Detailed Beta Overview

      I've played through this game since mid November, have hit the level cap with a character and leveled up several others. I've blasted players, crafted, remodeled my ship numerous times, explored every corner of every sector in the game and watched as a beta once rife with client bugs was transformed into smooth playing experience it is today. However, I have yet to see any detailed coverage of the game explaining whether or not this game is worth playing, so I decided to make a pseudo-review of my own. Here's my take on Black Prophecy, currently in closed beta:

Gameplay:

      The player character in Black Prophecy is a futuristic space pilot that aligns himself with one of two fictional humanoid races- the Tyi and the Genides. These factions are constantly at war and battle in a variety of non-instanced environments known as “systems”. Players have the opportunity to warp to these systems and fight both AI ships and players of opposing factions. Some systems contain space stations, which disable weapons, but allow the player to purchase new ship parts and select from a variety of missions. These missions are instanced and take place in systems not normally available to jump to. As players progress in missions, they will level up their pilot and gain skill points which allow them to equip their ship with more powerful pieces of equipment. In addition, they unlock new systems at certain level milestones as well as higher tier sets of missions. An introductory section called the Prologue is available to help new players learn the ropes, but due to some blatant issues in the mission structure most people opt to skip it entirely. I strongly advise skipping this section yourself if you don't want to encounter a great deal of frustration early on.

      Ships are modified through equipment slots called “modules”, which allow players to swap out armor and weapon parts at stations. All ship statistics, including armor value, are a sum of the values listed on this equipment. Higher level equipment is essentially the same as lower level equipment, but scaled up in statistics such as range, rate of fire, and overall damage. There are a limited number of modules available for each ship and every player has exactly the same module layout. This may be disappointing for players looking to pilot a ship class other than a fighter, but you still have a decent amount of customization options to work with. Ships bounce off of asteroids and other debris floating around in systems, but are wholly affected by friendly fire. Though unrealistic, the arcade shooter physics allow players to focus entirely on daredevil combat.

Ship parts can be swapped out 

      Strategy in battles generally consist of simply trying to land as many shots as possible on the enemy while evading attacks in return. There are no buffs, no special abilities, and no “rock paper scissors” balancing mechanics to give any one ship layout a particular advantage over another. However, the limited skill point distribution forces players to specialize in certain armor groups or weapons classes to develop an effective pilot. The primary armor classes are currently Cockpit, Hull, and Shields. Though destruction of a ship's hull and shields will cripple its ability to defend itself, destroying a ship's cockpit is required to blow it up entirely. Weapon classes primarily consist of Mechanical and Energy. Mechanical weapons are specialized to damage hulls and cockpits while energy weapons do extra damage against shields. A third weapon class exists called Explosives which does not do extra damage against either armor type. The Engine class controls how fast and maneuverable your ship is. Finally, the Tactics class gives you access to special maneuvers which you can use as you build “adrenaline” during battle. Carefully choosing skill points is crucial to surviving higher level missions.

      For players opting for PvP, battle options exist in both mission and free mode. These generally follow exactly the same rules as PvE combat, but the victorious player does not get any sort of item or EXP reward. As in PvE, upon death players instantly respawn in another random location in the system with full health. The only negative effect of death is a slight and cheaply repairable degradation in the quality of equipment. It's this total lack of incentives to participate in PvP (and the fact that players can avoid it completely by hiding near stations) which makes the system somewhat unpopular and disorganized among players. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone on the other faction looking for a battle, let alone anyone near your level. That being said, co-op missions against the AI can be a very quick and effective way to gain a great deal of valuable loot and EXP, so you should still expect plenty of interaction with other players.

