April 11th, 2008

Darkfall Dev Journal #25

Darkfall Online Screenshot 3

To summarize, Associate Producer Tasos explains that Darkfall is feature complete and that professional testers are already beta testing the game. Their general belief on beta testing is that it should be a process to aid the developers in making their product as stable as possible, not to promote some other artificial agenda, like marketing the game. MMO betas these days are like red carpet premiers and sneak peaks, rather than legitimate stages in development. When it comes time for public play testing, that’s when they’ll be looking for players, not testers, to simulate and optimize the experience of the retail version.

“Darkfall testing simply consists of testing each and every feature of the game and all associated features in a pyramid structure. It’s not the same as testing a railroad, linear game. There’s no path to follow, Darkfall is a sandbox game and we have to make allowances for numerous combinations of occurrences. Take the closest Darkfall comes to anything scripted: even in quests there is no instancing and there are more than one ways to complete it including PvP ways. There is no single set of actions and the end justifies the means.”

Due to the non-linearity of Darkfall, testing tends to be more unpredictable than other MMOGs, part of which has to do with the artificial intelligence of NPCs. The game doesn’t really distinguish between a player and an NPC. For instance, NPCs aren’t just stationary fodder for players to progressively grind. They roam, level up and live their lives just like any player character would. They’ll even engage in combat with other NPCs.

Aventurine S.A. are fully aware of the criticism surrounding their game and are confident when they say that they’re going to offer even more than what they’ve promised.

For the full diary in which Tasos talks more about the state of the game, click here. For previous diaries, click here.