City of Steam is a browser-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) still under development by Xiamen Mechanist Games, an indie developer who has announced the start of Alpha testing. The aim is to commence open beta testing in the first quarter of next year and launch within the territory of North America the following quarter.
Clientless 3D
Though City of Steam is a browser-based game, it boasts quite astounding 3D graphics on par with even the best client-games. Players are able to rotate the camera in all directions to appreciate the unrivaled vivid and immersive industrial age environment. Additionally, the game features an original soundtrack as well as background atmosphere for the scenesnr, dungeon levels, battles and skills.
Epic Stories Guaranteed
City of Steam has a well-defined history and story with lots for players to discover and learn throughout gameplay. The setting is based on a series of industrial age fantasy role playing books, The New Epoch , written by David Lindsay, currently General Manager/Lead Designer of Mechanist Games. City of Steam is set in a mechanical world where revolutions of clockworks, steamworks, combustion and lighter-than-air phlogiston have pushed the civilized world to an era of rediscovery and exploration. Hundreds of epic quests have been designed to lead players to explore ancient ruins, search for spoils dated back hundreds of chronicles in order to piece together mysteries of this lost past.
Semi-Real-Time Combat
The combat system of City of Steam has distinguished itself from that of traditional turn-based games in combining both real-time and turn-based combat. Rather, battles happen in real time instead of in a temporarily created battlefield as in some other traditional turn-based RPGs. Both players and monsters rely on cool-down bars to determine their speed and order of attack. The combination retains both the sense of excitement of real-time battles and the strategy and tactics of turn-based systems.
Solo and Team
The majority of combat in City of Steam takes place in carefully constructed dungeon instances generated to provide players with a multitude of playing experiences. There are hundreds of separated instances under scores of categories with different level and completion requirements waiting to be explored in a group or alone. Mythical spoils that date from ages past are ready to be claimed by deserving warriors.
Customization
Players will be able to customize unique physical attributes and choose between 4 races and 4 unique classes to create their customized character. Characters of different classes learn skills and spells with an array of abilities and impressive visual and audio effects. Additionally, the donning of different equipment and weapons also correspondingly changes a characters’ outer appearance; a feat that is rarely achieved in other web games.
Dynamic Environment
City of Steam has a diverse environmental effect system offering a different experience to players depending on random factors, time of day and the level entered. In the future, further functions will be added such that scenes and environmental effects may change depending on the outcome of quests or due to other in-game events. This allows for the writing of quests and events offering high player involvement in crafting the in-game environment.
Mechanist Games, the indie developer of City of Steam, stresses that the game is still under development and new features, content and expansions are planned for open Beta and launch. This shall include new races, classes, equipment, and dungeons. Though North America is the first target market, an edition of City of Steam is expected to be developed to go live in Mainland China as well as servers opening in Europe as playership increases.
