As of the time of this posting the NDA
is officially lifted. In the next couple of days the Darfkall pre-orders will
open up and stay up until right before Darkfall's launch on February 25th or
until they are sold out. This is how the pre-order will work:
The pre-order consists of the Darkfall client digital download along with a
month of play starting on February 25th. The full cost for this is 42 Euro. This
amount WILL NOT be charged during the pre-order. What will be charged is an
initial 2.52 Euro non-refundable payment to activate the process. The remainder
(39.48) of the pre-release price will be billed on release, February 25th.
You'll be free to cancel the purchase any time before the additional charge goes
in on February the 25th.
Darkfall's monthly subscription is set at 11.77 euro. A 3 month subscription
with a 10% discount and a six month subscription will be offered with 15%
discount on the monthly subscription rate.
There is 19% VAT added to both the initial payment of 2.52 Euro and to the
remainder (39.48) for residents of the European Union. The same applies to all
the subscription charges. People outside the EU will not be charged VAT.
For the pre-order all major credit cards are accepted. For Darkfall's launch
direct debit will also be available. More payment options will be available
shortly after Darkfall's launch such as Paypal, prepaid cards, wire transfer
etc. Our partners for the billing are GlobalCollect, a leading and trusted
global payment processor. (http://www.globalcollect.com/)
Players in North America are welcome to participate in the European Launch. The
plans for US servers aren't finalized at the time of this announcement. We will
offer the option for character migration to US servers for N. American players
who wish to use it. We have had people playing without problem from all over the
US and Canada. That being said, our servers are located in Germany and distance
does affect ping-time.
If the pre-orders are sold out, more Darkfall copies will become available on
the launch date February the 25th. If they are also sold out, we will offer more
copies every few days as we upgrade our capacity.
The initial system requirements for Darkfall are as follows:
Operating System: Windows XP, Vista
Processor: 2.5GHz Pentium 4, or equivalent
RAM: 1GB for Windows XP, 2GB for Windows Vista
Graphics Card: 128MB PixelShader 2.0 support
Hard Drive Space: 12 GB Free Space Minimum
With the NDA lifted, there will be a lot of information out in the next few days
both official and unofficial. There is a lot of passion surrounding Darkfall,
both positive and negative. Some views, unsubstantiated by evidence, have become
almost tenets of faith at both extremes. Now you can finally judge for
yourselves and make up your own mind, through player testimonials and game
footage. Be cautious of what is said however, by whom, and based on what
experience. The beta has been through several phases, and it's still a beta. The
main purpose of beta is to provide the developers with testing data, and not
provide players with a fun experience. Even during this process however the game
has been extremely playable and while many consider it to be their best MMOG
experience to date, others see its potential, some had something else in mind,
and few don't like it at all. Darkfall isn't for everyone.
It should be stressed that as with any MMOG Darkfall will always be a work in
progress. Darkfall's potential however, being a sandbox game, is dependent on
its players more so than other MMOGs. This is why we've been communicating with
a lot of our players, have been listening very closely to the testers and are
taking all the feedback, positive and negative, very seriously. Something
important to understand is that we are committed to fully supporting this game
and working with our player base to make Darkfall the best game it can possibly
be. After launch we're not going with just a “live team†to do simple
maintenance to the game while the rest of us move on to other projects. All our
resources are committed to Darkfall, and we will even increase our team size to
meet our ambitious future goals for the game.
Thank you for reading and we hope to see you in Darkfall.
The Darkfall Team
