Blacklight Retribution: How to Prepare for the Parity Patch

Blacklight:Retribution was a first-person shooter available on PC and Playstation. It was free-to-play, meaning that you could get started and try it out without having to make any investment at all. You could invest real money, if you want, to speed up your progress in unlocking special pieces of gear, but you could also earn whatever you needed with the currency you earned in-game. Sadly, the game has been shut down in 2019, but fans keep hope that the game might be relaunched or remade in the future.

Items which are in your inventory and not activated are activated for you when the patch hits. Duplicate items which have a duration have their durations added together and will show the total time this item will be available to you. Any duplicate items which are permanent are lost.

This means that there is no problem if you have many items, say Shuriken or Katanas, with a duration of 3 to 30 days - they will result in a single item available for the full total duration of all items.

However, duplicates of permanent items will be lost, so the first thing to do is check if you can find a good trade for them. Merchant passes, required to send over items via in-game mail, are available for 1000 GP (the ingame currency) from the Mini Mart menu. Buy one and search you clan or general chat for a person who wants to trade with you for an item you have duplicates of. Veteran Packs, Crowbars, Heroes, Permanent Receivers, unopened Chance Packs and the like are all good items to trade out.

When you have a hero, it will be turned into a skin for you to use as a cosmetic appearance only. All items that the hero has will be made available to you permanently. You will receive the receivers that will go with the hero's weapons and all components also unlocked permanently.

This gives a great opportunity to save some money; a Hero sells for about 2000 Zen, 1000 Zen if it is the Featured Hero.. Some can only be acquired through chance packs, like Ghost and Crusher. In this case, try to trade for one as per the previous entry.

The deal here is that in many cases the items the hero has cannot be made permanent with Zen otherwise, or would cost at least half as much as the Hero to unlock. Once the patch hits, you will not only gain the Hero's skin to use, but all of its items as well - saving you a lot of real money.

GP, or Gear Points, are the in-game currency of Blacklight:Retribution. It is used to buy most of the in-game goods such as weapons, armors and special items. Before the patch hits, it is a good idea to stockpile your GP and choose to buy the following with a permanent duration:

• All Primary Receivers
• All Secondary Receivers
• As many weapon components for the various weapons as you feel comfortable with
• At least one melee weapon, heal injector, stealth MK1
• Elo-Tec scope, an IR Scope and whatever scope is your favorite

The reason behind this is that once the patch hits, you will receive all components you bought for all receivers you bought - but once you buy a new receiver, you'd have to pay each component separately for each receiver. So any component you buy now will unlock for every receiver you own - a much better investment!

Scopes are always separate, so unlock as many as you feel you need - the Cons Elo-Tec is considered very good, and there's nothing bad about an IR or Infrared Scope.

Blacklight:Retribution after the patch will introduce the PS4 payment method. This means in short:

• You must buy each component of each weapon separately
• You cannot buy any item permanently unless you invest real money, it's the "featured component" of the week or you have a Blacklight Prime membership

Every account transferred during the patch will receive a Blacklight Prime membership, meaning you will be able to buy (almost) everything with GP, the ingame currency, rather than real money. It is currently not known whether this is a permanent membership.

This means that if you have a lot of GP left over after unlocking the items you use the most permanently, it is wise to keep it in reserve so that you will be able to buy the new items that will be made available from the PS4 version.

Another important thing to prepare for is the merger between US and EU logins. The details of this are rather sketchy, but if someone else has a character with your character's name on the other server currently, one of you might be given a forced name change.

An option for this is to append EU or US after the name, which is currently being looked at. But if you want to be prepared, log in to US or EU (whichever one is not your main server) and try to make new a character with your main character's name. If you cannot, it might mean you have to consider new names. And, given how people attach to names, this might be just enough time to get used to a new moniker.

A quick tip on stocking up on GP is to make a second account, with new characters. That way you will be able to do the dailies twice in a given day, and the weekly missions can be done twice a week.

Many times you are awarded 100GP, 200GP or 1000GP+ tokens, which you can then mail to your main character with the new "free" merchant pass. Don't forget that the GP you earn from playing can be used to buy items and weapons parts - just make sure to check the "Activate Later" box and you can send the item to your main.