After the sport was pulled from Steam attributable to an ongoing authorized combat with Nexon, Darkish and Darker’s builders determined to go underground, asking gamers to torrent the most recent playtest. Stunning in all probability nobody, that did not make for essentially the most logistically sound weekend. “We need to apologize for all of the bugs, instability, and hurdles that you simply needed to endure throughout this playtest,” Ironmace CEO Terence Park posted within the official Discord server right now.
The weekend was certainly fraught with hurdles, from the preliminary torrent obtain hyperlink getting pulled first from Discord after which Twitter, two subsequent hotfixes that had been additionally distributed by torrent, and a few prolonged server downtime on Saturday. All that on prime of the traditional bugs, PvP imbalance, and crashing you’d anticipate from a web-based recreation’s alpha take a look at.
Specifically, Ironmace launched a brand new map known as The Ruins, an out of doors setting a lot totally different from the standard dungeon crawling corridors from the final take a look at, which it says wasn’t fairly the place it wished it to be. “In our rush to point out off the Ruins map we moved a little bit too rapidly and pushed it out earlier than it was totally prepared,” Ironmace stated when it issued the weekend’s first hotfix on Saturday. The builders modified the loot steadiness and lighting settings of the brand new map. On Monday, a second hotfix largely addressed bugs with class abilities.
“The standard didn’t meet our requirements and we are going to deal with bettering the sport for our followers sooner or later,” the announcement right now added.
Ironmace posted extra particulars about points with the Ruins map within the Saturday hotfix. Portals all the way down to a deeper, extra harmful degree had been eliminated, turning the map right into a “single layer.” It additionally elevated the worth of loot on the map and reverted adjustments to lighting that it “could have additionally gone a little bit overboard with.”
I did not get an opportunity to play the primary model of the Ruins map however by the point I obtained into the sport on Sunday I fairly loved it. The goblin caves and dungeon maps from final take a look at felt a bit claustrophobic at instances and made avoiding fight with different gamers nigh unattainable. The out of doors setting was a pleasant change, and the extra open map meant I used to be capable of mess around with placing out torches for some stealth-only extraction runs.
I did have escape portals yanked from beneath me not simply as soon as, however twice in a single evening, although, so perhaps stealth is not the play in spite of everything.
I actually let the concern of being backstabbed get the higher of me there.
Ironmace hasn’t introduced any dates for a sixth playtest but, however says that it “will do every thing attainable to get the sport to our followers as quickly as attainable and replace you as a lot as we will.”