      Much ado has been made about the infuriatingly difficult AI in the game, but most of challenge level is a result of the cheap tricks AI ships use to tempt players into making obvious mistakes which leaves them open to brutal counterattacks. All AI ships are noticeably more agile than player ships and have access to an unlimited amount of adrenaline points, meaning that they will endlessly spam U-turns, boosts and serpentine maneuvers when being targeted in battle. The AI will, without fail, instantly dodge all missile shots and splash effect weapons fired at them from anything but point blank range. This is made more gratuitous by the fact that they can avoid shots coming from behind, which would not be possible for players even if they had superhuman reaction speeds. One player on the forums reported chasing down a lone AI target for 10 minutes before finally abandoning the mission in frustration. Another experience you will inevitably have as a player when battling an AI squadron is discovering that the enemy you are targeting refuses to fight back and will do nothing but dodge and run away the while the rest of the squadron takes potshots from a distance. As soon as you change targets, the new target AI will take the “evasion” role while old target starts attacking with the rest of of the squad. The only surefire counter to AI tactics is to sit in one place, spam healing drones and to allow the AI to charge you as you fire back at whatever enemy is closest. While this makes missions much easier to complete it feels more like a shooting gallery than the epic dogfights you will find in games like Rogue Squadron or Freelancer.

Missions often pit you against ridiculous odds

      Another of the main issues facing the combat system is the broken weapon balance. Many of the weapons such as the Railgun and Grenade Launcher are entirely ineffective in combat, and only three or four weapon types have any chance of competing in serious PvP battles. One of these “top tier” weapons is the Seeker Cannon, a weapon with similar range and projectile speed as basic weapons like the Pulse Cannon but which deals exponentially more damage. On the other hand, the entire Explosions class is a waste of skill points, as the terrible tracking ability of weapons like Carnivore Missiles only manages to amplify the frustration caused by their miniscule damage output. Listed damage output for weapons is sometimes very inaccurate. A charged Fusion Gun blast, for example, can instantly kill a ship with ten times the durability of the hull damage listed on the weapon description. The result these weapon imbalances is that PvP setups are extremely predictable and that new players who aren't already “in the know” suffer from a severe disadvantage.

Don't let the listed damage values fool you...

      In general, Black Prophecy has a great foundation for a serious arcade-like combat system. Ship customization is cool and allows players to radically change their weapon setup with little effort. Unfortunately, the limited content available and enormous balancing issues severely limits the amount of replay value available. The strategy required at level 30 is almost identical to the experience at level 6, just with scaled up damage and health values. The experience climb to this point is brutal, which is even more puzzling considering how the level cap is supposedly going to be moved to 100 upon the game's release. If you are willing to invest a great deal of time grinding missions and can work around the weapon limitations, you will probably find the gameplay here to fun and addicting.

Graphics:

      The environment generally looks gorgeous, especially on the highest texture settings. Stations feature a great amount of intricate architecture which, while serving little gameplay purpose, can be a lot of fun to explore. One of my favorites is the Babylon Health Club, a night club turned space station with a rather provocative neon light display. Black Prophecy uses some truly impressive lighting tricks to make objects flow seamlessly into the environment. It's often quite difficult to tell which asteroids or pieces of scrap metal can physically interact with your ship and which are simply decorative background debris. Backgrounds themselves are somewhat of a mixed bag, ranging from detailed, animated planets to gaseous hazes which can sometimes interfere with the aiming reticule. You can easily avoid systems you don't like, however, so this is unlikely to present much of a problem.

Some weapons feature stunning lighting effects

      One of the most touted features in Black Prophecy is how modules actively change the appearance of your ship as you swap equipment. Everything from weapons to cockpits to wings has a noticeable effect on the structure of your ship in-game. This is made more impressive by the weapon firing and armor destruction animations, which function independently from the rest of each vessel. Basic equipment appearance is heavily limited by your chosen faction, which means players are still going to be obviously identifiable as a Tyi or Genide regardless of the equipment they use. Weapon particles are decent but often underwhelming, and explosions are too small to be impressive at anything but point blank range. The ship design in general is very slick with smooth textures, but suffer from a lack of variety.

      These minor visuals issues aside, the graphics in Black Prophecy still blow away most other MMOs in comparison. This game would not be out of place on a third generation console. Unfortunately, you need a fairly powerful computer (a GTX 260 and a dual core CPU would be fine) to run the game at the highest settings consistently. Even at medium settings the game looks decent, but look to run with the highest settings possible if you want the most enjoyable gameplay experience.

