The folks at Darkfall have posted the release schedule of the game and announced that Darkfall has delayed its launch until February 25th.

We know that the community has been speculating and wondering about the Darkfall release for some time. We haven’t replied until now because there were several complex issues to plan and work out. We also needed to get authorization before we could proceed with this official announcement:

Starting on January 22nd there will be a Darkfall trial with the distribution of the release candidate client allowing thousands of players to sample the game for free, help us stress test our servers and test the final features of the game.

It’s important to understand that there are well over 200 thousand applications by players wanting to get into Darkfall. This number makes it unrealistic to distribute the client and to open up our servers to everyone. We’ll try to accommodate as many players as are possible for us to manage at this stage. Even so, the demand exceeds our current capacity. Interest in Darkfall has surpassed all our expectations to the point that we may need to manage our release differently.

The date of the Darkfall European commercial release has been pushed back to February 25th, 2009. A pre-order will be made available mid-February. The pre-orders will get priority for early access to the game. The pre-orders will also get priority for the game launch if we have to go to a staged release. We’ll go to a staged release only in the case we have more demand than we can handle properly, and until we can upgrade our capacity. The pre-orders are necessary so that we can have some measure of the demand.

Read more here.