Summary

• Dark and Darker Mobile aims to replicate the success of its PC version, focusing on fun gameplay that is competitive and enjoyable to watch.
• To that end, Krafton is looking into creating Dark and Darker Mobile esports.
• Krafton assures that Dark and Darker Mobile will not be pay-to-win, but monetisation is currently unclear.

Krafton's office is on the top five floors of a state of the art skyscraper in Seoul, South Korea. Your ears pop at around floor 20, you finally reach the modern workspace nearly twice as high, at floor 35. The views of Korea's capital are breathtaking, and the studio's huge windows let you take it all in. I'm not sure I'd get any work done in such a beautiful environment, but it’s one of many distractions that show Krafton encourages a 'work hard, play hard' culture.

But I wasn’t here for the skyline, I was here for a behind the scenes look at Korean game development, to meet some of the Bluehole devs trying their best to ignore the vistas, and Krafton’s mobile port of Steam's most controversial game in years, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark and Darker.

What Is Krafton?

You may not have heard of Krafton. Don’t feel bad,𝄹 most Koreans I spoke to didn’t recognise the name, but were well aware of games like PUBG, The Callisto Protocol, and Moonbreaker. But the is shooting for the moon. InZo🎐i, a life sim that an employee tells me has more influences from Grand Theft Auto than The Sims, is on a lot of radars, and Dark and Darker Mobile aims to replicate the viral success (and move past the legal trouble) of the PC version. But before I got hands-on with the games, I wanted to know more about Korean game development culture, and how Krafton operates as a company.

Krafton is also embracing generative AI and its own metaverse,💟 called Overdare, in news I was less than pleas𒁏ed to hear.

Jetlagged and curious, I was mainly guided through common areas rather than interrupt employees at their desks. There are no devs at the Gangnam office, they’re in other hubs across the country, this is all staff on the publishing side. I saw vending machines filled with soft drinks, beer, and whole pizzas free to take and cook in each floor’s kitchenette. A ramen station hosted more varieties of noodles than a 7/11. The cafe serves tea, coffee, and more for a tenth of the price of the Starbucks on the ground floor. And that’s before you get t🧸o the army of chefs preparing traditional Korean meals around the clock in the canteen.

“Employees can eat all three meals a day here,” explained Sung-won Yoon, PR leꦰad at Krafton and my guide for the day. I 𓃲wasn’t convinced this was a good thing, but at least it was all (barring the fresh coffee) free.

Then I was shown the game room, three enormous TVs with PS5s. A full sim racing setup sat abandoned in the corner, but it seemed the employees had been playing EA Sports FC and eFootball most recently. Next door is the PC room, where Krafton hosts internal LAN tournaments on its 20+ gaming PCs. Apparently therಌe’s an employee in the finance department who wins most of Krafton’s chicken🍌 dinners.

I was slightly worried about work/life balance, with Krafton seemingly encouraging staff to spend as much time as possible in the office. From the massage room to the plethora of meals, I’m certain you c♉ould live your life in this office and never have to leave. But is that a good thing?

Luckily, I returned to the office at 8pm one evening, as Krafton hosts weekly office parties with free drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. However, the office was dead. A handful of em𝔍ployees were sharing some beers, but the hundreds of employees I’d seen crowding the cafeteria at lunchtime were nowhere to be seen. Just two staff members were playing in🐎 the games room. If there’s a crunch culture at Krafton, as I was worried about, it’s well hidden.

Dark And Darker Mobile

Having successfully crafted PUBG Mobile from the bones of the hit PC battle royale, Krafton is looking to take that knowledge onto more games. Dark and Darker may not seem like the obvious ch𝓡oice, but Krafton identified a few key areas to bring the best out of the PvPvE extraction FPS.

Producer of Dark and Darker Mobile, Joonseok Ahn, believes there are three key areas: it’s fun to watch, it’s fun to play, and it’s competitive. He thinks that these elements will combine to create another hit for developer Bluehole Studio, which has seen great success with PUBG Battlegrounds (yes, it’s really called that now). And the company is even looking into esports: “there's a lot of potential for esports,” Ahn tells me via a translator. “A lot of room for us to expand into various arenas.”

Krafton clearly has big plans for the game, but it’s starting small.♚ Literally. The first job was getting the gameplay that made Dark and Darker into a viral hit work on a mobile device. That may seem simple enough with how p🎉owerful phones are these days – the Samsung S24s that we tested the game offered smooth framerates, and Krafton plans to accommodate most smartphones made within the last three to four years – but there’s a lot more to it than you might think.

