Darkfall

Darkfall's First Expansion Coming Soon

Kody — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:16:47 GMT

This July, the developers of Darkfall are planning to release its first expansion since launch. Darkfall is of course the hotly anticipated PvP MMO which released to unfortunate server issues earlier this year.

Now that the issues are taken care of, Aventurine is looking to expand the game's content substantially with this update. The details below are bullet-points, but you can find out more here. Suffice to say, this looks like a fairly hefty update.

Massive PvE Monster Re-balancing
Weapon Re-balancing
Armor Re-balancing
Crafting price Adjustments
Player Housing
The Village System
Character Specialization System
Clan City Crafter Income
Darkfall's Weather System
Title Quests
Compass
New Mount
Sithra - New elemental weapon
Skill & Spell Books
Special Attribute consumables
Random Treasure Chests
The Nexus System
And more...

As you can see, this is a lengthy list of features for the game's first expansion. Aventurine has included a lot more details about them on the expansion page, so head over and take a look.

Darkfall Online New Gameplay Videos Released

DoranM — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:56:29 GMT

DarkfallDB.com has dug up a few gameplay videos for players lucky enough to get into Darkfall Online. The game is rumored to have let a few thousand more players in late last night; and we'll keep you updated as soon as they release more!

Enjoy the videos!

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Darkfall Online's Tasos On Macroing, More CD Keys, and Server Status

DoranM — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:42:59 GMT

The DarkfallDB Dev Tracker has picked up a recent post by Tasos of Darkfall Online has posted the following update about the current state of the servers for the game, and answers questions about macroing. He also gives some details about the release of more CD Keys for players who wish to purchase the game.
Here's a look at his original post:

Latest: 10.25 GMT
We have brought down the servers for scheduled maintenance and patching. We apologize for the abrupt take-down. New ETA is 3 hours, we'll try to be up as soon as possible.

The game has been up consistently without much incident. We are monitoring the situation and keeping track of any issues players have to report.

We will bring down the servers for a patch in a few hours. Estimated downtime will be up to 2 hours for this. The patch contains optimizations of the server and client and various fixes to issues we’ve noticed in the game.

To address an issue reported by players: We generally frown on unattended macroing and if you use macros you do so at your own risk, but it should be mentioned that spamming spells and any macroing WITHIN the protective radius of the guard towers in the starting areas will result in a kick, and repeated offenses could result in a ban.

Support structures will also be available within the next couple of days to improve our responsiveness to your reported issues.

About Darkfall availability, we will give advanced notice for when more copies will be available. We need to run a few tests first to make sure things have improved and we will let you know when we officially make more copies of the game available. Availability is throttled because we need to make sure that the server population is having as good an experience as possible before we introduce more people and more servers. We hoped to be further along but have been held back by the account management system. We’ve made several optimizations since, and we’re working on a permanent solution as soon as possible.

Communication is still at a bare minimum, but this will improve steadily as things smooth out in the next few days and weeks. The forum downtime in the first 36 hours happened because of extreme load, making the forum unusable. We had to bring it down in order to be able to post status reports, and decided to keep it down until we were done fighting through our initial setbacks.

We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

Thank you
The Darkfall Team

Darkfall Online's Tasos: Darkfall Online Release Date Update

DoranM — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:15:46 GMT

DarkfallDB.com has been keeping on top of the recent news for the Darkfall Release which is scheduled for today. Aventurine had planned to release Darkfall Online today but appears to be having server trouble with processing the pre-orders and getting people into the game. Here's a recent update from Tasos in the issue:

We've had several people report they are unable to get into the game and have not even gotten the details yet on how to get in; Tasos has posted this recent update about current launch day troubles:

We’ve been waiting for the pre-orders to process through billing and it has been moving along but not fast enough. We’re almost done with this. Many of you will be getting notifications of this during this process. As soon as this is concluded we’ll process the accounts and open up the servers for the pre-orders. This will be done tonight; the game has been ready and waiting.

