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Mortal Online could have been the best MMORPG ever...
grimrot
Member Posts: 9
...if it was a AAA title made by a company with a ton of money and resources.
The immense detail, freedom, and realism in this true sandbox MMORPG is unsurpassed. The problem is that the graphics, animations, environments, production quality, etc are a bit lackluster and bug ridden, although I am still having a blast playing it.
In fact, I just began playing it for the first time a few days ago and I am blown away by pretty much everything. For me, it seems like almost a dream come true having just about everything I ever wanted in an MMORPG. It feels like a much more detailed multiplayer Skyrim and what Elder Scrolls Online should have been more like.
My dream is that a big company would buy this game and simply remake it with a better engine leaving almost everything else intact.
This game is pretty much the closest thing to an Ultima Online in 3D predecessor that I could ever imagine.
If only the majority of new MMORPGs coming out were more like this game, I think most of us would be a lot more excited.
Comments
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
Yeah, but at least they show your weapons and attacks like the Elder Scroll games. Unsheathing your sword in first person is actually kind of thrilling. But, it would be nice if they allowed an alternate 3rd person view.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
Yes, you are in the initial phase of playing Mortal Online. At first, it is a dream, and they promise everything no other game has in a long time. But eventually, you will see how a developer can ruin a game completely. The lack of bug fixes, the terrible EU lag (from USA), the small map with nothing at all going on besides select focus points, and a combat/crafting system that has gotten worse over time, not better....
I could go on. I might play it still if it were free to play, however they have a free-trial-forever model, further showing you that what is in the mind of the developer is not the game or the immersion, it is the money, even when they make so little.
Your initial dreamy phase will pass. Enjoy these few weeks while you can. MO is always worth a look for anyone, but long term it doesn't have the team behind it to make it real.
/wait for Embers of Caerus
One of the worst games I've tried. It fails in nearly every aspect but graphics. And graphics are not without problems either.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
This pretty much.
Also, the title could be made for any game in existance. But there's always another BUT, or a dozen..
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Yep, it had a lot of potential...
That's the problem with most of the sandbox MMO's we've seen through the last few years. They all have dazzling feature lists, but at launch most of those features are still "on the list", not in the game. And almost every time, that's where most of those features stay: "on the list".
It's always the same Catch-22, the features cannot be developed unless the game has a healthy paying population, but it can't attract a healthy paying population until all (or most) of the features are implemented. So the game limps along in some strange zombie-like state. Occasionally it shows some promising flickers of life, but then you realise it's just the reflection of distant lightning in those dead, staring, glassy eyes...
It's always struck me as odd that AAA MMORPG's usually promise 60% fewer features than the indie sandboxes, yet require 3 times as many people to deliver those features. The big difference between the two is that the AAA games actually launch, and with almost everything they promised.
I made a mistake back then when I purchased a collector edition of this game, hoping for an "UO2". The production quality is catastrophic, the game is full of bugs and exploits. Not to mention the gank fest the game is.
My computer is better than yours.
This game could have been really good but they completely botched 2 things:
1) should have never had ffa pvp
2) shouldnt have been able to gain so many skill points by reading a book......Reading should have given 1 point in that skill and the rest should have to be raised by doing...By having reading give 70 points of skill, it made it so I, as a free played, basically just logged in, started a book, and logged out......THere was absoultely no point whatsoever for me to play because my skills as a f2p were maxxed by reading and you cant compete with paid players.
If that was the case, then publishers would have stepped in and taken out the only good features of the game.
How do you move through life? First person just mimics real life point of view.
motion sickness, get a clue .
Here is a link of the list of features.
http://www.mortalonline.com/features/
It's like a dream come true (almost)... I just wish it was a AAA production.
It's pretty much the way a real; harsh; medieval; low fantasy life would be. It's a great role playing game amongst a crowd of fake RPGs out there that are not worthy to be called RPGs.
As far as bugs and stuff, I haven't really run into any. They do patch the game so I'm sure they try to work them out.
Here's a little bit of an intro video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhTuxJlJkfQ
If you give the game a good chance and learn it, it's pretty damn fun.
Mortal Online could have been and could be a LOT better than it is, but the game's mechanics really are a limiting factor in getting people to play. Yes, I'm talking about the PvP. Even if everything else about the game was "fixed", the PvP and the lack of any sort of structure in the PvP would be a huge disincentive to even start the game, much less keep playing.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The opportunities for exploiting the PvP "flagging" mechanism to grief without having consequences are abysmally bad design too. The game is a total mess because of that.
