The Black Death

Game has tons of potential. I have played it since launch and the devs have been working hard on fixes/patches. Currently there are a few bugs which is expected for an "alpha" early access game (some say it was released too early). The graphics are great, and it's fun to just run around and pick berries and steal from the people while the guards watch you do it and don't do anything. You do run across other players often enough, even with only a handful of people in the highest populated server. Currently the amount of content is limited, but the devs are active in discussions and reddit and listen to people's ideas. I'm looking forward to what this game has in store and I hope that more people check it out for longer than a few minutes before writing a negative review on the game.

The Black Death is a multiplayer survival game set in Europe during the time of the Black Death. You will choose from different classes during character creation (militia, peasant, merchant, blacksmith, etc) which all have unique abilities, then name them and choose a gender. Your character is then spawned into the server you chose and you can go around finding items, fighting NPCs and players, gathering supplies, improving skills, talking to NPCs, etc. Early on you might gather some sticks and craft them into a weapon to act as an early club for defense, crafting plants into cotton bandages, and pick berries for food. The skills that come with each type of character can increase resistance to the plague or hunger, improve your crafting abilities, give you more health, better tools, etc. The early access version has just launched at this time and a few patch and stability updates have already been released, the title is still having features added and the developers expect to launch fully in about a year going off of their early access description. The game does not feel ready to be played at this time, unless you have a lot of faith in the developer and want to support them. At launch the game would randomly crash or you would be disconnected from servers, there are a lot of graphical glitches, characters and upgrades might not be saved or can be removed with patches, certain aspects of the game do not work properly and are being tweaked. Right now you aren't playing a mostly functional early access title like something like Killing Floor 2, Darkest Dungeons, Battle Brothers, etc, here you will be paying to act as more of a alpha tester where current updates are more about fixing stability and getting the game to function properly. When the game first launched it could just crash, the servers wouldn't work, it would randomly delete your characters, most of the larger issues like that seem to have been taken care of. The game looks like it can be promising but you should wait for more updates if you want a more feature complete title.

This game in my eyes has potential to be the best medieval game there is out there but at the current status there isn't much to do other than build your skill tree and get equipment. they should implement quests to do with your mates and also add a wilderness. other than that this game is great and would recommend it if you have the cash

I'd been waiting for The Black Death to release in EA for a few months now, so when I found out that it was finally available to play I jumped on the chance. Firstly, the game crashed twice before I was able to log in and play. Once I got in, I discovered that currently there are only NA servers. Being from Australia, that was a bit of a let down but I chose the lowest ping server and dove in regardless. Much to my dismay, once I got in-game I couldn't really figure anything out. The keymapping is clunky and annoying currently, and there are no UI helper texts to get a new player further quicker. For instance, to open your inventory you hit I, and to close it you can ONLY hit I. Small, but terribly cumbersome when I'm so used to being able to hit escape on menus. Speaking of the escape key, it literally does nothing. Menus are accessed via TAB and there is precious little that you can alter thus far. I experienced an ingame crash and reloaded. My skill points had disappeared. So I started again, gathering berries and sticks to regain my precious skills. I soon realised that I couldn't collect rocks in order to craft the primitive tools that I'd just spec'd into. Watched a few videos of the game online and made sure I was looking at the right stones...there was just no prompt to pick them up. Needless to say, I was a little pissed. I crafted myself a stick weapon and took to murdering wildlife. 4 EMPTY pigs later, I thought that perhaps the loot system was also bugged. Opened a box or twelve, which were all empty and slowly realised that I'd have to wait a little longer before giving The Black Death a real run. So right now, it LOOKS pleasing, but beyond that there really isn't much that The Black Death can offer. With the Clunky UI, gamebreaking bugs and precious little at all to do, I'd suggest waiting a little while longer before investing in the game.