Awesome character portraits, too bad nobody else can see them

Sound:

      The soundtrack consists of a fusion of metallic reverberations and symphonic themes. The quality of the audio is top notch and does a fantastic job of enhancing the atmosphere of the environments. Tracks change dynamically- the background music will seamlessly shift from “safe” to “danger” to “battle” themes and back again based on your position in battle. This music could easily be featured in any of the big budget MMOs on the market today. My only complaint is that some of the best music in the game is exclusively in systems that are totally irrelevant to mission objectives. One example is the “space cathedral” chorus of Apo Kata, a short but memorable theme which most players will never hear due to the blatant lack of incentives to explore beyond each faction's starter zone at the lower levels. I've recorded a clip of the zone so you can listen to the great track for yourself (youtube clip).

      The voice acting has undergone a great deal of changes since the start of the closed beta, but remains a contentious issue with much of the community. AI enemies constantly give taunts and cries which are heard by any player in range of an active battle. While the enemy voice acting is generally decent, having enemies repeatedly scream “Frak!” as they get killed gets annoying fast. The narrator in the introduction sounds like he's putting on a fake British accent and is clearly disinterested in the script. The voice actors for station missions and in dealerships are much better, but their voice clips are brief and predictable. The voiced story mission sections in the Prologue are probably the best of the bunch. They have likable personalities and continue to communicate with you even during battles. It's a shame you won't experience any of it after you've moved on to the main section of the game.

Presentation:

      I have explored just about everything Black Prophecy has to offer and still only have a vague idea who the Genides or Tyi are or why they are fighting in the first place. This is not to say that an epic storyline is necessary in a twitch shooter like this but with so few presentational elements the developers might as well label the sides Team Red and Team Blue and dump the ridiculous faction specific taunts and AI character portraits. While the Prologue does feature a cohesive plot, it is so difficult to complete the initial story missions that skipping them entirely is generally a better option. What little explanation you get in the Prologue mainly centers around the Sapiens, a side race which vanishes entirely from the main game until near the maximum level. There are descriptions for the mission terminal quests, but they are simplistic at best and feel totally disjointed with the battles in the non-instanced game world (similar to the pointless Guildleve descriptions in Final Fantasy XIV). The closest thing to a “campaign” you will find are the special Station missions that are available in very limited quantities from each new station system you unlock. These are arguably the best solo experiences you will have in the game and even feature a few small mission chains.

Interface:

      Controlling the ship is generally a simplistic affair- standard WASD keys control thrusters and strafing, the mouse rotates the ship, and the mouse button fires your weapons. Weapons groups can be set with the number keys for precision shooting. Virtually all menus and chat options are inaccessible until you use the space bar to cut off access to ship controls and enter a menu selection mode. While this prevents accidental menu clicking during battles, it can be frustrating to have to constantly stop the ship when trying to loot enemies or access the inventory.

      There are plenty of customization options for those dissatisfied with the default control scheme. Joystick and even Xbox 360 controller options exist, which reportedly work very well and helps with aiming during intense dogfights. In addition, all key bindings can be remapped and mouse threshold and sensitivity can be tweaked to your liking. You will probably have to tinker with this as the aiming feels very loose and finicky on the default settings. Bugs remain with certain menu and login screens not loading, but this is often a temporary issue that appears mainly due to heavy server load. I expect that the regular game patches will improve these issues in the future.

You're going to be seeing this screen a lot

Community:

      Gamigo has created a detailed web forum for player feedback at http://blackprophecy.gamigo.com/forum/. I find their openness towards debate over game suggestions to be helpful, and there is generally a polite atmosphere in discussions which can be severely . However, there is very little feedback from the moderators concerning bugs and game issues and patch descriptions are extremely vague. One example of this is my continuing struggle to access my original level 30 character which was inexplicably locked out of the game. I have sent multiple PMs to moderators and made countless posts about the issue and have yet to receive any sort of response. That being said, the moderators appear aware of the general bugs affecting the game and have a good track record in improving client/server stability. There isn't any areas for clan discussion on the board, but you can create your own clan stations in-game. A lot of improvement could be done in this area, starting with private messaging systems for clans and clan ranking systems.

Clan sectors exist, but are rarely populated

Conclusion:

      The limited content and server issues prevent me from automatically recommending Black Prophecy as a "must play" MMO, but it's definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of the sci-fi or space shooter genres. The game has a fantastic core engine and unparalleled visuals, and if the same level of care and precision that was used in the Prologue was used in faction zones this game would be a classic. Hopefully Gamingo will manage to fix the lingering gameplay flaws by the end of the Open Beta.