After the disappointment of finding out that Atlus’ NeoSteam wasn’t actually very (if at all) Steampunk, it was wonderful to come home today to find that somewhat more authentically Steampunk MMO Gatheryn has entered closed beta!

Full details below, but be warned: They are going to ask you about your favorite Steampunk books…!

Greetings!

Some time ago, you expressed your interest in Gatheryn, a new steampunk-themed casual MMO from Mindfuse Games. We appreciate your enthusiasm, and we would like to thank you for your patience as Gatheryn draws closer to release!

Your continued interest is about to be rewarded, in fact: We at Mindfuse are preparing to start the Beta Testing phase for Gatheryn! As of today, we are opening the registration process to become a beta tester, and as thanks for your early interest and support, we’d like to invite you to be among the very first to sign up. By completing the full registration form, available now, you’ll be signing up for an actual Gatheryn account, and you’ll get a chance for an early look at the steam-powered Elymian Islands!

You can sign up for your full account, including full access to our new website features, at http://www.mindfusegames.com/index.php?option=com_user&task=register

Please note that our Beta Tester selection process is going to occur in waves, with our first rounds of testers playing strictly by invitation. Completing this form will not guarantee you an immediate Beta account. We will, however, be giving consideration to our earliest supporters, so sign up now, and thanks once again for your interest in Gatheryn!

In addition, please have a look at our all-new website, online now at http://www.mindfusegames.com.

Cheers,
Silas Gray — Elymian Ambassador to OutWorld

See you in the Elymian Islands (I hope!)

The servers are coming down this morning, all beta characters are being deleted (answering a question of mine), and tomorrow, you’ll be able to start cooking, racing, shooting, mining and everything else.

Here’s the full announcement:

Some of you have seen the signs. The NDA being lifted. Cryptic twitters from developers. Unexpected fan site announcements. Some have speculated that the next stage of Free Realms is here…they are right.

Since our initial closed beta announcement, we have been flagging more and more beta sign ups for access to the game. We have also been working with an affiliate site, Miniclip.com. The Free Realms beta has been open to the millions of players from that site as well as any new registrations made on our home page. While we did not announce it, we are already well into our open beta period.

Starting Monday, April 27th at 8:00am PDT we are going to be pushing a big update to the web and game servers. The servers will be unavailable all day Monday as we do our final tests and checks. At this time all beta characters will be deleted.

The servers and website will be brought back online Tuesday, April 28th. At this time Free Realms will be live! Just log in, make a character and play. Memberships and Station Cash purchases will be enabled at this time as well.

The party we have planned at Seaside today is going to be our last opportunity to celebrate as members of the beta. I hope to see as many of you there as possible for we can now call the “End-of-Beta Beach Bash”!

We are very excited to make this great leap and we have many, many beta testers to thank for getting us to this point. As a special thank you to all of our beta testers we are going to be giving you a unique in-game item when we go live on Tuesday. Be sure to check in on Tuesday!

Stay tuned for more information.

You can talk about it now! Expect an article about it for tomorrow, but if you’ve been playing — how did you like it?

The NDA prevents me from going into any detail at all about Free Realms, but Massively has more Free Realms info than you can read, so I don’t really have to provide detail. I do have lots of screenies and reactions saved up, though.

My highest level job is five, so I can’t claim to have seen much of the game, but what I have seen is amazingly high quality. The minigames are integrated well into the world (in much the same way I expect they will be in Gatheryn), and the adventure instances are funny and a lot of fun.

I’ve recently decided that what I like most in MMOs is exploring new places and dressing up my character to look cool. Free Realms scratches both those itches.

More details when I can :)

PS — I do love the shoutouts to EQ2.