Darkfall producer talks about beta, testing and setting release dates

There's a PvP-oriented game with real-time, aimed combat, a wide variety of races and tactical gameplay, but it's name doesn't have Conan or Warhammer anywhere in it. Darkfall aims to be the best free-for-all, PvP oriented game ever made. "Too good to be true" is an accusation they hear often; and yet one they aim to live up to, says Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras in Darkfall dev journal #25. Though Darkfall is feature complete, they have not yet opened their doors to regular players. The devs have hired a team of professional beta testers to check through the game first. When they do open the doors, the game will be as close to a finished product as possible, and they can focus on tuning the game for various hardware configurations and stress-testing the server without having to worry about fundamental game issues at the same time.

Darkfall NPCs go about their lives and level up as they age. Because the NPC AI is so sophisticated and seems exactly like a player to the servers, the NPCs themselves are doing a fair amount of game testing just by running around and exploring. Perhaps when the game goes live, the NPCs will eventually set up camps and build cities around popular player re-spawn points, the better to knock them on the noggins as they groan back to life. Darkfall's aim is to give players a world and let them do in it whatever they like. There won't be quests that tell you what to do, where to do it and what to do after that. It's well to the left of the sandbox-game MMO divide. Perhaps Darkfall will succeed where Shadowbane failed, to make a wide-open world where nobody is safe and anything can happen.