Dark and Light has one of the best character creators in the genre, far surpassing even the impressive array of options available in Conan Exiles and Atlas.
Players are free to customise almost every aspect of their character, including race, with players being able to choose to play as Elves, Dwarves or Humans by default, while the editor offers enough leeway for players to role-play as Orcs, Hobbits and more.
I would easily put the Dark and Light character creator on par with any early 2010s Korean MMORPG, which makes sense when you consider that Dark and Light (2017) began life as an MMORPG (Dark and Light (2006)).
Image credit Dark and Light - Published by Snail Games USA and developed by Snail Games USA.
Races.
Players are free to choose from one of 3 starting races, each with its own unique building style; I am partially fond of how good the elf buildings look and would have loved to see how the system could have been expanded upon, introducing additional races and aesthetics such as Orc, Goblin and Hobbit.
Dark and Light (2006).
Dark and Light started life as an MMORPG whose servers were shut down in 2008 without informing the players, leaving them to find out the hard way that the game they had purchased was gone and wouldn’t be returning in any form for almost a decade.
Ark Survival Evolved.
Dark and Light(2017) is based upon a fork of Ark Survival Evolved from early 2016, which could explain why it suffered from performance-related issues that Ark Survival Evolved had long addressed by the time Dark and Light entered early access.
Image credit Dark and Light - Published by Snail Games USA and developed by Snail Games USA.
Rivals.
Dark and Light and Citadel: Forged with Fire entered early access within seven days of each other back in July 2017, in a move many have deemed as “a rush to market”; unfortunately, both titles would struggle to attract an audience, resulting in many in the community believing them to have been abandoned by their developers.
Visuals.
Dark and Light looked stunning upon release in 2017 and still looks amazing in 2021; unfortunately, the price of this visual fidelity came at the cost of optimisation, and Dark and Light is unable to run at 1080p/fps at maxed settings even four years after release on all but the most powerful setups.
Image credit Dark and Light - Published by Snail Games USA and developed by Snail Games USA.
Dark and Light is a survival video game developed and published by Snail Games USA, it was released on 20 July 2017 and retails for $17.99.
Dark and Light is available exclusively on PC.
Dark And Light is no longer in active development, and the developers have moved on to other projects.
As of April 2024, around 400 people play Dark and Light on a fairly regular basis.
Dark and Light is essentially dead, and finding an active server is near impossible, and may require playing on a server with very high latency.
Dark And Light offers the following matchmaking options:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Dark And Light is unrated and contains:
I can only recommend Dark and Light to those who enjoy playing alone or who have a group of friends and the means to run their own server; for everyone else, there are far more accessible, popular and well-supported games to invest your time and money into, such as Ark Survival Evolved, Conan Exiles and to a much lesser extent Atlas, which continues to enjoy a thriving unofficial community despite its unimpressive player count.
