Dark And Darker Playtest Hit By DDoS Attacks

Dark and Darker was removed from Steam after asset stealing accusations, then its unauthorised GoFundMe page got taken down after raising $46,000, so the devs made it possible to torrent the alpha build of the game, which was... shut down due to copyright claims. If you've somehow gotten into the playtest after all of this, you may find that the servers aren't working, since it is now being DDoSed.

As reported by PCGamesN, the news was shared by an administrator and developer at Ironmace, Graysun, on the game's Discord: "We have been experiencing sophisticated DDoS aattacks since the very start of this playtest. Our server quality has not changed at all from previous playtests.

"As of right now, there is not much we can do to immediately fix the situation, but we are constantly trying our best to keep them stabilised". He then prompted players to "defend the line!"

No word has been given about the DDoS attacks since last night, so it's unclear who is responsible and how Ironmace will better protect its servers in future against such attacks. In the meantime, it has rolled out another hotfix, and servers appear to be up and running again, but fans are asking Ironmace to extend the playtest given the lost time.

Dark and Darker has a long, convoluted, and messy history. It first started under another studio, Nexxon, who had several prototypes for different video games in development under the names Ps, P1, P2, etc. One of these, P3, was a Dark and Darker-style game, but Nexxon scrapped it in favour of P7. This led the developers of P3 to start their own studio, Ironmace, to finish what they started.

However, Nexxon levied accusations against Ironmace, claiming that it had stolen assets and code from P3 without compensation to continue working on it under a new company. Ironmace CEO Park Terence Seung-ha denied the claims, saying that "our code was built from scratch" and that "assets are purchased from the Unreal markektplace". It's unclear right now who is telling the truth, but these allegations led to Dark and Darker's removal from Steam.

While the legal issues are still ongoing and the game is still unavailable on Steam, the devs are chugging along with playtests, and the current one is set to end tomorrow. Ironmace's goal is to launch Dark and Darker in Q4 2023, but that is beginning to look less and less likely. Even if it finishes development despite the mounting issues it's facing, the ongoing legal dispute with Nexxon means it can't be relisted on Steam, so it can't properly launch outside of continuing to let players torrent it.