Unfortunately we’re running behind schedule as far as opening up the extra sales which we hoped to do tonight as well. We’ll do this tomorrow as early as possible, likely sometime around noon GMT time, around the time of our first scheduled maintenance. At this time we will also process the problematic accounts which had 0 euro problems, no charges, no balance, but received a successful pre-order message. We are also looking into the few cases that have pre-ordered but have not received a confirmation email and we will resolve all these issues. Most of these problems were due to a combination of lag, multiple sessions, and multiple charge attempts.

We want to thank you for your patience again, and we would like to let you know that we’re adding a couple more days to the free month of play making them 33 for everyone that pre-ordered and that will buy the game tomorrow. This is to make up for any bad experience with the account management, the lag and the delays you’ve had to face with purchasing.

The traffic volume we’ve been experiencing has been unbelievably high because of the initial rush and was compounded by users hammering the system with multiple sessions. You should also know that we have been doing everything necessary to resolve all these issues as soon as possible.

We’ll post again as soon as the server is open.

Best,

Tasos

DarkfallDB.com Looking For Volunteers For Game Release!

DoranM — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:09:21 GMT

DarkfallDB.com has been a leading source of information for Darkfall Online for the past few months. The game is due to release tomorrow and they're asking for a helping hand to get everything that needs updating...well updated! They've got a populated Darkfall Wiki, several guides to get started like the geography guide and the race guide, but have plans to ad a lot more once the game goes live.

Checkout the original post and if you plan to play lend 'em a hand:

Looking for Volunteers!
DarkfallDB is looking for a few good volunteers!

We've grown quite rapidly and with the game coming out tomorrow we're not too big to ask for a helping hand or two..or three...or four!
We are looking for a few volunteers to help us out with the site. We are in need people who will be responsible for keeping the front page updated with Darkfall news, as well as site news. We could also use help with adding new content to the site, and moderating the forums.
Experience with Joomla is useful, but not mandatory. Of course anyone can help keep the Darkfall Wiki updated with important detailed information, but if someone wanted to help out a little more on that project we would love to put someone in charge of it!

If you have exceptional written communication skills, an enthusiasm for Darkfall, and the talent to bring comprehensive information to people, and would also like to be part of a first-rate growing community, please contact us using our contact us form with the subject: I would like to volunteer .
Be sure to include valid contact information, either an e-mail address, or some form of instant messenger info.

Darkfall Online Sold out - Oh Wait! There's a Few Left!

DoranM — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 02:53:23 GMT

The DarkfallDB.com Dev Tracker has picked up a post from Tasos regarding and update to pre-orders and their current status. They were listed yesterday as sold out, which had many players concerned, but it appears they are available again for purchase, with more coming available after the launch date of Feb. 25th. Yesterday he had posted saying they were not going to have any more pre-orders available and the next chance to buy more would come after the 25th release date, as shown by this post. Something must have changed, and I don't know what it was, but since I haven't ordered yet it's a good change! It's been a real rollercoaster ride watching this truly indie development company push this title out. We're really looking forward to playing it and providing you with the best information available for the game via DarkfallDB.com!

Checkout the original post here:

Quote from Tasos:

You can Pre-Order Darkfall here:

https://www.darkfallonline.com/accounts/f/default.php

Pre-Orders will run until February 25th, or until they're sold out.
If sold out, more copies of Darkfall will be offered on launch day, February 25th.

Thank you

Darkfall Online Major Patch and Pre-Order Server Outage

DoranM — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 04:12:16 GMT

Tasos has recently posted an update about the major patch for Darkfall Online. Our DarkfallDB.com Dev Tracker picked up the post where Tasos explains the current pre-order situation. He also explains some of the trouble they are having with the pre-order servers. He's got some info on the latest patch notes for everyone too.

Quote from Tasos:

Today a substantial patch was applied to the game. We've also opened up the beta information forums where you can read the newly released patch notes.

