Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Black Gold Online: Closed Beta Kicks Off
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Snail Games has announced the commencement of the first round of closed beta testing for Black Gold Online. Over the course of the closed beta, more and more players will be invited in to help the development team. Interested players are invited to head to the official site to sign up.
"Following our successful launch of Age of Wushu in 2013, Black Gold Online arrives as an important next step for our emergence in the North American market," said Jim Tsai, Vice President of Snail Games USA. "Our Closed Alpha period saw incredible player participation and useful feedback, which we've taken into consideration as the game continues progression. Closed Beta opens the floodgates even more for player eligibility, which means a more complete game experience for players to test and for our development team to evaluate as we look toward the game's summer launch."
Head to the Black Gold site for more information.
Comments
Same here, but there is no hype at all for this game which is fairly unsettling.
some people on there forums were saying there is a TROJAN linked to the download?? can anyone confirm if this is true and if so has this been fixed?
...or are they just trolling? would like to try this game out.
I downloaded it was fine for me... Doing a virus scan now
Edit: Scan came back clean.
same here, downloaded fine and no alerts
No signature, I don't have a pen
good for you it always says to me the file is corrupted, after teh 4th try I give up
There is a good reason for that. Google "Snail games review". Snail has to be one of the worst hosts I have seen for not having really any customer service (taking 2-3 weeks to reply on monetary issues), advertising as a non-P2W game when it clearly is an advantage to spend (you can even BUY skills in the cash shop for AoW), and the lack of game support. The game launched with only 50% localization and half the quests or random encounter things being broken.
Check out the BBB score as well. http://www.bbb.org/sanjose/business-reviews/video-games-dealers/snail-games-usa-in-los-angeles-ca-100110912
Sad to say, but Black Gold (Not to be confused with Black Desert, which is a different game and company) was dead before it started. With a different host, it might have survived.
Just how many mmos that they've hosted that you've played? If one is one too many then please don't mind if I reserve judgement for myself, especially if it's going to be F2P. More so if none of us have never played the game before and have no knowledge on how the monetary system will play out with their cash shop. I maybe an advocate of P2P mmos, but even I can reserve judgement until I've actually played this particular game.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Making my toon now
They must have a deal with NC soft/AION because the female hair styles are identical (as in exact)
Let me know how it plays when you get a chance.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
I dont think were under nda, I can post quick vid if u like
Pretty poor first impressions for me. Character creation is ok, plenty of presets and good customization options, although the hair and skin color pickers are really bad. It has a hue slider, saturation, and lightness but all of the colors feel very washed out. I thought maybe the hair I selected just doesn't get dyed well but all of them seem to be the same. It was practically impossible to get any good red for the hair.
Character models themselves aren't horrible but they do look a bit dated. Textures on armor and equipment in general are pretty good and I like the design for the steampunk faction.
The nice thing is that there are 2 factions, 4 races (3 really, there are "humans" for both factions), and I believe 8 classes with 2-3 unique ones depending on race/faction. So there is plenty of choice which I like. How different they end up being I have no idea but some of them seem quite interesting.
Intro cinematics are pretty bad, I don't know if it's intentional but it looks grainy and just very low quality in general. Lots of weird and jarring (and poor) camera work combined with pretty poor animation imo. And the environment textures (and most textures) in the cinematics are surprisingly bad compared to in-game ones. During the tutorial it felt like there was a lot of latency, I am located in NA. Playing a mage and couldn't tell if my spells were hitting because of the delay with numbers popping up was about 3 seconds. Aside from that when I was fighting a "boss" in the tutorial that had tons of HP it abruptly ended (it was nowhere near dead, neither was I) and replayed a cinematic that was played a few moments before which again, was very odd. Perhaps a bug. Then it just loaded into the normal world. I have no idea if there was more to the tutorial.
The UI is passable and pretty standard. The nice thing is that you can collapse everything including the chat window so that's nice. There are some buttons that you can't move and can't hide so THAT'S kind of annoying (event button, sign in rewards, level rewards, and online time rewards). It feels a bit clunky, you can scroll down automatically when quest dialogue appears, you have to click on the window then scroll down, that's annoying. There is a quest auto-tracker which is nice for lazy people like me. It works reasonably well but for whatever reason you can't click on things in the UI to autopath to it, you have to open the quest and click it in there, also annoying.
Combat seems to be a hybrid between tab and "action." As a mage you can miss spells but it's pretty generous, you really have to aim far off to miss. You can also double tap a direction to dodge. It's not too bad but so far nothing impressive. I'm not sure if these are bugs but in the first dungeon monsters seem to appear and disappear like the draw distance is insanely close. With that said it's nice that they throw you in a dungeon so soon even if it's incredibly basic and short.
I'll come back later after I get some real gameplay in but so far it's very "meh" experience. There is A LOT of refining and cleaning up to do before I would consider this something to put out to the general public.
crapy game is crappy.
cheap china pvp/pve/quest grinder nr 496762
awful animations,ugly UI.
Would not play again.
I think you just defined Closed Beta. Then again, that could also describe many of the past MMO launches
I know, but people need to know the state the game is in before they consider downloading it. And for the exact reason you stated many MMOs do launch in this state. Once MMOs hit closed/open beta a lot of the times that is indicative of how it will be at launch because the developers/publisher don't or can't change anything. This is mostly the case with MMOs ported over and published by an English-speaking company. They have no real power to change anything even if they wanted to.
I'm hoping they will refine and polish up all of these issues and not just fix minor bugs then launch it like most seem to do after CB and OB.
Definitely agree with you and appreciate your initial impressions. I've been on the fence whether to download (as luck would have it, I just got a Beta Key myself directly from the BGO Facebook page). It seems to have some interesting mechanics...many appear to be similar things from Age of Wushu. My hope is that the overall game has a better chance at stability because of Snail being able to leverage AoW base.
I'll probably dl tomorrow and dive in for a peek
Please visit my youtube channel for some H1Z1/DayZ casual roleplay videos!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrQoK5VZlwBBzpsksmXtjMQ
Well... Since I had nothing else to play this evening I gave it a try and holy crap... this game would've been worth a minutes attention maybe 10 to 15 years ago. The combat is utter garbage, the cinematics are a complete joke even by todays asian grinding game standards.
Bloody hell, why would a publisher even try to take this stuff to a non asian market. We all know how even seriously bad games can miraculously make a profit in asian markets but NA or EU? This abomination will be shut down 3 months after launch, if it even gets that far. The beta player numbers will probably and hopefully be enough to kill this pipe dream.
tldr: it's complete and utter garbage