Darkfall

Darkfall departs from the conventional MMORPG paradigm of character levels as the main form of character progression, favouring instead a broad skill-based system, similar to that found in games such as Ultima Online, Eve Online, Wurm Online and Asheron's Call. Skills and skill proficiency determine a wide range of a character's capability in the game, including weapons and weapon skills, a few special attacks, spells, and archery, all aspects of player crafting, as well as more basic facets of gameplay, such as the ability to swim, craft various types of items, and to ride and control mounts.

Skills may be learned from NPC trainers in the game, however certain skills will require other skills as prerequisites. Without exception however, skills are improved (raised in power) through actual usage in game.

On 29 August 2001, Razorwax announced the development of Darkfall and launched its official website. The Razorwax development team was based in Oslo, Norway, and initially consisted of five members: Claus Grovdal (Lead Design and Producer), Ricki Sickenger (Lead Tools and Game Logic Programmer), Henning Ludvigsen (Art Director), Kjetil Helland (Lead 3D/Client Programmer), and Erik Sperling Johansen (Lead Server Programmer). Approximately 14 months later, in October 2002, the Razorwax team was integrated into Aventurine SA, a newly formed company based in Athens, Greece, ostensibly created for the continued development and subsequent commercialisation of Darkfall. When the Razorwax team and the Aventurine team had their first meeting in Athens, a member of one of the teams joked that Razorwax should relocate from Norway to Greece due to the lower taxes and cost of living in Greece. Eventually, the two teams realised that this idea actually made very good business sense, and by December 2002, the relocation of Razorwax, now Aventurine, was finalised.

In September 2005, a signup page for a closed clan beta was made available on the web; this beta never happened, however a 1.5 minute Darkfall gameplay video was released in February 2006 as recompense to the community. A later statement from associate producer Tasos Flambouras explained that a decision had been made internally to devote additional money and resources into expanding the scope of the game.

Game Observer gave Darkfall an overall score of 83/100.

Meristation gave Darkfall an overall score of 7/10.