Despite these initial issues, it doesn't seem like players have been put off the PvPvE dungeon crawler. In fact, the game has blown up on Steam Dark And Darker Gold, managing to achieve a peak concurrent player count of 52,576. IronMace addressed this milestone on Twitter(opens in new tab), writing: "What the heck is going on?! We hit over 50K concurrent players today. Thanks a heap to our awesome community!"

The only downside is that Dark and Darker isn't going to release fully until Q4 2023, so we've got some time to wait until we get to experience it at its full potential.

Dark and Darker developer Ironmace could face legal action following claims it stole materials to create its popular dungeon crawler.

According to a report by Korean-based website ThisIsGame(opens in new tab) (translated via Reddit(opens in new tab)), Japanese game publisher Nexon claims that some Ironmace developers, who it says used to work for the company, took assets and code from a project it had in the works called "P3," before leaving to make Dark and Darker.

The report says Nexon - whose previous titles include KartRider: Drift and MapleStory - showcased Project P3 back in August 2021. It planned for the game to be a first-person adventure where players worked together to explore medieval fantasy dungeons, searching for treasure and battling monsters as they went. Later, in an interview with ThisIsGame, Nexon's Vice President revealed the game's codename had changed to "P7" Dark And Darker Gold for sale, and the idea had evolved to include a mix of PvP and PvE elements.