Dark & Light - Official Website
Dark and Light is a new type of massively multiplayer game, enhanced by the experience from previous generations. Immersion in a virtual universe is now a reality: with Dark and Light, you will experience a huge world along with tens of hundreds of players.
Dark and Light offers a gameplay that adapts to each player. Thus, you may fight frightful enemies by becoming a ferocious fighter or a powerful sorcerer, but also become a prominent politician, a fearless explorer or a renowned crafter. These game axes will offer many possibilities; for instance, players who take a fortress can manage a whole city as they please, thanks to options and interfaces only them can use. Crafters can improve their skills and use them to give some properties to their items, or enhance their statistics. If you prefer wandering in little-known places, Dark and Light offers complete gameplay options for explorers. And in order to make sure that they always have something to discover, the developers created a land of 40.000 Km². The game has no loading zones, in order to keep the feeling of immersion and to allow you to see the horizon, 50 kilometres away.
Of course, transportation is a fundamental aspect in such a huge universe; either by riding a dragon or a dodo, or using a teleportation portal, you may easily join your friends in wonderful epic tales.
Moreover, server technology allows us to offer a unique world where all players of Dark and Light can meet. This makes a more populated and lively game, in a constantly changing universe.
In order to give players an easier access to Dark and Light, the website and the game will be translated in five languages: English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Likewise, event and support teams will be available in all these languages make sure that Dark and Light offers an enjoyable and dynamic gaming experience. Online scripted events give players the opportunity to have an impact on the world and to witness the consequences of their actions and choices.
A game with a rich and varied game design, a vast and open world, a constant interaction between the universe and players, and a really massive community are all the features that the development team wanted to integrate to Dark and Light, in order to offer a strong immersion and an entertaining experience in a fantastic and attractive world.
Game Chronicles takes a look at this innovative new MMORPG with an exclusive GCM interview.
| GCM: | Hello, thank you for taking the time to answer these few questions about your upcoming game, Dark and Light. Can you please start by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about the team behind Dark and Light? |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
My name is Stephane Quilichini, Lead Game Designer for Dark and Light. I'm 40 years old, and I can say I have been a hardcore pen & paper role-player before switching over to video games. I saw the first personal computers when I was 15 years old, the first games with 16 kb RAM and 1kb video memory (yes, kb, not mb!), and yet I played these games a lot. I'm one of the founders of DnL project, the idea started almost 6 years ago. Dark and Light project started from passion, encounters, that made people decide to start this crazy project one day. 20 people have been working hard on development since four years now. Why on Reunion island? Because we all live there, and because we prefer asking people to join us than to leave for distant places. By the way, did you know that Ganareth is much bigger than Reunion Island? And if you look carefully, you will see that the island left some traces in the world of Ganareth |
| GCM: | Dark and Light is going to be a very large MMO (15,000 square miles), reportedly only using a single instance. Most other MMO's seem to find it necessary to have multiple servers in order to cut down on lag and server downtime problems. How were you able to make the game work using only one server? Will players have to worry about lag? |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
Dark and Light project was born from this idea: offer the MMORPG fan, for the first time, the opportunity to play without any border, restriction, to be totally free in his game’s universe. We developed everything in that aim: the unique world. The server technology is based on distributed calculation in a cluster of computers, working like a supercomputer. This concept is the basis for all our designs and intends to give us the technical means to answer the ambitions we have for the game. DnL™’s whole design is centered on this concept. It provides game masters with a great freedom of action, and players with a very special and immersive experience. Of course, managing a unique world is a complex technical challenge, but this is on this kind of world that we can develop such a deep game design, that is rarely seen in MMORPGs nowadays. Thus, DnL™ can integrate the following aspects, among others:
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| GCM: | Can you elaborate on the Mafate 2.0 engine – just how powerful is it and what kind of system specs will the average gamer need to play? |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
Minimum requirements will be as following:
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| GCM: | Speaking with some of your staff at E3, they mentioned that there will be a kind of live-event staff that will be constantly creating unique adventures and dungeons for the players. If so, can you tell us a little more about this feature of the game? |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
Planned events will be organized by our game managers. They will own specific tools developed especially to create and manage in-game events with a entire freedom. Content and schedule will be regularly published online. As for the planned events, game managers will be able to create and organize event whenever they want, depending on the game evolution. As you know, our objective is that Dark and Light players become able to handle and push the game in the direction they want. Dungeons won’t be available for the November release. |
