[Space Sim News]Black Prophecy Open Beta

As in you don’t have to purchase the game at all?

What else could “free to play” possibly mean?

Well like it says free to play, after you’ve bought it, like guild wars smart arse!

Yes, it is free to download/“purchase” as well.

Free to download, free to play. I also have to say it’s not unfinished by a longshot, I’ve seen far buggier games than this.

I hope people playing it are purchasing it.

I’m bored of seeing generic FPS ver 5 coming out, yet if sales of alternative game types are poor, they’ll keep cranking the usual cash cows instead

I’m gonna download it and give it a shot, but I don’t get the whole business of a game that’s free to play and doesn’t have to be purchased either.

I got the guild wars thing, buy the game then it’s free to play online, keep the expansions coming to make more money etc.

How the hell are Gamigo supposed to make money from this? Anything that sounds to good to be true usually is. What’s the deal, in game advertising? Got to purchase equipment to get anywhere in the game like Entropia Universe or something?

I’ve just had a scout around on the forums and now I understand how they are going to pull this off.

Basically they are going to make you wait every time you want to apply a mod to something unless you pay for accelerators in their store. Accelerators reduce the time taken to apply mods, boosters can also be bought to make you level up quicker otherwise levelling will be a serious grind.

It seems that applying a mod will take 25mins, during which time you can’t do anything but wait, so you might as well go and take a shower or watch tv. The mod might also fail, which would be really annoying after waiting 25mins.

Each piece of equipment, say an engine for example, has slots to which you can apply mods to make it better. Some of these slots will be locked unless you pay to unlock them.

Obviously there will also be premium equipment that can be purchased which will kick ass.

So I think that without spending money you will be waiting around a lot, that’s always painful in any game, I hate loading bars nevermind 25mins of waiting. I also think, unless you spend money to unlock slots on your equipment modules, you’re likely to get your ass handed to you on a plate in pvp. No doubt pve will be okay, but pvp is likely to leave you at a serious disadvantage without splashing out.

I’ll download it and take a look at it, but I have a feeling this going to piss me off. I’ve never paid to play any game, not sure I ever want to. Guild wars had a good model, pay once and play on forever, this grind or pay model of BP is like entropia and LOTR and in just the same way they do, this is going to suck big time I’m sure.

True end true. I play Shaiya for 3 years end is Free to Play but if u rely wona be good gota pay money to be on top. I spended more then 700 $ just to be somewhat on top but i know ppl that spended more the 5k on that game end they ar untochable so if u dont pay well everyone will kik u but so i gues this will be no diferend

and if you pay too much, you’re “untouchable” and then, no challenge… No Pain, No Gain…

wait, you don’t even have to pay for the base game? I was sure you had to buy it…how did I get confused - maybe I read about the buy-able content instead but I don’t think I did

Let us know how slug-fest it is…I don’t mind a lil grind as long as game play is great, but if it is a case whereby you are so disadvantaged by not paying that it becomes unplayable (aka purposefully being hunted by those that pay as they are self righteous about the game, and want to force non-paying players to leave the game - fan boy behaviour in other words) then it’ll be quite a disappointment

I’ve been invited in the US closed beta, so I’ll be checking this out over the weekend!

I tried out closed beta for a while. Let me just say it gets old fast. The flight control felt reeeeally bogged down, to the point it was near impossible to hit jack, even stationary targets.
This had to do with 3 things (1 being similar to FL): 1) when not in 1st person view, your aim is always off. 2) equipping weapons with different speed / range / etc will skew your aim as well.
The latter makes having good custom drop weapons and modding them entirely useless. 3) Movement felt seriously like fighting with the interface. To be fair, a little of that is due to ship mechanics like turn rate and mass, but it feels much different than FL’s implementation -in a bad way.

Game-play; well I solo most times so I don’t need to wait for people or schedule my in-game time around others. If you go this route, you will be mostly out of luck and bored as hell within 2 weeks. Story-line stuff is OK the first run through, but is mingled with open pvp areas, so if you’re solo / casual and new, you’re likely to be toast on those missions.

Honestly, it didn’t feel like a very immersive game. Grind to get better equipment, then grind some more, no real point.

And waiting 20 frigging minutes for your mod to apply to an item is entirely unnecessary. You shouldn’t need to go afk and watch a damned movie WHILE you play a game. Add to that, there is of course the possibility of failing after that 20 minute wait.

In short, it is no replacement for FL, not by a long shot. If you want eye candy for a bit, it looks great. But it isn’t a next gen FL replacement; you can’t explore planets, you can’t interact while docked (actually, there aren’t even any NPC models, it’s just a static picture of the person with text), there aren’t any missions out of the ship, and there isn’t even an effective trade system.

Confirms what I was thinking really I guess, good feedback man.

In my opinion it also got boring quite fast, although I didn’t have too much problems with the guns or the flight controls, I used 3 plasma flamethrowers and a lightning gun for the shields, and only used parts with low mass and no shield, that makes handling a bit better. But you have a rather low range then of course, and you have problems with multiple enemies.

But you all have to admit that the character creation is very nice, the only problem is that you never see anything of him in the game!

Meanwhile I have to revise my opinion.

The prolouge is quite fine story-wise, but after that I didn’t experienced major storyline events.

With the time goes along, you feel like there doesn’t seem to be new things.
You can explore, but the sectors are given and you don’t find any specific things there, sure, mission objectives and stations, but nothing like anomalies or wrecks you can plunder like in Freelancer.
There is also no trading system.

The crafting is pretty useless with the waiting time atm.

At first glance it seems to be that the missions are very difference, but in short it is a simple “destroy X enemies or all enemies in the area”, “protect a transport” etc.
However, the missions vary each time you start them, there do even different events occur on the same mission if you do it again.

There are also still a lot of bugs in the game, for instance, you can’t complete certain missions and the weapon and equipment balance is quite…inbalanced, at least a bit.

I know that this sounds pretty negative, but if you have a computer capable of running the game you surely want to try it out. It is it worth.

No trading at all? I hope that’s revised for the future…otherwise it’s, well, basically a PvP game in space

So no trade, explore a la Freelancer and Egosoft’s X-Games.

wait… egosofts x-games are no trading games? wtf! dynamic economy on the very best level ever released in a space sim and you call it “no-trading”? fascinating…

Re-read the sentence Gisteron. I think it doesn’t mean what you think it means