It Lives: Indie MMO Golemizer
We get a lot of mails about indie games. How do we pick which ones to write about? Random chance. Random chance plus including a sentence like "Golemizer is a free MMORPG where players are set in the role of mad scientists creating strange creatures in a steampunk universe" in your mail. Even if it isn't true, we're going to look at your game. As practitioners of mad word-science, RPS generally consider ourselves exactly like that anyway, so it's RPS the game in all but names. Including being 2D and not aesthetically pleasing. But fuck it! Full user crafting? Full User-quest generation? There's a lot of things here to see. You'll find a video explaining the game plus some more thoughts from my few minutes with it below...
What's most immediately notable is how it's taken a skill-system akin to Eve Online. That is, you earn skill points dependent on time, whether or not you play. You then choose what to spend them on, with a mixture of skills which allow you to make individual stuff (Chairs, Forges, Mechanical Bulls) and skills which open up categories of other skills (Engineering (Basic), Engineering (Advanced), Engin... oh, you get the idea). So the grind for ability is removed. Being a crafting based MMO, the grind is more in gathering the resources required to make your toys (or trading for them). But what toys they are! Biological golems are made from pieces of monsters which fall off when you kill them. Mechanical golems are formed from iron and good copper-piping, and can be further experimented on to increase their killing abilities. It appears very much a game which works on its concepts rather than the actual experience of playing - combat is just sitting back and letting people batter the living hell out of each other, for example. But if the idea of a game which leans so heavily on crafting, while not being a purely social game like A Tale In The Desert appeals, I suspect it may be worth investigating. While I didn't get that far, there's apparently over 2000 quests and 8000 dungeon created zones created by players.
I did craft a vicious clockwork gnome, however. Go play here.