Darkfall

» see darkfallonline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Darkfall was built for people who missed Ultima Online before the world got split into a safe half and a dangerous one, and that is an itch I actually had. Mine got scratched somewhere else. Official subscriptions were not a realistic thing for a Turkish teenager in the early 2000s, so my UO ran on private shards where the hosting was somebody's hobby and the population was a few hundred kids logging in after school. By 2009 I had money and a real connection, and a fifteen dollar monthly charge for a niche PvP world with no Turkish players in it was still an easy no.

Aventurine SA was a small Athens company, incorporated in late 2002, that wrote its own 3D engine and then spent most of a decade building one game on top of it. Darkfall had been talked about since the start of the century. Long enough that by the time it appeared, a good part of the MMO forum population had stopped believing it would.

It launched in Europe on 25 February 2009 and in North America that July, sold in small batches because the servers could not absorb everyone at once. There were no levels. Your character got better at whatever you actually spent time doing, and aiming was manual in a genre that still mostly rolled dice for you. The whole player base shared one world with no instances to hide inside. Every death dropped everything you were carrying for whoever had killed you.

That last rule is what the argument was always about. Full loot makes a game where your inventory is a bet and other people are the house. It produces the best stories in the genre and the smallest audience, because most people who try it lose a bag of hours to a stranger once and never come back.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

For two years it worked, in the way these things work: a small hardcore population that treated the game as a second job. Clans built cities out of the landscape and other clans came to take them apart in sieges that ran for hours. There were ships and open water. There was no matchmaking anywhere in it, so a fight started because two groups happened to be in the same place with opposite intentions, which is a thing modern design has mostly engineered away.

The monthly fee was fifteen dollars, and Aventurine dropped it to $9.95 in July 2012 under a promotion aimed at the people who had drifted. That is usually a signal rather than a strategy, and it was here too.

~ the slide ~

In September 2012 Aventurine announced it was replacing its own game. The original servers went off on 15 November 2012 and Darkfall Unholy Wars arrived on 16 April 2013, rebuilt around defined roles and a tighter structure, aimed at being learnable by someone who had not already spent three years there.

It landed in the gap between two audiences. The people who wanted the sandbox found the new version narrower than the thing they had lost, and the people who found the old version impenetrable did not turn up for the friendlier one. Killing a live world to launch its replacement is a bet you can only make once, and the population that came back was never the population that left.

~ what got buried with it ~

At the end of May 2016 the servers went dark and the statement said the conditions in Greece had caught up with them and no longer allowed the game to run as it had. The country had been through capital controls the previous summer, and a studio of under fifty people in Marousi funding a niche MMO out of subscription revenue is exactly the kind of business that does not survive its banking system freezing. The post said the disruption was hoped to be temporary. Nothing came back.

The license went out to two separate teams of people who had worked on it. Big Picture Games launched Darkfall: Rise of Agon on 5 May 2017 and Ub3rgames launched Darkfall: New Dawn on 26 January 2018, both unaffiliated with the company that had shut the thing down. What did not survive is the argument Darkfall was making: that an MMO could refuse safety entirely and still be a business. Nobody with money has tried it at that scale since.

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