The browser-based steampunk MMO finishes its Alpha: and we check it out!

After the tutorial, new players arrive in the Refuge area of Nexus, the official lowbie area. The earliest quest sends them around the city section to discover points of interest such as shops, a temporary buff area (and the location of a giant statue commemorating early helpers in the game), and the first dungeons. As mentioned before, the dungeons are only small amounts of data which allows for quick loading times; they are also unique to each player or group, so other players cannot enter your version. Andrew said that this may change in the future to allow more players in to help and hunt around, but to not quote him on it. So note, he isn’t quoted! 

Heh... "clockroaches." I see what you did there, CoS.

The dungeons also have locked chests and doors that can only be unlocked by keys. These drop randomly off enemies and come from crates, and any key works for any door. This means that keys become something of a currency in and of themselves; locked chests will usually contain several prizes such as better equipment, item modifications, health “jabs” (CoS’s version of potions), and perhaps rare items. Most of the dungeons I played through also had smaller “normal” enemies, as well as hidden or rare enemies of much higher strength and level. Speaking of level, the level difference did not seem to be too dangerous in the beginning of the game so long as enemies could be taken one or two at a time; at level 5 I was able to safely kill level 8-9 enemies solo. This made exploring new areas less risky than I’ve found in other games; and that’s a good thing as some dungeons contain several other dungeons within their boundaries, often at significantly different level ranges. I stayed out of the level 15+ dungeons… I may be confident, but I didn’t have a death wish!

The main focus of the Alpha build was the racial quest lines. As said before there are 9 different races, though they roughly break down into “human type, elf type, “greenskin” type.” The races have slight attribute and damage resistance differences, and later will have unique abilities, but the key difference I discovered was that cosmetic looks are very much locked into specific races. I suspect this may upset min-maxers, as you may end up with a bunch of black-haired Gunners because only their race has helpful racial abilities or slightly more useful stats. Still, the differences did not seem huge at the beginning, so these fears may be unfounded. “The racial quest lines can probably be completed in about 3 and a half hours,” Andrew noted, adding, “We don’t currently have the main quest line for all races in the Alpha, as we want to make sure it’s completed and epic before we release it.”

In fact, the Alpha build did not have all that much content available; by the time a player hits 20 they’ll likely have completed all the available quests and most of the dungeons. Their only option to hit the weekend level cap of 30 would be approximately 25 hours of grinding dungeons (Andrew confided that several players actually DID manage to do this). What CoS did have was a plethora of bugs; however, more and more of these were squished every play test. Some of the persistent ones during the final test involved other players appearing without their armor, and graphical errors that would show modifications floating apart from their weapons. Players also occasionally would get stuck in areas; the development team actually created an emergency “Get me out of here!” button with a 10 minute cooldown to return players to the city. I’ll admit, I used the feature as a sort of hearthstone!

For a browser-based game, I was surprised that 60 FPS was normal with all the spell effects

Now that their Alpha play tests are officially over, Andrew said the team will have a small interlude until Beta. Mechanist Games has been looking through bug reports and at feedback from their forums to best focus on what the player base desires most. Although they ran with several hundred concurrent players during the test, Andrew told us that the servers could likely hold ten times that amount without any visible stress. And fortunately, the testers seemed to enjoy what they played; negative remarks were relatively minimal (outside the usual trolling all games with forums seem to attract) and the occasional dumb question (““How do I exit the game?” was the worst,” said Andrew, “It’s a browser-based game: just close the browser!”). Overall, the community seemed interested in the steampunk world that City of Steam had to offer, and Andrew told me to give a thank you to all their fans. 

We’ll keep an eye on City of Steam’s progress when they come back for Beta testing: stay tuned for more details, or check out their site for loads of background lore!