I was looking for news that Elsewhere Entertainment might still be working on the sequel to Outcast, but they’ve been bought up by 10Tacle Studios, which led me to discover this.
Black Prophecy is being made by Reakktor, who are the guys who made Neocron, which I liked. This, however, is a different kind of game. It’s more like EVE, with ships instead of characters, and massive space battles between clans fighting for dominance. There’s no mention of economics, though, and that could be a big plus or minus depending on your point of view. Anyway, I don’t know anything else about it; I just thought all the EVE fans here might be interested, if they don’t already know.
Question: the verbage mentions that battles can be fought between up to 300 players, which would seem to indicate that the server limit is 300 people. Is that normal for an MMOG? I was under the impression that most MMOG’s can accommodate several thousand per server (obviously, EVE can).
Neocron was a fun game, but Reakktor kept doing things exactly backwards from how they should have if they actually understood MMO player mentality. Things like having a “plot” concerning some NPCs doing various things and occasionally there would be scripted events that some players might be in the right place at the right time for. 95% of the people online during one of these would have no idea what the hell was going on, just that it was a chance to shoot some stuff that normally wouldn’t be there. And they also turned too much of the game into something that required grinding your way to the top before you could NPC effectively. The “Neocron 2” expansion seems to have been generally disliked, whenever I take a look at the various NC boards there area always people reminiscing about how the game was better (and there was at least one NC1 server that stayed up and non-updated for quite a while after NC2’s release, so it wasn’t just rose-tinted memories).
The outpost conquest was never more than a shadow of what it should have been. Eve does that right. Well, better, anyway.
Whenever players would find ways to do unexpected things Reakktor would try to clamp down on it and make people play the way the game they wanted - sort of a Vision thing but less visibly overbearing. The best example of this I can think of was con training - the only normal way to do it is to go out and get hit by monsters a lot. In other words, you get rewarded for playing the game badly - because taking damage unnecessarily is bad; it costs downtime and money to fix, and you’d have to do this over and over and it’s tremendously boring and anyway it often simply wasn’t necessary - you could use cover or long range fire or psi defenses to really cut down on damage. But that meant con wouldn’t get trained. So people found a workaround: sit in one’s apartment and fire rockets (AoE weapons) at your feet. The impact would damage the player, who would heal up and do it again, and again. Often this would be done in conjunction with several other people while sitting in a guild apartment and just chatting. It was a workaround for a bad design decision and useful thing to do while socializing - it helped socialization. But it wasn’t how Reakktor wanted people playing the game, so they announced that that was now a bannable offense. Training con would have to be done by playing the game deliberately badly.
That’s when I cancelled. Forcing me to play the game in an unfun way rather than rethinking their own mistakes is where I draw the line.
I haven’t actually read whatever it is you read (link would be nice), but 300 people fighting in one place is quite alot. Fleet battles in EVE do get bigger than that at times, but it’s incredibly laggy.
If they mean 300 people on the entire server though, then that’s not very impressive no.
I remenber games like Captain Blood with a lot of politics “planet”<->“ship”.
3D space games have devolved into World War I dogfighting.
Seems that game dev’s can figure out any other use of the Universe (literal).
Even if you are for some reason limited to combat, … Why this type of games don’t include a planetary invasion, the type and size of “Battlefront: Los Angeles”?
I could imagine a gameplay similar to WAR keeps battles, where a group of players decide to invade a planet, anhiliting the defenses and deploying millions of soldiers of infantry.
EvE has pretty decent science-fiction lore. But other than that, is a very dry game.
I would play a space mmo where you can be something similar to the Reavers (of firefly), but there are infinite options. The universe has not limits.
