Development history of Darkfall Online

To date, over 600 screenshots, 9 official game videos, and approximately 280 pages of developer journals, articles and Q&A transcripts are available, charting Darkfall's development progress over 7 years. By comparison to its contemporaries, Darkfall has had quite a checkered development history, having been widely lauded by gamers for its wide-ranging gameplay and hardcore approach to PVP, as well as having been accused by some[who?] as vaporware[citation needed], due primarily to its long development time, repeated retractions of beta announcements, and unconventional approach to the game's public relations and advertising.
On 29 August 2001, Razorwax announced the development of Darkfall and launched its official website [3]. The Razorwax development team was based in Oslo, Norway, and initially consisted of five members: Claus Grovdal (Lead Design and Producer), Ricki Sickenger (Lead Tools and Game Logic Programmer), Henning Ludvigsen (Art Director), Kjetil Helland (Lead 3D/Client Programmer), and Erik Sperling Johansen (Lead Server Programmer). Approximately 14 months later, in October 2002, the Razorwax team was integrated into Aventurine SA, a newly-formed company based in Athens, Greece, ostensibly created for the continued development and subsequent commericialisation of Darkfall [4]. When the Razorwax team and the Aventurine team had their first meeting in Athens, a member of one of the teams joked that Razorwax should relocate from Norway to Greece due to the lower taxes and cost of living in Greece. Eventually, the two teams realised that this idea actually made very good business sense,[5] and by December 2002,[6] the relocation of Razorwax, now Aventurine, was finalised.
In September 2005, a signup page for a closed clan beta was made available on the web. This beta never eventuated, however a 1.5 minute Darkfall gameplay video was released on February 2006 as recompense to the community [7]. A later statement from associate producer Tasos Flambouras explained that a decision had been made internally to devote additional money and resources into expanding the scope of the game.
Darkfall's first major public revelation was at the game convention E3 in 2006, and while Aventurine did not have a publicly playable version at the time, various industry journalists were shown a standalone demonstration version of the game [8]. From June 2006 onwards, just after E3, the Darkfall development team began releasing bi-weekly developer journals and community question/answer articles, published on the game forum site Warcry.
An announcement on the 11 July 2006 stated that preparations were being made to begin beta [9], although Aventurine stated it did not have a publisher for Darkfall at this time, and that they were considering the possibility of self-publishing the game [10]. Six months later, on 17 January 2007, Aventurine announced they were in active discussions with prospective partners, distributors, publishers, and technology providers, and that a fully functional and stable beta build was running on remote servers [11].
On the 30 January 2007, Aventurine released their second official gameplay video, consisting of about one minute of ingame footage demonstrating real-time melee combat, mounts (including mounted combat), spellcasting and naval combat [12]. In May Aventurine gave an update on their progress towards beta, announcing that their internal target date for beta was for summer 2007 [13]. A later update, on 2 August 2007, stated that beta would not start until negotiations with possible publishers were complete [14].
On 22 February 2008, Aventurine released a "location test video" depicting various NPC and player-crafted city locations in the game [15]. Later, in April, it was announced that Darkfall was feature-complete [16], and in May, that "... our launch date will be inside 2008, with the public beta preceding it by a few weeks. This is official and internally we're a lot more specific, but pending an announcement, we cannot say more at this time" [17].
In June, Aventurine confirmed they had signed with Greek company AudioVisual Enterprises to distribute Darkfall in Europe [18], and this was confirmed by AudioVisual in a stock market announcement made to the Greek stock exchange.
On 29 August 2008, Darkfall's official beta was announced as the final scene of a 17 minute gameplay video, which demonstrated numerous aspects of the game, such as small and large group PVP, including small and large group mounted combat, ship sailing and naval combat, magic and archery, and vehicular combat, creative use of in-game physics and magic, crafting, banking, 3 different PVE encounters demonstrating mob AI, and city building and sieging.
Since September, Aventurine has been conducting a limited public hardware test of Darkfall as the first phase of public beta.
On 16 October 2008, Darkfall was publically presented at Athens Digital Week. This event was unofficially reported by a member of the Darkfall forum moderators during this event, including a 30 minute video of Darkfall played live on stage.
On 05 December 2008, Tasos Flambouras announced that Darkfall would be released for the European market on 22 January 2009 . The American release is said to proceed shortly after.[19] Players from other parts of the world may participate in the European launch event since tests have shown the game will be playable from outside Europe.[citation needed]. However, Tasos Flambouras announced on 16 January 2009 that the European release date had been delayed to 25 February 2009.
Since the commencement of public beta, several official and unofficial beta reports and previews have emerged. These include a selection of beta tester reports, an on-site Darkfall preview conducted by MMORPG.it, and an ongoing beta preview series conducted by the author of the MMORPG comic site The Noob.