Earlier this week, we covered the impending return of Darkfall Rise of Agon under a brand-new indie studio – we’d known it was cooking for the last few years, but this past weekend, the devs at Toxic Rain Studios ran a multi-day test that the studio deemed a success, both in terms of technical details and financial ones. “Because of everyone who picked up subs, we now have the runway to keep the server funded for the next few months, cover infrastructure costs, and start pushing outreach like an email ad campaign to bring more players into the game,” the team wrote.
Well, now we know that timeline is speedy indeed, and those new players are coming in hot. The devs made their announcement in a newsletter and on Steam:
“We are pleased to announce that the Rise of Agon Reforged 32bit server will officially go live on Friday, January 16 at 6:00 PM UTC. Following a successful test weekend and strong community participation, we are moving forward with the full launch of the 32-bit Reforged server. No progress made during reforged server will carry over to 64bit. Toxic Rain Studios has officially assumed full operational responsibility for Rise of Agon. This includes server infrastructure, live operations, and ongoing development.”
The Steam announcement further clarifies that the 32-bit legacy server will stay up until the 64-bit server is ready, and that only “activated skins” will carry over – nothing else.
Note that the Steam memo and newsletter are signed by Toxic Rain Studios, though the revival was initially announced years ago by Big Picture Games (and the Steam page still references BPG as the publisher). We reached out the Toxic Rain for clarity on the hand-off; apparently, Toxic Rain is a bit of a spin-off studio of Big Picture made up of a Big Picture founder and some of its devs who took over development when some of the Big Picture ownership decided to exit the project. Long story short, Toxic Rain has been spearheading development for years already and says the Steam page will be fully updated when the game’s 64bit server is closer to launch. In the meantime, legacy is almost upon us.
