If A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words, Why Can't I Shut Up?

On the opening day of IntPiPoMo I thought it would be nice to do an all screenshot post. Also, it saves me having to write a whole lot of words, which means more time to play New World. As you'll see, even though I did my damnedest to keep it short, things didn't go entirely to plan.

But first, what pictures? I take an unconscionable number of screenshots so finding half a dozen I haven't used before was never likely to be a problem. Choosing which might be.

The first thing that caught my eye as I opened my jumbled directory of images was the folder named "New World Alpha". I took a lot of shots back in those very early days but the strict NDA made it hard to use any of them. Impossible, actually.

It would be very interesting to compare what I saw then with what I'm seeing now. Looking at the old screens, there are more differences than I remembered. Some of the images are striking in ways I'd fogotten the game could be.

I toyed with the idea of a post based around that but the NDA never ended. It's still in force. I'm probably breaking it just by alluding to it. And the screenshots are all very thoroughly stamped with the ID of the account that took them. I could crop around some of that but it wouldn't leave much of an image and anyway I'm paranoid enough to wonder if there's some other tag there that can't be seen.

Yeah. No one cares. I know. I probably read too much science fiction. No coincidence the book I'm reading right now revolves around the use and abuse of just this kind of invasive monitoring tech by global megacorps and amoral billionaires. This how paranoia begins. (It's not.)

Next I looked through a folder I'd helpfully named Fraps Screenshots. There's all sorts in there, mostly from games where I'd had issues using the screenshot function provided or where I couldn't find one at all.

The filename Fraps creates for each game varies wildly but mostly there's a strong clue to what it would have been. Some have the full name of the game - Istaria, Nine Lives, The Crew, Villagers and Heroes, Wildstar - and some have an abbreviated version of it - AO (for Allods Online), VGClient (for Vanguard).

Some, though, have completely opaque labels like WindowsPlayer (That's Project: Gorgon) or javaw (which turns out to be Dinostorm). And then there's the astonishingly uninformative plugin-container. Care to take a guess what that is?

Okay, it's a trick question. I've been using pictures taken from plugin-container all through this post. It's one of the handful of sunset mmorpgs I truly wish could return from video game heaven the way Fallen Earth just did. It's City of Steam, of course.

I'm not going to write yet another mournful post eulogizing just how good this game was and how no-one, least of all me, appreciated it when it was around. I'm not going whine about how much I wished I'd paid attention to the story while I was playing or how it's the exception that proves the rule about story mattering in an mmorpg. I'm not even going to rehash what an exemplary job the developers did with everything from class and race to setting and theme.

I will repeat how City of Steam has the best soundtrack of any mmorpg I've ever played and how it's the only one with music I've ever wanted to own and listen to separately from the game itself. I'll also take this opportunity to wonder what happened to Mechanist Games, the company behind CoS.

The second game they produced, Heroes of SkyRealm, was fun but shallow by comparison. It was a mobile game and although it looked great it had little of the gritty charm of its predecessor. It closed down some time ago and it's been a while since I last did a search to see what, if anything, might be coming next. So as I was drafting this I thought I'd better check.

It didn't go the way I imagined. The old City of Steam website still exists although all that's there is an epitaph with the promise that CoS is "Resting, Not Retiring." The page concludes with a confident assurance: "So as we look toward whatever the future brings, we give you Heroes of SkyRealm and say "see you soon" to our dear City of Steam." but the link to the new game now goes to a completely unrelated site that has nothing to do with gaming at all, or indeed Mechanist Games. The same link on the Steam page for City of Steam brings up a malware warning and it looks very much as though whatever address it once used has been reacquired and repurposed by a bad actor of some kind.

Mechanist Games, however, very much still exists. They have their own web page on which you can find details of the five games they operate, which apparently include Heroes of SkyRealm still. I imagine it's running in some territory or other, most likely China, where Mechanist games are and always were based, even though the origins of City of Steam itself are here in the United Kingdom.

None of the games on offer are mmorpgs of any kind. The graphics, always one of Mechanist Games strengths, do look gorgeous but the games themselves look like fairly standard takes on various mobile gaming staples. Nothing I'd be interested in playing. 

