Throughout my years and years of MMORPG playing experience, I've definitely been happy to see this genre evolve in a variety of different ways. The implementation of quests over monster grinding, the massive increase in solo content over group content, the graphical upgrades and PvP game play becoming more and more important; the list goes on. Of all of these evolutions, however, none of these industry shifts appear to be as prevalent and genre-changing as the one that has managed to attach itself to many budding MMOs, and has also shown itself to be the cornerstone of Blizzard's 11.5 million subscriber base: 'easy casual' MMO gaming. No other term would also be as divisive in the MMORPG community as this.

In this regard, then, gamers will often note that, when something is easily achieved, it's considered to be 'casual' content, and it will be stigmatized as such. On the other hand, when something is extremely difficult to attain (Absolute Virtue items in FFXI, perhaps the "Alone in the Dark" achievement in World of Warcraft?), other players are quick to conclude that it requires too much of a 'hardcore' effort and, while the difficulty of the content will be appreciated, chances are high that very few players will be able to take part in it. In this way, the question I have is this: is difficulty the sign of a quality MMORPG, or, in our busy world, does the quality of an MMO now rest upon how many things a player can do in under an hour? This editorial may not provide all the answers, but at least it will give you something to think about!

Almost everyone has now heard of Darkfall, and almost everyone at least wants to try it. Well, now everyone will have to wait. They have pushed the European release back to February 25th. North American release information has yet to come forth, but it does not bode well for those dreaming of Darkfall.

"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. Interest in Darkfall has surpassed all our expectations to the point that we may need to manage our release differently."

Regardless of where you are or who you are, you're going to have to wait a little longer before you get to play the next-big-thing in Massively Multiplayer. 

Source: Darkfall Forums

Anticipating the launch of Darkfall Online ? Well if you live state-side, you're going to have to wait until Europe gets a turn. Tasos has confirmed on the Darkfall forums that the game will indeed launch in Europe before North America. Sure, it's frustrating to have to wait, but just think; they'll have to deal with all the launch bugs, so hopefully our launch will be cleaner.

First of all, this isn't an issue of us being located in Europe. It just means that things are moving faster for Darkfall in Europe. A few months ago, it was the other way around and that's how fluid things are at the moment.

It would be a publishing and a logistics issue that the European launch might precede a N. American launch. We have a publishing partner in Europe; we haven't settled on one in N. America yet. Unfortunately as things stand right now, we can't launch in both regions at the same exact time but, of course, we would like to.

Read on for more...

Try not to die of shock! They folks working on Darkfall have actually said something !

We're working on two fronts, development and publishing. Development is mainly focused around testing and fixing bugs. We're also optimizing client and servers. We're playtesting a lot, we've also logged many hours of large battles and we're very excited with what we're experiencing. While playtesting we're getting a lot of video footage that's going to end up in a video we'll be releasing next month so you'll get an idea of what we've been talking about.

As far as publishing activities go, we're working on the servers, customer and technical support, billing, and distribution solutions along with our partners.

We've been hiring people in all departments, and we have eight new team members.

Since it's summer and a lot of people are on vacation in Greece, we've been getting a lot of requests to visit the studio. We've already had a few people come over and we had to say no to a couple of others due to the bad timing of their visit. The people who have been here may or may not write about their visit, we didn't make them sign NDAs and we showed them the game.

We enjoy these visits, but unfortunately we can't spare the time unless it's media so we won't allow more visits for at least a couple of months. We've also had some media over here and there should be a couple of articles in the local press.

We've been putting in the long hours, so the next three weeks we're on a weekly vacation rotation, the last chance we'll get to rest for a long time.

I'm floored that they've actually said something, but then again, I'm a skeptic! (Not to be mistaken with skeksis...sorry, Comic-Con on the brain this week folks!) I'm very excited to see any coverage we can get, so as soon as something is released, we'll have it for you!