Curse

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.