The promise
was the world’s largest massively multiplayer online game, and in that developer
NPCube and publisher Farlan Entertainment has delivered.
But even the
best plans can falter in execution and unfortunately while Dark and Light brings
several wonderful ideas into the genre, the game has a lot of problems – so
many, in fact, that the game is hardly worth playing on a given night.
Before
getting to its faults, perhaps it is only fair to take a moment to talk about
what the game brings to the forefront. The world is 15,000 square miles in size,
full of diverse backgrounds. Players can earn experience in three areas –
crafting (CXP), fighting (FXP) and social (SXP). There are forts to fight for as
well as mana pools. There are 12 races and 14 classes, with 27 equipment slots
to bolster the armor of your character. There are also nine gods to choose from
and pay homage to. The gods do have a role within the game.
The world of
Ganareth has 13 realms – three for non-PvP (player versus player) and 10 that
are PvP-enabled.
Players,
after choosing race, begin at the citizen level, killing mobs to acquire the
experience to level. Upon leveling, there are seven areas in which a player may
distribute points, and there are also four initial paths that players can put
points into. A player is considered a citizen until reaching level 10, at which
point they get to choose their general class. The base skills fall into four
categories – fighter, healer, hunter and spellcaster.
As you
level, you begin to define your character and class in the world. But not only
in terms of your combat class; you also have to define your crafting class and
can drop points into a wide range of areas, not only in crafting but in
harvesting. In the jewelry crafting area, alone, there are 12 different areas
where skills can be assigned. In addition to jewelry, there is coppersmith
(armor), blacksmith (wesapons), tailor (fiber armor), tanner (leather armor),
and then five areas in extraction (harvesting) where you can spend points, with
each of the five broken down into three areas.
When it
comes to crafting, DnL purports to allow players to take advantage of moon
phases and special areas to add different buffs to the crafted item. And adding
new magical properties can yield different results. One of the problems, though,
is that you have to craft several pieces before you can actually get to a
finished product.
For example,
as a young crafter, you have to make several ‘training’ items to use in crafting
a finished product. This means a longer grind to crafting usable items.
One bug
dancing around the game in the first week is the seemingly lack of the ability
to repair a crafted item. A dagger that was crafted was starting to miss and was
showing as a graphical icon floating in the game window. This generally was a
sign that the item was on the verge of breaking. But no matter what repair NPC
was clicked on, the dagger was not available to be repaired. This was
frustrating – considering that it took an hour to collect the coin, find the way
to the appropriate recipe and component vendor and then work through the various
iterations of training weapons to get to a final product. And when you do buy
components for recipes, there are several price levels you can buy. However, if
you find, say Cern’Unnos leather for one goth (goth being the lower coin unit of
the game), and click for the first, and then add a second, the price for the
one-goth leather jumps to three goths. What is that? A handling fee? If you buy
the pieces one at a time, you only will pay one goth for the individual pieces.
You can also
find harvesting nodes in the game, but unless you have spent CP on upgrading
your skills, the chances of getting anything that can be used diminishes.
Add to that
the problem with transports working on and off and you have a game that borders
on annoyances leading to frustration. When they do work, traveling from one area
to another will take time, often several minutes.
DnL has been
four-plus years in the making, and playing the title makes it readily apparent
that this game is not finished. The game was made by a development studio that
works in the French language, but at the onset players can determine what
language they wish to play the game in. Despite picking English, French still
pops up in places. Clicking on a flying mount produced the word “entrer,” French
for enter. And the language also shows up with frequency with the vendors.
But that is
not the only example of an unfinished product. Even early on, as a new character
playing two days after the release of the game, unlocking a skill produced a
placeholder icon for the hotbar.
And little
things can add up on the annoyance scale. Recipes become receipts in your menu
options, and finding a crafting station is difficult, if you buy a recipe and
the ingredients. The compass rotates when you move, making it hard to maintain a
north aspect. The best way to find out which direction you are moving in is to
open up the map and generally determine which direction you are traveling in.
One of the
draws of the game was the travel options. Vendors, even in the newbie spawn
towns, would offer players gliders (for a small fee, of course). Flying and
landing the glider was challenging, and even through beta it was not easy to
master the landing. But soaring above the valleys was freedom and gave a truly
wonderful sense of the size of the world. One night, three days after launch,
the servers came down and when they came back up, the vendors’ stores had
changed and noticeably missing were the gliders and parachutes that one could
store on their backs.
Some entry
zones have more than one quest; some have one that is silly hard for a new
player to accomplish. Imagine being level 2, getting the only quest in town, and
then finding out one of the target mobs is not only three levels higher, but
they swarm in packs and can beat you down quickly. For another race, the quest
was for a mob five levels higher that did more damage than even a normal level
seven can stand without having solid armor and finely crafted weapons.
