Thank you for joining me for a night cap. Remember a time when Darkfall was on track for launch? Neither do I. Now, I’m not going to be mean to an indie developer for not making a release date, I know only enough that much larger companies have just as much of a problem meeting deadlines, but I have to admit: the excitement is waning. It’s been a good month or two since we’ve heard anything of substance from Aventurine on the status of Darkfall: Unholy Wars. My personal diary (this website) says December 11th as the last day anything meaningful was revealed about the release of Unholy Wars, and even then it was a non-direct sometime-in-the-future statement.
It is February 1st, we’ll be heading into three months from the initial November 20th, 2012 target date for Unholy Wars, and even further if you would go as far as to count Darkfall: Unholy Wars as still being the final product of what was once called “Darkfall 2010.” On November 14th, Aventurine delayed launch until December 12th. Late at night on December 11th, the day before launch, Aventurine delayed Unholy Wars yet again to an undisclosed date sometime hopefully in 2013. Mid-December, Aventurine opened up preorders for Unholy Wars, allowing new players and old to join up and play the beta until the new game launched. Those players aren’t in any place to tell us anything, as there is still an NDA in effect.
And again, I’m not going to be mean to an indie dev for not making their launch date, but it begs to question: Did Aventurine really think that Unholy Wars would be ready for November 20th? If you read the news posts, the first delay into December is most closely attributed to the sudden and unexpected approval on Steam Greenlight. The second delay was due to a desire by Aventurine to have the game tested by members of the community. After that, how long can Aventurine keep the public’s attention before they all walk away to check out the other attractions?
After all, there is only so far you can go on trailers and feature lists.
MMO Fallout 
I am getting increasingly disappointed, though their decision not to launch was probably wise up to now. I’m not in the beta but I know several people who are and they claim that Decemeber saw a game breaking bug born. Like, you would log out and everything on your character would disappear. Now how that could get through in the first place, after the game was supposed to have launched, let alone that it took weeks to fix is pretty surprising. I am excited for the game but this is increasingly turning into Aventurine Being Aventurine: taking forever to do what they promise after months of waiting with no inclination to take 2 minutes for a brief update. It’s “hang on, we’ll be with you in a moment” while the operator has long since forgotten you were ever on the line.