Steam hit Dark and Darker extends playtest over network issues

Four adventurers journey into a dim dungeon — (Image credit: Ironmace)

The Dark and Darker playtest has been extended by three more days to compensate for some of the issues players experienced when it started.

As announced via the game's Steam page, the playtest - which started on December 16 and was initially set to end on December 23 - has been prolonged and will now end on December 26 instead. The reason behind these extra three days is due to the game's developer IronMace wanting to make up for the early network issues, instabilities, and rollback issues players were experiencing at the start of the playtest.

The playtest has been extended 3 more days.Due to the early network issues, instabilities, and rollback issues, we have decided to extend the playtest, as is tradition. View the link to our steam page for the new ending time.https://t.co/AQMRVkcicJDecember 22, 2022

As documented on the game's Twitter account, shortly after the playtest went live, players began reporting server issues and bugs in the game. Thankfully, the developer quickly solved the situation and rolled out a hotfix that ironed out some of the teething issues Dark and Darker was having. Unfortunately, things didn't stay smooth for too long, and three more hotfixes had to be rolled out. It seems like things are going well right now, though.

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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, managing to achieve a peak concurrent player count of 52,576. IronMace addressed this milestone on Twitter, 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.

Fancy giving the playtest a go? Take a look at our Dark and Darker class guide before you get started.

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After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.