Starting on January 22nd there will be a Darkfall trial with the distribution of the release candidate client allowing thousands of players to sample the game for free, help us stress test our servers and test the final features of the game.

It’s important to understand that there are well over 200 thousand applications by players wanting to get into Darkfall. This number makes it unrealistic to distribute the client and to open up our servers to everyone. We’ll try to accommodate as many players as are possible for us to manage at this stage. Even so, the demand exceeds our current capacity.

The date of the Darkfall European commercial release has been pushed back to February 25th, 2009. A pre-order will be made available mid-February. The pre-orders will get priority for early access to the game. The pre-orders will also get priority for the game launch if we have to go to a staged release. We’ll go to a staged release only in the case we have more demand than we can handle properly, and until we can upgrade our capacity.

Audio Visual Enterprises SA and Aventurine SA in a joint statement today announced that their highly anticipated MMORPG title Darkfall Online will launch across Europe on January 22nd, 2009. North American players are also welcome to participate in the European launch of Darkfall which will precede a North American launch.

A lot of the same going on since the last update. 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.

Clan registrations for beta are no longer being accepted or processed at this time.

Solo player beta applications will be taken soon. Please watch the news forums for this.

There is not currently a date available for the public invitation phase of beta.

Clan city structures are still being worked on. These are racially unique so there are six sets to work on. The landscapes around the clan city and clan village building locations are getting additional design for balance, fairness and in order to make them more exciting for the players. I'm not sure if we've talked about clan villages before. They are villages close to resources, or with a strategic position, which can be owned by the clans and operate like mini clan cities.

Most of the work now consists of adding and testing content, mainly quests, NPCs, and dungeons. We're adding all kinds of things though, for example something we're doing right now is adding monster armor sections which can be looted and worn by characters. Each of these needs to be fitted for all races and each sex, so 12 templates in total for each armor bit. We have hundreds of unique armor sections now which can be mixed and matched, and dyed, giving millions of possible combinations.

If anything is holding back the public beta testing at the moment it's important practical issues. One big internal debate for example is whether we publish this game ourselves or if we agree to work with one of several publishers, or accept a number of compromises between the two, based on business model, territory and a number of other factors that need to be carefully weighed. We're prepared for any eventuality, and we do have several options but the final decision is critical. In the end we'll be doing what's best for the game, and ultimately for the players. We want to settle this before we move to a beta, and preferably do that as soon as possible, but we're still considering several options. Agreements, negotiations, discussions etc. go at their own speed, and they cannot be rushed.

There have been some updates to the website and now all races except for the humans are updated. They're next when we get a chance. I was going to add a couple of screenshots, but Henning took the time to put together a short video featuring the Mirdain mount, the Aerdin Cat, which you can view here.