Greetings citizens of Agon!

We hope you all survived the Darkfall anniversary celebration and had fun while doing so. Sometimes we wish we were a much bigger team and could spend more time running dynamic events. We are however working on it and it’s an ongoing process. Make sure you keep an eye on the forums for some future update coming early next week for more information about those mysterious essences!

On other news, which mostly affects our EU server, we got swamped with PMs about an old name making a return to Darkfall. For the Veterans that have been staying with us from the start this is an interesting turn of events, while newer players probably would be more along the lines of: “who?!” Either way, hop on over to the forums and read up on the Hyperion Kingdom and its leader King Mannus. While you are at it you might even stumble over some Agon history back from the old days or even a kind soul who is willing to share some dusty war stories.

To get one of the important things out of the way first: Due to our scrum sprint meeting being postponed until next week, the weekly activity report will also be postponed until next week. We hope you understand that we want to have some proper update for you with what the teams have been working on.

On other exciting development, the winners of our first in game item design contest have been chosen!
First of all, a big thank you to everyone who participated! We were really awed and enjoyed looking through all the entries. I was told that the team had a hard time picking since, despite the fact that you had a very tight deadline, we got quite a wide range of submissions. While we wished we could make every contribution into an in game weapon, three had to be chosen and here they are. Congratulations to our winners who each will not only see their design come to life in Darkfall, but they will also receive one in-game version of the weapon they designed:

We picked this one for several reasons. For starters it’s nicely presented as a concept, and the design of it is nicely within standard high fantasy genre. We will need to slim the hilt a little for the players to be able to wield it with both hands, but we also liked the really wide blade and thought it would be cool to have a greatsword with a wide blade and possible slightly shorter reach.

Axe (by Geck Zilla)

This axe was picked out from a wonderful complete set, and we really liked the design of it. It has a really cool and complex silhouette and at the same time maintaining a fairly clean design otherwise. It has this really nice visual contrast that we fell for.

Bow (by Banedon Cohcknshpiel)

We received some really good ideas for the bows, but had to take a few limitations under consideration; be it where or how the grip was located, where the arrow is being placed before shooting, and how it fits when sheathed on the back of the player characters. We picked this one because it’s covering all those aspects, and at the same time had an interesting silhouette. With this being a black and white drawing we also thought it would be fun to have some freedom with the materials and colours within the designed shape.

None of the winners have chosen specific names for their weapons so we would like to give them the opportunity to chose a list of names for their winning weapon that our team could pick from. Obviously we would reserve the right to dismiss offensive names or names that violate copyright in any way or are in any other way not suited for the World of Darkfall. Therefore we invite the winners, if they so choose, to send us suggestions about naming of their own weapon at our usual contest email.

Now, there are a few contributions which were just as amazing but didn’t quite make the cut for one reason or another. We would like to spotlight some of them come next week. All these contributors will receive a little surprise as well. Stay tuned for our run-down of the close follow ups next week! There is a chance that we might get back to you about your designs at a later point and this was definitely not the last contest of its kind.