The human race has stumbled upon an ancient secret race in the depths of space and is now in a fight for its survival, or something like that. Black Prophecy an upcoming real-time space combat MMORPG being developed by Reakktor Media that looks to bring back some good old fashion space flight sim combat. Although you can play in 3rd person if you want, but common who wants that.
The actual storyline is a little more complicated. The human race has been fractured into 3 separate subraces, Tyi, Genides and the normal humans. The Tyi and Genides are the only playable races and both are trying to control the rest of the human race. In their war for power they stumble upon another race, the Restorers, who basically delcare war on everyone else.
The Tyi race are cybernetically enhanced humans while the Genides are genetically enhanced humans, so each race has their own strong points, although I’m not sure how much that will make a difference since you’ll be flying a ship the whole time.
Missions will be instanced which I kinda don’t like. At this point there isn’t enough info out there to know if it’s just some missions or all missions, but hopefully it’s only some. Reakktor has also stated that in some of the bigger instanced missions up to 300 players can participate in battle which just sounds crazy. Players will also be able to pilot fighter carriers and other capital ships, although the specifics have not been released. Players personal fighters will also be completely customizable.
The leveling/skill details have not been released yet, but they did say there will be 30 skills that a player can choose from and upgrade.
That’s basically all the info I could find as it’s still very early in the development process. If you’re interested they are taking signups for closed beta. There’s also 2 trailers and 1 gameplay trailer available on their site, it’s worth a look, the graphics look amazing.
Actually, development process is a fair way through, having been started sometime between late 2004 and the very start of 2006, with launch expected this year at some point. Also worth pointing out that the capability to fly big ships hasn’t been confirmed.
Over at The Prophecy Network (http://www.prophecy-network.com) we’ve done our best to collate information about the game (beyond what you can already find in the offical FAQ) as well as got ourselves some exclusive info.