MMOpocalypse

So, having decided to finally break free from the warm and fuzzy clutches of World of Warcraft I've recently been in the market for a new game to spend my (admittedly limited) free time playing. Handily, the latest PC Gamer demo disk contained just what the doctor ordered; a free to play, Steampunk/Fantasy RPG with multiple factions and a whole host of player classes.

Up stepped Neosteam: The Steam Wars Begin.

After creating an account you are, then and there, told to choose one of the two available factions (there is a third one, but at time of writing it hasn't been introduced into the open beta yet) themed around two nations vying for supremacy.

The two factions are the Rogwell Republic and Elred Kingdom who are, respectively, themed around either a dependence on advanced technology or magic. Unfortunately, once you've chosen a side you can never swap over to see how the other half lives, so being a fan of Steampunk and not about to throw away the world theme for slightly better magic spells, I pledge myself to Rogwell.



There are 6 races in NeoSteam, 4 basic races and 2 "Beastkind" races - one for either faction. Each one has very different starting attributes and as you level up your character you unlock more advanced racial feats. Humans, for example, start out with the relatively handy "get +10% cash on sold goods" and progress to the godly "+20% attack speed", while Elves start out with a bonus to consumable items and gain a "-20% aggro radius" ability. This ensures that the race you choose at the start does inpact your playtime significantly.

There are, to start with, 4 base classes; two handed hammer using Fighters, Mages, Rogues and gun using, seige engine producing Crafters. These classes each split off into 2 sub classes with slight differences between nations on which skills you get. For example, the Rogwell "Tracker" rogue subclass gains the ability to cripple their foes' movement speed whilst their Elred counterpart, the "Ranger" gains the ability to raise fallen comrades.



As the game is merely in the beta stages of testing, there are a few niggles which I'll go into later, but the advantages of the low server population is that pretty much any name you want is available. For example; I'm currently sitting pretty on top of the "Alexei", "Fixer", "Aegis" and "Sanctuary" names.

Now, the fact that it's in Beta shows through in the current bugs and the whole host of translation issues. Now, the development team have been pretty lazy by the looks of things; translating a Korean game to their native German and then back again to English must take some effort, pity that they seem to have run the code through some sort of online translation machine as quite a lot of the quest text requires deciphering by the player.

It can also be lagtastic.

The combat is good, with the class variety and whole host of skills providing much needed depth and the quests themselves are decent enough, though the storyline of the game would probably shine through if you can get past the aforementioned translation issues. The main attraction to the game, however, has to be the crafting.

Every class in the game can customize their weapons and armour with various upgrades such as increased defence or, in the case of the "Core Machine" items adding new faux-skills to equipped socketable items (such as Alexei has the ability to deal a whopping 1000 damage every 3 minutes due to an attatchment to his bow). Items can be crafted by handing over drops to friendly NPCs and all this is interspaced with the ability to build and customise your own mounts (for crafters, anyway), weapons, armour and accessories.

I'm only level 14 right now (though the level cap for the Beta is 40) so I haven't seen much of the content, but this Korean/German/English MMORPG has just the right balance between questing, crafting and relaxing grinding to tickle me the right way.