If you scroll to the bottom of the Timeline section on the About page, though, you eventually come to a panoramic picture of races and classes from City of Steam, here badged as the latterday "Arkadia" revamp. Whoever runs Mechanist Games now still remembers their roots: "May 2013, Mechanist launched its first 3D web browser-based game, City of Steam. It featured in Forbes as one of 2013's most-anticipated games and placed in the Top 10 for the first ever Unity Game Design Competition."

Not much of a brag, is it? I wonder who owns the IP rights these days. If it's Mechanist Games ("Established in the city of Xiamen April 2011 Xiamen, China") I wouldn't hold out much hope of ever seeing the promised return of this flawed gem.

If it's whoever's maintaining that tenuous, single-page web presence at www.cityofsteam.com, though, there still may just be a chance.

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.

End Of The Line For City Of Steam

It's no surprise. Not really. For several months it's been in the back of my mind to play some City of Steam before that option got taken away. Well, no putting it off any longer.

Last night I logged in for the first time in maybe six months. For an MMO that's about to close for good in a week's time it seems in unusually robust health. A deal of content's been added since my last visit including airship missions and holiday gifts. Arkadia's central plaza still buzzes with activity.

Endless messages ping across the screen exhorting players to join in this activity or that. The chat box ticks with reports of purple and orange purchases and discoveries. For a game about to die it feels oddly alive.

Supposedly its not economics or lack of players that ran City of Steam into the buffers. The press release blames the shutdown at least in part on the eternal march of technology:

A number of factors went into this decision, the decline of Unity support in the browser is one of them – Google Chrome no longer supports NPAPI plugins like the Unity Webplayer, and Microsoft's next browser, Edge, won't either. 

That's undeniably so. I have never been able to get the microclient to play nice with Win10 so I've been playing through the browser. It works in Firefox, mostly, but if the platform your game rests on begins to crumble there's not much you can do, short of moving to another. After six years, two changes of ownership, and having already revamped the game several times to keep it limping on through various crises, there comes a time when it must just seem right to jump the tracks and head off in a different direction.

Closing down sale. Everything must go.

I've been with the game since its very earliest days. It remains the poster child for Better in Beta, with each later iteration losing a little something from the one before. The heyday of the game was probably late alpha or early beta but give me an offline, standalone version even of that original "Sneak Peak" and I'd come back to it with pleasure, now and again, for a very long time, just the way I'm playing old favorites from YouTube as I type this.

The version that still lives on for another week is very, very different from that original, dark, filmic vision. The enigmatic complexity of the crumbling city, weeds poking up through the flagstones, martial warnings ringing out across empty streets from hidden tannoys, all trains stationed and guarded against some existential threat; long since compromised, diluted, tossed away.

The endless, sprawling dungeons of early beta, opening on level after level after level seemingly forever were replaced by short, structured, tiered runs with flagged objectives. The fountains of loot that left you in fits of happy frustration as you tried to sort through the options dried up to a flicker of shillings and couple of drops from the boss at the end.

Never trust an elf who shoots his cuffs.

The promise of real housing that shone fitfully in early iteration was extinguished by a player vote in favor of concentrating development resources on combat. The stub that remains, never expanded, rots forgotten in the racially segregated refugee zones of the starting hub, along with the family that once looked as though it would form a backbone to every player's story.

So many great ideas wasted, withered, thrown away in favor of a frenzied cash-shop clickfest. And yet, for all the lost promise, poor decisions and wrong turnings City of Steam remains and will always remain one of my stronger MMO experiences. It would, without doubt, have been one of those worlds to which I always returned, in time.

Well, not any more. Now I have just one week to take screenshots, shoot video, revisit old haunts, say my goodbyes. Except this: I have unfinished business with City of Steam.

The plot curdles.

There is, after all, a story. A straightforward central narrative. I have been pursuing it for four years in dilettante, desultory fashion. Clearly I am never going to hit max level, extended some time back to fifty or sixty, and see all the remaining zones but I believe the main story hits a big reveal somewhere in the 30s.

My one and only character, a Goblin gunner, is 31. I have a week to find out if Imraphel has been playing me for a fool. It will mean some hard fighting. Every quest step seems to require clearing at least three dungeons and I'm at the ragged edge of what I can clear already.

Fortunately, Mechanist Games have chosen to brighten the dark last days with showers of cash shop currency. Last night I came into a vast fortune.

All City of Steam players will receive 30,000 Electrum per day until server shutdown. There's still time to upgrade your characters to their utmost potential, and to try things you've never thought of before, be sure to enjoy!

