October 31st Update Part 1

[Tasos]

Catching you up with our activities to date - in this post a brief recap of our activities surrounding the first official presentation for Darkfall during the Athens Digital Week.

The Darkfall information we’ve been giving out lately has been targeting civilians. While there have been a few interviews, on a variety of local (Greek) and fewer international media, there is really nothing new. We’ve shown about 10 different version of the Darkfall trailer, we’ve given a few presentations about the game, there are some Darkfall ads out there, and more waiting to be deployed, a couple of local television presentations etc. but it’s the general information that people need to be introduced to the game.

You probably already saw Shaar’s update on the Athens Digital Week activities. He did a good job giving the information about what all happened there, but here’s the official take on things:

The presentation didn’t contain much new information. It was meant for a general audience. The video shown was a shorter version of the Darkfall trailer. We played the game live on the stage during the presentation for about 20 minutes and we stopped when the internet went out.

The announcement during ADW was that the open beta phase is scheduled to end early in December. More importantly this means that the game will be ready to release at that point. Marketing consideration kept us from just announcing a release date. The game will be ready for release, and the launch may follow directly, or shortly after, depending on the marketing landscape at the time. Obviously the earlier the better for us, but there are a lot of things needing coordination for the launch, internal and external. So our side of things (meaning the development end) will be ready.

Some general information on the Athens Digital Week activities because a lot of people were asking: We organized the entire gaming section, mainly to support publicity for Darkfall’s first official presentation. There was an international Quake 3 and Warcraft 3 event, the ESWC Masters of Athens, where the best professional players in the world competed for the top spots. It was nice to know that most of them knew about Darkfall and a few were waiting for it to come out. Then we held the World Cyber Games national finals, there was a large LAN set up for the public, and a bunch of game consoles with the latest Xbox 360 games. There was a concert with the symphonic orchestra of the city of Athens playing videogame themes. Last but not least we had a small game developer’s conference for game developers in Greece.

We were happy with the attendance of the event, a lot of international journalists covered ESWC Master’s of Athens and had a lot of question to ask about Darkfall, and we met a lot of fans during the Darkfall presentation, but mainly in the days following it. I was very surprised at how many people were asking about the game, and about when we would have another presentation. We didn’t know we had such a strong following in Greece. Unfortunately our time slot for the Darkfall presentation was during normal business hours and many people couldn't attend.

I’ve posted some pictures from the event in the gallery.

We’ll follow this up with a Darkfall status report within a couple of hours from this posting.