After having wrapped up Alpha testing in August of this year, the developers at Mechanist Games have been striving to get City of Steam ready for Beta testing before the end of the year.
Today, they have announced the dates and plan for the closed Beta test. City of Steam will undergo a series of 5-day test phases, beginning on November 16th, 2012.
The schedule is as follows:
Springtide: Nov. 16 – 20Summercrest: Nov. 30 – Dec. 4Autumnwane: Dec. 14 – 18Winter Festival: Dec. 23 – 28City of Steam is a 3D MMORPG set in an industrial age fantasy world. Using the Unity 3D engine, along with a number of in-house tools, the game has been optimized to be light and accessible without sacrificing graphics or content. Levels take up mere megabytes, keeping loading times very low. In addition, being browser-based means there is no need to download or install a bulky client; the game can be picked up and resumed on the fly on any other computer that has a web browser.
Beta Collaborator Packs can also be picked up for a number of in-game extras, such as character name reservation, guaranteed Beta access and social currency, and also to support City of Steam development. Higher levels of these collaborator packs further include personally designing an item, getting one’s name appear permanently as a city founder in-game, even a signed poster from the development team.
The developers have also given a set of goals they can strive to for extra Closed Beta content, through what they call Steam-o-meter. City of Steam fans are encouraged to support the game and spread the word on social networks to increase points on the meter, which will in turn push content previously planned for Open Beta to instead be made available in Closed Beta. They have included a handful of developer humiliations for extra motivation as well.