Thank you. I will. Last night I bought a spiffy new Aeronaut outfit. More practically I filled my bags with enough potions to enable the otherwise impractical, profligate Auto-Combat that allows you to sit back and watch as your character and her supporting team (mercenary, pet) clear dungeons and fulfill objectives with no regard whatsoever to cost or personal safety.

Quaff those pots like there's no tomorrow. Because there's no tomorrow.

In that way, and especially with the funds to take the "Revive Here At Full Health" option that I've always sniffed at before, I was able last night to burn through two full story stages in as many hours. Even then it was very tight on the final bosses. I'd buy my way out of difficulty by overgearing but there's no source I can find for gear in the 30s that's better than what I have. Oh for a true Pay-to-Win button instead of this half-assed "Pay-to-Go-A-Bit-Faster".

I have a week. I also happen to have a fair amount of free time coming up. At the very least I can give it a go. I'd probably settle for just watching the cut-scenes on YouTube but as yet I haven't found where anyone's posted them.

I'm afraid it's going to have to come out.

Some of the soundtrack is up, though. Here's the wonderful main theme for a taster. City of Steam has one of the very best MMO soundscapes I've ever encountered and Daniel Sadowski's music is a big part of that. It's also the part you can buy. So I did.

City of Steam is a game that's been exceptionally hard to capture in screenshots. The UI can't be turned off and as soon as you reach the level where you have mercenaries and pets they jitter and jump around, messing up the composition, photobombing like drunken frat boys. Even without that, the fantastic skylines and cityscapes are ferociously hard to frame.

My plan was to travel around and take some video travelogues before the sun goes down for the final time. Luckily others got there before me so I won't need to give up those hours from my questing. Indeed, there's a surprising amount of footage of the game available online. Rather than record my own I plan to trawl through YouTube and download the pick of it.

The "shuttering" or "sunsetting" of an MMO, sad, even heartbreaking, though it can be, isn't after all so different from the way time moves in the outside world. I can't go back to the Barcelona I knew in the 70s and 80s, before the 1992 Olympics turned Spain's gritty, overlooked second city into Catalonia's capital, a bright and shining global brand. City of Steam as it fades to grey is another world already from the one I first fell in love with four years ago.

In the end all we have are our memories, our photographs, those few fragments we shore against our ruin. It's been a good run but now it's over. Farewell, Nexus. May your rails never rust.

Going Undeground: City of Steam

A week ago, give or take, I stepped off the train into Central, the fading, failing heart of Nexus, City of Steam. I enthused about it. Gushed, even. First impressions count double but do they last?

This time they do, yes. And then some. I've played more City of Steam this week than any other MMO except EQ2 and even while I was in Norrath I had a nagging desire to be in Nexus.

Every day I logged in and played for at least an hour, often longer. What the heck is it about City of Steam? It's not even in alpha, for Pete's sake and yet there already seems more to it than most MMOs I've tried in the past year or two. Let's get some detail in here.

See? Embattled. I said it was!

Central, the aptly named capital city is a safe haven surrounded by danger above, below and on all sides. Merchants trade and the trains still run from Central Station but beneath the chipped cobbled streets lie miles of tunnels, tombs and crypts, a forgotten necropolis where a Skeleton King rules over hordes of undead. Across the bridges gangs own the suburbs while the Central Boiler that should have provided city-wide steam power sinks to rust behind sealed doors, a failed engineering project home to thieves and wild clockworks. The inevitable sewers teem with vermin, the embattled Nexan Archives ringing the Central Square stand closed and guarded. The Mythspikes, those great towers that pierce the Quarters hold onto their mysteries.

It's a  service hub surrounded by instanced dungeons, in other words.

I've spent most of my time so far in Paragon's Gate. At the entrance of each dungeon you get a helpful pop-up detailing its level and how many players would be best advised to tackle it. Paragon's Gate appears to be the entry-level instance, supposedly suited to solo at level four. For a while I thought it went on forever but on my third trip down it tapped out at sublevel seven. It goes deeper but not during this pre-alpha Sneak Peak.

My Goblin Gunner was level five when he went in and boy, did he have a hard time. First run through he died a lot, but then I only had a sketchy idea of his abilities. At least I got to learn how the death mechanic works.

The things I do for art...

