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Darkfall sees troubled, delayed launch

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.