Welcome back to another episode of: “Hot goss the Dark and Darker edition”. In today’s episode, we see the creative lengths that the team at Ironmace studios have gone to, to try and keep their hopes of getting Dark and Darker out into the wild.
The team at Ironmace pulled a little sneaky and ran an “underground” playtest for Dark and Darker by offering the game files via torrent. Of course, they had to go through the “black market” as their game was pulled from the Steam Store while they underwent, what could be, quite the trial against Nexon.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that the dev team had to offer quite an apology when the playtest didn’t go exactly as planned. For a second, let’s ignore the fact the playtests will come with the standard issues, like bugs, imbalances and game crashes. The playtest was also hit with a few extra hurdles, like the torrent link being pulled from Discord and Twitter, some balancing hotfixes that had to be distributed via torrent, and the dreaded server downtime. None of this sounds like a very successful playtest on paper.
While Ironmace CEO Terence Park did offer an apology, “We want to apologise for all the bugs, instability, and hurdles that you had to endure during this playtest”, it doesn’t sound like it was all bad.
The Ironmace team did push out a new map for the playtest called The Ruins, which offers an “outdoor” experience, different to the dungeon-like setting previous play tests held. And, for the most part, it seems players still had a good time. Call me old school, but if a game is buggy, and I can still have a good time playing it, then I’m pretty satisfied.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a Discord to hunt down for the next sneaky playtest. Or not, you never know.