If there's a penalty for dying other than some potentially serious inconvenience I didn't notice it. While you're lying on the filthy crypt floor with the clockroach that killed you skittering about on your corpse you get three options: You can revive for free outside the dungeon, you can use a Cardiotonic from your pack, which revives you on the spot or you can open the Store and buy a Cardiotonic for 500EL. That option is currently greyed-out. The cash shop isn't implemented yet.

You start with five Cardiotonics. Vendors sell them for 500 silver, which isn't chump change at low levels but isn't by any means out of reach either. At level seven I have just under 9,000 silver. Of course, if you do use a Cardiotonic you stand up right next to the thing that just killed you. Fine if you just crushed five clockroaches and jump back up to finish the sixth. Not so hot if you only killed two and four of them are still there.

Nevertheless, you don't want to be taking the free option and respawning outside because the instances are non-persistent. If you just spent an hour clearing down to level four that's another hour to get back to where you were, unless you were lucky enough to have reached a Mythdock. Mythdocks are handy teleporters that not only send you back to Central so you can empty all the Oily Cargo Manifests and Powdered Glass out of your pack but also give you a return ticket that lets you port back down the same Mythdock and carry on where you left off.

I'll be back!

Not got a Mythdock ticket on you? Never mind. Look on the bright side. Maybe you'll ding fighting back down and then you might have the edge over the Tombcrawler that killed you last time when you meet him again.

Kidding! You won't ding. Killing stuff gives very little experience. About 2xp per. Quests give 1000xp. From the forums I gather that the devs are set against grinding. The focus is on questing and story. I'd prefer it the other way round but maybe I'll come on board when there are more than a handful of quests.

Those aren't fireflies

If plowing through mobs gives next to no xp and there are no quests to speak of, what was I doing clearing seven levels of tombs over five nights last week? Having fun! Really, it's as simple as that. Paragon's Gate is atmospheric, intricate and has a great sense of place. Everywhere in City of Steam has a great sense of place. Being there is absorbing in a way I haven't experienced for quite a while and the combat itself is slick, simple and satisfying. If you like traditional MMO hotbar combat you'll be right at home like I was.

There's a skill tree that lets you spend points to improve the skills you have or add new ones, just as you'd expect. I found it clear and straightforward, intuitive and easy to understand. Just like everything in the game, come to think of it. It really is well-designed. Nothing's new but it all works and works as it ought to work. Slightly more unusual are the three stances you can toggle between on the fly. They switch you between sword-and-board defense, dual-wield slice and dice dps or two-handed big hitter. You have the weapons for all three options equipped at all times - you can see them on your character's back and at his side - and switching from one to another is instant and without penalty. Supposedly there is, or will be, a deal of tactical gameplay in this, with different mobs requiring different stances even within a single encounter. I didn't pay sufficient attention to notice if this is already in. I was too busy hitting things 'til they fell over.

It better not be Shakin' Stevens

I read a couple of comments that CoS is similar in gameplay to Diablo but I can neither or confirm or deny because I never played any of the Diablo games. I understood Diablo, Torchlight and their ilk were very fast and action-oriented, though. Combat in City of Steam is nothing like that at all. It's steady. I imagine some would call it slow. There are large parts of the dungeons where nothing aggressive lurks. You can see the mobs at a fair distance and you can pull them EQ-style to get something you think you can handle. I felt in control of the pacing throughout, except when I made an error of judgment, like opening a door I shouldn't have.

Being Boiled

Ah, doors. I like doors. Paragon's Gate has plenty. Some are locked, for which you need keys that drop occasionally. Some are hidden, sliding panels or walls that swing open at a touch. Although how you can call something "hidden" if it glows yellow when you run a mouse pointer over it ... . Maybe some kind of "Search" skill is coming. I hope so. Probably just about everything is "coming". It's really hard to remember City of Steam doesn't even claim to be in alpha yet. I swear I've played MMOs that launched with less content. I know  I've played released MMOs with less polish.

This is running on. Again. I still have a lot more to say. There will be a part three. At least.

In The City : City of Steam

I don't believe we've yet seen a really satisfying Steampunk MMO. Fond as I am (was) of NeoSteam, an eight-foot-tall tiger flattening balloon rabbits with a beer-barrel impaled on the end of a scaffolding pole does not scream 19th Century techno-noir to me. I've not revisited Gatheryn since beta so for all I know it may have changed out of all recognition but I remember it mostly as a Victorian-themed fairground portal for some uninspired mini-games. Echo Bazaar is wonderful, of course, but it's more Surrealist than Steampunk and more card-game than MMO.

