Dark and Light

Well thought I would give this a try now its free to play...

Anyway downloaded the client from their FTP server.. was a realyl fast connection so downloaded the hole thing in less than an hour..

Ok great I thought.. so installed the client.. ran a feww updated.. well onyl 300mb worth of updates  whitch is quite suprising considering the game was released some time ago.. thought it would be much more than that.. maybe they keep the main client download updated or somthing...

After it updated the client restarted went through the file check again.. oopps whats this..

Cant run the update as the following is running

"dark and light"

WTF.. tried to close down dark and light and  got a not responding message.. terminated the process in task manager.. this new update now ran fine.. started the client up again.. same message.. so i done the same thing, but this time the update would not run.

I jumped onto the dark and light forums to look for some help.. a few people where having this issue but there where no replys on how to fix this .. I thought i would give it one more go instead when the message came up this time i jsut cancelled the patch.. games started up and went to log in.. oopps user name and password wrong.. wtf I just made the account...

so created a new account.. blah blah..

Finally got to the character creation screen..

took ages to load it up and when it did .. well the graphics where nothing special , created a half orc and jumped in...

When it finally loaded up I did notice that the lnadscape looked pritty big and it actually looked quite good.. but sadly the character models where nto the best :(..

Anyway started to move around and from the start i noticed how clunky the movement was, has to be one of the worst movement systems in a mmorpg.. you use the keys to move but when you try and do anything there is this big clunky animation then you jump a bit and then start moving.. you can you the mouse for point and click movement but thats just as bad..

Ok so took a look at the interface next, the tool bars seemed to be layed out really well everything was pritty accessable tell you the truth so nothing wrong here :), can see there was a lot of thought put into this..

at this point i was getting lots of tips about the game poping up whitch where really quite helpful, telling me how to get back to my bind point if i got stuck or lost..

Talked to the first guy with a ! above his head.. told me some stuff abotu the land then said to go speak with another guy to learn how to fight.. So i walked down to the nxt guy.. he told me to kill 5 badgers  bloody badgers..

So jumped into the woods and attempted to find a badger.. well after searching around for a bit i managed to find 1... woot so I attacked him, sadly i did little damage and the badger did tons and then done some kind of finishing move on me and i was dead... respawned and tried again.. this time he died with no issues.. ok onto the nxt badger. searched for another few mins until i came accross another one.. got him down to about 0 hp and then he ran off and regenerated in about 3 seconds when running way lol..

Combat animations where really clunky.. and look as if the game should be in alpha tests. infact i think the game should be..

Ok I thought hell I wil ltry and give this a go so onto the next mission..

Had to talk to some guy about killing rats cos he was scared of them.. when i got to the guy he turned out to be this big troll.. wtf a troll scared of rats. ooo now i had to kill 5 rats.. in the end i gave up and just chatted to a few people.. they where all there jsut filling in time really until conan or warhammer came out hehe..

Its a shame really this game has some nice features, some sort of player housing system.. what looks to be a good PVP system but I dont think i can get past the unfinished feel of the game.. hell its been out for quite somw time now.. its a big shame this game could have been so much.. I may try and carry on with it who knows after all its free...

Also just to note this game is so laggy.. I mean my system aint too bad AMD dual core, geforce 8800 320mb, 2gb ram, loads of HDD space but yet i still had to turn the graphics right down :(

I would say give the game a go if you dont mind playing really early betas then cool :) you might have some fun... hell the game has dragons in it and you can ride them.. tho thy do look a bit odd.. really small legs and massive heads..

I think a rating of about 4-5 is right for this...

Instead of making another "First Impressions" thread I decided to reuse this one.

1. The engine runs like crap. At first I assumed it was just network lag doing it, but even the offline demo runs badly. Even at the lowest possible detail levels with everything allegedly performance-optimised. Speaking of which, WHY IS THE LOWEST POSSIBLE RESOLUTION 1024x768? Or, more to the point, WHY DOES THE LAUNCHER OVERRIDE THE INI SETTINGS?

2. Even just moving around is a frustrating ordeal, not unlike integral calculus in Chinese. There's no way to toggle mouselook (that I've been able to find) and moving around in any other way besides holding down rclick is functionally impossible. Collision detection is somewhere between so-so and poor. Apparently one needs to take classes to be able to properly turn one's avatar with enough precision to avoid obstacles. Speaking of turning one's avatar, the game fights you for it. On a hill, the game will force the avatar to turn downhill in certain conditions. I don't care that it forces you to MOVE downhill (gravity being what it is), just that it hijacks my camera and forces me to fight it so that I can see where the F I'm going when it does that.

3. The interface tutorial gives you advice that is wrong. Obviously it's a remnant of a previous development milestone and has never been updated. The in-game tutorial itself seems to work okay, the one involving talking to NPCs and such, but the little tutorial window that tells you what to do in your windows and such is what's obsolete. Either the advice it gives is contradictory, or more often just totally unhelpful while not necessarily being wrong.

4. The in-game map leaves a lot to be desired. Basically I found this forum while looking for a decent map. The lack of a good map, per se, is not really a big issue to me, since it sort of adds to the immersion of having to explore, however it is also very difficult to keep track of where you are, and where you've been. I don't know if it's possible to add labels to the in-game map with custom descriptions, but it REALLY damn well should be. With a cap at around, oh, maybe ten thousand. At least.

5. Remapping the controls is an exercise in frustration. There's no way that I can determine to just UNMAP a key aside from finding the ini and changing the entry to NOKEY manually. The in-game keymap doesn't alert you when a key is double mapped, and I haven't been able to find a way to restore the default mappings, so alter at your extreme risk.