These patch notes, among other things, explain the basics of the conquest system. We've been working hard on the game as you can see by the volume of this update, we've already spoken of our commitment to supporting the game and that's what we'll continue doing. Things are looking good for launch; the game has been very stable, even though server and client are still in debug mode.

We feel we should explain what's happening with the pre-ordering even though it hasn't been officially opened yet: Yesterday we gave the beta testers some lead time to the pre-order. This was offered not only as a courtesy but also in order to get reports on any problems before releasing to the public. Since the pre-order link leaked out, our system has been overrun by players from all over the world trying to pre-order at the same time.

Even though areas like Asia are excluded from this release, they remain major contributors to the heavy server load. This load is many times above our highest estimate and as a result the system has been very slow. We've been correcting the few issues that have surfaced while in the process of increasing our web server capacity-yet again.

We apologize for these problems, we have people working on this around the clock and should have it fixed by tomorrow. We're disabling the pre-orders until then. Even though many persistent people have managed to pre-order successfully, it's just not a good user experience. We'll post the pre-order information and resume taking pre-orders as soon as we're back up tomorrow.

Darkfall Online NDA Has Been LIFTED! Get the Details Here!

DoranM — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:38:46 GMT

The Darkfall Online NDA has been LIFTED! Our Dev Tracker at DarkfallDB.com has picked up a recent post by Tasos detailing how the launch will work and provided details regarding price, billing, and pre-ordering. See you there :D

Checkout the original post:

As of the time of this posting the NDA is officially lifted. In the next couple of days the Darfkall pre-orders will open up and stay up until right before Darkfall's launch on February 25th or until they are sold out. This is how the pre-order will work:

The pre-order consists of the Darkfall client digital download along with a month of play starting on February 25th. The full cost for this is 42 Euro. This amount WILL NOT be charged during the pre-order. What will be charged is an initial 2.52 Euro non-refundable payment to activate the process. The remainder (39.48) of the pre-release price will be billed on release, February 25th. You'll be free to cancel the purchase any time before the additional charge goes in on February the 25th.

Darkfall's monthly subscription is set at 11.77 euro. A 3 month subscription with a 10% discount and a six month subscription will be offered with 15% discount on the monthly subscription rate.

There is 19% VAT added to both the initial payment of 2.52 Euro and to the remainder (39.48) for residents of the European Union. The same applies to all the subscription charges. People outside the EU will not be charged VAT.

For the pre-order all major credit cards are accepted. For Darkfall's launch direct debit will also be available. More payment options will be available shortly after Darkfall's launch such as Paypal, prepaid cards, wire transfer etc. Our partners for the billing are GlobalCollect, a leading and trusted global payment processor. (http://www.globalcollect.com/)

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 its potential, some had something else in mind, and few don't like it at all. Darkfall isn't for everyone.

It should be stressed that as with any MMOG Darkfall will always be a work in progress. Darkfall's potential however, being a sandbox game, is dependent on its players more so than other MMOGs. This is why we've been communicating with a lot of our players, have been listening very closely to the testers and are taking all the feedback, positive and negative, very seriously. Something important to understand is that we are committed to fully supporting this game and working with our player base to make Darkfall the best game it can possibly be. After launch we're not going with just a â€œlive teamâ€ to do simple maintenance to the game while the rest of us move on to other projects. All our resources are committed to Darkfall, and we will even increase our team size to meet our ambitious future goals for the game.

Thank you for reading and we hope to see you in Darkfall.
The Darkfall Team

Darkfall's Tasos Interviewed About the Feb. 25th Launch Date

DoranM — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:03:01 GMT

DarkfallDB.com has tracked down a recently completed interview between Tasos, the Darkfall Community Manager, and MMORPG.com.

