Darkfall - Development History

Development History

On 29 August 2001, Razorwax announced the development of Darkfall and launched its official website. The Razorwax development team was based in Oslo, Norway, and initially consisted of five members: Claus Grovdal (Lead Design and Producer), Ricki Sickenger (Lead Tools and Game Logic Programmer), Henning Ludvigsen (Art Director), Kjetil Helland (Lead 3D/Client Programmer), and Erik Sperling Johansen (Lead Server Programmer). Approximately 14 months later, in October 2002, the Razorwax team was integrated into Aventurine SA, a newly-formed company based in Athens, Greece, ostensibly created for the continued development and subsequent commercialisation of Darkfall. When the Razorwax team and the Aventurine team had their first meeting in Athens, a member of one of the teams joked that Razorwax should relocate from Norway to Greece due to the lower taxes and cost of living in Greece. Eventually, the two teams realised that this idea actually made very good business sense, and by December 2002, the relocation of Razorwax, now Aventurine, was finalised.

In September 2005, a signup page for a closed clan beta was made available on the web; this beta never happened, however a 1.5 minute Darkfall gameplay video was released on February 2006 as recompense to the community. A later statement from associate producer Tasos Flambouras explained that a decision had been made internally to devote additional money and resources into expanding the scope of the game.

Darkfall's first major public revelation was at the game convention E3 in 2006, and while Aventurine did not have a publicly playable version at the time, various industry journalists were shown a standalone demonstration version of the game. From June 2006 onwards, just after E3, the Darkfall development team began releasing bi-weekly developer journals and community question/answer articles, published on the game forum site Warcry.

An announcement on the 11 July 2006 stated that preparations were being made to begin beta, although Aventurine stated it did not have a publisher for Darkfall at this time, and that they were considering the possibility of self-publishing the game. Six months later, on 17 January 2007, Aventurine announced they were in active discussions with prospective partners, distributors, publishers, and technology providers, and that a fully functional and stable beta build was running on remote servers.

On the 30 January 2007, Aventurine released their second official gameplay video, consisting of about one minute of ingame footage demonstrating real-time melee combat, mounts (including mounted combat), spellcasting and naval combat. In May Aventurine gave an update on their progress towards beta, announcing that their internal target date for beta was for summer 2007. A later update, on 2 August 2007, stated that beta would not start until negotiations with possible publishers were complete.

On 22 February 2008, Aventurine released a "location test video" depicting various NPC and player-crafted city locations in the game. Later, in April, it was announced that Darkfall was feature-complete, and in May, that "... our launch date will be inside 2008, with the public beta preceding it by a few weeks. This is official and internally we're a lot more specific, but pending an announcement, we cannot say more at this time".

In June, Aventurine confirmed they had signed with Greek company AudioVisual Enterprises to distribute Darkfall in Europe, and this was confirmed by AudioVisual in a stock market announcement made to the Greek stock exchange.

On 29 August 2008, Darkfall's official beta was announced as the final scene of a 17-minute gameplay video, which demonstrated numerous aspects of the game, such as small and large group PVP, including small and large group mounted combat, ship sailing and naval combat, magic and archery, and vehicular combat, creative use of in-game physics and magic, crafting, banking, 3 different PVE encounters demonstrating mob AI, and city building and sieging. This was soon followed by a "limited public hardware test" of Darkfall as the first phase of public beta, which was then followed by a staged gameplay-oriented public beta.

On 16 October 2008, Darkfall was publicly presented at Athens Digital Week. This event was unofficially reported by a member of the Darkfall forum moderators during this event, including a 30 minute video of Darkfall played live on stage.

On 5 December 2008, Tasos Flambouras announced that Darkfall would be released for the European market on 22 January 2009, with an American release to follow. This launch date was later revised to 25 February 2009. The NDA for beta players was lifted on the 18th of February.

On 24 June 2009, Tasos announced that Darkfall will launch in North America on 7 July 2009, alongside Darkfall's first free expansion to the game. Darkfall launched successfully in N. America on July 13, 2009.

Darkfall's first free expansion launched in July and features massive monster re-balancing, player housing, Darkfall's village system, the Nexus system, a character specialization system, the weather system, special items, new weapons and much more.

Darkfall's second free expansion launched early December 2009. The EU-1 server went down late on Thursday December 3 and the North American Server went down shortly after for patching. The update was the largest the game has seen to date and added many desired dynamics to the game not seen in the games first 9 months. Shortly before both servers went live extensive patch notes were released for the 2nd expansion titled "Conquer the Seas".

On June 11, 2010 Darkfall developers released patch outlines which outlined critical fixes to the game. These fixes are some of the most important changes made to Darkfall to date.

On February 10, 2011 Darkfall developers released yet another patch which addressed several issues that had major effects on gameplay. Three Notable changes were clan bank permissions, War Status Timouts (7 days from declaration), and bindstone mechanics designating where you will spawn in the event changes in political affiliation and alignment

April 25, 2011 Aventurine changed hosting locations to Chicago to improve server stability.

July 2, 2012 Aventurine releases the Ultimate Promotion patch. Increasing skill gains and loot while removing the purchase fee entirely and reducing monthly subscription cost to $9.95, down from $15. This promotion will run from release until the launch of Darkfall 2.0.

On September 18, Aventurine announced Darkfall: Unholy Wars. The game was due to launch on November 20. On 14 November, Aventurine announced that due to a combination of external factors, last minute issues, and final testing feedback, the company was forced to push back the release date to December 12, 2012. Darkfall Unholy Wars is set again in the fantasy world of Agon, countless centuries after the events that took place in the original Darkfall Online. The company has released a set of feature, game play and developer diary videos to support the launch (http://www.youtube.com/user/DarkfallOnline)