere, or camping your zone drop. We feel that this is crucial for a PvP game. To run from one end to another at regular running speed could take more than 8 hours. This is just an estimate: It could take less or more time depending on your route. It's not the exact size of the world which is that important though, it's what's in it. We could conceivably make an endless barren world but what's the point of that? In Darkfall our world is full of content, we keep adding more every day and it's all usable: Movement is not restricted, you don't have to stick to road travel, there are no invisible walls, no impassable mountains. Furthermore, you can go to places we didn't necessarily mean for you to go to by running, swimming, diving, climbing, using ladders, elevators, get blasted up, boosted up...any way you can get there, we've placed no restrictions. The scale of the Darkfall world is closer to realism than any other MMO we've seen. In Darkfall snowcaps are earned. This effectively multiplies the size of the world in a much bigger way than in most scaled down MMO worlds.

Thanks to Ammon777 for pointing this out in the forums.

WarCry presents us with three exclusive screenshots of a stronghold called Severii:

Today we have three exclusive screenshots of Severii, a stronghold which houses an undead army commanded by the will of Cyriacus. Cyriacus is a godlike and ancient skeletal dragon.

Severii fortresses are found throughout the Alfar nation of Nagast and Cyriacus himself (the Alfar area demigod) is said to occasionally manifest within its borders.

Much to the enthusiasm of a rabid player-versus-player community that has been eagerly awaiting the highly anticipated Darkfall Online, the official website for Darkfall Online has recently been updated with a brand new official Location Test Video!

Location Test Video - Friday February 22 2008
Posted by Darkfall News on February 22, 2008 12:03

For today's update we put together a medley of location test videos, from in and around clan cities and racial outposts. You can download the video HERE (~114MB)

You can also find location test screenshots in the gallery section of the site which closer resemble the actual screen quality of the game - free of the considerable video compression degradation.

It is obvious that the graphics have improved a good measure, compared to their previous official video that was released a year ago in 2007. The animations appear more fluid, the graphics are more detailed than before, and they also appear a bit crisper and with more environmental ambience than they did a year ago.

Darkfall is a sandbox, skill-based (no levels!), medieval fantasy player-versus-player MMORPG with an innovative blend of features: such as a player alignment system; racial tensions; clan-versus-clan warfare involving politics; territorial control and conquest; open-PvP with full-loot; custom-built clan townships; as well as meaningful player-versus-player with massive battles measuring in the hundreds of players. www.darkfallonline.com blends player-skill-based action with fantasy online role-playing elements, as well as elements found in real-time strategy games.

Tasos Flambouras answers questions from the community about Darkfall.

Fan Question: How long does it take a build city from a let's say guild with ~80 working hour a day (with sufficient funds given)? How long does it take to tear down a city from group of ~80 who have already conquered the city?

Tasos Flambouras: I hate to estimate but let's say you could fully build up a city if you're working hard at it in about a month. That estimate could be way off at launch, but at least you know that it doesn't take three days or a year. Then you can break down the city a building a day or a building section (for fortifications) a day. Of course it's not efficient to do that when you could keep the city you conquered.

Tasos Flambouras, Associate Producer of Darkfall, summarises the current status of the game in a new developer journal at WarCry/

Overall, we have a near complete implementation of the game, speaking of the technology and our feature list. A few things that are not implemented yet but in the works are some clan controls, the environment system, and some AI optimizations. The Darkfall AI resembles Quake bots in the Darkfall context of course. They are not the stupid predictable AI you meet in most MMOs, waiting around to meet their fate. They challenge the player and help train him since they behave like someone's controlling them. A new tabbed message system is also being implemented where you can move and arrange your tabs anywhere and any way you like. It's full of cool features like for example you can drag and drop items in there to show someone their stats, or you can arrange for your kill messages to pop up FPS style in the middle of your screen etc.

Tasos Flambouras answers community questions and talks about the future of Darkfall in a new developer journal at WarCry.  Also featured are three exclusive screenshots showcasing an Ork female, Human male and Alfar female.

Tasos Flambouras, the Associate Producer for Darkfall, has provided a round-up of recent happenings in a new developer journal at WarCry.

Things have been progressing smoothly in most areas except for testing. We're behind on the actual tasks and it's a lot of work. We have on-site testers on the job right now and we're looking for more. What we're looking at, at the moment, are the things we don't want the beta testers to have to worry about (ideally). I'm pitching in too, and my task at the moment is to check some areas for out of place objects, and doing accessibility testing, meaning that I'm making sure that players can get to places they're supposed to be able to get to. It's not the most rewarding work but it's important that it gets done. Some Dwarven locations for example are being corrected because they were just too hard to access through the mountains. We are behind schedule on the testing, ahead in other areas, but we're doing our best with it. We're getting much needed new hardware next week and this means that things will speed up considerably; we're also creating more workstations for additional testers.

WarCry has a new Darkfall dev journal focusing on the economy and prestige classes along with a couple of exclusive screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

Warfare is the driving force of the economy. Everything in the game revolves around wartime production. NPC Merchants sell the basic items. Everything else is crafted by the players as you already know. Crafters need ingredients to implement the formulas to create the items they want to. Monsters also drop items. As far as items go, there is wear and tear through use. There are universal banks, clan vaults with player controlled access levels, a secure trading system, and in-game trade boards. 1 Gold is the monetary unit.

Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras considers publishing options and business models in the latest Darkfall developer journal at WarCry.

Asian publishers have always asked us to look at their preferred business model, which is giving the game away for free and making money from selling advertising, items, and services. This is how most MMOs operate in Asian markets. Darkfall of course with the full loot and the player crafted items doesn't lend itself well to this business model. We're starting to see more and more of this in the west as well, with several recent examples, and I can't help but wonder, and prompt a debate if possible, how western audiences view this. I'll add a strong disclaimer as to avoid any misunderstandings: This is NOT to say that we're even considering this for the N. America and Europe, or for Asia for this matter, so please don't start speculating, or worrying that we are. Something I read about a very large publisher wanting to experiment with this in the west made me want to ask for some feedback about where you see the market going in the near future.

Tasos Flambouras, Associate Producer for Darkfall, has posted a new developer journal at WarCry.

We've been throwing around the word beta quite a bit, and it's not to churn the waters, it's because it's what we're working on right now. An editorial on this site urged us to come out with a date. Well that's nice, and we will when we have one. We've specified that our internal target date is this summer and we can't get more specific yet, but we will when we're ready to make an announcement. We have recent negative examples of games with good potential being rushed out having been improperly tested and we don't want that for Darkfall. Things are going well and we'll keep you updated on that front as we know more ourselves.

The latest Darkfall developer journal at WarCry takes a closer look at the Mirdain (aka the Elves).

The mirdain are a sophisticated and cultured people, who tend to prefer diplomacy to warfare, and subtlety to brute force. They are a race of merchants and politicians, whose networks of intelligence and trade extend like sinuous branches from the Mirendil Forest, forming an empire which controls and manipulates extensively while remaining in the shadows.

Tasos Flambouras, the Associate Producer of Darkfall, has posted another developer journal at WarCry.

The players seem to want it all: graphics, gameplay, a high level of interaction, freedom to shape the world, player created content, as well as some off-the-wall features (by today's standards). The reason we decided to make Darkfall is because we want it all too, or to get as close to it as possible. I would like to know what "next generation MMORPG" means to you. If you want to contribute to the answer we're going to give for the Japanese interview, you can start a discussion thread which we'll use for reference.

Blue's is pointing out a new fan Darkfall Wiki site.  I've haven't looked around but it may be worth a look for those following Adventurine's long-developed title.

A new Darkfall movie is available at the official site. 

We made a new video from in-game footage just to give you a taste of what the game's like at the moment.
You can get the video HERE 

Kicking off an ongoing feature, Adventurine's Tasos Flambouras writes his first dev journal on Darkfall for WarCry:

I’ll use this journal to share a little information about our company, and about the project's background:

While most of this information has been communicated in the past, Aventurine seems to remain a mystery and a point of discussion for some of the Darkfall community. It reminds me of an "America's Army" developer who visited us at our offices and said something like "wow this looks like any other development studio in the US". I'm not sure what he was expecting.

Aventurine was originally formed to fund and publish Darkfall. The development team was in Norway, at the time it was four developers working on design, concepting, and prototyping. While working with Razorwax to put the development team together we realized how high the operating costs, and the cost of living is in Norway. We decided to move our activities to Greece under Aventurine to get more game for our money. It took a while to organize and assemble the team and to get into full production which started about three and a half years ago. Aventurine was now developing the technology, the tools, and the game. At the time this project started there was no technology available that would allow us to do what we wanted, so everything had to be made from scratch.

A Second View of Darkfall is up at RPG Vault, offering a very short overview of the title (presumably after a First View some time ago).  Here's the Reservations section:

Although the project is at least six years old, when it's likely to launch is still not very clear. Skill-based designs can be quite tricky to execute well. Players looking for PvP have more choices than ever, and the range continues to grow. The proprietary client and server technologies are unproven. Publicity has been quite sporadic, resulting in limited awareness outside the title's own community.

The Darkfall Online site has added a batch of new screenshots.

MMORPG.com has five new Darkfall screenshots and an interview with the game's Associate Producer, Tasos Flamboura.

MMORPG.com: As Darkfall continues its development cycle when can we expect to see a Beta? Also do you have a target for production?

Tasos Flambouras: We've mentioned before that it's difficult to run a beta test while continuing development on the game, especially when all our human resources are in development. We are now at a stage where we can and we are preparing the beta test which will allow external beta testers in and this is now a high priority for us. We do have a target for production but realistically the target date will be tweaked during testing. We think it's better to hold off on an announcement until then.

New Darkfall Online screens are available at the official site.

Darkfall Tactical Overview

Today's massively multiplayer online games do contain tactical elements, but many of them have little to no real-world references, and others are based on the exploitation of the game's design and technology - zerging, stacking, excessive jumping / strafing, lag tactics, zone and portal camping, etc. "If it's in the game, it's in the game", so you're forced to compromise and get used to using such actions and to having them used against you.

