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.

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.