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Dark & Light Q&A #2 with Gilles Zedde
We sit down for the second in our series of bi-weekly Q&As with the team behind Dark & Light. This week we discuss a range of issues, and include two exclusive screenshots of the game!
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| MMORPG.com: |
In my previous interview you mentioned that players could technically place their house anywhere in the world, but you also said that players can only buy land in predetermined places. Can you expound on this a little more and clarify what you mean a bit?
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Gilles Zedde: |
We determined areas around every city and in other locations, where players can buy some land and build their own house. Regarding their management skill, they will also be able to work in a field, and even to run production units.
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| MMORPG.com: |
With the world being as large as it is, are you worried about players “congregating” around just one or two areas of the game? Every game I’ve ever played it seems like one town ends up being the “center of the world” for all intents and purposes. Is there a system of any kind to prevent this from happening in Dark and Light?
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Gilles Zedde: |
There will be more than 400 safe villages in Ganareth, from the tiny hamlet with 2 or 3 buildings, to villages with 40 houses. Every city has its own characteristics, and its own economic loop depends on the resources available nearby. If the city gets convoys from its exploitations regularly, traders and crafters will offer products that are specific to the region. Moreover, every city has a limited number of plots of land players can exploit. Thanks to this system, players should spread on the whole territory.
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| MMORPG.com: |
You’ve mentioned several times that the game will start off with “NPC Masters” and “NPC Guilds” and such but you plan for it to gradually switch to a player-run system. Does this mean that once you feel the players have “advanced” the game enough the NPC Masters and such will be taken out of the game and players will have to fully rely on each other?
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Gilles Zedde: |
This is what we aim at doing, but there will always be NPC vendors in Al Drifa to keep a minimal service. A management skill will allow you to own additional vendors, as well as a predetermined number of vendor slots for each city. However, it is very risky to let a vendor alone out of the city.
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| MMORPG.com: |
Is there a possibility that there will be a TRUE rare item system in place in Dark and Light? Meaning in most games they call an item rare, but after the game has been out a couple months there’s really nothing rare about the item anymore. Players camp spawn points for hours on end farming the item and dropping them into the economy. Personally I’d like to see a system in place where there was a limit on the number of instances of an item could exist in the world at the same time. Basically if the limit is X and there are X copies of that item in the world it gets removed from the loot tables until a copy degrades or is broken etc.
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Gilles Zedde: |
We will have truly rare items. These items will be made by players, and will have unique characteristics. We will always control the probabilities for a player to get exceptional components in order to craft these rare items. This is simply because our items are crafted from refined resources, and there can also be rare components with a higher or lower quality. Rarity combined with quality is what makes items exceptional. It will be very hard to craft something using rare components that have an excellent quality!
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| MMORPG.com: |
If you could only ever talk about or promote ONE feature or aspect of the game, which would it be?
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Gilles Zedde: |
Let’s talk about how the cities of Ganareth are provided with resources. Every city is a safe place with its own economic flux that depends solely on convoys that come from neighboring exploitations. These convoys are either sent automatically, or sent by players according to market trends. The route to the city can be dangerous, and the convoys can be attacked. These convoys provide traders and crafters in the city with the goods they need, and most of all, convoys give more income to players who own some land attached to the city. Stopping the convoys makes the city lose money, and a siege can have very bad consequences on the efficiency of production units. This is why people managing the city always have to make sure they protect their convoys like they should.
Besieging an important city in a barony can also create problems for the local Duke, since he indirectly gets an income from the production units on his territory. Without this money income he needs in order to run his business properly, he will not be able to passively defend his fortress, and will be very vulnerable…
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Thank you for taking the time! We look forward to another set in two weeks, and new images every Monday.
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