Darkfall Online. Maybe you've heard of it. It's a MMORPG.
Way back in the summer of 2001, Darkfall was announced. At the time, it was under development by a team from Norway calling themselves Razorwax. In October of 2002, Razorwax merged with a team of Greeks, and became Aventurine.
The game has had a development history almost as ridiculous as Duke Nukem forever. The number of delays have reached an almost innumerable amount. It's about five years overdue at this point, if you want to go back to the first release date estimates.
There have been multiple beta signups that have resulted in no invitations ever being sent out. Numerous times the game has been discarded and put aside, but it always seems to pop back up. It's not surprise the general consensus from the community has been to dub it "vaporware".
What makes Darkfall special, besides its own hilarious history? It's a spiritual sucessor to Ultima Online, one of the "founding fathers" of the MMOPRG genre, to coin a lame phrase. The idea behind Darkfall is to give the players a sandbox and let them create their own history and conflict. A huge continent with player built cities, player built boats complete with naval combat, a comprehensive resource gathering system and a robust crafting system that allows you to create ANYTHING you see in the world, realtime twitch based combat with no autotargeting or ability queues. A completely freeform skill system that allows you to build whatever character you want, with no pesky "levels" or "classes" getting in the way of your customization, and a HUGE library of spells and magic schools to compliment this open ended character building. And full loot free for all PVP, where your death means the loss of everything you're carrying. This is what has all those old hardcore UO players salivating, a return to the basics where simply travelling down a country road may mean the loss of all your finest gear to a bunch of player controlled bandits. The possibility for full on clan warfare, complete with player city sieges and fragile alliances and betrayls. It certainly sounded interesting at least!
Well in August of 2008, after seven years of delays, cancellations, and returns to the metaphorical drawing board, Aventurine announced another closed beta. Except this time there actually was one. While the general consensus was sitll that Darkfall would never see the light of day, even the so called "haters" were starting to get a little hopeful. And the fanboys went nuts. Aventurine announced plans to have the game out by December of last year.
It's no great surprise that the date came... and went. Still Darkfall was in closed beta. And a VERY closed beta. Complete nondisclosure. Aventurine was more tight lipped than a virgin puritan. Those fragile hopes were quickly being dashed. They came out with another release date - January 22nd, 2009. This was the real deal. Definitely. January 22nd. Darkfall would be out!
You don't have to be a skeptical person at all to be extremely skeptical of anything Aventurine says. The official Darkfall website's News section was only updated once every few MONTHS. Some of the actual CONTENT on the website hasn't been touched even half that much. ALL of the information comes from the forums, where they post snippets of info.
So it wasn't a big surprise when close to the new January 22nd release, Aventurine, by way of head PR honcho "Tasos", announced another delay. Due to the need for further testing and finalizing of their billing system, blah blah blah, Darkfall won't be here until February 25th, 2009. However, starting January 22nd, Aventurine would be "opening up" the closed beta - which only meant they'd be letting a few more people in, and possibly not jsut the rabid forum fanboys who have spent the last four years posting about the game. The nondisclosure agreement? That stayed on. So while a few more people were actually testing the game, the greater internet community still didn't know dick about shit as far as how well the game actually played.
So there was another month to wait. Aventurine was TOTALLY 100% SERIOUSLY NO JOKE THIS TIME ITS HAPPENING commited to getting the game out in February. So they came out with their "phased" release plan. Starting a few days before February 25th, players would be able to "preorder" a digital copy of Darkfall. The cost was something like 42 Euro, plus a 3 Euro "processing fee" or some shit. The 3 Euro fee was paid upon your order, but the preorder cost of 42 Euro wouldn't be charged until the 25th, when the game came out and the server went live. Copies would be limited. Why? Because Aventurine only has one game server, and it's a European one. The North American release to "To Be Determined". So they were trying to hold back a large percentage of players because they simply didn't have the infrastructure to deal with them. Apparently they were "shocked" that a game promising the fucking moon and the stars was "popular" among MMORPG players and simply weren't prepared to deal with the overwhelmingly large number of potential players.
More "copies" (remember, this is only a DIGITAL release) were promised to be made available on launch day.
Sooo here we are, the 26th of February. A day after Darkfall's launch. And what has happened?
Well, I don't even know where to start. Firstly, the moment preorders were available, their entire account management system crashed. Hard. Apparently, once again, the demand was SOOOO great that they just couldn't handle it. Purchasing attempts timed out, resulting in double billing, or no billing at all, and many simply got a 404 when attempting to access the account management link. It's worth noting that during this, the official web page hasn't been updated. At all. the last news posted is from January 22nd, mentioning the new release date. There isn't an account management link or ANYTHING on the website.
Eventually, after hours of delays and frustratingly obtuse messages from the development team, preorders were back up, and promptly sold out. Nothing to do but wait. The big day came.
Forums went down. At first, their forum software, vBulletin, simply displayed "Server is too busy, try again later." error messages. Later, Aventurine manually disabled the forums and periodically left status updates as to what was happening.
Firstly, preorders were taking "longer than expected" to process. What? It seems they are doing it manually... or something. No one knows for sure. They don't really say. Account management is down again and there certainly aren't any new copies of the game available. There billing errors by the hundreds, people being charged and not being activated, people NOT being charged and also not activated. Forums are still down. And the server sure isn't up, even for those who WERE charged and WERE activated.
Last night, Tasos says that a large bug was discovered and must be fixed before the server goes up. Several patches are released - the first of which corrupts the 9GB Darkfall install, which by the way is only available via torrent.
So today, it seems the server did go up, but only for the people who have finally had their preorders processed. How the game actually plays is really up in the air as NOBODY SEEMS TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON. The forums are still down:
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/ with continual assurances of them being back "soon". Account management still gives a 404, and their official site reflects absolutely none of this:
http://www.darkfallonline.com/ Stratics, who hosts their IRC network, "requested" them to disable their channel due to performance issues being caused by the flood of players.
I don't know how any of this will end, but it's been a pretty funny thing to read about, and I thought I'd share what's happened. It's sort of the culmination of eight years of internet history. There's no way in hell I'd send them any money and I feel a little bad for anyone who has!
Oh, here's a gameplay video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWjfvW38lZIYeah.
Gaming World Forums
The Amazing Darkfall Adventure