During yesterday's OTK Games Expo, South Korean developer IRONMACE announced the availability of a free-to-play option for Dark and Darker.
Free-to-play accounts have certain limitations, as you would expected. Players taking advantage of the free access will only get to create one character and only be able to enter Normal modes, although there are no limitations regarding maps. The goal is obviously to get more players into Dark and Darker while also providing the option to upgrade later to 'Legendary' status. All players who purchased the Standard and Founders Edition will be automatically upgraded to Legendary Status, by the way, and premium players will also have exclusive access to the Shared Stash between their characters.
That's not all the news IRONMACE shared yesterday. The studio also discussed some of the changes coming with the upcoming season, which starts in a few days.
One of the big changes is the reduction in the power gap for items. We have now removed all ‘Junk’ and unnamed ‘Unique’ items. Named ‘Unique’ grade weapons still appear but they now share the same stats and rolls as their ‘Legendary’ counterpart with only difference being the addition of their unique passive. We have also reduced the damage and armor rating values for all weapons and equipment at the upper end to make them less overbearing. We have removed random modifiers that were too valuable such as the +all attribute rolls and have lowered and tightened the gap for the remaining rolls. We have also diminished the movement speed penalty gap on armors to reduce the heavy reliance on move speed. Finally, we have added a flat HP boost to all classes to slightly improve survivability in battles. Please note that many of the perks, skills spells, and class balance remain to be tuned with this new philosophy in mind and will be adjusted in the future.
Dark and Darker, you'll remember, is the fantasy extraction game that first debuted on Steam in early 2023. It enjoyed great success for a while, but NEXON quickly filed a DMCA and had it removed from the store, alleging that IRONMACE employees developed the game using 'trade secrets' from NEXON's unreleased P3 project. The lawsuit in American court was eventually dismissed last year, and Dark and Darker will soon launch on the Epic Games Store, but there's no confirmation regarding a return to Steam.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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