I've been fighting off space/flight sim cravings of late. A year or two ago, when I was diving back into Crimson Skies, I replaced my dead flightstick (with a Thrustmaster T.1600M, if you're curious; it's pretty shocking how drastically the variety and selection has shrunk in the past decade or so) of old to play the PC Crimson Skies game.
Recently, though, I've been getting some yearnings for the good old days. As a little background, some of my formative gaming years (Jr/Sr High, for the most part) were spent in sordid love affairs with flight sims. I cut my teeth on my favorite flight sim of all time (and this might just be the nostalgia/newness to the genre talking, but I suspect it probably would hold up), Knights of the Sky. After that, I played a heck of a lot of Commanche, X-Wing, TIE Fighter (best Lucasarts space sim ever, lack of multiplayer be damned), XvT, X-Wing Alliance, every Wing Commander game in the series, Privateer, and Freelancer. I never could get Starlancer to run on any of the PCs I owned within a reasonable window of its release, much to my disappointment (as Freelancer was the casual mouse-friendly game of the pair, which didn't interest me much).
So when I say I've been craving some old-school space sims, well... I miss interesting stories as backdrop for compelling dogfighting combat that is fast paced but a little twitch-forgiving and really adept at making you feel like a hotshot. Rock, Paper, Shotgun's "Gaming Made Me" article for Crimson Skies really captures the essence of what I found I loved about the space sims of my heyday, and it's a well-written piece that's worth looking up. But to summarize, it praised Crimson Skies for infusing the experience with a "lubrication of panic" that would grease the cogs of the experience and turn it into something compelling, gripping, and ultimately very special. The key, the author recognizes, is to instill the sensation that things are about to slip out of control and go really bad for you, while allowing and enabling you to pull off some move that you're absolutely positive would look dynamite on the big screen and makes you feel like an ace, allowing you to turn the tables and smoke a couple bad guys to even the odds again. That sensation is something that the few games to emerge, critically, from the paucity of offerings the dwindling flight genre has been able to provide have just not been able to capture for me in recent memory. X, X2, X3, Freespace, Jumpgate.. these things just didn't offer that kind of experience for me.
Oddly enough, Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed came the closest I've been since, well, probably Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. It was truly a shame it was just an expansion pack to a game I couldn't bring myself to continue playing, and that continuing to play the rest of the game was pretty necessary, to some degree or another, to keep your starship in repair and advance, since JTL wasn't a self-sufficient game in its own right.
But now, I've come across a game that looks promising. I've played around with it for a handful of hours this weekend, and once I made a few keymapping option discoveries to smooth out my flightstick play experience (the mouse flight looks to be decent, though I never prefer it) so that I'm not spending half my time wrestling with the UI (there are a couple critical things to help reduce the amount of switching between cursor-based button UI elements and actually flying; joysticks and cursors have never been friends, IMO), I was having a lot of fun. It's called
Black Prophecy, and it's a starfighter-centric Space MMO currently in Open Beta in the US as of last Friday. It's an interesting approach to MMO, in that it features open world unscripted content AND heavily scripted missions that essentially feel like single player game content (but can be engaged in with a team).
To elaborate, there are two methods of seeking out context and purpose for your forays into space. You can either look up and take missions from a station's Mission Board (which has a very Privateer/Freelancer feel to it, in that they're also games that have a big component of self-determination when it comes to what missions you select) and be whisked away to an instanced mission that is scripted in the way pretty much any of the games I mentioned above would be (engage this group of fighters, then inspect these cargo containers, when you find the one you're looking for, another squadron of fighters jump in on cue, etc.), OR you can talk to contacts to get MMO-style quests (kill 20 Jad Baran, collect 10 dropped loot, etc) and zip off to open world sectors that can have players who aren't grouped with you jump in and out on their own tasks and errands, with NPCs and objectives spawning in periodically on an unscripted basis. When you're taking the MMO-style approach, though, you can often find multiple tasks that will take you to the same region(s) of space, allowing you to work on multiple missions at once in the course of completing others, unlike the scripted ones which, since they take you directly to an instance specifically built to contain a single mission, don't allow for the overlap.
I was having occasional minor lag issues; nothing game-killing, just every 10-15 minutes I might notice an "oops, he just jumped out of my crosshairs" moment. The game is graphically satisfying in much the same way the X series was; when you put some processing power into rendering nebulae effects and asteroids with lens flares and the like, space is a pretty place, and the ship models were relatively detailed with a good sense of art direction behind them. True to form for any good space sim, your ship is upgradeable, and the upgrade parts will actually visually alter your own ship's model. If you replace one of your two engines, your ship is now visibly asymmetrical if you take a good look at it (granted, this is probably more for your viewing pleasure than your enemies', simply due to ranges and them having better things to do than admire your ship, like shoot you). Likewise for different cockpits, wings, weapons, etc. The game's got a crafting system, though I'm still figuring it out. I can tell it allows for modifying and repairing ship components in addition to straight-out upgrading to different modular components, but I'm not exactly sure how it works yet.
It appears as if there will be the opportunity for PvP play, as they're clearly setting up two player factions (but, in an interesting design choice, you don't choose your faction right away), one of technocratic cyborgs and the other of feudal-esque gene splicers, both self-enhancing human in origin. The flight model is pretty good; it hearkens back to some of my favorite games in a good way. The weapons are varied and have good feels to them; I've already settled on a few favorites that seem to "fit" me well.
The MMO-style contact NPCs are voiced for all their mission briefing/conversation stuff, though you can read along/ahead and cut their spoken lines short if you want. There are also a few cutscenes, mostly as news bulletins (had a rather Privateer feel for me in that regard).
The game is set to be Free to Play upon launch, using the Freemium model where they'll offer a microtransaction shop. So far, the only reference to shop-bought stuff I've seen has been items to allow you to extend the daily crafting bonus (there appears to be a system where you're given a number of concentration points a day, and some activities use up concentration. If you've got >0 concentration, your crafted stuff gets bonuses to it over the normal recipe; it appears to be a throttle, of sorts, to crafting output; the microtransaction shop will allegedly sell items to replenish concentration once or twice a day).
So, if any of this sounds fun, hop over to the site I linked earlier and give the ~5gig download a whirl. Let me know if you do, I'm open to giving some teamplay a shot.
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