It so seems that Aventurine -the company behind the upcoming mmorpg Darkfall- underestimated the mangituted of interest and demand their game would stir even before its beta stage.

As gamer's anticipation is growing by the minute, Darkfall's lead developer Tasos Flambouras, announced in a forum post that the release date of the game has been pushed back to February 25th. Meanwhile, the first wave of beta invites has been sent, and the game is right now under heavy beta and stress testing.

With the NDA soon to be lifted, Tasos explains the reasons why the release date got pushed back...

• At this stage, everything is connected: Hundreds of elements need to come together. When one thing falls behind, everything else tends to follow.
• Demand for Darkfall at launch could be much higher than expected. If this is the case, we need a different process to better handle the demand.
• Darkfall’s partners (distribution, billing, account management, support, etc.) entered into the game at a late date and we needed more time than expected to integrate properly.
  
• We fell behind on a couple of weeks of beta testing progress and we need to make this time up. We need more playtesting data on several features we haven’t had much chance to test externally.
  We’ll use this extra time to implement updates based on tester feedback and also make some enhancements we were saving for after release.
• We want as many players as possible in the game before the launch and we haven’t had the chance to stress test our servers with live players yet.
• We underestimated the effect the holidays would have on our preparations. While we worked through them, the world around us seemed to stop.
• We don’t want to rush things more than needed. An extra month may not seem like a lot of time, but it’s enough to allow us to take care of any compounded delays.

For more juicy info, head over to Darkfall Online's website. It sure's going to make our very own Dj Darkfall happy =)