[Judas Deceit]

From Tasos Lead Developer of our favorite forever delayed love affair:

European vs. N. America Launch
The answer to the question on whether we're going to launch in N. America and Europe at the same time is: "Right now it doesn't look that way"

I’ve been frustrated by issues like these while waiting for a game myself, and I’ll try to explain this as well as I can:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. While the actual status on this hasn’t changed much since our friends visited our offices, things are moving at a fast pace.
4. What we can say with relative certainty is that the first beta test will be on the European servers. This isn’t to say that N. American players will be excluded from it.
5. It also doesn’t necessarily mean that N. American players would be excluded from playing on a European server.
6. While we haven’t selected a publisher in N. America yet like we have in Europe, this doesn’t actually mean that we need one, or that we're going to wait for one, in order to launch the game there.
7. Our publishing effort has been for a common infrastructure and we’ve been adopting solutions with a global reach so that the setup in one region could be shared by- or quickly duplicated in the other. I don’t want to say that we could be up in N. America in no time, but that’s our intention.
8. It’s important to remember that our preferred scenario is to launch Darkfall in N. America and Europe at the same time. This is on our mind as we move forward. Even if we don’t manage this, it’s our intention to move very quickly to catch up.


My personal pet peeves:

1. No mention of digital distribution: Max profits sans packaging... why the hell not?
2. No american beta and strong talk of selling and distribution... No stress test? Funcom not enough proof? Which we still may have a beta but why the rush on publishers then?
3. The average ping from america to greece * per dslreports * is between 170-220 while tolerable isnt exactly an awesome ping to be sporting for first person style gaming.
4. I think i would go postal if the game was released and I still couldnt play it.