A friend of mine spent the three day weekend playing a lot of the Dark And Light beta, the upcoming MMO whose primary feature is that it’s big (as previously discussed). It’s currently targetting a late April release. His response was overall favorable, although in his rundown of what happened to him during the play session, I found this quote hilarious:

[paraphrased]This guy took me for a ride on his dragon. He took me 3 miles in the air, then dropped me and told me to aim for a lake.

I will note that the screenshots really do focus on making a huge world look great – some of them look spectacular. The big question will be, of course, Time To Content – how much time players spend consuming content rather than walking/running/flying/teleporting to get to it.

I’m rooting for Dark and Light because they are, I believe, the first Western MMO company that will ship a game using the BigWorld technology (they seem to be using the server-side tech only, not the client side). As anyone who has contemplated buying or selling middleware will tell you, it’s hard to justify buying middleware that’s not proven in a shipped product somewhere. You just don’t know where the warts are. Even if DnL is a moderate success, it should dramatically increase BigWorld’s clout as a player in the space.