Dark and Light: Preview
Ekim, 2003-11-25

Developer NPCube is currently hard at work on Dark and Light (DnL), a large-scale mmorpg set in a 40,000 square kilometre fantasy world that had its moon shattered in two after a terrible cataclysm. Now, each halves of the moon, the Dark and Light moons, grant different powers to the mages that belong to each faction. These two factions of Dark and Light battle one against another for the control of the world.

Thanks to a new proprietary engine, and powerful servers, Dark and Light's large land mass will have no zones to speak of. But the most extraordinary aspect of DnL's environment is that there will actually only be one world in which to play, one server available to accommodate tens of thousands of players simultaneously. This world will also feature a complex procedural weather system that will be able to produce realistic temperature and climate changes, which in turn will affect gameplay in various ways. For instance, snow will actually accumulate on the ground as it falls, making it harder for a character to walk even on the straightest road, covering flora and even items that might have been left on the ground before winter.

Character advancement will revolve around a dual experience system to let the player choose his or her own play style. By either gaining Social experience points (SXP), or Fighting experience points (FXP), players could eventually become lords or nobles and hire mercenaries to do their dirty work, or powerful Knights that protect their respective factions with their swords. Players will be able to gain SXP by practicing their trade skills, or participating in large group hunts that bring members of their factions together.

DnL will have a total of 12 different races at launch, including the proverbial Elves, Humans and Dwarves, along with some less conventional ones like Faeries, Trolls and Orcs. Classes have the same kind of variety between the more or less familiar, including Wizards, Rangers and Warriors, or even Necromancers. Each class will have a skill tree that should offer some level of variety between players that adopt different playing styles.

DnL will introduce a fairly revolutionary off-line playing mode in which players may leave their avatar active in the game world even while they are logged off the game. This way, a player could set up his character to become an NPC until he returns, enabling other players to purchase items that he wants to sell without needing to be present for the trade. This system could also be used to advance some of the more tedious trade-skills while offline.

Player-vs-player will play an important role in DnL, as the two factions will naturally be natural enemies by default. A code of honour system will be in place which should prevent high-level characters from slaughtering lower-level ones by implementing player bounties. A player that would choose to kill another lower-level character without any valid reason, for instance, would see his avatar hit with a loss of SXP and bad faction, as well as seeing his name appear on a "wanted" list of players with a price on his head, which other players could claim for his death.

Players may possess fortresses of different sizes by seizing them from other players, belonging to an opposing faction. Because of the size of the world, and because there will only be one server for the whole population of DnL, there will have several thousands of fortresses ready for the taking, and each of them may have small villages built around them to create intricate centres of trade away from larger cities.

DnL entered the first phase of beta at the end of September, and NPCube hopes to release the game early next year (2004).