My Loot, Your Tears

Back during the "CCP versus Players" era of a few months ago, I went looking for possible alternatives to EVE. One of them was Black Prophecy. I never got around to trying it, and the icon has sat on my desktop mocking me. This past weekend I fired it up and have now put in a sold 12+ hours.

I'll do a comparison with EVE later on in this post. What is Black Prophecy? At it's core, Black Prophecy is a real-time space combat simulator with overlapping PvE and PvP content. Expect to run missions for one of the two universe factions in the same area that people will also be running their missions - or trying to shoot you - or you shooting them. One of the missions actually requires you to go and shoot down a number of other players. Outside of combat you can expect to outfit your ship with various parts, build new parts, and socialize with other players. Black Prophecy's model is a free-to-play with premium content for purchase; fairly common these days.

The graphic content is excellent, the music is fantastic, and combat is riveting enough to get me yelling at my screen. Adding to this is the really well done introduction story line, which will take you anywhere from hours to days(!) to finish. I was swept up in the story and enjoyed every moment of it from manning the guns on the colony ship to the massive space battle versus an unknown alien intruder. The storyline missions are interwoven with well done cut sequences.

Black Prophecy has some rough edges: While live in Europe it is still in open beta process for US players. The loading times between sectors is noticeable, as is the initial game loading time. The in-game help files are largely absent; you'll get "database not found" for most of them. Thankfully the in-game encyclopedia and tutorial system are working and reasonably well done. The game consumes a very large amount of memory; at 1680x1050 with high quality settings I top out at over 1.2 GB - make sure you've got a solid system.

Now with the inevitable EVE comparisons. BP combat is full 3D control in real time, dog-fighting style. If you played X-Wing games you'll be at home here. Shooting is entirely manual targeting (some guided missiles are a rare exception). You have one ship and one ship only, and you can change various parts: cockpit, wings, guns, shields, missiles. Everything has mass, and more mass means a slower and less agile ship. You can go for a heavy ship with lots of armor, shields and firepower; or an agile dogfighter without shields; or something in between. Similar to EVE, gun types offer you energy weapons, projectile weapons, and explosives. There is no ship perma-death; if you blow up the condition of your items will decrease, and you'll get a debuff to your combat skills for a few minutes. You do create a real person character, very similar to EVE's new character creator. This is purely for player uniqueness. There is docking, but no walking-in-stations as of yet.

Character advancement is done with XP for missions/combat with a leveling system. Each level provides points to spend on skills, which allow you to use higher-quality ship modules, or for tactics, which allow special ship maneuvers such as snap-roll, split-S and emergency speed boost. Wrecks from missions can be looted to provide new items, which can be sold off or used; and also provide materials used to build new items - or mods to items - via blueprints. Travel in the BP universe is done by jumping between sectors; unlike EVE all sectors are equidistant from each other in terms of time taken to travel. Each sector is like a very large EVE grid - open over long distances and filled with everything PvE and PvP going on there. Player organization is via a clan system, and clans can compete for control over sectors. Gaining control is similar to factional warfare in EVE - hold a sector for long enough and you 'own' it.

I recommend Black Prophecy. Play it for the excellent graphics, exciting combat, engaging story line and epic feel. I'm unsure of how it plays at the end-game, but as long as it is free I'll see what it's like when I get there.

This entry was posted on December 19, 2011 at 6:05 PM by khalia and is filed under Not Really EVE.