| GCM: | Players will be able to develop their character in fighting experience and social experience. Can you explain what kinds of things someone strong in social experience will be able to do in the game? Is politics going to be something people can get into in this game? Could they even become a king or queen? |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
Social points open the door to exploration, craft and economic management skills. Whether the players choose to enrich more the Social XP or the Fighter XP, any gamer will be able enter politics or become a king or a queen. |
| GCM: | I also remember being told about the moon cycle and that crafters or magic users will be affected by those moon cycles (i.e. some things will be more powerful if done during a certain period of the cycle). If so, is the cycle a real-time month, or is it accelerated, and can you tell us more about this feature, as well? |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
We do have astrology in Dark and Light. Players will have to manage with its influence to determine the best as possible their craft success rate. Some ingredients used in recipes are sensitive to celestial bodies. So, players, if they want, will have the opportunity to optimize and master their chances of success. In the same spirit, some ingredients are all sensitive to natural objects. Players will have to choose: nor they wait for the best celestial condition to get the best result to their crafts, nor they don’t wait but they won’t benefit from the good influence of celestial bodies. |
| GCM: | What is a player’s overall goal going to be in this game? Is there a war to be won? Riches to be gained? Fame and power to be had? |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
According to player’s respective temper, many goals are possible; the player can become a ferocious warrior and attack fortresses, a powerful sorcerer, an influent politician, a dauntless explorer or a renowned artist. But more than anything, levelling is not the main goal of Dark and Light. We want players to be integrated into Dark and Light community and take part to various actions to strengthen the power of its alignment in the world of Ganareth. |
| GCM: | What, would you say is the coolest or most unique feature of this game? The thing that you feel players will enjoy the most or that sets Dark and Light apart from other online games. |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
Definitely exploration. As we already said, the development team is constantly surprised by discovering herself new areas she had never seen yet. Given the size of our world, we have developed many alternate gameplays (hang glider flight, snowboard, parachute and more) in order to allow our players to move freely in a 3-dimension universe. The conquest system, with players having the ability to create their fortresses and the economic life around, in real time, is an asset I have never encountered in our competitors' products. DnL aims at giving complete freedom, even if players don't have the required level at any given time, to have an impact on a given place. They can still visit these places and start quests, and have to use their wits in order to success. |
| GCM: | What is the balance going to be for PvP, party adventures and solo gaming. |
| Stephane Quilichini: | This will totally depends on players’ choice and election. Depending on what they decide, they will increase their SXP or their FXP skills, more fighting or more crafting for instance. But we really didn’t want to push the game in one direction or another; this will totally be under the influence of player’s decisions. |
| GCM: | Many MMORPG's don't focus that much on the role-playing element of gaming and focus more on action. With the social experience meter, I get the feeling that there will be a more in-depth role-playing element in this game. What kinds of things will people not just interested in hacking and slashing have the opportunity to do in this game? What other professions are there? |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
Political choices will need a strong time investment to set up conquest strategies with guilds and other noble persons. Ganareth’s plots of land management can also be really time consuming, but this gameplay will attract players more interested in management for instance. Craft evolution will be an interesting option for the players who target the highest levels of Master…or even higher. |
| GCM: | What steps are you taking to make sure Dark and Light doesn’t become “just another level grind”? |
| Stephane Quilichini: |
One of the main objectives of Dark and Light was not to become “just another level grind”. Of course the player will have quests to achieve and will have a level progression. But if we decided to give the same importance to combat, exploration, item crafting, political management of fortresses, resources extraction system, it was to propose the player something very different from only leveling. The player is free to choose how to evolve in the game, if he wants to evolve or if he doesn’t. The game won’t be less attractive if he chooses not to evolve for a while. This is also why we focused on a very deep lore and a game-mastering team in five languages entirely dedicated to enhancing the role of players in a truly interactive scenario: English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. |
| GCM: | Will Dark and Light be available worldwide or is this just a North America release? |
| Stephane Quilichini: | Dark and Light will be available worldwide. The November 05 release will be 100% online. |
| GCM: | Thanks for answering our questions. Do you have any parting words for our readers? |
| Stephane Quilichini: | We want to thank you the strong community who has been following us since the beginning. It’s been sometime hard, deceptive, tiring as the challenge we faced is huge. But many people are still confident and we really don’t want them to be disappointed, we did everything just for the pleasure to play. Thank you to all and see you soon in Dark and Light! |
