The Greek development team Adventurine went belly up, and sold the licence to the original and highly favoured original Darkfall (pre 2009) to a Canadian company called Big Picture Games.
Big Picture Games has spent the last year reworking the game to make it what is was suppose to be. Here are some of the changes :
- Craftable scroll and skill book system to eliminate macroing
- Single-alignment system (Harsh Karma system to reduce ganking)
- Champion Spawn and Unique Rare Mob mechanics
- Monster respawn scaling
- Protection for blues in NPC areas to avoid unintentional damage
- User interface overhaul
- Territory control of alignment
- New player tutorial to teach basics of game
- New mount sprinting mechanic
- New racial skills and rebalancing
- New Dungeon Quests for meditation point rewards
- Gathering rates increased to encourage active harvesting
and many many more changes.
Darkfall: ROA is launching on May 5th. It will be free to download with a subscription. You can get some deals on the store right now.
ROA is also going to use Nithron coins, from which you can buy services and tokens to sell on ah ah. You can use these tokens to pay for your gametime. Similar to WOW tokens.
Oh yea Darkfall: ROA is still like the original, a hardcore full loot pvp sandbox, but this time with a Karma system similar to Lineage 2 (they hope this will prevent noob ganking). Here is a video that explains it a bit. The graphics are pretty bad in this video and Big Picture Games has improved it since.
Funnest times in the game was when everyone was a n00b and had no idea what we were doing. In the beta with my clan we can sailed to the desert and got attacked by the red dragon there.
RIP my fucking raft and all 15 of us that were crowded on it.
Game kinda blew once the systems were figured out.