Dark and Darker is a pretty fun medieval fantasy dungeon-dive loot-and-extract game currently in development. Think Tarkov, but with swords and wizards. I participated in the free (they aren’t selling the game yet) playtests and found it to be pretty fun, if a long ways from being finished.
Anyway, it recently got yanked from Steam amidst a lawsuit that may have merit, or more likely be corporate jealousy/bullying. Who knows, you can read about the messy situation here.
Since then, Ironmace (the developers) have attempted to continue playtesting, and the process of getting the newest game build into people’s hands without Steam has been… a rather interesting journey to follow.
I don’t want sound like Blizzard but, don’t they got an official webpage there they can post links on?
I assume the issue is one of bandwidth. Hosting a webpage is one thing, distributing hundreds or thousands of copies of a game client of whatever size this game is is another matter entirely. (this bandwidth being provided by steam for downloads a big part of their appeal to developers for that reason
I understand not hosting the actual game on their site. But if social media sites are deleting their torrent links, why can’t they just share the torrent link on their own site, which they control?
Posting the link would be the easy part. The game files are probably quite large, you couldnt, for example, host that on your corporate website – you’d pull the hosting server down transferring the data to all the play testers.
The service Steam provides is not just a well known place for people to ge ttheir games, but also the infrastructure to deliver content at scale.
If the problem in the beginning was that they don’t was allowed to post a torrent link on Disscord then I supposed that they did have means to host the file for torrent sharing, at least till it got other to share. Or am I stupid to think like that?
No, I wouldnt call it stupid. That was the only solution I could come up with as well. Torrenting the client brings its own set of risks though, it might not be an option they would go for.
Damn, videogames industry sounds more and more like reality tv.
Captain, what exactly is happening in the last frame?
Smoke Signals, something never used now that pretty much everyone has cell phones with coverage also pretty much everywhere.
Some cultures native to what is now called North America, would use that to communicate quickly over large distances, in the past at least.
I don’t know the code, but it has something to do with getting the smoke clouds into certain rough shapes and sizes. Probably like a more complex version of morse code.
As Frogspoison said, its popular name is “smoke signals.”
It was size and the spacing between “puffs” of smoke.
Thanks.
Welp, now I officially feel old.
Nexon.
Generic game company that makes a lot of pay-to-win shit, and to my experience aren’t exactly nice to their users. Hope they lose this, and that Ironmace sues them for damages.
In this case Nexon are probably in the right.
From what I’ve read:
Lead of Dark and Darker was previously employed at Nexon as a lead dev working on this exact type of a game, putting assets and prototypes on a private server, retaining access to it after being fired, and taking part of the dev team with him.
There are currently designers working at Nexon who are saying they worked on the exact features and assets used in Dark and Darker.
So yeah, even though “Nexon bad” and power to the small devs, there are still laws.
Just a question. But I followed the first link about the story and many of the comments mention that the ‘Identical assets’ are items you buy for the engine. As in things any and every developer has.
Also the multiple police raids have failed to produce evidence of theft.
So do you have another source?
Practically all of my informations are from this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9twVyOIRQ4
Yes, the assets are from the store. But the way they are used is the issue.
Just to clarify, I’m not on either side and I don’t really care how it ends.
For me the whole situation is just “huh, I guess that’s a thing”, so I may be misremembering some of the details from the video.
korea has some strange laws when it comes to things like copyright. its why fortnite went to them to try and claim ownership over the game format, cause over there they actually have a chance of getting away with it. that the game was being made for nexon first before everyone working on it quit/got fired and made their own company to make it is pretty much the whole case, and from the looks what happened.
“Think Tarkov, but with swords and wizards”
What’s Tarkov, though?
Well Tarkov is like Dark and Darker, but without swords and wizards, obviously.
(By the way, I have no idea what Tarkov is either.)
Tarkov, AKA Grief Simulator is a game that tells you nothing, explains nothing, and best of all injuries from dying carry over to your next life. Or as VLDL so eloquently put it, Tarkov is a game where every aspect feels like getting punched in the dick:
The Tarkov creators had a clear vision – Dev Meeting – YouTube
Basically one of those games that is fun to watch, but not so fun to play.
so dark souls
Escape from Tarkov s a hardcore and realistic online first-person action RPG/Simulator with MMO features and a story-driven walkthrough. The game is set in the fictional Norvinsk region, where a war is taking place between two private military companies.
You forgot to mention it is in the middle of dealing with a massive ongoing hacker crisis that even the top players have been on record as saying includes a significant portion of the playerbase.
Kinda stupid of discord to block torrent links, its not always piracy, wtf are they on about?
Not necessarily stupid. It’s not ALWAYS, but if they don’t want to be involved in piracy, and there’s no way for them to tell if it is or isn’t…do you see another viable approach beyond “No torrent links at all?”
torrents can also easily hide dangerous stuff and allow dangerous things. honestly blocking them protects them and a vast majority of their users.
Put the torrent link in a google doc.
Share google doc link in discord
???
Profit
the game heavily resembled a working project …. this extended to “major gameplay, rules and arts.”
Probably true. I bet it resembles WoW & Everquest too. MMO gameplay & rules has been around for decades. Fantasy Art is Fantasy Art. If they want to convince people…post details. What’s ‘unique’.
“It turns out we aren’t allowed to make fires in the forest. Please take out your ouija boards and we will contact you around midnight.”
“So, this is a little embarrassing… turns out that Satan, Lord of Darkness and Emperor of all unholy, has a thing against torrents; apparently, they cut into his profits, as he currently owns two thirds of the gaming industry. So the Ouija boards are offline. Instead, we’re redirecting you to the prison or R’lyeh, in Antarctica, where dead Cthulhu waits with a dowload link.”
“So I’m being told that Nyarlathotep messed with the torrent link and it seems it downloads a digital copy of the Necronomicon instead of the game. If you’re not one of the people who went mad from reading it, or if you still want to play the game even though you’ve gone insane, we’ll just go a bit more traditional and send you a mail. Like, with an envelope and all that.”
“Figures: now that we’ve delt with otherworldly hostiles, no government mailing service will deliver for us. We’re just going to etch our game code onto the side of a mountain and sue whoever photographs it.”
I couldn’t figure out how this discord thing works. More chaotic than reddit. No idea how people find anything there. Those sites won’t catch on in my opinion.
Yet it sux that a good game can be killed that way.
i guess it would depend on the server. for the most part you use the invite code to join a server. once there the server owner and admins make channels for people to post/chat in. discord doesnt delete anything themselves, outside of things obviously not allowed to stay, so you can usually scroll back to see what was posted all the way to the start. they will, if smart, also pin important messages/links so its easy to grab for newer visitors.
Huh, reading the attached article really makes it seem like Nexon is kinda just bullying as they haven’t provided any evidence. The nature of the claim makes it difficult to provide counter evidence in Ironmace’s defense as well. Also truly a bizarre series of road blocks from several other companies.