First Look: Battle Isle: DarkSpace
We have early impressions of the online-only space strategy game coming from Blue Byte.
At the end of July, Blue Byte announced that it planned to publish an online-only space sim, Battle Isle: DarkSpace. Today, the company showed off the game at the GameSpot offices. Currently heading into its second year of development at Palestar, DarkSpace puts you in command in one of several different types of ships in a nonpersistent environment that supports hundreds of other players. Starting out as a rookie pilot, you won't have access to any of the bigger ships until you earn enough prestige points. Prestige points are the central focus of DarkSpace's gameplay, and you earn them by performing tasks in accordance with the type of ship you have. For example, if you select a scout ship, you will earn prestige points by performing scouting duties. If you select a repair ship, you gain more points by repairing more ships. Not performing your assigned duties slows the promotion process. By acquiring a certain amount of prestige points, you eventually reach the rank of admiral, which provides access to better ships and empowers you to give orders to other ships. Rank, prestige points, kills, and other statistics are tracked on the Blue Byte Game Channel for global ranking purposes.
To progress through DarkSpace's various scenarios, you must complete numerous objectives and overtake as many enemy planets as possible. To do this, you must bombard the enemy planet until the majority of the occupying troops are wiped out. Once the enemy planet's forces are weakened, you can send troops from your ship down to the planet to take control of it. Of course, enemy planets can have an added measure of defense if the opposing force orders ships to stay behind to protect it.
DarkSpace's combat was designed with ease of use in mind. Once an enemy ship is targeted, you select from any number of weapons displayed in a menu on the left side of the screen. Obviously, the bigger ships have large arsenals complete with torpedoes and other weapons of mass destruction, while the smaller ships may only have small complements of lasers. Once you have a weapon in mind, you simply click on the appropriate icon and your ship fires - easy enough, but you won't hit your target 100 percent of the time, so it's wise to make sure that you have a clear shot before firing. If your ship receives damage during a battle, you can go into the ship's engineering screen where the systems needing repair are highlighted.
In addition to regular text messaging, Blue Byte plans to support actual speech in the game interface, so those with microphones and other similar devices will be able to actually talk to their teammates to give them orders.
This is just a small portion of what DarkSpace has to offer, but we'll have more on the game before its early 2001 release.
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