Interview with Stephane Quilichini from Dark and Light

WarCry: First of all, can you tell us what you do at NP Cube, and how long you've been with the company? Do you imagine that this is what you would have been doing, if you were looking at your life 10 years ago?

Laurent Paret: My name is Laurent Paret and I'm a Co-Founder of NP Cube. As I have more a technical background, I work on the MAFATE engine with the other senior designers. The team is very talented and has brought its cutting edge experience to Dark and Light and other projects we handle. Being here in Reunion Island making an MMORPG is very exciting and fun. Each project brings a new experience and this project is very demanding. Ten years ago I was not personally thinking of doing such a game. But today, I can say that it's a sort of destiny. And working with hardcore gamers who designed Dark and Light is very different from the other projects I've worked on. So, let me introduce you to Stephane Quilichini who is one of the Game Designers of Dark and Light and he will answer your questions in detail.

WarCry: Is NP Cube publishing Dark and Light independently, or do you have a partner for in-store distribution? Will you even be distributing in stores, or will DnL be a download title only?

Stephane: NP Cube is developing DnL with Farlan which has the copyright for the game and does the publishing of the game at the moment, but the door is open to any distribution proposal for DnL.

WarCry: Dark and Light is another MMOG in development to be released in a time frame that literally hundreds of other MMOG titles are to be released. Like a measure of popularity in High School, you've probably got a set of features that you feel makes Dark and Light stand out from the pack. Can you tell us what these might be, and how they're better or at least different from the other MMOG titles a user can play?

Stephane: To start with, DnL is the first MMORPG game to have only one world for the all of the gamers. NP Cube has developed a technology enabling us to generate a huge diversified world. According to the initial testing, simply wandering in the world is a joy. The game design enables the gamers to find each other quite easily despite the huge size of the world (40 000kmē). DnL is also the first game to create a social progression bar as important as the combat one.

WarCry: Why Fantasy RPG? Even if you boast that your game is much better than anything now or in the near future, don't you have to fight with the entrenched fantasy RPG MMOGs (of which, you have the biggest and most successful MMOGs lists) in order to gain any sort of audience? Does DnL provide any draw to players that aren't already playing online?

Stephane: Of course we will be on the same hardcore gamer's market segment as our opposition, but we do hope to create our own market segment in the moderate gamers and the women demographics. The game design was not conceived as just a levelling game, but one where every one can find pleasures, no matter his level in the game. You can progress in the world without having to kill monsters or fight. We feel that all of that should attract other online types of gamers.

WarCry: What are the artists and designers inspirations for the game? Are we to expect something like what we may have seen in a movie or read in a book, or does DnL describe an entirely new fantasy world -- something none of us is expecting?

Stephane: DnL takes its roots in the rich and varied heroic fantasy literature. It is a voluntary choice as we wanted our gamers not to relearn a mythology, to enable us to explore its great topics. As gamers ourselves, the games on the market had, to our eyes, very poor mechanisms, very far from table-top role playing! We are trying to push the envelope a bit further with DnL.

WarCry: How long has Dark and Light been in development? When do you expect the title will be released in the wild?

Stephane: DnL has been development for more than three years, and we hope to have is released 2004 2nd Quarter.

WarCry: Are you going to have a (by community standards, at least) expected close beta or open beta period prior to launch?

Stephane: For the moment our beta has been off line, for about six months; online is due to be on the 15th November 2003. An open beta is scheduled for one month before release.

WarCry: Dark and Light advertises having a seamless world bigger than anything that we've played before. This has a positive and negative aspect, as I'm sure you know: If you don't have the user base to fill the world, the concept of MMOG flies right out of the window, as players will rarely come into contact with each other. What do you have in mind to keep users engaged in a multiplayer setting, rather than going off on their own all of the time, and essentially playing for the privilege of interacting with a single player RPG?

Stephane: Of course the challenge for an immense world is that it should permit the gamers to meet easily. To make things easier, our huge world is linked by how all the gamers will find each other. The game design is made to work with 10 000 gamers as well as with 100 000 gamers or more. In DnL you will have some hot spots with easy access where gamers can meet easily for a combat as well as for socializing. There will also be huge areas more or less difficult to reach for the gamer, or groups of gamers, in quest of discovering new scenery, flora or fauna.

WarCry: The graphics feature set for Dark and Light throws around a lot of big numbers. Can you explain to us how this will impact play? Will we, as players, be able to see complicated spell effects, landscapes stretching off into the distance, or grotesqueries that stun our imagination and tighten the grip on our swords?

Stephane: P4 1.8 GHz or equivalent, 512 Mo of RAM, GeForce 4 or equivalent. Of course a better configuration will give the best of textures and effects. We do not have any restrictions in the upper end of technology for now: The more you have the better it will perform.

Laurent Paret: Thanks very much for giving us the opportunity to give you information on Dark and Light. I hope this will help you out to better understand what the project is and how ambitious it is. Talk to you soon.