So how is Dark and Light?

That's the common question and according to the DnL Forum it's the best MMORPG and launch ever and at the same time the worst thing some have ever seen and utterly doomed to fail.

So what's my take on it?
It's what I expected it to be. It's not better than I hoped, it's not as worse as I feared and what some tend to forget, it's not Star Wars Galaxies and especially not the NGE.

I don't know SWG from launch but to my knowledge, day one in SWG was not day one, since the server broke down during start up. So compared to that DnL launch was pretty okay, they had their break down already with the SoG launch and it looks like, at least stability and network wise, they did their home work.

The game runs smooth on my current computer and I had only one forced crash since somehow I got stuch in the map mode with my keyboard not reacting.

So how does it look compared to SoG.

The environment engine goes up one level again, was the immersion in SoG already fantastic with the tremendos view you had, SoG is like DnL in minimal settings. There is grass, trees, stuff all ove the place and the landscape together with the upped details is rich and immersive. Picture yourself in one of those landscape shots in LoTR, just you and now lift off with a glider flying around just like the helicopter in those shots and you get the idea - breath taking.

The characters and their animation are ... plain. They lack variety in character customization during creationg and everbody gets the same outfit at start making everybody looking like clones. Now looking back at SoG this was pretty much the same, I don't see any big improvemens, but also recalling SoG the diversity in looks came with the outfit. There are 9 different slots for different armor parts and I expect when more armos is going to be looted or better crafted the characters start to look different. At least in SoG the variety in the end was pretty good.
Some complain about the crappy animations and the lack of emotes and compared to the emots of SWG well DnL is not even playing in the same league but as far as I know, they weren't there at launch. This is something they can updated over time, more important is ...

Game mechanics: You have 7 attributes which all more or less are tied to your skills, you have for different paths, each of them branching off into at least two different classes and again each class again with at least two specialisations.
As far as I know you can specialice in crafting an invidiual item. You gain social XP, crafting XP and naturally fighting XP. You can meddle with in different paths, going for fighter, hunter, healer and spellcaster at once or you can specialize.
You can re distribute your skills.
Now are they any good?
I don't know yet. It's rich and challenging to find what you like. I don't want to say its complex just for the sake of it but it offers a wide variety of possible playstyles, which I for sure want to try.

PVP - something a lot of people focus very much on. Well PvP in DnL is not PvP just for the sake of it and interestingly it is very tied to socializing, if you want to give your death and victories a meaning. You occupy land by owning forts for which you need social XP, you loose these in PvP battles or to conquer other lands in destroying others.
This will need more time - and IMHO not just a few weeks - to show its beauty or faults but it's certainly more interesting than ganking in bestine.

Quests. As important to me a detailed terrain landscape is to immerse myself into the world, quests are important to me to immerse my character into the history and live of a MMORPG. Now I haven't found a single quest yet, which is pretty disappointing ... but I have the Alchemic Dream Team working on SoG with their live events. I am pretty confident that they will introduce some not to say a lot of quests and that the live events have a very interesting style in happening. I just say GM RPing NPC and events with an open outcome.
Multiple language live events each supporting each other in sub task to a common goal.
In SoG even dark and light working together - or not - in open PvP areas, so those events are not "static".
Also add that players and their guild where able to write their own quests for their guild integrating their guilds into the history of DnL - an option my guild and partially myself failed to take. So there will be quests and I'm willing to wait.
It's not that I ever have been a lot questing in SWG anyway. I was there for the player made content.

The community - well this is, at least for me, the biggest let down. The official forum only consists of fanboys, flamers, trolls and "I hate DnL". There is nothing going on besides that. Nothing. But I partially brought my own community with me, so there might be a chance that at least in game you meet some decent people.

With that said, so much from me to Dark and Light, I'll gonna play it for the two pioneer months and probadly go for a master subscription.

See you in Ganareth!