There's not a whole lot of new information in the interview, and Tasos remains pretty tight-lipped about some of the happenings around the NDA and current game development, but one Q&A segment that struck our interest was about the input they have received from the new wave of beta testers, and their continuous development cycle to get those changes and fixes implemented. Enjoy the read!

Question:

We haven't heard anything new from the developers since the Jan 22nd news item announcing the first round of invites. Can you tell us why we haven't heard any further updates?

Tasos:

That’s not entirely correct because we’ve had a substantial update on January 25th and a few interviews since then but basically we’ve been doing what we said on the 22nd. Our first priority is getting the game ready for release. There are also thousands of testers to support and all this has been keeping us very busy. We have announcements coming soon with all the info the public needs in order to play Darkfall.

Question:

We keep hearing that the developers have responded to quite a bit of user input since the 22nd. Can you give us an idea of some of the changes that have come about as a result of player feedback?

Tasos:

We have been getting a lot of valuable user feedback and responding to it as we have done throughout the development cycle. Most of the feedback confirms our original intentions meaning that often players ask for changes or fixes that are already planned or in production.

We have benefited from the feedback in several areas where we needed testing input and we’ve had a lot of great feedback related to balancing, and on tweaking the gameplay experience. A lot of the user feedback has led to more testing of features. We’ve also been doing our best to respond immediately to any bugs reported by the testers and so far our track record has been very good at fixing them immediately. By looking at the player logs, we’ve corrected many areas that the players didn’t need to report.

It’s our commitment to continuously and proactively support this game throughout its lifecycle, on a daily basis, and to listen closely to what the players have to say so that the game can evolve and grow. We won’t simply assign a ‘live team’ to support the game while the rest of us move on to something else. The testers working with us already know this.

Check out the entire interview for more.

Darkfall Online Due to Release Feb 25th

DoranM — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:55:26 GMT

Darkfall Online is due to release the 25th of February. So far the game producers have been incredibly tight-lipped about letting too many details out to the media or their fan base. The game had an originally scheduled launch on January 22nd of this year which they failed to meet. The delay, of course, had the forums up an uproar, but things seem to be progressing well with the start up company Aventurine's first MMO.

This game is supposed to be one of the most hardcore PVP games to come out in recent years, and although the lack of content released doesn't really give us much to show you there have been 6 official trailers added (We're posting the 6th because the building placement just look OH so cool).

(Please visit the site to view this media)

You can see all 6 videos at http://www.darkfalldb.com/latest/videos.html

We've also thrown together some information you might find useful before trying the game out:

We'll keep you updated as the game draws closer!

Beta Registration Open

Ltcobalt — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:08:56 GMT

Darkfall is now accepting registration for beta testing,

http://www.darkfallonline.com/beta/

It's pretty straightforward, follow the instructions. If you get a confirmation at the end, we've received your beta application. There's no confirmation email.

source: http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=64329

New Gameplay Trailer for Darkfall

Ltcobalt — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:05:42 GMT

A new gameplay video has been released for Darkfall,

On FileFront (click Download now! under the player)
http://files.filefront.com/Darkfall+gameplay+trailerwmv/;11645449;/fileinfo.html

Torrent:
http://media.darkfallonline.com/Darkfall%20gameplay%20trailer.wmv.torrent

Direct download link:
http://media.darkfallonline.com/Darkfall_gameplay_trailer.zip

On youtube (in 6 parts):
http://www.youtube.com/DarkfallOnline

For those who don't know what to do with a torrent file here are some instructions:

Step1: Get a BitTorrent client. For example uTorrent http://www.utorrent.com/

Step2: After installing the BitTorrent client, click the torrent link I posted to download the torrent file.

Step3: Double-click on the torrent file to open it in your BitTorrent client program.

source: http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=64217

Update: August 22nd

stragz — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:22:05 GMT

A small update posted on the 22nd from Tasos on the official forums:

Hello,

I thought to quickly check in before too much more time passes. As we step up publishing activities, the updates should increase in frequency and quality, which should make up for the ones we’ve been missing the last months. We take for granted sometimes that the Darkfall community is savvy enough to understand the limitations of independent game development and make allowances, however we’re also keeping track of what we need to give you in order for you to know exactly what you’re getting into with Darkfall.

