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 founders' window, and that is the complete list of things Darkerlight will ever charge for. It's written into the promises, in public, permanently — which is the only thing that has ever actually held a studio to its word.

An ordinary, fair monthly price — announced when the game is ready for it, 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 the promise is written down in public, permanently, alongside everything we've actually done — and because the studio doesn't need to break it. Nobody above us has to be kept happy, and there's no number we have to hit; the whole thing is built so a bad month costs us nothing we depend on. Studios break that promise when they get desperate. We made sure we can't get desperate.

We don't work to a schedule — we work to what's actually true, and the front page lays out what the world can already do and what it has to do before a door opens. The honest version: it's being built now, the founders' window opens before the world opens to everyone, and there will be something real and playable to judge before we ever ask anyone for a dollar. 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. You begin protected and stay that way until you choose to put it down — and while you're still learning, only players close to your own strength can touch you at all, whatever else is happening around you. Every settlement is guarded — the smallest as surely as the largest — and anyone who prefers peace can carry real, in-world protection anywhere in the world, at any point in their journey; it costs you the contested trades and the fighting, never your progress. 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.

An independent studio in Canada — answerable to its players rather than outside 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 an honest, independent 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.