Pirates Ahoy! : Pirate 101

Sneak Peak for Pirate 101 is on as I write. Just popped in long enough to do the tutorial, reach Skull Island and take these few screenshots. 

Character creation is a question and answer session very similar to Guild Wars 2. My parents were eaten by a squid and I was raised by the dogs of Marleybone. Tarzan out of 20 Leagues Under The Sea!

Combat animations on the Stork companion were exceptionally impressive. Only to be expected given Wizard 101's similar set pieces. I imagine you'll get to see these hundreds, probably thousands of times so they need to be good!

Ship-to-ship combat is never my favorite thing and even here, in the tutorial of a lighthearted game aimed at a young audience, I thought it was a bit slow and labored. Not sure it can ever be anything else - its always two ships going in circles until one sinks, isn't it?

And here we are on Skull Island. That's a lot of pirates! Looking forward to exploring the Sky Seas with all o' ye!

Pretty Green : City of Steam

The City of Steam Sneak Peak has been extended to Thursday, which gives me a chance to  try out the remaining two classes. There are four altogether: Warden, Gunner, Arcanist and Channeler. I'm a little hazy on how the roles fall out between them. The Warden is a tank, for sure. The Gunner is ranged DPS, I think, but so is the Arcanist. The Channeler is Healer/Support and also the one I've not tried yet.

Move Along, Citizen

Everyone but the Warder uses magic, even the Gunner. I thought they were just firing pistols and throwing bombs but it seems they're using their own blood to "transform their sidearms into occult implements". Is that legal? It makes more sense than the the Channeler job description, anyway, which claims they're bardic healers who use "battle-hardened musical instruments to turn the steel eye of the World Machine to the suffering of their companions". Run that by me again?

No-one is officially Melee DPS, although I think everyone can dual wield. Unless the Channeler can't. Hang on, let me make one... Yep. Dual-wields blunt weapons, starting out with Censers, incense optional. I was hoping he might clout ratlings upside the head with a brace of maracas. Maybe later. And yes, there are ratlings. They don't wear any clothes or talk, at least not the ones I've met (and by met I mean chopped up with a big sword). But, hey, they walk on two legs so they count.

The Warden and Gunner I covered last time. The Arcanist seems to be the classic glass cannon. She gets Fire, Ice and Electricity lines, heavy on the AE. The explosions are spectacular. Most solo fights end with her standing in the middle of a pile of dismantled clockworks, beating the flames out of her dress. I took mine down to level 14 of the Nexan Archives. and she didn't die once. She nearly died about twenty times. Not for the faint of heart.

And that's just the healer!

The Channeler gets Fire, Sound and Light lines with some very nice visual effects. All healing and damage derives from a multiple of weapon damage, which I think is true of all the classes. Everyone gets the same vast number of stats. Seven active, seven passive, ten resists making a grand total of twenty-four. That won't last. Items have negative as well as positive stats. Neither will that. Armor has three resistances, different to the ten general resistances. There are at least four grades of armor. Weapons and Armor have class restrictions. I said it was old school!

City of Steam is a real rpg statfest but the UI is so elegantly designed that I haven't found it in the least overwhelming or confusing. It's certainly counter-trend, though, which can't be said about the choice of races.

I don't want to breathe YOUR germs either

Steampunk does not say elves to me. Nor orcs. It might possibly say dwarves, at a push. CoS offers a choice of nine races and five of them are varieties of elf or greenskin. The three greenskins (they call themselves that and it's true) are Goblin, Orc and Hobbe. I'm guessing the Hobbe is a Hobgoblin although they're big enough to be ogres. I called mine Calvin. I assume everyone will.

Checks are in this century

The elves are the first elves I have seen in many years that I would willingly play. They look, sound and act more like pale, fin-de-siecle goths than elves. If they didn't occasionally mention their elvishness I'd have guessed they were vampires. They come in two flavors, Riven or Draug, the main difference between them being their lifespan, short for the Riven and long for the Draug. How that will impact gameplay I cannot say. Ask me in fifty years. Oh, and one kind is blue.

The rest of the races are humans of different regional background and attitude. I notice they are all White European in appearance. There's no option for skin color (so far) at character creation either.

I think the elves work. I remain to be convinced about the Greenskins. I'd have preferred Steam Dwarves as a playable race. Or ratlings, although that might just be me. Still, it's early days. Much could change and much remains to be revealed. The website suggests a considerable level of political intrigue to come, of which as yet there are barely hints in the game. 

There's no mention of crafting but I'm sure it's on the way. There are vendors for Oil and Coal. Also Pleap, Toap and Hawte which appear to be foods. Or diseases of the sheep. One or the other. On the subject of vendors, they all have a timer that tells you when the shop will restock, which suggests an interesting scarcity mechanic could be in the plan. A variety of "Repair Materials" drop in dungeons for which there is as yet no use. They look like crafting raws to me and I hope that's what they are but could they point to armor and weapon degradation. I hope they don't.

I could go on, and on. And on. But I won't. This is now my most-anticipated MMO save only for Guild Wars 2. I'm going to miss it when the server closes on Thursday. Here's hoping for an alpha invite in a month or so. More chance of that than a GW2 beta invite, that's for sure!

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.