It looks like they're going to let a few more people play on the 22nd,
but the actual release date has been pushed back another month; here is
the information from the horse himself, Tasos:
We know that the community has been speculating and wondering about the
Darkfall release for some time. We haven’t replied until now because
there were several complex issues to plan and work out. We also needed
to get authorization before we could proceed with this official
announcement:
Starting on January 22nd there will be a Darkfall trial with the
distribution of the release candidate client allowing thousands of
players to sample the game for free, help us stress test our servers
and test the final features of the game.
It’s important to understand that there are well over 200 thousand
applications by players wanting to get into Darkfall. This number makes
it unrealistic to distribute the client and to open up our servers to
everyone. We’ll try to accommodate as many players as are possible for
us to manage at this stage. Even so, the demand exceeds our current
capacity. Interest in Darkfall has surpassed all our expectations to
the point that we may need to manage our release differently.
The date of the Darkfall European commercial release has been pushed
back to February 25th, 2009. A pre-order will be made available
mid-February. The pre-orders will get priority for early access to the
game. The pre-orders will also get priority for the game launch if we
have to go to a staged release. We’ll go to a staged release only in
the case we have more demand than we can handle properly, and until we
can upgrade our capacity. The pre-orders are necessary so that we can
have some measure of the demand.
The reasons for the new release date follow:
- At this stage, everything is connected: Hundreds of
elements need to come together. When one thing falls behind, everything
else tends to follow.
- Demand for Darkfall at launch could
be much higher than expected. If this is the case, we need a different
process to better handle the demand.
- Darkfall’s partners
(distribution, billing, account management, support, etc.) entered into
the game at a late date and we needed more time than expected to
integrate properly.
- We fell behind on a couple of weeks
of beta testing progress and we need to make this time up. We need more
playtesting data on several features we haven’t had much chance to test
externally.
- We’ll use this extra time to implement
updates based on tester feedback and also make some enhancements we
were saving for after release.
- We want as many players as
possible in the game before the launch and we haven’t had the chance to
stress test our servers with live players yet.
- We
underestimated the effect the holidays would have on our preparations.
While we worked through them, the world around us seemed to stop.
- We
don’t want to rush things more than needed. An extra month may not seem
like a lot of time, but it’s enough to allow us to take care of any
compounded delays.
Our hope for Darkfall is to have a good game with a tight player base
that we can nurture and steadily build up. Hype surrounding Darkfall is
huge right now, despite our best efforts. We’re not sure how this will
translate on launch day but we have to make allowances for the
possibility that demand could be more than we anticipate.
Announcements will follow with more information on Darkfall pricing,
pre-ordering information, North American player access, and system
specifications.
The Darkfall Team
You can access the original article at Darkfall Pushed back
