Continuing the drama-filled saga of Dark and Darker, a dungeon-crawling PvP title that was recently taken down from Steam, developer IRONMACE recently published a response to the takedown, where they reiterate that Dark and Darker was not built with stolen assets, as doing so “would have been a hindrance” for the game’s development.
Dark and Darker’s development is being led by a former Nexon employee, who previously worked on a similar project over at Nexon, codenamed P3. This individual left Nexon due to “a breakdown of trust with one of his superiors,” but not before informing his team that he wanted to “pursue a project in the same genre as P3” within a new studio. He did, however, explicitly clarify that “development would be made completely from scratch.”
Nexon had claimed that Dark and Darker was made with assets, concepts, and code taken directly from P3, and now, this new statement by IRONMACE attempts to disprove said claim. Nexon claimed that the former employee stole assets by placing them into a personal server “without authorization.” IRONMACE replies that this server was opened during work-from-home periods allowed due to Covid-19 and that the individual deleted it soon after leaving Nexon.
Nexon explained that in just ten months of development time, IRONMACE published an open demo for Dark and Darker, the quickness of which would only have been possible “using Nexon’s trade secrets and confidential information.” IRONMACE replies that the quickness was achieved by heavily relying on store-bought assets from the Unreal Marketplace.
The devs assert that they have “numerous videos providing evidence of key milestone builds from our early internal playtests up until our most recent tests showing our progress and how we built the game from the ground up that we will soon start to post online.” They then throw a bit of a jab at Nexon, explaining that, given “how quickly and haphazardly the P3 Project was built,” using assets, design, and code from said project, would have been, if anything, “a hindrance.”
When it comes to the similarity in visual style and concept, IRONMACE notes that Dark and Darker’s artworks are based on generic and ubiquitous fantasy tropes that can be found across all forms of media. It states that though there is undoubtedly some similarity in style, this is inevitable, due to the art literally being made by the same individual from P3.
IRONMACE furthermore labels Dark and Darker’s concept and storyline as “purposely traditional and generic,” and, in order to substantiate this, IRONMACE prompted popular AI software ChatGPT to come up with a description for “a generic PvP Dungeon-Crawling game,” and indeed, the overall concept the AI made up isn’t too far from Dark and Darker’s general formula.
