Hey burglars, Raven here 🖤
It’s been one wild week since Dark Hours left Early Access and stepped into 1.0. If you’ve been with us through the ups and downs (the bug hunts, the broken lobbies, the cursed microphones), thank you. Truly.
I wanted to take a moment to share what’s been going on behind the scenes: how the launch went, what went right and wrong (and why), and what we’ve been working on to improve things.
⏳ Before Launch: Building the 1.0
The two months leading up to 1.0 were intense, and honestly, tougher than we expected. There were so many things we’d been wanting to bring into the game for a long time: a reworked gameloop, new heist items, more interactions with monsters and the environment, etc. All of it with the goal of improving the overall experience, adding more fun and depth to what was already there.
In reality, much of that time was spent deep in technical work, especially integrating Epic Online Services. The goal was simple: make Dark Hours ready for crossplay between platforms, and bring custom microphone settings into the game (something many of you had been asking for since Early Access).
But that integration took longer than expected, with more than a few tricky challenges along the way. That extra work inevitably delayed or de-prioritized a few features that were already in the pipeline but not quite ready for release, things like the new gameloop, item lifecycle across missions, custom van interiors with their special items. The PvPvE mode was also affected, limiting its release to a PvP Training mode, while the full PvPvE experience (with seasons, progression, and leaderboards) is planned for a future update.
And as if that wasn’t enough, we also had the bad surprise of a major server outage hitting Dark Hours right on release day and in the days that followed, something I’ll dig into in the next section.
That’s why we’ve spent the past week solving issues and catching up on the polish for features that weren’t fully ready at launch, all to bring the experience closer to what we had in mind from the start.
💥 The Launch That Started With an Amazon Outage
When 1.0 launched, we expected a busy release, but not quite that busy. Within hours, reports started flooding in about voice chat not working, lobbies failing to connect, and crashes during missions.
We immediately knew something was off. As soon as we started receiving reports, we began investigating, and honestly, it wasn’t easy to figure out what was going on. Our first clues pointed to Epic Online Services: lobbies weren’t being created, and voice chat simply refused to work. We stayed in constant contact with Epic’s team, but at first, even they couldn’t pinpoint the cause.
After a few days of testing things on our own, we noticed that some players had trouble connecting directly to the web services behind EOS. That’s when we discovered what had actually happened.
As some of you might already know, on October 21, Amazon EC2 experienced a major 12-hour outage that impacted services all over the world. We thought things had gone back to normal the next day, but for Dark Hours, they hadn’t.
To make it short: one of Amazon’s root certificates had expired, and the version of EOS we were using wasn’t able to renew it automatically. That single issue broke a chain of dependencies and caused the connection problems many of you faced at launch.
Once we identified the exact cause and reported it back to Epic, their engineers were finally able to help us patch it. On October 30, we pushed the fix live, along with all the other gameplay and stability improvements you’ve seen in the latest update.
💡 What Got Better With the Regular Update
While all of this was going on, we didn’t want to just sit still. So, during that same week, the team kept pushing forward: fixing, polishing, and adding some of the features that didn’t make it in time for launch.
We’re a small team of about ten people, and with both of our devs focused full-time on the EOS situation, the rest of the crew took the week to polish some of the features we’d mentioned earlier: the new item lifecycle across missions, the arrival of custom van interiors, a more refined gameloop — while also tackling a long list of bug fixes based on your reports.
You can find all the details in the dedicated news here:
By the way, something I didn’t mention in the news: each van now includes a few advanced starting items that fit its theme (for example, Ice Grenades for the Ice Cream van)
And just for fun, here are a few screenshots of the new van interiors, in case you haven’t seen them yet.
🧠 What We Learned
This launch reminded us of a few important truths:
Even carefully tested systems can buckle when they meet the real world.
Sometimes, things will break that you couldn’t possibly predict.
And most importantly: a small, passionate team can keep pushing forward when the community has their back.
We're doing our best to deliver the best experience possible. It’s not always perfect, but we’re working hard to fix issues as fast as we can so you can enjoy Dark Hours the way it’s meant to be played.
💖 The Most Important: Thank you!
This release reminded us why we love this community. Your feedback, videos, and patience have helped us more than you know. Thanks for your unwavering support. It’s been incredibly helpful in improving the game day after day.
And on top of that, thank you for all the positive feedback you’ve sent our way, especially about the new Mafias bosses and gameplay items. It means a lot to us to see that you’re enjoying them as much as we enjoyed creating them.
📆 What’s Next?
Our immediate focus:
Keep monitoring your reports on Discord, the Steam forums, and by email.
Gameplay and quality-of-life improvements.
New map rotation and monster behavior improvements.
Preparing the next round of major updates
From all of us at the studio: thank you again for everything.
Get ready for your next heist night — and if you run into anything odd, drop it on the forums or Discord. We’re watching your reports every day.
Good luck on your heists!
Raven
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