According to today's Darkfall activity report from developer Tasos Flambouras, the team has spent the majority of the past week working on features for the game's relaunch. He also says that the upcoming "Arena" expansion will bring a major change to the starting areas:

"A significant change coming with the 'Arena' expansion to NPC city layouts is that there will be only one starting town for each race. This will be each race’s capital city. There will also be three racial NPC faction cities around each capital. In addition to these changes geared to make starting areas more user-friendly, all NPC racial vendors will offer the same serivces whether they are situated n the capital or in the faction cities. All types of workstations will be in all NPC cities as well."

In addition, "over 50 percent of Darkfall’s quests have been rewritten and many introductory training quests have also been added to guide new players through most aspects of Darkfall’s gameplay." For more details, check out Flambouras' activity report.