Dark and Light

» see darkandlight.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

npcube.com is still being served. It opens with a welcome, explains that in August of 2002 five talented and ambitious people joined together to form NP Cube, names three industry veterans among them, and then lists what the company has in the pipeline. Under the heading for current products in development there is one entry: Dark And Light. That page has advertised a forthcoming game for eighteen years. The game it describes was playable for two.

The studio was on Reunion Island, a French department in the Indian Ocean about nine thousand kilometers from Paris, which is already an unusual address for a massively multiplayer world. The pitch was scale. Dark and Light advertised 39,000 square kilometers of continuous terrain, roughly the size of the Netherlands, at a time when the going standard for an MMO world was a few dozen square kilometers of hand-built zones. It went on sale on 5 June 2006 as a subscription game, published by Farlan Entertainment.

The scale was real and the game around it was not finished. GameZone gave it 5.3 out of 10. The complaints were the ordinary ones for a project that ran out of money before it ran out of ambition: bugs, graphics well behind the competition, systems that did not work as described. An enormous empty world is a harder problem than a small full one, and nobody had solved it in 2006.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the lawsuit ~

On 27 April 2007, a company called VWORLD brought an action against NPCube and Farlan in France. The claim was software counterfeiting, failure to credit, unfair competition and parasitism, which is a phrase French commercial law uses for free-riding on somebody else's work.

NPCube's answer that September was to sue back, for unfair competition and damage to its reputation, asking 710,000 euros. Its defense rested on a technology called SCAPER which it said it had built in-house. The problem with the defense was that SCAPER had not been used in Dark and Light at all, so it settled nothing, and the court found that NPCube had in fact used VWORLD content it had never acquired. On 13 March 2008 the counter-suit was dismissed and NPCube was ordered to pay 50,000 euros.

Fifty thousand euros does not kill a healthy studio. It was enough for this one, which had a two-year-old game reviewing at 5.3 and a subscriber count it never published.

~ no announcement ~

The servers have been offline since 2008 and there was never an official announcement of any kind, and that absence is why this gets a grave instead of a footnote. Subscription games normally get a goodbye, a final event, a date circulated weeks ahead so people can log in and stand around. What Dark and Light's remaining players got instead was a login that stopped completing, on some day in 2008 that nobody wrote down.

~ the brand sale ~

Snail Games bought the rights in 2008, the same year the lights went out, and did nothing visible with them for nine years. In 2017 it put a game called Dark and Light into early access: a fantasy survival sandbox on a different engine, made by a different company in a different hemisphere, sharing nothing with the 2006 release except five letters and a word.

That is a brand purchase, not a continuation, and it is why this grave is filed as a death rather than a hiatus. The thing that shipped in June 2006 cannot be bought, cannot be installed and cannot be connected to. Its studio's homepage, meanwhile, is still up, still dated to 2002, still describing it as forthcoming. darkandlight.com serves a 114-byte redirect to a parking lander.

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