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The team answers several more beta (SoG) questions
Settlers of Ganareth has been billed as a prequel to Dark & Light's full launch later this year. The pre-order beta has live events and other content, but Farlan and NPCube said in last week's Q&A that it is not supposed to be confused with a completed product. This week we get more answers from them about their recent semi-launch and how it has gone so far.
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| MMORPG.com: |
Some have rumbled about frame-rate and how intensive Dark and Light is on their computer systems. What are you doing to improve this for release?
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The Dark & Light Team: |
The dev team is now working on improving our 3D engine. Thanks to its optimizations, frame rate won’t be impacted, for instance, by objects or character density. Screen display will also be enhanced thanks to technical improvements such as shadow management, self shadowing, bump mapping, and GLSL.*
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| MMORPG.com: |
The combat system has taken a lot of heat. What are your thoughts on it as it exists today and how it is intended to exist?
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The Dark & Light Team: |
What has been most criticized is the lack of dynamics and the slowness of the system. As for our 3D engine, it is being enhanced to get a faster and more dynamic combat system. Sounds will also be integrated soon.
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| MMORPG.com: |
Sometimes hype can be a game’s worst enemy. Do you think fans expected too much from Settlers of Ganareth?
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The Dark & Light Team: |
There are always people who expect more than what you can offer. We’d like to remind everyone that SoG has been offered for free in order to start exploring Ganareth and to begin conquering territories. SoG is not Dark and Light, and it was never our plan to offer all DnL gameplays.
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| MMORPG.com: |
What part of beta so far has been the most positive?
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The Dark & Light Team: |
We learned from our beta players that it is impossible to force a player to play the way you want! Each player has his own way of starting, playing, and evolving in the game. It’s critical to plan numerous game opportunities so as to reach as many players requirements as possible. Another thing that has been really positive: two of our beta testers joined our dev team.
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| MMORPG.com: |
Can you tell us about your live events being run by Alchemic Dream. How have they gone so far?
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The Dark & Light Team: |
Events have been organised since the beginning of SoG.
They can happen in various ways: if most of them are organised by AD teams, using prepared scenarios and animated by dedicated game managers who lead exiting and innovative adventures, game managers naturally contributes to any animation or event ingame, according to the current situation.
The game managers team is organised in order to be available 24/24Hours a day in five languages so that any player can take part to an event or an animation and enter deeper into Ganareth intrigues. Indeed, a very deep lore is being developped, in collaboration with Gary Gygax.
Following each player action is key to keep organising animations in line with the current life ingame . For instance, even if players settled in withdrawn areas, they could discover that surrounding pets where not that welcoming and quickly meant their dissatisfaction to the new Settlers ! Strange things are woven in the world and Ganareth inhabitants observe with more or less benevolence the installation of these strange adventurers.
A Gazette will be soon online to report Ganareth events and be sure anybody can know how are evolving Ganareth adventures.
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You can comment on this article in two ways. First, on their hype meter and second, in our comment thread.
Editor's Note (02/02/08): Dark and Light's development team contacted us on February 2nd to inform us that there was an error in the original answer. They had originally mentioned "displacement mapping", but this is not a planned addition to their engine. That line has been removed.
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