14 DAY TRIAL // The indie strategy project Star Lords has opted to switch its rather bland and generic name to a much more resounding Lords of the Black Sun, which sounds at least 33 percent creepier and more foreboding.
The game is a traditional, good old 4X turn-based strategy game set in space, in a living universe that features pirates, salvage operations, and random events, where players take the reins of an empire and begin exploring the stars and colonizing new worlds.
Lords of the Black Sun attempts to set itself apart from similar offerings by delivering a much more in-depth experience, providing payers with the ability to use their generals, diplomacy, intelligence operations, trading, and plotting in order to emerge victorious in the interstellar war.
The upcoming PC title will still be available through Steam Early Access as before, only with the brand new and much more inspired title.
Publisher Iceberg Interactive stated that the main reason for the name change was the similarity to a known comic book and that the decision was made in order to remove any potential confusion that may ensue from the resemblance.
The upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy movie features the homonymous Marvel character, so the decision might have also been related to potential legal complications. Well, be it out of reasons that serve logic, copyright, or vanity, there is no real difference, and the fact is that the title is much better now.
In addition to the renaming, Lords of the Black Sun also comes with a neat update, as the game has finally reached its beta phase. The beta stage of course means a host of in-game improvements, from improved AI that manages to properly make use of the ship design component, translating into more powerful ships and more of a challenge, to streamlined gameplay and better interface functionality and much more.
The most notable beta updates are the improved AI, able to design better ships and to better manage its military forces, making for a significantly tougher overall experience, along with many major bug fixes and some stability issues being resolved, including the corrupted save files bug and the Trade Routes menu crash.
Indie developer Arkavi Studios is also currently testing Lords of the Black Sun's multiplayer mode, only internally for now, which means that it's not yet available in the first beta release, but that it will be included as soon as possible.
The developer has also released a new trailer to celebrate reaching the beta development phase, highlighting some of Lords of the Black Sun's most prominent features.
