Why we're building what we're building.

None. Not "cosmetic-only." Not "coming later once the money gets tight." There is one subscription, one founder's keepsake sold once during the backing campaign, and that is the complete list of things Darkerlight will ever charge for. It's written into the promises, and the server-code escrow exists so that breaking them costs us the world.

An ordinary, fair monthly price — announced with the campaign, identical for everyone, and the only recurring thing we'll ever charge. No tiers, no premium editions, no "deluxe" anything.

Yes — forever, not as a trial. The starting region is free for as long as you want it: real combat, real exploration, real grouping, real people. What the free visit doesn't include is the player economy and the world beyond — that's what the subscription opens. The idea is simple: you should be able to judge us thoroughly before we've earned a cent from you.

Because we've made it structurally expensive to betray you. The no-pay-to-win rule is a core promise backed by the escrow: cross the line, lose exclusive control of the world. No studio keeps a promise because it feels nice; studios keep promises that are costly to break. We built the cost in deliberately.

We work in phases, not dates — you can see the whole path on the front page. The honest version: the world is being built now, backers enter first at community alpha, and there will be something real and playable to judge before we ever ask anyone to back it. The waitlist hears every step first.

Because instancing quietly deletes the thing MMOs are for. A private copy of a dungeon is a single-player game with extra steps. When there's one world, what happens in it matters: the boss someone killed is dead, the pass a guild controls is controlled, the stranger on the road is real. Shared space is the point — so we refused the shortcut, everywhere, for everything.

No. Cities and the starting lands are genuinely safe, new players are sheltered while they learn, and anyone who prefers peace can carry real, in-world protection at any point in their journey. Beyond that, danger is honest and consequence is real — attacking the innocent marks you, and the world treats outlaws accordingly. Risk exists because stakes make the world mean something; it's a choice you make, not a thing done to you.

Never. No seasons, no resets, no fresh-start servers that quietly abandon the old ones. Your character, your home, your reputation, and everything you've built persist for as long as the world runs — and the shutdown protections in the promises exist so even the worst case is handled honestly.

A small independent studio in Ontario, Canada — deliberately small, funded by players rather than shareholders, and building in the open. The work speaks from the devlog and the playtests; no NDAs means every tester is free to tell you exactly what they saw.

A world like this doesn't need millions of players — it needs enough people who want what we're building to sustain a small, honest operation, and it's engineered from day one around exactly that. No hypergrowth targets, no growth-at-any-cost treadmill, no live-service bloat: a sustainable world at a human scale. That's not a compromise — it's the design.

The minimum, handled carefully. Right now the only thing we collect is an email address you volunteer. Before the game holds any player accounts, a plain-English privacy policy publishes — and we will never sell your data to anyone, which is easy to promise when players, not advertisers, are the customer.

Two ways. Join the waitlist — early believers are how a world like this gets to exist — and tell the one friend who's been waiting for exactly this game. Playtest invites go to the waitlist when the time comes, and there's no NDA between you and your honest opinion.