Head Full Of Steam : City of Steam

I sometimes refer, rather glibly, to "my top five favorite MMOs of all time", which makes it sound as though I keep a list. I don't. I tend to slot things in and out on a whim as the occasion arises, as my mood changes or, as is most often the case, as I remember some game I'd entirely forgotten and succumb to a surge of nostalgic affection.

One such title is City of Steam. I have a lot of history with that unlucky and mostly unloved MMO. There are more than fifty posts tagged for the game here on Inventory Full, starting with my thoughts about the pre-alpha Sneak Peak back in March 2012 and ending with a brief mention in May of this year, when I said  "One of my favorite MMORPGs and definintely one that failed to live up to its full potential".

I also wrote "The original vision for the game was... a real labor of love". What I neglected to mention then, or probably ever, was that the "original vision" was also a published pen and paper roleplaying game.

I vaguely knew it existed. Or once had. The subject came up occasionally on the forums but that provenance was never really pushed as heavily as it might have been. Instead, Nexus seemed to  emerge, fully formed, out of the void, something that was  - and still is - quite common with MMOs.

Nevertheless, it's clear from early promo trailers like Room for Rent that someone knew a backstory we didn't. I felt much the same about WildStar. It's a good way to create interest in an otherwise unfamiliar property.

On a few occasions I've commented that City of Steam was at its very best in its earliest incarnations. It's commonplace to claim that MMOs are better in beta. That's not always objectively true - there are several subjective factors - exclusivity, novelty, camaraderie - that influence opinion - but also it is an indisputable fact that games do often change radically in development.

City of Steam changed many times. The Sneak Peak was perhaps the purest, most distilled version of creator David Lindsay's original vision, while some of the Alphas may have been the most immersive. I called the first Alpha "a disturbingly compulsive experience".

The game changed a lot in beta and in it's various Live iterations, first drifting and then sprinting away from its original conception. The final version, City of Steam: Arcadia, was arguably a better game but it was also as a neon-lit carnival, almost a parody of the dark, brooding, anxiety-inducing retro-future I'd fallen in love with five years before.

City of Steam shuttered in early 2016. There were vague hints that it might not be the end for the concept but Mechanist Games moved on to a new project, Heroes of Skyrealm.

HoS was a mobile game. I've played it. It was quite good, in its way. It almost felt as if it was part of the same world as City of Steam, but much shinier and more upbeat. Yesterday, for arcane reasons I won't go into, I thought of it and went to check the website to see how it was doing.

It's dead. But I didn't know that until this morning.

Heroes of Skyrealm launched in the Spring of 2017 and closed in June 2018, just over a year later. I only learned that five minutes ago as I was fact-checking for this post. The website is still there, frozen in time at the moment before Open Beta began in February last year. The links still go to the Google Play and Apple Store but the game is no longer there. I found the sunset announcement on Facebook.

The reason I didn't discover the sad news of the demise of Heroes of Skyrealm yesterday is that as I was following links back to Mechanist Games to see what they were up to I landed on the "About" page, where I read this:

"City of Steam: Arkadia... is based on The New Epoch, a series of table-top game books written by David Lindsay, co-founder of Mechanist Games" 

So I googled "The New Epoch" and found this. Minutes later I was the happy owner of Watermarked PDFs of both The Character Codex and The Adventure Codex for what is to all intents and purposes the roleplaying game edition of City of Steam.

I've written before about how reassuring and comforting it is to have a solid, physical representation of a virtual world. Novels, gamebooks, comics, even soft toys all help shore up confidence against the inevitable day when the last server goes offline.

Best of all, though, is a full set of roleplaying rules that let you feel that you could re-create the entire gameworld on your kitchen table. If you wanted to. You never will, of course, but you could, and that's what counts.

A PDF isn't quite as good as a printed book but it's a darn sight better than nothing. And these PDFs are stylishly designed and lavishly - gorgeously - illustrated in full color.

I haven't had time to read much in depth as yet. I need to transfer the files onto a device I can hold in my hand before I get stuck in to the detail.

Even so, at a skim, I can already tell just how fascinating a read it's going to be. It's not just the pre-cursor to the game I loved - it is that game. Some of the illustrations in the book are even the very same ones that were used in the early promotional videos.

One of my few gaming regrets is that I never finished the storyline in City of Steam or saw all the zones. I can't change that but now I have another chance to dig deeper into the lore and history that was always evident but ever elusive in the game itself.

And, I guess, one day I might even get to tell some stories of my own.

All Roads Lead To Home : Heroes of Skyrealm

Exactly a year ago tomorrow one of my favorite MMORPGs closed its doors forever. My affection for the game is well-documented. No fewer than four dozen posts here hold the tag "City of Steam".

I played the game in all of its iterations: from Sneak Peak through alphas and betas, at launch and on to its first seeming demise before its unlikely rebirth; then, finally, down into a future of drifting decline. The posts tell a tale of frustration and disappointment as much as one of joy and delight. All emotions, I'm sure, that must have been shared by its various creators and owners along the way.

