May 23rd Update

[Tasos]

This is not an update as much as it is checking in with the community. Just to inform you about the sparse updates: they’re due to an urgent health problem that landed me in the hospital for a week and I’m still trying to catch up with work.

Our main contact has left Warcry so we’ll see what we’ll be doing with the Journal there. We will be giving out a few interviews to various mainstream media and we will try to keep some specialized updates for the core Darkfall community. We’re looking at releasing a comprehensive video sometime in the next few weeks. We’re doing this ourselves and our first priority is working on the game, so we can’t just slap something together in a couple of days. We also won’t hire a production company to make a Darkfall-inspired cartoon for us, so we’ll be using actual Darkfall gameplay footage like we always do.

I don’t have the time to continue last week’s Q&A but I’ll address some specific concerns stemming from it:

I never said that public beta would be two weeks. I said several weeks. Public beta will be as long as it needs to be. We hope and we’re working hard so that it won’t need to be very long. The clan beta will likely be a stage of public beta. The announcement of launch within the year is an official company commitment and it’s not a guestimate. We’re making strides with publishing in the direction where we maintain full creative control on the game.

The universal banking system we’re implementing in Darkfall is because we found it was very tedious not having it. Universal banks have become an industry standard for a reason. We've found that their existence does wonders for the fun factor as opposed to their absence. Darkfall is challenging in every way, you don’t need it to be tedious. We’ll balance universal banks to work as well as possible and we’ll continue balancing them if we have to.

As for caravans, firstly, we never confirmed that they were in the game. They were never in the original design; they weren’t announced as a feature, they were just brought up and have been promoted by some community members. We have looked at them as a possible cool feature but to be honest, I can't say they're that cool in practice. As things stand you can form a caravan using mounts, ships etc. With them you can move large quantities of goods, fairly fast, rather than running small loads back and forth over and over. The world is huge and the distances to travel are great and there will be a need for transport of large amounts of resources such as those intended for city building.

You do have the freedom of forming caravans. You also have the option of universal banks. When we make design decisions like these, we’re thinking of the majority of players and we speak from experience. Few players would initially enjoy the absence of universal banks, but even they would get tired of the wasted time commitment.

Finally, these raised undead armies, armies of dead players, and armies of NPCs etc. we keep reading on the boards: What’s this NPC fascination about? Why not raise a player army instead? Every bot takes up resources players could be using and Darkfall is a massive multiplayer game. Even if it’s all the rage in MMOs lately we want to further the multiplayer real-time aspect with Darkfall rather than go the other direction. There is no progress in having to introduce single player features such as more NPCs to a MMORPG.

As for underscores, numbers, etc. in names it's just the way it works right now. If you don't like them, sure we'll take them out until you petition them back in when you run out of naming options. : )

There's no ETA for the next update, but we'll do our best on that.

Thanks for reading