Dark and Darker achieved over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam during its playtests. However, the responsible studio Ironmace Co. has been fighting accusations since 2021 that the foundation of the game was stolen. Now, the South Korean police conducted a search at the studio.
With Dark and Darker, the studio Ironmace is developing a novel “extraction shooter” like Escape from Tarkov. Instead of focusing on firearms, the game uses swords, blades, and magic – it’s a hardcore dungeon crawler with PvEvP.
On Steam, Dark and Darker celebrated some successes and announced that over 2 million players have already jumped into the adventure (via twitter.com). So far, there have only been playtests. The next and final test before release already has a date.
However, the team has been dealing with plagiarism accusations for some time. It has gone so far that the police recently searched the studio premises. Is the popular project in danger?
A glimpse into the gameplay of Dark and Darker is given in the teaser:
What accusations are there against the developers? According to a report from a South Korean site (via n.news.naver.com), the plagiarism accusations originate from the publisher Nexon (among others, Maple Story).
According to this, the founder of the studio Ironmace was fired from Nexon for disciplinary reasons and founded the new studio just a few months later.
Nexon states that they presented the project “P3” in 2021 and Dark and Darker is pretty much what was developed under the internal name P3 at that time – a “medieval fantasy-style dungeon exploration game.” However, Nexon quickly shelved the project.
Nexon accuses the founder of Ironmace of stealing the idea and using code and assets in Dark and Darker that actually belong to Nexon.
According to the report, the proceedings have been ongoing since 2021 and recently led to the search of the Ironmace office in South Korea.
What do the responsible parties say about it? As PC Gamer reports, the developers have already addressed the issue on their Discord (via pcgamer.com). There, a responsible party wrote: “Nothing was found.” Another statement from Discord is available on Twitter:
Translation: “Don’t worry too much about what you hear from Nexon. Most of what you’ll see online is not correct. The development is not delayed because of this, and there is nothing to worry about.”
The people at Ironmace are downplaying the issue. However, the proceedings have been going on for a while, which does not necessarily indicate an easy resolution of the situation. Now, all that’s left is to wait and see how the problem develops.
If you are a fan of the extraction genre, you can find more alternatives here: 6 games on Steam that you should play if you like Escape from Tarkov.
