In last week's activity report, Darkfall Developer Tasos Flambouras said that he recently gave a short postmortem on the game's development at the Hellenic Game Developer’s Conference. In the speech, he talked about the the next expansion/relaunch and mentioned plans for the sequel to Darkfall.

As one would expect, the brief mention of a Darkfall sequel and relaunch confused many players. In an attempt to provide some clarification on the matter, Tasos just posted a thread outlining Aventurine's future plans for the game. He says the team hasn't diverted resources to a Darkfall sequel, and there are no plans to replace the current game with a Darkfall 2. Basically, it appears that a sequel may be part of Aventurine's long-term plans, but that doesn't mean the company is currently working on a new game.

Tasos also confirms that the team is in the process of developing a major expansion for Darkfall. It can be considered a relaunch, but Aventurine will not be wiping the servers. The relaunch simply means that "it may give fresh options to new and existing players."

Darkfall Online has been looking for ways to reach out to players, new and old. The team just announced the creation of a new blog set up to give players the most up-to-date information on the game, new content, contests, and more. The blog includes posts like "Tips For New Players" and a look into Aventurine's motion capture studio. The blog even has some off-beat posts just for fun such as "Darkfall's Rescue Lolcat" in which a member of the team talks about a recently rescued kitten.

The company has also set up a new Facebook page to keep players up-to-date on all things Darkfall. Head on over to "like" the page and keep your news feed full Darkfall news.

The Hellfreeze expansion is finally live in Darkfall, but don't be surprised if there are a few hiccups downloading the patch through a torrent client. Apparently the Aventurine team had a long night of dealing with hardware issues, which Developer Tasos Flambouras has outlined in a post on the game's forums.

The Hellfire expansion adds a wealth of new content to the game, from new terrain to new mounts and ships. Newbie dungeons have been added to all the racial capitals, and 17 of the existing dungeons have been revamped. For more details, check out the Hellfreeze overview page.

Darkfall's upcoming expansion has been delayed numerous times, but Developer Tasos Flambouras has announced a new tentative launch date: Tuesday, October 5. The expansion was supposed to go live yesterday, but the Aventurine team decided to hold off and fix some bugs to minimize the possibility of problems following the launch.

Flambouras went on the say that most testing has been concluded, so the team doesn't expect that any further delays will be necessary. If you're curious about the game, you can try out the fairly new 14-day free trial.

It was a few months ago that the Darkfall Online team decided to offer a free trial to players at the low cost of 1 euro/dollar, presumably to lessen the massive influx of players that would be lining up to check it out. Well, now the team is confident that they'll be able to take on more free trial users, so they have begun to offer their first 14 day free trial - absolutely free! With regards to this, the team does note that they will be throttling availability as needed, in addition to placing a per country quota on Asian accounts, so North American and European players should have priority (as the Darkfall Online servers are specifically for North America and Europe). Finally, the free trial offer is also limited to one trial per computer, so don't be sneaking around trying to multi-account with free accounts!

European users can download the Darkfall Online client here, while North American users can download the North American client over here. In addition, European trial signups are located here, while North American trial signups are located here.

Friday marks the first anniversary of Darkfall's European launch, and Aventurine has unveiled a new 7-day trial to celebrate the occasion. You'll notice we didn't say the trial is free. The team has decided to let you try out the game for the "symbolic price" of $1 or 1 Euro.

So why would Aventurine choose to charge for a week-long trial? According to Lead Developer Tasos Flambouras, "we've chosen to include symbolic pricing as a minimum commitment, to protect the existing user-base experience."

The launch of the trial further explains why the team recently implemented an optional newbie protection feature that prevents new users from being attacked in the racial starting areas for the first few hours of play time. Will you be taking advantage of the $1 trial?

The Darkfall art team confirmed last month that it is currently working on improving or completely redoing all armor and player models in the game. We got a preview of the new human female model a few weeks ago, and the team just posted a preview of the chain armor for human males and females.

In addition, a patch was implemented today that adds the new newbie protection feature to the game. The optional system prevents new users from being attacked in the racial starting areas, but only lasts for a few hours. You can read the patch notes after the jump.

Darkfall Lead Developer Tasos Flambouras has announced that the team plans to introduce a feature that protects new players so they can get accustomed to the game without being ganked. The optional system prevents new users from being attacked in the racial starting areas, but only lasts for a few hours.

The feature could launch as early as the next patch. You can read all the details in Tasos' full post after the jump.

The Darkfall art department recently confirmed that it is currently working on improving or completely redoing all armor and player models in the game. As an update, Community Liaison Laenih posted a preview image of a human female model in progress today and provided some details on the changes:

"For now she still has one of her old haircuts but new hair options and other additional features will be introduced with the updates too. One of the improvements is a slightly higher polygon count while still keeping the performance of the game in mind. Additionally, the proportions have been slightly changed."

Laenih reminded players that all races will be getting a revamp, so we'll just have to wait and see what the art team has in store for the rest of the models.

The Darkfall team announced today that the Awakening dynamic lore event is currently scheduled to take place on Jan. 29 on the NA1 server. Here's the teaser description:

"A breeze blows south from the green jungle canopies of Yssam. Amongst the sounds of rustling leaves and twittering fauna one can almost make out the faint echoes of drums of war. Powerful and influential families and factions turn north wondering what rumors fly on fluttering wings down from the verdant continent."

The announcement thread has been locked and will be updated with new information as it is revealed, but Community Liaison Thraiax has started a thread for discussion and speculation surrounding the event.