When the engine powered down for the final time I did something I've never done before. I bought the soundtrack. City of Steam had a magnificent audioscape, of which the score was just a part, but it was the only part on offer so that's what I got. I've listened to it often, too.

That probably should have been the end of it but there's a coda. Mechanist Games, the ill-fated company that had such high hopes at the start, only to see them thwarted, altered and watered down until what was left must scarcely have seemed recognizeable even to those who helped bring it to the world, didn't fold up their development tent and slink away into the night.

They opted instead to work on a smaller canvas, taking their vision mobile. The second game to emerge under their banner is not an MMO, sadly. The days when those letters suggested a license to print money (a license that few were ever required to produce) ended some time ago.

The captioning in cut scenes could use a little work.

Heroes of Skyrealm is described as "a 3D mobile action RPG" for iOS and Android. I've been keeping an eye on it and today I finally got to try it out.

The history of HoS's testing process is confusing to put it mildly. According to the website the sequence, chronologically, runs as follows:

• Closed Alpha June 2016 - iOS only

• Closed Beta August 25 to September 9 2016 - North America Only, Android Only

• Open Beta October 19 - Android Only, Austria, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland Only

An observant reader of this blog might notice that The United Kingdom, the country from which I am writing, doesn't appear on that last list. If it did I would probably have been posting this back in October. I have the website bookmarked and I check it fairly regularly.

A couple of days ago I was doing just that when I noticed that the U.K. had been unceremoniously slipped onto the end of the line-up. The FAQ hasn't been updated and it was sheer chance I spotted it on a link from YouTube.

Today I downloaded the game from the Google Play store, where it has a confidence-inspiring four-star rating. It installed smoothly although the over-zealous virus checker I'm using for Android (AVG - going to swap it for something else as soon as I can be bothered) tried to tell me it was Malware simply because it uses in-app purchases.

This shot was taken in a thunderstorm. The lightning effects and rain were highly atmospheric but unfortunately they haven't reproduced well.

I then ran through the first few chapters of the tutorial, which played beautifully and looked even better. Taking screenshots on my tablet is a hit-and-miss affair so I didn't get the ones I wanted. Still, I think it's clear from the couple of action shots I did manage to take that all the first-rate design aesthetics from City of Steam have transferred seamlessly to Mechanist Games' new baby.

It's also the exact opposite of Revelation Online in that Heroes of Skyrealm looks better in-game than in screenshots. It also sounds fantastic, which isn't surprising when you learn that the score is by the same person who did the score for City of Steam - Daniel Sadowski.

Gameplay-wise I haven't played enough to form much of an opinion. Like just about every mobile RPG I've tried (which isn't a huge number - maybe nine or ten so far) it lacks subtlety. I'm really not the target audience for mobile games of any description, though. If I'm out of the house I'd pretty much always rather read a book or listen to my iPod than play a game, assuming I'm not just people-watching or sight-seeing anyway.

The one thing I would immediately flag up as an issue is the translation. It seems to suffer from exactly the same problems in this respect as City of Steam. The sentences rarely have any rhythm and the dialog feels off somehow. It's not that there are glaring grammatical errors or walls of sheer gibberish, more that everyone talks like someone who has good English but only as a second or third language.

Blame my screenshotting skills (or lack of them) for the unfinished sentence. I clicked while he was still talking. I actually wanted to get a much odder conversation about how a female pirate was "more masculine" than the men but I missed that one completely.

This is odd because the original creators of Mechanist games were English and the first iterations of City of Steam were idiomatically and indeed mellifluously written. Somewhere along the line the task of writing the words must have been handed on. I wish whoever was doing it back when the company was much smaller would take that task back.

Apart from that Heroes of Skyrealm looks like it should be a jolly good wheeze. I hope it does really well, not only because Mechanist Games deserve a hit, but also because if the studio prospers then the prospect of seeing more of the world in which City of Steam was set might come a step or two closer.

Indeed, the demise of that world may not be quite as "forever" as I suggested at the top of the post. The website is still up, defiantly affirming "City of Steam: Resting, Not Retiring". What's more, it seems that Heroes of Skyrealm not only "draws inspiration" from the world of Nexus, it's set in the same world.

At the very start of the game I was offered a choice of three Heroes: Reinhard, Kashiko and...Servo "an outdated wartoiler [who] fled the Nexan Republic...". In a strange way it felt almost like coming home.

And Still They Come : Revelation Online, Hero's Song

Almost from when I first began playing MMORPGs back in the very late 90s, third-party websites were an essential adjunct to gameplay. I don't think I lasted a week before I started searching for better information than Verant Interactive deemed sufficient for EverQuest players.

Caster's Realm, Allakhazam, EQ Atlas and a host of others found their way into my Netscape Navigator bookmarks but in those days knowing where to look up quests or guides or maps was only the first step. Next you had to find a way to access that information when you needed it.

