RAoV - Random Acts of Violence

1/22/09 First Wave of Darkfall Invites!

First wave of Invites - Thursday January 22 2009
Posted by Darkfall News on January 22, 2009 20:36

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.

We are spacing out the invites in order to facilitate the download of the client and patching. We will continue sending out more invites every day until we reach our capacity.

Since this first phase has to do with stress testing the servers, and doing final testing on features, we are not lifting the NDA until this testing is concluded.

We apologize for the problems with the forums and the website today, we have been experiencing denial of service attacks, and we are working to resolve them.

Darkfall Pre-Order and Release Date Information 1/15/09

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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.

The Darkfall Team

1/15/09 Darkfall Q&A @ Ten Ton Hammer

In the third installment of Ten Ton Hammer’s VIP Access series, Premium Members had the chance to get their Darkfall questions answered by the folks at Aventurine. Fielding questions were Claus Grovdal, Lead Designer and Tasos Flambouras, Associate Producer. Trond Evanger, one of the Darkfall designers provided additional feedback.

Read More Here

The Man Says “You Should Be Charged $$ IRL For Griefing People :)

Can You Feel The Love?

Richard Garriott to Make Online Fantasy Game?

Lord British

In the article Richard Garriott confirms he’s planning on coming back to the game industry to work on a new game that is “probably medieval fantasy and probably online.”

“For me, the high point - quite literally - was spending 12 days on the International Space Station. As a result, I’ve been somewhat outside the gaming scene; I was in quarantine for nearly three months in2008 .

That said, Halo’s sequel was a big deal. World of Warcraft continues to dominate the massive multiplayer arena - more power to them. If I had to pick a developer who has done a bang up job, it would be Blizzard [the development team behind World of Warcraft]. The number of people they have converted is just amazing. They have shown all of us what good game development is all about.

After 25 years at Origin, the last thing I wanted to make was yet another medieval fantasy game. Now, after a very interesting break, I’m keen to get back into the fray and work on a new game. Probably medieval fantasy and probably online; there’s something very powerful about getting people together.”

Waiting for Darkfall

Everyone is starting to get hyped up for Darkfall’s release. Right now, as we play EQ2’s watered-down pvp on the Nagafen server, the bulk of our conversations in ventrilo revolve around Darkfall.

Will it release on 1/22/09? Dunno. I personally have my doubts due to the lack of interaction between the devs and the playerbase. I hope we get an update from Tasos in the near future to shed some light on things.

We’ll be going Alfar, for sure. We’ll be bandits/pirates/dirty bitches. We’ll keep the guild small and play within our limits. We’ll have to craft, unfortunately. We’ll have no allies.

You know, even if Darkfall is only half as good as expected, I’ll still play the damned game. The prospect of true FFA PvP, full loot, no safezones, no levels, no lock-targetting, no evac, no stealth, no instances, etc, will be more than enough to make up for any shortcomings the game may have.

Why did I write this? I’m fucking bored, that’s why.

Bloodaxe Clan - You Have No Idea How Horrible You Are At PvP…

Mal and I were out in Steamfont on our 46 SK and 43 Warden. We come across a 55 Brig and 57 Ranger from Bloodherpes Clan. One has a hunter title, the other has a destroyer title. We’re bored, so we say ‘WTF’ and take our chances attacking the two that are 10+ levels higher than us.

We ripped their fucking faces off.

We were laughing at how horrible they were as we ran around the zone. They showed up again and we killed em…again. A level 38 and a level 40 happened by and joined them in their fight against us…we killed them too. As we’re fighting, we notice that we’re near a rezz point because these level 50-somethings start rezz zerging us!

LOL?

Seriously, just quit the game already!

Eventually, we ran out of power and the 4 of them took us down. Still, if I had to rezz zerg during a 4 vs 2 with people 10+ levels lower than me, I’d quit.

Bloodjerkoff Clan, you suck. Daisycutter, you suck. Denallor, you suck.

Too funny.

Darkfall 6-Part Gameplay Trailer

Just…wow.

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