Tasos Flambouras is an hyped name like his game, Darkfall. A good vs evil battle is running around this controversial title, but it's undeniable that the Aventurine MMO has traced a demarcation line between the MMO mass-market need of WoW theme park style and the players' desire of something (old) new, like a good sandbox one. Listen to what Tasos told to us ...

GS: Many potential players are waiting for a trial to test the game. Will there be anything similar in the next future?

We don’t currently offer a trial. This is something that we may offer in the future.

GS: Hackers, bots, cheaters and macro players: what plans do you have to eradicate these aspects?

We detect and permanently ban all cheaters. As a result cheating is very rare in the game. It certainly doesn’t affect the game world and the incidents we have are sporadic and far in between. We now ban at the account owner level which is a level deeper than the account level, so people won’t be tempted to use disposable accounts to cheat with.

About macroing: We have taken and will continue taking steps to make macroing unnecessary. We have re-balanced skill and spell progression, we made skilling up more dependent on actually needing to play the game, we have added several automations to the game like autoharversting and autocrafting to make repetitive tasks a little less tedious. We are committed to address all these issues at a deeper level, and continuously strive to improve the gameplay experience.

GS: Do you think to release regular and periodical expansions like the next one in the future as LotRO free books updates, for example?

We will release regular free expansions for Darkfall much like the one we just released. We are already working on the next one.

GS: NA server has launched this month.  Are there the same contents, patches and updates , relating to the European version? Will there be IP blocks for players outside US? Please feel free to give us other details about that.

 It’s the same content as the EU server. There is no restriction to geographical region; anyone can play on the NA server, just as they can on the EU server.

GS: Do you think that the accounts number limitation has discouraged many players to try Darkfall later?

I believe you refer to the limited sale of accounts in the beginning. Unfortunately this was necessary to maintain a good gaming experience for the players. We’re sure that people wanting to try the game will eventually get it and play. The game is better than ever it’s continuously improving and attracting a lot of new players. We have done many optimizations and as a result there is no limit to account sales and anyone can get Darkfall by visiting the Darkfall website.

GS: Since the beginning of the Darkfall development, how much your ideas about the game and the features have changed, comparing the release version at launch? How much the budget influenced your choices, regarding these aspects?

We have stayed true to the original ideas about the game. Publishers have asked us to make changes in order to cooperate with us, if we made Darkfall more marketable, rather than a niche game. We didn’t want to make a game for the mass market however, so we did whatever we could to stay true to our original vision. 

GS: During last years there was a huge hype around Darkfall, talking about communities and press, but the big international publishers haven’t demonstrated the same interest. Was it fear of the sandbox and hardcore nature of the game, far from the theme park WoW style, perfect for the mass market?

Many of the big international publishers have expressed a strong interest in Darkfall, but we had the capability to complete the game without their help. Now that Darkfall has launched there is still publisher interest and it will be easier for us to cooperate now that we have followed through with our vision.

GS: What do you think about the actual MMOs panorama, and about the upcoming Mortal Online, in many ways similar to Darkfall ?

I like some of the games that have come out recently but I don’t believe any game can be similar to Darkfall any time soon. I won’t go into the long list of unique features that Darkfall has but I’ll just say that Darkfall is the largest seamless, zoneless, un-instanced MMO ever created that holds more than 10 thousand concurrent users with no artificial barriers and invisible walls. The largest and most epic real-time online battles ever with thousands of players participating are happening in Darkfall right now. For any game to be able to do just that they would have to create their own groundbreaking technology like we had to do in order to offer things to our players that nobody else could until now.

It’s difficult to make a MMORPG. It’s easy however to announce that your game will have some of Darkfall’s features when and if your game comes out some day. In the meanwhile Darkfall is a live game, we’re working on Darkfall’s second massive free expansion as we speak, and Darkfall is improving by leaps and bounds every day and will continue doing so because it’s not restricted by its technology. Darkfall is not a mod, it’s a game made from the ground up for PvP and massive battles.

 

GS: Could you talk about the website changes for the official Darkfall one?

We have a new website up right now and we will continue making changes to improve the online user experience.


 

Thx to Tasos for the interview.