Many if not all of you have heard by now that Darkfall's release
date has been pushed back to February 25th, with beta testers being let
in on a limited basis on January 22nd. And this despite Tasos'
now-famous quote from their
dev journal #25 published in April of 2008:
"[T]here's no way we'll miss a release date and we're not going to just
set a date as a goal, and either postpone or be forced to release
something unfinished. We resolve to stick with our release date because
we know how people tend to plan around this as far as organization,
time and hardware goes when they're looking to make a commitment to an
MMORPG, especially a competitive one like Darkfall."
Several people have been citing the above and getting rather angry at
the Darkfall developers and the company for the delay. We've decided to
break down the reasons given for the delay, and give our input with as
clear of a head as we can, recognizing that perhaps some good can come
out of this despite our feelings of disappointment. Please feel free
to discuss any of the topics in the forum links provided below; we'd
love to defend our statements and have an open discussion about any of
the issues you see.
1
. At this stage, everything is connected: Hundreds of
elements need to come together. When one thing falls behind, everything
else tends to follow.
Our thoughts: With any project of this magnitude, there is
absolutely no question that this can and does happen. Most critics just
gripe that "hey, the game's been in dev for years and these things
should be fixed." We understand, though, that there has really not
been a proper development period with a large enough group of testers
for this game to go live yet. So a little more time might help fix this
problem. We hope.
Discuss it here:
2.
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.
Our thoughts: We have suspected the general lack of
updates/press/advertising was due to the fact that they were already
getting more attention and people wanting to play the game than they
can handle. The game was initially supposed to appeal to a very small
niche of hardcore gamers who didn't enjoy some of the other MMORPGs out
there. With the population of MMORPG gamers growing 3-4000% since the
beggining of Darkfall Online development; this is to be expected. They
have what most of us feel will be an amazing product, so of course
demand's going to be high. Given a little more time we hope they can
get the funding, resources, and people in place to handle the larger
load.
Discuss it here:
3.
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.
Our thoughts: This is just business in general, being an
independent publisher is HARD. Getting the funding and correct channels
in place to set up distribution on what is looking to be a very GLOBAL
scale is no walk in the park. Should this have probably been addressed
sooner? Yeah. Did they probably have more important things going on? No
question in our minds.
Discuss it here:
4.
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.
Our thoughts: There was not really a suprise here, we havne't
heard a lot lately so we had pretty much assumed they were a little
behind on a few deadlines. This is a problem that should resolve itself
with the extended deadline and the open beta due to begin on the 22nd
of January. Hopefully with a month of more players, more testers, more
fixes, more enhancements, and some more publicity the game will be
ready to roll out and a much better state than it is in now - The
benefits are worth the delay.
Discuss it here:
5.
We’ll use this extra time to implement updates based on
tester feedback and also make some enhancements we were saving for
after release.
Our thoughts: Obviously there needs to be a lot more user/tester
feedback before they're able to actually make changes or enhancements.
A game with 1-2000 beta testers is a different game entirely than a
game with 20-30,000 beta testers, and that will factor in over the next
month. The decision is a good one; sadly it will just result in a delay
for those of us without beta accounts. (Hint Hint)
Discuss it here:
6.
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.
Our thoughts: This of course has to be done; most critics have
asked why this hasn't been done yet. We think a lot of it boils down to
cost of servers and bandwidth. Those are very expensive and it's been
suggested they didn't want to fund it until it was absolutely necessary
and they knew they were close to a launch. In house we've personally
wondered why there had been no open beta as of yet, and this seems like
a plausible explanation.
Discuss it here:
7.
We underestimated the effect the holidays would have on
our preparations. While we worked through them, the world around us
seemed to stop.
Our thoughts: Justifiable - most businesses do close during the holidays; can't expect everyone to work as hard as us.
Discuss it here:
8.
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 thoughts: We can agree with this, but we also understand why
many have expressed concern. The game has been in development for
years; and updates have been very quiet for the last month. Our
tentative position is that delaying the release is the best option at
this point - Darkfall Online does not have endless development dollars,
and they have to work with what they have. We'd rather another month
wait and a successful launch than to launch next week and have it be a
catastrophe.