Darkfall was created with player and clan warfare in mind. In designing the combat gameplay, the simulation of military tactical aspects of combat required technical and design innovations to be implemented. In this article we'll look at some of the basics.

Like axe-bristling avalanches, dwarven legions surge across Agon's battlefields, neither wavering nor resting until victory is secured. At any stage in any battle, no matter how ridiculous the odds may be, dwarves believe - with unblinking certainty - that they will prevail through superior skill, rock-hewn strength and indomitable bravery.

The debate is between the following two positions:

1. One Character per server
2. One race per server

As you know Darkfall is a full PvP (player vs player) and clan warfare game - with accountability. Some restrictions to the character selection per game world need apply.

While we believe that Darkfall's skill system ensures never having to reroll a character, meaning that one character slot per world is enough, we would like to know what the Darkfall community thinks. We invite a civilized and constructive debate on the topic.

Anyone can start a clan in Darkfall. From that point on, our goal as developers has been to make it as easy as possible for you and your comrades to compete in one of the most challenging multiplayer environments ever created. The only problem with this is that you're going to have a hell of a lot of competition.

Darkfall's Dynamics of Conflict

Darkfall features full, unrestricted player versus player combat. By that statement alone, the uninitiated might imagine total anarchy, and a chaotic free for all. We'll try to explain why conflict runs much deeper than random aggression, and will also highlight various layers of the complex and conflicting relationships that form between groups as a result.

Good vs. evil
In Darkfall, good and evil are subjective. Evil is not absolute, there's no poetic justice, and good is usually a condition, or the opposite to what's perceived by the players as evil. This particular conflict exists mainly within a realm or racial area driven by factions with opposed agendas. Those working for their own society, realm and race are usually in conflict with those working against them.

The Mahirim of the Tribelands

By the light of the Ghost Moon, Mahirim packs strike deep into enemy territory, plundering and killing without mercy. They vanish as quickly as they appear, leaving outpaced pursuers and utter devastation in their wake.

The Mahirim are a fierce race of predators whose society has only recently moved towards civilization. And while they may have cities and laws now, they retain the wolf-eyed wildness, the finely honed instincts and the uncaring cruelty of their pack-hunting ancestors.

Risks and Rewards of Trading in Darkfall

Commerce is the mechanism driving Darkfall's economy. Since this is the case, we didn't want to impose restrictive rules and game mechanics on it; rather, we preferred to allow it to simulate real-world economy properties. These make for very complex trade relationships adding depth and new and exciting dimensions to gameplay for everyone - not just for traders and merchants.

Anyone can dabble in trade. There will be no shortage of crafters, adventurers and resource gatherers trading for themselves, but for the purposes of this article, we'll be looking at dedicated traders and how they can capitalize on their specialization for efficiency in turnover and profitability.

Think you'd like to join the Stratics Team? Considering applying your skills to projects that will help others? Excited about upcoming MMO release, Darkfall?

We're currently seeking new staff! As our community expands, and as Darkfall grows ever-closer to beta-testing, we'll expand and promote from within. Get in on the ground floor today!

There's no radar in Darkfall. There are no floating nametags over player's heads. You won't be able to see bleeps on the mini-map that will alert you to the presence of other players and monsters. For that, you must rely on your senses and stay alert, rather than letting your user interface do it for you. This opens the door to a number of very interesting and unique gameplay possibilities, which are supported by a number of sensory cues, some of which we discuss in this article.

As a skill-based game, Darkfall stands apart from most MMOs that use a class / level system. In this article we talk about why we didn't take the beaten path, and a little bit about how the skill system in Darkfall works.

As players, we enjoyed playing skill-based games like Ultima Online and The Elder Scrolls series, and we couldn't help feeling restricted by class / level-based ones. When faced with the decision of allowing players the freedom to take the skills they want and need as their character grows and the game evolves - or not - it was a no-brainer.

n this series of articles on RPG Vault, we take a look at what features make Darkfall stand out in the MMOG landscape. This time, we'll talk about mounts and mounted combat.

One of the major items on our wish lists as players of other games was horses. So, many of us had been asking for this feature from our favorite games for years. Unfortunately, most MMOGs don't have mounts, or they've added mounts with very limited capabilities that don't go beyond transportation. True mounted combat doesn't exist in any MMOG today.

As with the crafting of the terrain, populating the world had been planned and mapped out in great detail, trying to take into account every possible variable. Everything is connected and serves a purpose, and nothing is randomly thrown into the game. This time, we'll take a look at some of the most important of these variables.

Darkfall is one of the largest gameworlds, and it needs to be to accommodate over 10,000 concurrent players. The terrain spans thousands of square kilometers. Some of the pitfalls inherent in making a huge gameworld are repetition, emptiness and boring barren spaces. There needed to be a more thorough process for us to follow in making the Darkfall terrain. Looking at the available options, we decided to go a different way and undertake the monumental task of handcrafting all the terrain. The results have confirmed to us that this is the only way to go if you want a "truly 3D" environment. The handcrafting of the terrain in three dimensions, along with the fact that there are no zones, makes Darkfall the largest single game level ever created.