“Since our game is on mobile, the screen is very small, so we had a lot of challenges when it came to allowing players to get a good feel of the situation that they were in,” Ahn explains. “Secondly, we think that the game being live is also very important in the core loop of the gameplay. This is why we implemented things such as AI and the mercenaries so that users can do indirect gameplay wi🍷th AI as well.”

Don’t🅠 worry, this is regular gaming AI, the kind that has controlled enemy movements and attack patterns for decades. When I jumped into a dungeon, it was good fun. The gameplay holds up well, and the on-screen controls (probably the part I was most nervous about) were comfortable and didn’t block the screen too much. But when I was joined by two f🍌riends in a party, Dark and Darker Mobile came alive.

Dungeons are more difficult when you’re in a party. Extraction is harder too. We faced far tougher enemies, and were forced to work together to tackle boss monsters and other parties with clever synergies. Dark and Darker Mobile is fun alone, and when you level up enough to bring mercenaries along for the ride it’ll be even better, but playing with friends is unparalleled and that’s where the gameﷺ will thrive.

The trickiest adaptatio𒐪n for the mobile game is the Ranger class, Ahn tells me. The curr💃ent iteration has strong aim assist, but drawing and firing your bow takes a long time and feels a little unwieldy compared to the other classes. Aim assist will be “much more enhanced” in newer versions, Ahn explains, and the developers are trying to simplify the moveset so players can focus on exploring dungeons while fighting like they can with other classes.

Mobile Monetisation And The Dark And Darker Lawsuit

I can’t talk about Dark and Darker without mentioning the controversy surrounding its creation and the ongoing lawsuit against developer Ironmace. Multi-billion dollar gaming conglom🙈erate Nexon is suing the creators of Dark and Darker, former employees of the company, claiming that they stole the assets and ideas from when they worked at the company. While there has been no conclusion just yet, Dark and Darker was removed from Steam a🌌t the peak of its success.

Dark and Darker Mobile has no such issues, Ahn assures me. “Regarding Dark & Darker, we did strike a licence deal with Ironmace in August of 2023. But we are only using the original title of the game, and all other aspects are independently developed by Bluehole Studios. Regarding the lawsuit, we are completely a third party to the lawsuit, and we ourselves at Krafton are 🅷waiting for the judicial decision on the case.”

With no lawsuꦏits threatening Dark and Darker Mobile, the main issue to tackle, from my point of view, is monetisation. I noticed three different currencies during my hands-on with the game – a slightly worrying sign. I’ve 𓃲played plenty of mobile games that obfuscate their prices through numerous gold stashes or gemstones, and a predatory system like that would put me right off this game. The only information Krafton can give me at present was that it wouldn’t be pay-to-win.

“When it comes to monetisation, we definitely want to utilise the insight that we've gotten from PUBG and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PUBG Mobile,” Ahn explains. “But we definitely don't want to focus just on pay-to-win, we want to delve into a different direction.”

When I pushed to find out whether we’d be seeing battle passes and loot boxes in the game, Ahn said a little more: “We're not considering those now, but there's definitely room for implementing those in the game. But I do want to emphasise that any of the monetisation models will not directly affect the user's possibility of winning the game.”

The one currency that struck me was a kind of scroll, of which you start with ten. You spend one of these every time you enter a dungeon,🍌 and they refill over time. They’re available to buy with in-game currency instead of spending it on better swords or more bandages, but I could see these being monetised, too.

There’s a lot to like about Dark and Darker Mobile. The gameplay is faithful to the PC game♔, the excitement is infectious when playing with teammates, and the gradual upgrades to buff your character between dungeons is enticing. I unlocked a wolf pelt at one point, which basically turned my character into a werewolf. Krafton is planning on adding pets to fight alongside you, leaderboards to dial in on the social aspects, and of course has one eye on esports.

PUBG and PUBG Mobile are runaway esports successes, so Krafton has the experience in this arena. I can just imagine two teams racing to the final extraction point – an appropriately eerie glowing gravestone – as a live audiꦑence cheers them on. I imagine thousands of fans yelling that there’s a devastating Wraith lurking behind an oblivious player on stage and think back to me doing the same to a teammate minutes earlier. In a game that thrives on personal connection, this feels like the natural conclusion.