| Darkfall Team: |
Darkfall is a very ambitious game as you know, and there have been so many challenges to overcome that we can't really agree on "the biggest one" of them. There are challenges of a psychological, technical, and of a logistical nature:
Psychologically, the team faces the challenge of maintaining focus over the long development period, while dealing with the everyday pressures, and through setbacks or disappointments along the way. The way we overcome this is through discipline, keeping our heads down and involved in the work, just grinding away at it, and reaffirming our commitment often. Our commitment to remain true to the spirit of Darkfall and to our promises to the Darkfall community through the production delays is something that we have to deal with every day, but we believe that the end result will reward us for our perseverance.
The technical challenges have been considerable: The amount of data, the seamlessness of a world this large, the large number of concurrent players that the game world hosts, as well as making the game look great while maintaining smooth gameplay, are all technical issues we're constantly working on.
The logistical challenges have to do with the size of the Darkfall world and the amount of content and diversity in the game. As far as we know this is the largest MMORPG world out there and it's all hand-crafted, the terrain is all modeled and textured by our artists, rather than auto-generated. The six unique player races were another logistical challenge, having to create six unique cultures and doing everything six times over. The logistical challenges were overcome by taking the time to do things right, while working efficiently and diligently producing the content. We could have taken the shortcuts but the end result is so rewarding that we're glad we haven't. |