Yes, you can
ask for help in the in-game chat channel, but answers are few and far between.
Either the other players in the game are confused, don’t know or busy – but
regardless of the reason don’t expect much in way of an answer. Sure, there are
those who try to help, but this is not speaking for the majority of the players
there. (As a side note and personal observation from years playing MMOs: apathy
breeds apathy, and leads to a dysfunctional player community and a game that
won’t be around for long.)
The controls
are ponderous at best. The right mouse button will control the direction you are
facing, unless you are moving, and then it is useless and inoperative. At that
point you have to rely on the A and D keys (if in the right keyboard setting) to
turn and avoid things, like mobs and trees and other environmental objects. The
game is supposed to allow PvP (player-versus-player) combat, but with the way
the controls handle, or don’t – depending on semantics, that would be an extreme
exercise in frustration.
There are
several graphical glitches, including times when you will have a large black
flat panel block out some of the environment. It is temporary though and moving
generally removes it. The animation, at times, is silly at best, but there are
inexplicable stalls in movement – during combat – that will result in death.
When you die, you drop a small amount of the coins you are carrying. There are
some players who will not do a thing to help a player fighting higher-level
mobs, instead waiting until they die to grab their dropped coin. Equipment also
degrades, and needs to be repaired.
The rest of
the graphics are a mixed bag. While the environments are very well done, the
player characters are not. Armor, in places, looks like it is layered on the
wire mesh, not part of the clothing, with gaps in some places. The audio mostly
consists of a repetitive musical score. The rest of the sounds, a.k.a. combat,
are sub-average for the genre.
As silly as
this may sound, this game was much simpler and player friendly during a beta
phase a year ago.
The biggest
frustration of all, though, would be that underneath all the problems, the bugs,
the changing on the fly that Farlan/NPCube seems to be doing (after not ironing
out the ideas during the long development phase), and the bad in-game mechanics,
there is a decent game hoping to get out. Will it? Farlan has a tough road
ahead. As a personal fan of the MMO genre and one that really enjoys the
diversity and play styles of MMOs in general, it is sad to say but this is one
MMO that cannot be recommended at this time.
This may be
a game worth revisiting down the road, once the developers have had time to
stabilize the client and address some of the design flaws. But for not, it is a
pass.
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Gameplay:
5.0
The game controls
fight each other, highlighting a game that is not very intuitive, nor well
designed. Holding the right mouse button will allow a player to change the
direction in which their avatar is looking – unless they are in motion and then
that button doesn’t work at all. Lag/delay in commands will also result in
standing there and receiving numerous blows from an enemy while doing nothing.
The interface is not very well designed. And then there is the matter of not
being able to attack a mob because it is “too far away” when you happen to be
standing inside its influence circle.
Graphics:
5.5
The world may be
huge, but this game’s graphics offer up a blend of what could be considered fine
and elements that harkens back to the state of graphics 4-5 years ago. The
combat animations are redundant and borderline silly in some regards (depending
on the race, it seems), as in the way a fighter uses a dagger.
Sound:
4.8
The music is
average, the battle sounds are not good, and the environmental sounds keep
cutting in and out.
Difficulty: Med/Hard
Understanding the
concepts of the game will take time. There will be frustration and little help
from nearby players. Of course, having a manual that actually detailed all the
commands would be helpful, but that isn’t available.
Concept:
6.0
The game has some
decent ideas but they are buried under the grind, and poor conceptual ideas that
seem determined to battle players and embroil them in a struggle rather than
welcome them.
Multiplayer: 6.0
It is hard to get
help from others when all are mired in the same struggle. Give props to those
who are in the game and do try to help. Shame on those higher-level players who
stand by and watch mobs five levels above newbies run through the entry spawn
ground and eat new players without lifting a finger to help. Shame on the devs
for creating an environment where that happens. The only reason the category
score is this high is in recognition of the very few who do try to answer
questions.
Overall:
5.3
Innovative
gameplay elements are not enough to save a game that is fraught with concept
flaws, lag and bugs and unfinished elements. There is grind in every MMO, and
that is not the problem with this title. The grind here is not that well hidden
but even if willing to put up with the grind, it is another matter in putting up
with game mechanics that do not work well together. This is not a game for new
MMO players, and only the faithful will be able to work through the frustration
to get to other game elements. Perhaps the game may survive long enough to
overcome the flaws. But given that there has been a long development time, this
game is well past the stage when allowances are made for an incomplete game.