Half the supposed high-fantasy MMOs that I've played have Steampunk elements. Airships drift, glide or rumble across the skies in WoW, EQ2 and Warhammer. The Empire in Allods is is almost post-steampunk, pushing into the mid 20th Century with its totalitarian politics and constructivist architecture. The Defiants in Rift look to have taken their entire aesthetic from the James Whale Frankenstein . How well technology of this order sits with high fantasy is debatable, although by now it's apparent that once you let gnomes into your fantasy world there really isn't any point trying to hold the line against clockworks.

Until yesterday I'd never heard of City of Steam. Massively posted a news item about a pre-beta "Sneak Peak" that looked interesting but supposedly you had to have registered on the CoS website before the 28th of February when the event began. Massively right on the case there, then. A bit of digging around turned up a website that still had a few keys left from some cross-pollinating offer and with one bound and several registration forms I was in. (Looks like they might still have a few left, although a lot more have gone since I nabbed mine last night).

The Sneak Peak lasts for two weeks so there's a week left. The question is, is it any good? Well, yes it it is, rather and since there's no NDA here's what I've found so far.

City of Steam is in great shape for pre-beta. I've put several hours in and I haven't run into a  single bug, unless Clockroaches count. There's plenty of content in place, all running smooth as gnomish machine-oil. Not that there are any gnomes. Or dwarves. No, wait, hang on there are dwarves but they're clockwork. I think. I spoke to one and he chided me for forgetting about his marvelous clockwork city, tragically now overrun by undead. Nice twist.

The writing is very good.  Mechanist Games, the studio behind the game, may be Chinese but the opening credits name one David Lindsay as both Creator and Producer and the English throughout is impeccable. The text and dialog isn't just grammatically correct either. It's idiomatically comfortable, literate and witty and there's a wealth of interesting detail which I found endearingly old-school. Every item has a mouseover tooltip that reads like an entry from a tabletop rpg rulebook from the 1990s.

The UI is first rate. Elegant, clear and responsive. Can't fault it. I found it intuitive, familiar without being generic and a pleasure to use. The game runs in a browser but looks like it's running from a client. Masses of detail, very gritty feel. There doesn't seem to be a first-person view option but the camera is well-behaved. Movement is click-to-move, which is fine by me. Maybe they'll add WASD at a later stage.

"None" includes Your Reporter

Visually City of Steam is gorgeous. I couldn't get it to run full-screen, which is a shame because I would love to be able to get an even better look at the dirty buildings, moss-covered cobbled streets and juddering steam-powered vehicles. Airships and even flying steam-locomotives cross the skies above the sprawling city in which you begin. It really is a city, too. Seen from above in the opening cinematic it reveals itself as port city that has spread back into the surrounding hills like a stain. Reminded me a bit of Bilbao.

Thus far I've spent most of my time taking screenshots and exploring. At the end of various streets or bridges an option sometimes popped up inviting me into some suburb where the City Guard's writ no longer runs, or down into the inevitable substrate of sewer and crypt. Instanced dungeons, in a word. Two words. For a pre-beta there seemed to be quite a few  already,  stretching at least into the high 20s.

Click here...

... Go there.

One feature I really liked was the signposts. You can click on the destination and your character will make his own way there. I've played plenty of MMOs that have this autoroute feature activated from the quest journal or the map but for some reason having it on a large sign in the gameworld itself seems much more immersive.


Ah, there's that word. Immersion. Some MMOs attain it effortlessly, some couldn't find it in the dictionary. I suspect City of Steam has it and if it does it's down to something I can't show in a screenshot. Sound. The sound direction is about the best I've heard in an MMO. The music is sweeping, elegaic, bittersweet but it's not the music that builds the pervasive atmosphere, it's the ambient sound. Train whistles hoot mournfully, sinister functionaries make mysterious announcements over a distorted tannoy system, dogs bark somewhere in the maze of streets that stretches into the distance all around. It's like being somewhere.

And with that I think it's time to take a break. More on City of Steam to come. Probably. So many MMOs, so little time. I think this one deserves attention.