In those days you couldn't even tab out of most MMOs reliably. Chances were you'd crash the game. For EverQuest it wasn't even legal to try because running EQ in anything but full screen was a bannable offense. The only way to do it was via the EULA-breaking EQWindows, which I never even downloaded.

Dual monitors may have existed back then but for most players the virtual worlds of their choice played out on a single 14" CRT screen. Most players' second monitor was probably a lever-arch file with a sheaf of printouts. I still have reams of pages from the three key EQ sites above in a cupboard somewhere.

Over the years third party websites have proliferated and increased enormously in sophistication and scope. Any MMO worth its salt has a wiki up long before launch. Twitch streams and YouTube videos have become mainstream alternatives to word-and-picture websites but as yet they show no sign of replacing them entirely.

Most resource sites are dedicated to one game. It's unusual to find one that caters to several unrelated MMOs, let alone one that's compiled and fronted by a single person, but that's what Dulfy.net appears to have become.

Dulfy was there from the beginning in GW2. She's so embedded in the process she even has her own permanent namesake in Tyria. I only really began to notice and rely on her regularly-updated, accurate information a couple of years ago and as far as I can recall at that time her site only covered GW2.

Since then it's expanded to include full divisions for SW:TOR, Black Desert and ESO. Checking something on Dulfy yesterday I noticed she's added another: Revelation Online.

I don't believe I've mentioned RO here before but I've had it vaguely in my sights for a while. I have the official website bookmarked and I pay attention to the mentions it gets on MassivelyOP and other news sites. My attention was first drawn to the game by the averagely-spectacular "World Trailer" but it was only when I found out it could be played (optionally) in full tab-target, WASD "WoW Mode" that I added it to my list of probables.  It also didn't hurt that it's published by MY.com, with whom I already have an account for Allods.

After a small hiccup, Revelation Online went into "Closed" Beta four days ago. Of course, its a beta that's closed only as long as you refuse to open your wallet. The final payment model for the game has yet to be announced (bet on Buy-to-Play with hyperactive cash shop) but right now you can join the Closed Beta for the price of a Founder's Pack, the cheapest of which is just $17.99.

Dulfy has an excellent New Player Guide that lays out what you can expect most clearly. I read it yesterday and felt myself getting flashbacks to several recent MMOs, most particularly to ArcheAge. Although it's been promoted with the usual sandbox features that have become de rigeur of late, RO looks, on paper, somewhat more PvE Theme Park oriented than either AA or Black Desert.

To quote Dulfy's guide

It is a high fantasy game with some scifi elements set in an ancient Chinese Wuxia backdrop. It has action combat, dungeons, raids, 3v3 Arenas, battleground (10v10, 20v20, 30v30), territory/guild wars, open world PvP, reputation grind and minigames. It has a very large open world with no load screens (unless you are teleporting around using waypoints).

All of which sounds very familiar. This, also from Dulfy, less so:

(RO) is not your typical Asian MMO grinder. Leveling up is easy but to actually progress in the game you need to do doing group content with other players. Endgame is all high end group content like hard dungeons and raids.

If I was in an MMO lull right now I'd stump up the eighteen dollars (or sixteen euros) and give it a run. Based on my previous experiences in ESO, AA, BDO and Blade and Soul over the last couple of years I could reasonably expect to get four to six weeks of fairly intensive play and have a lot of fun before suddenly stopping for no definable reason and never playing the game again.

Oh, and I'd get a dozen or more blog posts out of it and a month of increased page views for covering the new hotness. So there's that.

In practice, though, Revelation Online has landed at a bad time for me. I have the EQ2 expansion coming in a week or so and there's a good chance I will get Legion for my birthday, which is also just around the corner. With that and GW2 there isn't really a space in the calendar for yet another MMO.

Not that that will stop me indefinitely. I still want to take a look but that can probably wait until Open Beta, which will no doubt be the real soft launch. Can't discount the possibility I might still buy in early on a whim, though.

So far I feel no such draw towards Smed's pixel-art project, Hero's Song. That odd duck, which seems to be neither Massive nor Multiple, having no official servers, but which is definitely Online and purports to be an RPG in some not entirely clearly defined fashion, went to Steam Early Access today.

By most accounts I've read it isn't anything like ready. The consensus seems to be that its been forced out of the door by financial constraints. The first flurry of Steam reviews are very positive, though, with the almost universal caveat that Hero's Song has great potential but is currently nothing like ready to be played as a working game.

The comparisons to EQ and the suggestion that the game may be quietly re-using some of the more interesting concepts originally touted for EQNext have, I must admit, managed to shift Hero's Song from the  "not interested at all" pile to the one marked "hmmm...maybe one day", which is progress of a kind, I guess.

Once again, though, I think I'll pass for now. Too much on my plate already. And I have to leave some room for Heroes of SkyRealm.