[Space Sim News]Black Prophecy Open Beta

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

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

Entirely correct. Sorry Gisteron, it is poor use of punctuation and grammar on my part :oops:
I mean no trade/explore in Black Prophecy, unlike Freelancer/X-games.
Own X2/X3/Terran and used to be fairly regular at Egosoft even trying to help out when things went badly at release

okay, sorry… sorta confused today a bit or stuff… must be something in the air lol.

I’ve been playing this since the closed beta started. The released version of the game I have to say is much better than the state it was in during the beta.

There’s still quite alot about the game that really anoys the life out of me though. Like the fact you can just be minding your own business trying to compleate one of the side quests and all of a sudden a level 20 enemy player will fly up behind you and one shot your tiny level 6 ship.

The compleate lack of instructions is also a bit of a pain, it can leave you wondering what things do more often than not.

The controls have been greatly improved, only thing missing for me is engine kill, the rest I can live with.

The gameplay is actually alot better than I expected, you do get a sense of scale to the game even though you are still restricted to flying within a set combat zone.

With that said I still do feal the game will get really old really fast for alot of people, more so the people who prefair interaction than PvP. The game leaves no room for anyone wishing anything other than a purley PvP based game, unless you want to run the missions from the mission board all the time. these missions get repeated too often through out the level for my likeing.

All I can say is that it’s a fun game, it’s not Freelancer though. And the funny thing is, that’s what the game is being compared to. I know that for sure, you just have to watch the global chat for a while and see if you can go for an hour without someone mentioning it.

I must be blind, can’t find system requirements anywhere on the site.
I remember that my gfx card wasn’t min spec when I downloaded the beta 7 months ago, but without a systems requirement specification…

Found a post on their forum Chips.

From BP BETA Manual. But will still apply:

Minimum specs
This beta version of Black Prophecy is not completely optimized yet. As a result, in order to run the game
properly, your PC will require at least:
CPU Intel Core2 Duo 2Ghz / AMD Athlon X2 2GHz or above
GPU Geforce 7900 series / Radeon 3800 or above at the bare minimum
Geforce 8 series / Radeon 4850 or above recommended
RAM At least 2 GB, 3 or more recommended
OS Windows XP, Vista or 7

It still lets you run it if you don’t meet the requirements, it just displays a warning message before you enter the game.

I meet all of the requirements, though I have 1.5GB RAM instead of >2GB. And trust me, my graphics performance when playing the game is less than pleasant.

I know that for sure, you just have to watch the global chat for a while and see if you can go for an hour without someone mentioning it.

How about 2 minutes? I actually wintessed a debate over whether the Eagle was better than the Titan… In the Black Prophecy global chat.

Yyyyeah. Exactly.

Q_Q…my poor PC can not handle the game…I suppose, damn wirth my 1GB RAM and 8kb L2 cache memory Q_Q

I guess I’m downloading this for nothing then? I can add more RAM to give me a full 2 gigs but, if it implies 3 is best then, it will more than likely need it. I’ve played these games before and not just Space Sims and they do drag my game without the right amount of RAM.

I think I’ll just finish the dl and package it. I’m not going to bother any further and if the game is as bad as these reviews and this has been a great waste of time to me.

Hope anyone here that does play it, has what’s needed and enjoys it?

Well the whole space sim genre is an endangered species or dead like the good old adventures of the 90s. Since FL and Freespace there was not a single good space sim. RIP space sims.

Thanks Timmy, I may dl to try when I have spare bandwidth and nothing better to do

I’m doing much the same myself, got the first two chunks over the last week, but have no sense of urgency to try it. At last found someone who’s taken the time to give a little review. http://aylives.com/blog/2011/03/black-prophecy-review/

Well, I have to be honest, I’m really enjoying playing this. It’s really quite similar in style to FL but at it’s highest settings looks so much better. Hope it’s true potential can be realised and the teething problems ironed out quickly.