From Darkfall:
Hello everyone, we hope you’re doing well. Today we have a small status update for you which we’ll follow up with more as needed.
The beta development milestone was met early in December. Since then we've had a fully functional and stable beta build up on remote servers, which is being patched regularly. At the moment we're using part of this system to show the game to prospective partners, distributors, publishers, technology providers, etc. Our motivation here is to provide the best quality assurance, distribution, and service for the game and its players, so we consider this to be a very important phase for Darkfall.
We've already planned for self-publishing, but we need to know who's willing and able to do it better. We can’t announce a clear ETA on the first phase of the public testing yet, but we'll keep you posted on developments.
In the meanwhile we're working overtime on balancing, optimizing, beautifying, adding content to the game etc. We've added some new features, and a few surprises that we weren't sure we'd be able to get in before launch.
We've also hired a few extra people to help in the final push, animators, worldbuilders, and sound engineers. There's a lot of work to be done in all these fields, and in applying the final polish on Darkfall.
Development-wise we’re grinding away, a lot of repetitive tasks, with little to report but you should know that everything is going well.
That’s it in broad strokes, now we’ll try to give you a little insight on our update inconsistencies so that you know where we’re coming from:
It's easy to imagine that 5 minutes is all it takes to make an update, a developer will pop online to say hi, or that we could just appoint someone from the community to generate updates. Unfortunately, that's not the way it works in a professional environment. There are clear guidelines, we're bound by NDAs, and all disclosure needs to be approved, as is the case with most development studios.
Often due to disclosure issues we’re forced to be vague, or talk around topics and this is sometimes mistaken for coyness, by those who wish to interpret it that way.
We get plenty of requests for publicity, most of them involve us having to create regular content, or answering interview questions we've answered a million times before. Answers to questions we haven't answered before are often in the realm of information we're not allowed to disclose.
As all our resources are put into game development, it's a stretch for us to de-prioritize in order to create Darkfall features and updates. Even so, taking a look at what other MMOs in development are doing, it seems that we've produced more substantial content than most, while giving the community an extensive and truthful look under the hood.
It’s important to remember that we're just game developers making a game, not trying to string anyone along, we're not looking for investors, we're not looking for pre-sales, there's no conspiracy, so we don't invest a lot of time in hyping Darkfall up, when we need to be in our perpetual development crunch. We firmly believe that the game speaks for itself.
Whenever we’ve dropped off the radar, it's because we were working hard, and not because some catastrophe had befallen Darkfall development. If we don’t update there’s nothing substantial to report, but we’ll try harder to communicate this and to stay in touch with the community.
We’ll follow up with some fresh updates within the next couple of weeks, and keep you posted on any developments as permitted.
Thanks for reading.