6. There is essentially no such thing as a context menu in this game. It REALLY suffers for the lack of them.

7. Having alignments that are set in stone that the player can't change after character creation is a grossly stupid idea. As are classes of no return. Nothing dooms an MMO game faster than forcing a player to roll a new character and start back at level 1 every time they want to try something new. The only reason to do it that way is because the devs are fully aware that the classes are not cross-balanced, and that it would amount to an exploit to let someone level in one class and then redistribute to another. Or, in other words, experience points are not worth the same amount of value across classes. They SHOULD be. They deny the player freedom, in order to cover up their own incompetence.

8. The game crashes at the end of EVERY play session. This is not an exaggeration. As soon as you click to verify that you're exiting the game, it crashes. It does not know HOW to close gracefully. Even if you play the offline demo it does this.

So, I would like to give this game two ratings, if I could.

The game world itself is stunning, as far as it goes. This should get a 20/10. From what I've been reading here and elsewhere, I understand that the person who designed it, along with his algorithm, have long since left the dev team and is currently suing his former coworkers for the rights to it. I don't really know anything about it, but props to him for the good coding anyway.

The actual playability of the game, being able to interact in the game world in whatever way you want, is horribly crippled. I don't know whether to be judicious and give it a 2/10 or say what I really feel and give it a -50/10. The visual interface itself is mostly fine, except for the above mentioned lack of context menus and the difficulty in remapping hotkeys, which are themselves game-breaking as far as I'm concerned.

I've been following the progress of this game very sporadically since 2004, and I've never had any intention of paying a monthly fee for it. Rule number one of playing beta tests is to NEVER give your financial information to a startup company just because they impress you with their game hype. Because they might be some true Francophone retards on the other side of Africa who have never heard of "unconscionable contracts".

I also find it interesting how much of what's good in the game seems to have been blatantly plagiarized from Shadowbane, which coincidentally was just released when this went into development. Imagine that!

PS - I still don't understand why this is called a 'released' game, when it is clearly still early beta quality. I've never seen it on any software store shelves, or on any wesbite I've ever visited aside from their own website and ones like this one that list millions of defunct beta tests.

Also, a note to anyone who has ever played Ultima 9.

Remember how moving sidways was faster than moving forwards? This game does it too.

In fact, it shares a lot of things with Ultima 9, including the near-unplayability, and horrifying movement and camera controls. It really makes you wonder...

I find the game in that beta state as well, but it is refreshing for me. To many games leave me feeling to polished and finished. Theis game has more to be done to it and I like to think that the developers are doing something, to increase performance. 

The thing that grabs me most and makes all the little things disappear is the sense of atmosphere and environment . The sounds in thebackground are really well done as well as a few peices of music.

Like a stated in my previous post, this is more of a beta tester game then a finished product, and hopefully more people will be interested in maybe trying to rememdty what went terribly wrong with things that can improve the game, the community, as well as the trust that Farlan has lost with the players. The first step has been taken, making the game f2p and having a cash shop later....

My system :

Vista Home

amd 4200 x2 64

2 gigs of ram

7300LE

DSL

And the game runs with zero server lag.

Oh yes, the music is beautiful, and I can't place where I've heard it before, in some other place. It sounds a lot like Dead Can Dance, or what Hans Zimmer does generally. The Gladiator soundtrack, for example.

I could not play this game after the first night, i could not bring myself to play it :(

Most of the engine lag is apparently due to the shader. Turning it off makes it run a lot better, even at stupidly high resolutions and full texture quality.

After you get used to the controls, it's doable, but it still fights you. Right click should really be a toggle instead of a hold-it-down.

I'm now level 16 and it's pretty friggin boring. Getting to this point was completely without challenge, and now there's like nothing interesting to do. The cities are laid out badly, and there's really no point to the buildings besides decoration, since they are totally without functional value. Everything is so spread out that it's inconvenient to get anywhere, even with the fast travel balloons and dragons and such (why do they charge a toll?).

The teleporter system seems stupid to me. Why should you have to have previously visited a tower in order to be able to teleport to it? You're not casting a spell, so you, personally, shouldn't need to know how to find the tower on foot. The tower is what's sending you around, and presumably it already knows where all the other towers are.

What's the point of a Big McLargeHuge game world when it's essentially identical everywhere? I mapped out the Dark starting barony and went to Al Drifa for a while, and even to the Light side of the map (died there), and it feels the same no matter where you go. I feel like I've already pretty much played this game out.

Also, apparently undead can outrun dodos. I lost two while running past the hill with the named skeleton lord on it. He friggin chases me down and kills my mount. I lost a third dodo on the Light side of the map, in some mash, surrounded by ghost-like things which the HUD assured me were no challenge (grey). Like four of them went aggro and started chasing me, killed the dodo, then me. Turns out that Darks going into Light territory lose all their mana and stamina until they leave! Or maybe it was just that particular barony.

 Interesting note: Most of the animals I saw in the water as I was traveling around were land animals. Apparently they don't know how to prevent land animals from roaming to the bottom of the sea.

Finally, it's VERY obvious that all the dialog text in the game was originally written in French. A LOT of it doesn't make any sense at all in English. Especially the attempts at translating idioms.

Interesting note: Most of the animals I saw in the water as I was traveling around were land animals. Apparently they don't know how to prevent land animals from roaming to the bottom of the sea.

well thats bloody easy.. i have messed around with a few mmorpg engines and you usually just map out a zone where they can go.. problem with that is htat when you pull a mob it stops at the edge of its territory.. but there are ways to program exceptions...

its a shame a real shame the idea behid d&l is really good..