Darkfall Dev Journal #15: A Visit From a Fan
by Dana Massey, 28 Sep 2007 11:09 am
aventurine sa, darkfall, developer journal, exclusive, tasos flambouras

This week, the Darkfall developer journal series continues with a brief, but enlightening entry on recent events at Aventurine SA. This last week saw a fan - Asp of the Lords of Death guild - visit the studio and Flambouras also reveals that they now have a specific Beta date chosen. Although, he isn't yet in a sharing mood on that front.

Darkfall Developer Journal #15
Article by Tasos Flambouras (Associate Producer, Darkfall)

This is going to be a short journal. I was originally planning to give you a preview of the game in this installment but I didn't have the time to put it together.

A lot of the same going on since the last update. It's going to be like this until we launch more of less. Still adding content, balancing, testing, optimizing etc. We're making good progress. A couple of numbers I heard today: nearly 12 thousand items in the game, and 706 complex quests at launch. If there's an interesting development it's that we've narrowed in on a specific beta date and we should be announcing it very soon, right after we make sure that a couple of conditions are met.

To this end, we changed our version control system and the build and integrity check servers need to be updated to the new version before we can get our build up early next week so we can resume the internal testing. In plain English, servers are down.

Asp from the Lords of Death guild visited us today. He was in a neighboring country on business and he made the trip down to meet us, see what we're up to, and to hang out. We were hoping to maybe give him a small beta preview but he couldn't delay his visit until Monday for our beta build to be up again. We talked about city building, conquest, tactics, the economy, griefing, clan cities, alignment, racial balance, and a lot more. He met several of the developers and saw some of the work. We let him play our demo to get a feel for the gameplay. Asp has played pretty much every MMOG out there since Ultima Online, and his reaction really elevated our spirits, made us remember what our goal is: to hopefully blow you away. We don't get that many visitors around here so it was great meeting with him. I believe he's going to write something on his impressions when he gets back home.

Kjetil and I pretty much spent the day with him and we really need to get back to work, I think his feedback on his visit is probably better than whatever we could say right here.

Thanks for reading,

Tasos Flambouras