Tasos Flambouras checks in with his bi-weekly journal update. The team has been extremely busy locking down a beta build of their game and had a recent incident involving a hacker, as such, the journal is a bit shorter than usual. Nonetheless, the content more than makes up for it and just to sweeten the pot, Aventurine SA has thrown in two exclusive screenshots of the Shulgan drake, a mount for the Alfar race.
Journal by Tasos Flambouras
I don’t have a lot prepared for this journal for lack of time. We’ve been really busy since the last update. Aside from all things to do with Darkfall, we’ve had to deal with the added time sink of that hacking attempt on our webserver.
I got some private messages from community members ranting something like “WTF HOW IS IT POSSIBLE FOR SOMEONE ….” regarding the intruder. I’ll remind our friends of incidents involving colossal projects like Half Life 2 and World of Warcraft, and so many more you never hear about, and say that at least we caught the guy before he could do any real damage. These things happen. As far as we know he’s still in custody. We hate seeing people in trouble but this guy did everything he could to land himself in it and there are also other gaming companies involved.
This happened right in the middle of our huge effort to prepare the beta, so I’ll say a couple of things about that. There are a couple of variables to be sorted out before we talk about a date. It will happen in phases leading up to the open beta. We’re not looking forward to a prolonged beta period, and we’ve already performed extensive internal testing in order to minimize it.
The first beta build will be very close to the full game: all races, the whole world, full gameplay, around 300 quests, countless adventure areas, hundreds of monsters, all the mounts, ships, cities, sieging, with as few limitations as possible.
Since this journal is short, we’ve got a couple of screenshots of the Alfar mount for you, the Shulgan drake. We recently added it to the game so we’ve been riding those around testing them. I would also like to thank everyone who responded to our dev sparked debate on what a next generation MMOG is, there’s some great stuff there.
Until next time,
Tasos Flambouras
