Monday, April 8, 2013

Very Like A Duck: City of Steam

Idly flicking through my bookmarks this afternoon it occurred to me that I hadn't visited the City of Steam website for a while. Open beta's looming. Probably should take a look...

Play button still greyed out. No sign of beta dates. Anything new? Just some Design Journal promo. Wouldn't normally pay much attention but Mechanist Games do knock out some interesting behind-the-scenes blog posts from time to time. May as well just see what it's about...

"Off To The Wilds We Go!"

Hang on, what's this? Well, stap me! I really wasn't expecting that.

As I've mentioned before, in answer to the self-asked (and awkwardly-phrased) question "Why am I  hearing it being called an MMORPG?" the City of Steam FAQ replies "...we like to think of it as an online RPG with MMO characteristics". Well it's your game, you can think of it as whatever you choose but no matter what label gets hung from the clocktower, one thing I thought we were sure about was that CoS was going to be a lobby-based game with instanced dungeons. And that was all.

Courtesy CoS Website
Apparently not. Out of nowhere comes an announcement from The Nexan Archeology & Geology Society introducing :

"The Wilderness...a public area...you can be in there with dozens of people, killing mobs, doing quests, all while getting loot and XP"

Hang on - that's what we on planet MMO call "a zone" isn't it? And there's more. It's also

"...the link between suburbs, so if you want to travel from for example The Refuge to Heartland Road, you can take the Wilderness route".

So now it's a public PvE combat zone that connects the City to one or more instanced dungeons. This is beginning to sound awfully familiar. But it doesn't end there:

"There are going to be public events in these areas, random rare mob spawns and some other things we’ll talk about soon".

 Now let's not get carried away but isn't this beginning to sound less like "an online RPG with MMO characteristics" and more like a plain, old-fashioned MMO?

Wherever this is heading, I think I like it.




2 comments:

  1. Yes, it is definitely grabbing that MMORPG feel right now. The re-write of the server helped with our ability to increase players per server. So tada! We're hitting that MMORPG... Look forward to it releasing soon!

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  2. Glad you like the addition :) We weren't sure it was possible at first, but when we found a way, we just couldn't resist adding it; so now we have both private and public instances, whee! :P

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