Back when City of Steam launched its open beta, removing features, emphasizing the cash shop, increasing failure rates on modifications, and more. As someone who loved the game’s closed beta period enough that I not only loved enough to throw my own money into very early in closed beta, I partnered with Mechanist Games to share beta keys, I was particularly disappointed. After open beta on R2Games fell hard and we found out about City of Steam: Arkadia, I had hoped with every fiber of my being that the reason the game went so astray was because of publisher pressure.
How wrong I was. I opened Arkadia in hopes that it would bring back the special moments that I shared with closed beta, but instead I found that the game had fully made the transformation into every other Chinese free to play browser title. I apologize in advance if this rant jumps from topic to topic without a proper segue. I don’t know where to start, so let’s dive in.
Direct trading between players does not exist, still, rather you are forced to use the auction house which only deals in Electrum (real money currency). Previously instanced dungeons are now open world areas where players stumble over each other to complete intricate puzzles like killing twenty enemies and collecting five shillings. Luckily for you, and the other random people you’ll be sharing the dungeon with, groups of mobs respawn just as quickly as you can defeat them, often times faster.
And you will never be under-powered or outmatched. Thanks to fishing and mining, which serves no other purpose other than throwing mass quantities of ability and talent points at you, I probably have enough ability points at level 8 to sustain me to the level cap, and enough talent points that I never have to worry about running out. Even without these upgrades, I found myself constantly emptying my inventory of the hundreds upon hundreds of potions given during quests, as drops, and I haven’t had a reason to use any of them. I don’t think my health has dropped below 97% for the entire time I’ve been playing, and that includes solo’ing boss battles on the harder mode for that dungeon.
Apparently Mechanist Games realized that somewhere along the line, City of Steam had its soul stripped and churned into mulch, because they added the ability for the game to play itself. A built in goldfarming bot! Your character will walk himself through the dungeons, kill enemies with pinpoint precision, use abilities, pick up shillings and whatever else drops, use mana potions as they are needed, find his way to the boss, kill them, and the game will then log you out of the dungeon. I believe that experience and shillings are capped per run, because I hit the auto-attack button and went to sleep just to see what would happen, only to wake up to find my character still running around killing stuff but without any notable increase in experience or cash from the previous night. I haven’t checked my achievements, I probably have a good few thousand gun kills racked up over that seven hours.
Then I came across two of the game’s new mini-games. One game mode is a giant Pacman level, where you run around a maze with knee-high walls and the game throws experience at you. The other game mode has you smashing eggs that drop massive quantities of shillings. There-in lies the problem, that the game gives you everything and does everything for you. Arkadia feels like it is two degrees away from handing me a book and some crayons and telling me to color and stay quiet while it plays itself.
Now that I’ve finished shouting myself blue in the face, I want to end this rant as I normally try to do: On a positive note. The silver lining in all of this is the admission that the US version of Arkadia was essentially built up on short notice with a tiny crew. There are multiple versions of City of Steam, each meant to cater to their respective region, which hopefully means that the English game will be molded to better focus on American and European customers.
For COS English, unfortunately, we are very short of hand for now. The English version will be started from Dave, Ethan, and Shirley. I believe it will get better and better and we will have more resources to be invested, more localization, more specialized cosmetics, and more and more cool stuff which I don’t know.
One can dream.
MMO Fallout 