On progress, there are no major problems to report, some minor delays maybe here and there which don’t affect our timeline. Most of us had a short break, the last for a long time. Everyone is back and we officially entered into our crunch period on Monday. We’ve had several new people join the company the past month, and more on the way.

There's a video coming out, most probably next week, or shortly after. We’re talking about a long 100% in-game pure gameplay trailer with no scripting, no simulation, no post-processing. It’s us play-testing while fraps is running on free cameras and playercams and all the footage was collected and edited. The scenarios for it had to be run as part of our testing and development schedule as they came up. Nothing is scripted. We wanted to give you something that can put you in the true spirit of the game and this requires us to be actually playing the game like you would be, and not just taking you on a sightseeing tour or have a company make a marketing cinematic trailer for us.

If you're experiencing problems with the website and the forums it's because these days we're upgrading our webservers and this should be going on most of next week as well. Thank you for your patience.

Our next update would be the video, so until then, thanks for reading

source: http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=63380

European vs. North American Launch

stragz — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:59:02 GMT

Theres been alot of talk in the last few days about whether Darkfall would be launched simultaneously in both Europe and North America. Earlier today Tasos made a post on the official forums to clarify what going on with publishing and launch in different regions. Here's what he posted:

The answer to the question on whether we're going to launch in N. America and Europe at the same time is: "Right now it doesn't look that way"

I’ve been frustrated by issues like these while waiting for a game myself, and I’ll try to explain this as well as I can:

1. First of all, this isn’t an issue of us being located in Europe. It just means that things are moving faster for Darkfall in Europe. A few months ago, it was the other way around and that’s how fluid things are at the moment.
2. It would be a publishing and a logistics issue that the European launch might precede a N. American launch. We have a publishing partner in Europe; we haven’t settled on one in N. America yet. Unfortunately as things stand right now, we can’t launch in both regions at the same exact time but, of course, we would like to.
3. While the actual status on this hasn’t changed much since our friends visited our offices, things are moving at a fast pace.
4. What we can say with relative certainty is that the first beta test will be on the European servers. This isn’t to say that N. American players will be excluded from it.
5. It also doesn’t necessarily mean that N. American players would be excluded from playing on a European server.
6. While we haven’t selected a publisher in N. America yet like we have in Europe, this doesn’t actually mean that we need one, or that we're going to wait for one, in order to launch the game there.
7. Our publishing effort has been for a common infrastructure and we’ve been adopting solutions with a global reach so that the setup in one region could be shared by- or quickly duplicated in the other. I don’t want to say that we could be up in N. America in no time, but that’s our intention.
8. It’s important to remember that our preferred scenario is to launch Darkfall in N. America and Europe at the same time. This is on our mind as we move forward. Even if we don’t manage this, it’s our intention to move very quickly to catch up.

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=61038

Update: State of the game

stragz — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:03:03 GMT

Yesterday Darkfall Online developper Tasos Flambouras posted a small update on the state of the game on the game's official forums.

Briefly checking in with you on our progress:

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.

Since it's summer and a lot of people are on vacation in Greece, we've been getting a lot of requests to visit the studio. We've already had a few people come over and we had to say no to a couple of others due to the bad timing of their visit. The people who have been here may or may not write about their visit, we didn't make them sign NDAs and we showed them the game.

We enjoy these visits, but unfortunately we can't spare the time unless it's media so we won't allow more visits for at least a couple of months. We've also had some media over here and there should be a couple of articles in the local press.

We've been putting in the long hours, so the next three weeks we're on a weekly vacation rotation, the last chance we'll get to rest for a long time.

The next update will likely be in a couple of weeks.

Thanks for reading.

source: http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=60100