Well the Easter holidays are over, and the date for Black Prophecy Closed Beta to start is early April. So far, no-one has let slip and told us they are in closed beta. (Although to be fair, anyone in closed beta would be under a NDA and probably shouldn't be telling us!)

However the signs are picking up that closed beta is coming soon.

One of the big signs is the hardware exchange for that is currently happening for Neocron, however the upgrade is over running. The upgrade started on 25th of March, and was supposed to be completed on the 27th of March. The upgrades are still taking place, but while Nidhogg was responding to players questions for an ETA, he did reveal these 2 little bits of information.

...We're moving Neocron to new servers in a new facility... (Source)

...(hence the server modernisation rather than closure)... (Source)

Now from my knowledge of Neocron, it runs on old Pentium 4 hardware that's about 6 years old, and Neocron is optimised to run on these old spec servers, but why move an old server cluster to new hardware? Apart from reducing your support costs, there is another use for the new hardware. Yes you guessed it, it's also could be the new hardware required for the Black Prophecy servers.

So when the Neocron game servers come back up, I do expect those emails for closed beta to start arriving in your inbox. (Although to be clear, I don't know how ReaKKtor are going to send out closed beta invites.)

However, that's not all from the speculation department.

Today, it was spotted that Carnage was now listed as a Lead Moderator on the Black Prophecy forums. For those who don't know Carnage, he is one of the Developers for Black Prophecy. He was also the lead QA for the Neocron 2.2 upgrade, he took a big role in talking to the community when the testing and development was taking place. And what does a developer need to help keep the Closed Beta forums in good order... yes some good moderator privs to close treads, sticky important notices and powers to banish spammers to the blood moons.

So the signs are out there, closed beta is edging a lot closer than we think.

Want to comment on closed beta start dates and speculation - head over to our forums and leave your thoughts in this thread.

There hasn't been very much news released on the Black Prophecy closed beta since it began, however Snowcrash released this little update today.

We are currently preparing a new wave of invitations, so things are moving forward as we speak.

As to when and how these invites will be sent out, is not known at this time. We will post any new information we get.