Darkness is a competitive multi-player action role-playing BBS “door” game based on the Legend of the Red Dragon style of game play, featuring a post apocalyptic cyberpunk setting.
First released in publicly in 2000 with a wide beta release of v1.00, development on Darkness stalled out in 2001. Now, 20 years later (in 2020) Darkness 2.0 has been fully rewritten and redesigned from the ground up to fix many of the bugs and other issues that plagued it as well as to tweak the gameplay, the setting, and so much more.
Features:
- Easy to setup and run!
- Available in both a modern 32 bit Windows version and a 16 bit DOS compatible version which can be used on retro systems, Linux and other alternative OSes, and DOS emulators such as DOSBox.
- Complete FOSSIL driver support for communications compatibility with most classic dial-up BBS software and full DOOR32 support for socket sharing on 32/64 bit Windows telnet systems.
- Supports the two most popular classic drop files formats: DOOR.SYS and DORINFOx.DEF, along with the widely adopted DOOR32.SYS format supported on modern 32 bit systems.
- A complete, full-featured door game, including a powerful configuration and player editors, automatic game maintenance including the deletion of inactive and unused characters, inactivity timeouts to automatically boot AFK players, and local SysOp side features such as online chat and forcing disconnections.
- SysOps can easily add additional random events by adding downloaded DRS scripts using the built-in event editor included in the configuration editor. Likewise, developers can create their own custom random events using Darkness’s incredibly easy to use DRS scripting language.
- Players can communicate in various ways, such as a “one liner” message boards/walls, daily news announcements and comments, and email messages.
- Full multi-node support including node notifications, node messaging, and real-time player vs. player fights.
- Characters can explore the high tech but devastated world of Darkness across 7 unique areas, including a central hub area featuring various activities.
- A large variety of enemies to defeat and weapons and other gear to help defeat them with!
- A unique game world with subtle (and not so subtle) references to related sci-fi, cyberpunk, and post apocalyptic works.
- Free! Darkness is uncrippled emailware.
Darkness 2 is in active development, with fixes, new features, and tons of new content still on the horizon. Check back here for more news and information!
Other notable articles related to Darkness:
- A Look Back at Darkness – a recount of the development of the original version of Darkness.
- All posts tagged with Darkness.
—
1. Original Darkness Font by Cyberphreak, Unreleased. (1998)