Dark & Light: It's not ALL about the 360

The 360 hasn't quite taken over my whole gaming life yet! I'm a fan of MMORPGs, and the PC is still the platform of choice for that genre.

Of the MMORPG's due out in the next half year or so, I'm most interested in Dark & Light, a game being created by a small French company. They have some interesting and ambitious design ideas such as having only one large instance of their world that can host up to 100,000 people at once. (At least, that's their goal.) In addition the geographic area itself will be enormous, and they are looking to create very rich alternatives to combat, with lots of things to do for crafters, traders, etc.. The game will also provide plenty of opportunities for PVP and faction vs. faction activities.

Another new approach they're taking is to offer a slowly-increasing subset of the final game's feature set starting December 8th that will be open to the public. It is pretty much an open beta, but they're branding it 'Settlers of Ganareth', and seem to be putting alot of thought into making it a fun gaming experience on its own right, without requiring people to go through the usual beta formalities.

They're also letting people pre-purchase a limited number of keys to Dark & Light that will give all sorts of in-game perks. At the time of this post lots of people were trying to get in to purchase those, so their site may be slow right now. (Essentially it's the beta for their billing procedures!) But, you do not have to do this to participate in SoG starting on December 8th, so you may just want to wait a couple days before trying to check things out.