So seriously who owns Darkfall Unholy Wars now?

[VideoGamerOnline]

So who owns the rights to darkfall unholy wars now? Why haven't they sold the rights to the unholy wars IP, or even just rights to use the game engine? While Unholy Wars may have eventually failed financially that doesn't mean the technology behind it is worthless. I figured some company or individual would purchase the rights to use the darkfall UW engine and make something profitable out of it.

[RobbenDuMarsch]

AFAIK it's still Aventurine, SA - Which is still managed by Zad Mehdawi.
I spoke with Zad Mehdawi briefly on facebook and he was willing to entertain requests to purchase the IP. Whether or not he's got clear title is another issue which none of us can probably answer.

I heard his last asking price was hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[VideoGamerOnline]

It may have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars the day Unholy Wars shut down, if a company decided to make this f2p with a cash shop, but that was 3 years ago. The darkfall UW IP is an asset of diminishing value. The more time goes by the more antiquated the game engine becomes. Even when the game was launched the graphics looked a bit dated, now it just looks fugly compared to new titles. I'm hoping they will release the game client and engine as an open source project with a very very liberal terms of use license. This wouldn't be completely unheard of now as the original Doom, Doom 2, Quake 2, and Doom 3 all went open source, as well as other older titles.

[Squeak]

I agree. This game could have been great. I know there were a ton of bugs that made the game not take off.. But the idea of this game.. GOLD. Sure hope something comes of it

[75hzCLUB * NVEsp]

all those id titles went open source because of id software just being id software. they haven't released source for a game since they were bought by zenimax unless you count doom 3 BFG edition.

[Fatbill]

DF was always a dumpster fire.
All versions of DF were exploitable from go (blood wall, afk leveling, exploits out teh azz), and that is a BAD thing in a permadeath PvP game. The bugs... oh, the bugs....
Bad company, worse owner, terrible devs, terrible business practices.
More games/companies as badly run as this should fail.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

[VideoGamerOnline]

Originally posted by Fatbill:

DF was always a dumpster fire.
All versions of DF were exploitable from go (blood wall, afk leveling, exploits out teh azz), and that is a BAD thing in a permadeath PvP game. The bugs... oh, the bugs....
Bad company, worse owner, terrible devs, terrible business practices.
More games/companies as badly run as this should fail.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

No version of Darkfall was ever permadeath. Your thinking full loot, meaning you drop everything on you when you die.

Unholy Wars didn't have blood walls, that's an original darkfall thing, and it really wasn't a big deal.

At the end Unholy Wars had fixed the major problems prominent in other Darkfall games. Starting with DFUW as a base, could create a great game.

Can't really call subscription MMO's that last several years a failure either. I'm sure they made a significant return on investment.

The general idea would be to have better business owners make a better full loot pvp oriented MMO out of the old Unholy Wars game engine.

It would probably be a good idea to drop the whole "darkfall" title.

[Fatbill]

Originally posted by VideoGamerOnline:

Originally posted by Fatbill:

DF was always a dumpster fire.
All versions of DF were exploitable from go (blood wall, afk leveling, exploits out teh azz), and that is a BAD thing in a permadeath PvP game. The bugs... oh, the bugs....
Bad company, worse owner, terrible devs, terrible business practices.
More games/companies as badly run as this should fail.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

No version of Darkfall was ever permadeath. Your thinking full loot, meaning you drop everything on you when you die.

Unholy Wars didn't have blood walls, that's an original darkfall thing, and it really wasn't a big deal.

At the end Unholy Wars had fixed the major problems prominent in other Darkfall games. Starting with DFUW as a base, could create a great game.

Can't really call subscription MMO's that last several years a failure either. I'm sure they made a significant return on investment.

The general idea would be to have better business owners make a better full loot pvp oriented MMO out of the old Unholy Wars game engine.

It would probably be a good idea to drop the whole "darkfall" title.

Yes, I wrote permadeath when meaning full loot, that was my mistake.

That said, the central problem remained in both DF games, that when the consequences of death for the player are severe, cheats and exploits must be locked down hard, or else players/customers get really pissed off.

Since the code was a mess in both DF games, and the devs were unwilling or unable to deal with cheats/bots/hacks, most people quit after a short while. The month to month player losses were staggering.

As to "have a game last several years" qualify as not a failure, that is an extremely low bar to measure success: Mortal online is still going after years and years, despite being a complete hackfest, having corrupt Gm helping their friends, having the ENTIRE database of player accts and payment information hacked at least twice, and being down to a couple hundred fanboys that keep playing. It was also "financially bailed out" at least twice.

Mortal Online has been around 8-10 years now, and it is still mostly the same garbage alpha/beta quality game it was when it started, so, no.

DF was not much better, its owners just had higher expenses and less deep pockets so the games both closed. Plus all of the "fraud" and missing promised features and the stringing along of the paying playerbase to make money.

Anyway, a DF game can succeed, just not run/coded by incompetent morons in Greece.

[VideoGamerOnline]

I have to agree with you 100% that games with harsh consequences of death must be especially careful to lock down exploits, and prevent cheating. However I would say that Unholy Wars did this (for the most part). The original darkfall MMO had 3rd party cheats anyone could buy and use that allowed people to teleport out of danger, and stick to someones back. Unholy Wars really didn't have these 3rd party cheats that anyone could just buy, and while there was still some cheating, a lot of that was early on in Unholy Wars history, and was fixed fairly quickly.

Most MMO's have roughly a 90% playerloss, meaning after the first month of gameplay only roughly 10% of players will pay to continue to play another month. I would say that the player losses was fairly typical for any MMO.

Darkfall is not Mortal Online lol...

Every game company needs a revenue source. If it was free to play, it would probably have a pay to win cashshop, and I think we can all agree we hate pay to win. I remember the original darkfall promising more then it could deliver, (Wolf run form) but I'm not sure that qualifies as fraud.

But, back on subject. Who owns the source for Unholy Wars now? A dedicated team of developers could use it as a spring board to create an awesome full loot pvp oriented MMO.

[[K9]-Ŧƛ§§àĐǟʁ]

i wanna play again very badly..roa and nd suck big ballz

[Frankol23pl]

In the df site See video df is resureced is True?

[AryanPendragon]

reach out to this dude maybe? @zadelme
Something should be able to be done. Everyone is so fixed on money and it ruins gaming companies. Why can't a small company make this on Unreal 5 and just.. copy and paste it for the most part. All their names and character model tyes came from history and not made up out of nowhere. I think its just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that so few gaming companies lack the nuts to make a full loot mmo.