Darkfall sees troubled, delayed launch

By Oli Welsh Published 26 February, 2009

Servers are finally opening today.

Hardcore player-versus-player MMO Darkfall Online is finally opening its servers to paying customers today, after yesterday's planned launch was held back by bug-fixing and an inability to handle traffic.

Despite limiting the number of copies it has put on sale, developer Adventurine has been struggling to cope with public interest in its new MMO. Pre-order pages and forums have been unreliable and swamped with traffic, causing many orders to go unprocessed, or in some cases, credit cards to be charged multiple times.

With its forums taken offline, Adventurine announced via MMORPG.com that slow order-processing and a bug discovered in final testing had delayed the launch of the game yesterday evening.

The forums have now been replaced with a message stating that servers are now coming online after a 12-hour delay, and that problematic orders will be resolved today. Adventurine hopes to open up more sales tomorrow.

Darkfall has been in development for over seven years, and despite being a small-scale independent development, it has attracted considerable interest for its old-school insistence on free-for-all PVP and corpse-looting, Ultima Online-style.

We had hoped to bring you hands-on impressions of the game by now, but extensive downtime during the final days of beta testing made it difficult for us to log any time in the game. We'll post something as soon as we can get our accounts transferred to the live game.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (12) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Benno #1 3 years ago

    Darkfall sees troubled, delayed animations

  • Darkjinxter #2 3 years ago

    Darkfall sees troubled, unreliable servers.

  • Slabbathepave #3 3 years ago

    Anyone playing this is under direct orders to relay all information via Eurogamer so i can evaluate the games prospects. Anyone caught not doing this will be ill thought of, shunned, and driven out of the village.

  • PearOfAnguish #4 3 years ago

    Darkfall sees troubled, delayed lunch.

  • BrokenSymmetry #5 3 years ago

    It was pretty hilarious, in the last few years, to read MMO forums about Darkfall, with some regarding it as the great saviour of the MMO genre, and others seeing it as vapourware from an obscure developer, only meant to take the pre-order money and run. It will be interesting to see how this pans out...

  • Roamer #6 3 years ago

    After reading about it, it sounds a bit like Eve with elves and dwarves. Colour me interested.

  • ObiChrisKenobi #7 3 years ago

    I'll give 12 months.

  • Xeaon #8 3 years ago

    /shocked

  • Whitewalker #9 3 years ago

    I was in Beta for two weeks prior to today's launch. After the first day of trying to acclimatise myself to a very different style of sandbox MMO I'm really enjoying DF. The client was rock steady; I had no CTD, only the server going down sometimes without warning. It’s a totally huge world, very open to exploration with lots of danger & discovery for those that like to travel. And by no means do we have another one of those cloned, theme park mmos.

    By far the best AI mobs I have encountered in any MMO, and don’t listen to what others have said about the world being empty, it’s not & I’ve done a lot of exploring. But don’t expect to see mobs everywhere overlapping each other...they are spread out, but if you can see them in the distance, when they look your way they can see you and they will attack, or call for re-enforcements. They will fight you with an assortment of tactics that at times even rivals that of human players.

    PvP is harsh and cruel but it’s also cool and fun...outside of the safety of the city walls you wouldn’t want to travel alone.

    Didn’t have enough time to get into crafting much however, due to exploring/adventuring, that’s something I’ll be looking at now once the launch settles down.

    Graphics are more than fine, pictures and videos don’t do the game justice...it looks so much better in game.

    I’d place my bet on DF as being one of those surprise hits that come out of nowhere by an Indi-underdog developer who puts more heart into creating a game they love and taking the time to make it so.

    Edited by 1 at 26/02/09 @ 13:21

  • Omgruserious #10 3 years ago

    Meh. I think it'll be a niche game at best. The graphics and no-holds-barred PvP will drive away most people.

  • Slabbathepave #11 3 years ago

    The graphics themselves arent awful, the engine has to be quite robust to accomodate all it appears to promise. Its the Art direction, quite frankly its just ugly. In tha same way Morrowind was ugly but certainly graphically capable considering what it promised at the time.

    Adventurine probably just settled for a slightly capable concept artist who had a wealth of other skills and after all who can blame them? A very ambitious project, why hire a dedicated concept artist(or 2) if you can get a 3d modeler guy who dabbles in a bit of character art.

    Simply put they should of hired me, and then Darkfall would have been the most majestic and sexy MMO of all time.

    /blowsowntrumpet

  • iokthemonkey #12 3 years ago

    Ha ha ha ha ha.

    TRUMPETS!