Black Prophecy
- Thread starter Juheniqus
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It looks good. Did a bit of snooping around the site and I'm downloading the client as we speak. Thanks for letting me know about this!
Currently there's only two servers, British and German I think. I personally like the storyline so far, but you never know if they have bothered making a good one after the starting zone. also, is anyone getting massive latency in public areas? or is it just me..
Been playing is for a couple of days: Prologue's got cutscenes, voice acting and a plot, then it just seems to stop, lol. Turns into a grindfest, as far as I can see - think Freelancer crossed with WoW, a more accurate link than with EVE.
Unlike Freelancer, there's no exploration and no space infrastructure - no jumpgates or anything, no choke points to hold, no way to intercept enemies, so it's never going to be as grand and theoretically cool as EVE. Each ship can insta-warp to map with a 5 second or so warm-up, but those locations are severely limited at the start to just your starting base and three PvP zones. Again, none of the scope and scale of any other space game I've ever played, which is a serious shame.
I mentioned the plot at the start, and whilst it's nice for them to have made some effort, it blatantly rail-roads you into clumsily being a stooge for both factions;
"Terrorists are using this Genide transport as a drugs ship, go out there and blow it up!" ... "Oh, it has Genide fighters defending it? Eh, they're probably stolen"
*sees Genide portraits and com chatter* -_-U
There's no option to dismiss those missions as the prologue is basically you fucking up your life so much that you need to be re-borne as one of the other two races. It's a damn shitty way of doing it if you ask me as someone with even a modicum of brain function will notice just how retarded what you're doing is. /prologue rant
On voice acting, most of it is budget and stiffly delivered, making me skirt the 'at least they tried' and 'would have been better without' line. After the prologue, most of the vocal work is done by a synthesizer. Interesting, give the ships computer a synthesized voice, all cool, right? Well, would be if they'd decided whether they wanted an AI or some person to be talking to you when they wrote the lines. Having your computer say, "dammit, they've beaten us to it!" in a monotonous synthetic voice is just jarringly weird. If they'd used the synthesized voice to have it clearly as your ships computer giving you missions and update that would have been great, but the human language and informal phrasing really spoil the effect. /voice acting rant
The gameplay's pretty fun - if you're thinking freelancer you've got the controls nailed. The interesting things come from the weapons and tactics: weapons are energy, kinetic and explosive. Energy work through shields then armour, kinetics do little shield damage but do bypass shields, losing some power in the process. Explosives just ignore shields completely and blow shit up
(yeah, I went explosives ^_^)
Tactics mix things up with moves such as your basic boost and break, but also funky still like U-turns, barrel rolls and loops. U-turn is fantastically useful, btw These tactics are executed with direction key combos, which are a nice way to make combat more than Freelancer's circle-breaking to try and get on your opponents tail.
The trouble is, you can only successfully specialise in one weapon type, and since there's only around 4 variants within each weapon category you've sampled most of the game's variation within the first couple of levels. I'm still waiting on access to two other types of missile though, so I've got that to look forward to at least.
Lag is an issue, with many shots not registering in PvP, but it's still Beta I guess.
My overall thoughts: A game with so much potential as a next-gen MMO Freelancer squandered on a limited universe with few options outside of mission grinding. I'll play for a while yet, seeing what other areas open up past the level 10 mark, but initial impressions are distinctly average.
Unlike Freelancer, there's no exploration and no space infrastructure - no jumpgates or anything, no choke points to hold, no way to intercept enemies, so it's never going to be as grand and theoretically cool as EVE. Each ship can insta-warp to map with a 5 second or so warm-up, but those locations are severely limited at the start to just your starting base and three PvP zones. Again, none of the scope and scale of any other space game I've ever played, which is a serious shame.
I mentioned the plot at the start, and whilst it's nice for them to have made some effort, it blatantly rail-roads you into clumsily being a stooge for both factions;
"Terrorists are using this Genide transport as a drugs ship, go out there and blow it up!" ... "Oh, it has Genide fighters defending it? Eh, they're probably stolen"
*sees Genide portraits and com chatter* -_-U
There's no option to dismiss those missions as the prologue is basically you fucking up your life so much that you need to be re-borne as one of the other two races. It's a damn shitty way of doing it if you ask me as someone with even a modicum of brain function will notice just how retarded what you're doing is. /prologue rant
On voice acting, most of it is budget and stiffly delivered, making me skirt the 'at least they tried' and 'would have been better without' line. After the prologue, most of the vocal work is done by a synthesizer. Interesting, give the ships computer a synthesized voice, all cool, right? Well, would be if they'd decided whether they wanted an AI or some person to be talking to you when they wrote the lines. Having your computer say, "dammit, they've beaten us to it!" in a monotonous synthetic voice is just jarringly weird. If they'd used the synthesized voice to have it clearly as your ships computer giving you missions and update that would have been great, but the human language and informal phrasing really spoil the effect. /voice acting rant
The gameplay's pretty fun - if you're thinking freelancer you've got the controls nailed. The interesting things come from the weapons and tactics: weapons are energy, kinetic and explosive. Energy work through shields then armour, kinetics do little shield damage but do bypass shields, losing some power in the process. Explosives just ignore shields completely and blow shit up
(yeah, I went explosives ^_^)Tactics mix things up with moves such as your basic boost and break, but also funky still like U-turns, barrel rolls and loops. U-turn is fantastically useful, btw
These tactics are executed with direction key combos, which are a nice way to make combat more than Freelancer's circle-breaking to try and get on your opponents tail.The trouble is, you can only successfully specialise in one weapon type, and since there's only around 4 variants within each weapon category you've sampled most of the game's variation within the first couple of levels. I'm still waiting on access to two other types of missile though, so I've got that to look forward to at least.
Lag is an issue, with many shots not registering in PvP, but it's still Beta I guess.
My overall thoughts: A game with so much potential as a next-gen MMO Freelancer squandered on a limited universe with few options outside of mission grinding. I'll play for a while yet, seeing what other areas open up past the level 10 mark, but initial impressions are distinctly average.