I know that I said “a brief development report” but it has been a while, so it came out a bit longer than expected. There will be more soon-ish.
Darkfall is still in internal beta. Delays and development taking longer than anticipated is the norm in the gaming industry as we all know, even in companies and projects with virtually unlimited resources. In our case the time related problems were tied more with the development of the advanced technology and the tools behind the game and not so much with the game itself. While delays are the norm, we're not at all casual about them. They drive us crazy too, and we're doing everything in our power to minimize them. There actually is a bright side to this: the development process isn't linear, so the extra time helps us make a better game.
Darkfall is a well funded, fully staffed and supported project. Production has been stepped up since the last development report and right now we're going stronger than ever. Any speculation to the contrary is completely false. Not only are we fully committed to producing and supporting Darkfall, but we're fully committed to doing it without cutting any corners.
We understand and we even share the community's impatience to a certain degree. We understand that you want to know specifics about the beta testing and the game launch. All we can say responsibly is that we can see light at the end of the tunnel and we'll let you know as soon as we know for sure. The fact that our planning has been off before makes us more cautious about getting into specifics. The beta forms have been ready for months and our tester evaluation is an ongoing process.
Here are the main areas of concentration in Darkfall development right now:
• We're putting a lot of resources into testing and refining the combat system and the actual PvP gameplay, doing our best to make combat fluid and as much fun as possible without making it too complicated.
• We're revising the conquest system that we weren't very happy with and we've come up with several ways to improve it. We'll leave it open for further adjustment during open beta testing.
• Races: Character models, armors, weapons, architecture are completed.
• Monsters: Completed.
• Worldbuilding: We're still working on the Alfar and Mirdain areas, the Ice and the Jungle continent.
• Dungeons: We're redoing some of them that turned out less than great.
• Skills and spells are about halfway done being implemented.
Addressing a couple of the frequent community complaints:
Lack of feedback on gameplay and game mechanics.
We don't think that giving the community an x-ray of the game and analyzing Darkfall gameplay features while-you-wait is the proper thing to do and we also believe that we've gone way overboard with this in the past. This is one of the reasons we've chosen to give you a preview our game through features like the Travels on Agon, even if this is very time consuming for us. Finally there are a lot of things that we shouldn’t talk about yet.
Not enough updates / need more developer interaction:
Again, time is a problem here. Development is our first priority and time is very-very tight. Timing is also a factor, and the development stage we're at isn't very developer feedback and update friendly. With the previous website we gave you more than 70 updates over the course of a year, over 400 visuals, a bunch of interviews and frequent developer visits into the IRC channel and there were still a lot of requests for more. We're doing the best that we can.
Overall we feel that we've given a lot of feedback, information, and interaction, especially to the people that have been with us for a while. We do hear you though, we do read the boards every day, and we’re trying to improve the frequency and the quality of the feedback and interaction.
We'll try out this (possibly) regular Q&A feature and see how it works out. Brannoc has already set up the infrastructure for it and we're (possibly) looking forward to answering your questions.
Status Report- July 9
Linear Mode