My computer is better than yours.
By your own words you claim to have just started playing the game "a few days ago" but then are an expert on how they patch and eliminate bugs?
Here is a hint, the game has been out for over 3 years since release. Just take a look at the "PvP video" thread posted last week by a fan. http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/396809/PvP-Video-19913.html
As you infer... MO COULD HAVE BEEN a great game. Instead it just stands as a monument to unfulfilled potential and a warning to future developers (and fans) about trying to make an ambitious open world sandbox with an inexperienced team. Luckily the industry as a whole is turning to more of a sandbox play style and real companies with experienced programmers are shifting to sandbox games.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Last time I checked in on that game, EoC suffered from same issues as MO, namely devs being stuck in an old "hardcore" mindset that will ultimately ruin the game. I recall, for example, reading some of them saying how cool it would be if you had no fast transportation but only horses.. Yeah, have fun guys with a game where it takes me hours just to meet a friend so we can play together. There is "hard but userfriendly" and then there's "questionably hard but annoying". MO fell into the latter category with its design issues.
There are advantages and disadvantages to what you and they like. There isn't a good way and bad way to do fast travel unless you allow your subjective personal preferences to define what is good.
Some people might ask what your friends are doing an hour away from where you guys usually hang out in the first place. There is a lot of game design decisions behind fast travel and why your argument works for a particular game or not.
The MO developers did choose to forego many of the convenience features with their game. That doesn't inherently make it a bad game. It just makes it a game where many players who want to log in for 20 minutes, do some content, and then drop what they're doing and leave whenever they like are going to have a harder time enjoying it.
I wouldn't want to see a -click to travel to any town- type of ability in the game. Like gps tracking on an in-game map, A fully linked auction house that delivers goods from anywhere, A friendly-fire OFF option, and many other features new people often ask -- For those of us who enjoy it, these features would take away more than they would give back.
Exactly right.
Where have all the "good" shills gone?
WALL OF TEXT ENGAGE!
No no no NO NO. The hardcore mindset is why games like DayZ, Minecraft, and previously World of Warcraft and Ultima Online are SO POPULAR. World of Warcraft was a hardcore game in terms of raiding pre-Burning Crusade. Even BC had some hardcore aspect that kept a lot of players hooked. 40-man raids were hardcore as anything MO has to offer, requiring massive organization on the scale that most small businesses can't match.
Casual games are ones where your actions have little meaning to the overall outcome of the game. These include titles such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, hate to say it but Guild Wars 2, current World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Skyrim, Mass Effect, Crysis... games where sure, you can play hard, but really you know you're going to a) beat the game, or b) get high end loot, depending on how long you play, not how skilled you are as a player.
The reason why try out all the new games is for that hardcore experience; to find a game where our actions matter. Mortal Online achieves this actually, but in a poor way that has become worse over time. It is a hardcore game, where your actions can have lasting effects on the game world for a long time. If you manage to kill off the skilled enemy player in a big fight, it can turn the tide for your group in the long run. There is no instant-respawn with all your gear. Shit matters.
There is a huge demand for this kind of thing. The problem is most complainers are the carebear kids that get hooked on Cow Clicker and have the time to come on forums and complain. These are the same kids that complain when a AAA title is 'too hard' even though they are fighting computer AI. They are the majority, that is for sure, but that is not to say that the hardcore element gamers always strive for is an issue. No, it is a feature. If League of Legends was easy, if Starcraft 2 and DOTA 2 were easy, they wouldn't the most watched games on Twitch.tv, and wouldn't be the highest paying games out there. They are popular because they are easy to get into, but hard to master. They are hardcore games with the gloss of easymode to maintain a casual player base. Everything you do in those games, every click, every move, every choice, matters in the outcome of the game. So it is critical to be on top of your game to win.
We want risk, we want meaning, and we want to get upset and rage if we fail. Yes, we want it to take hours to run to a friend, because it has meaning. It means if you go somewhere with a friend and ambush someone, it will take their friend hours to help. There will be no instant-teleporting in reinforcements, no friends flying in to swoop down and help. That is good, not bad, that you have to form meaningful relationships with your friends in the game, and have to plan and rely on them being there when you are doing something important. And if not, you have to run away, and be good at running away, to survive.
To this extent, sure, not everyone likes that. They want to click their cow and not be bothered by someone. To those people, stay in those cow clicker games and stay out of hardcore games. The real problem in any of the hardcore games has been the extremely odd decisions by developers to CATER to the casual gamers! EVE for example DOES NOT cater to casual players! And it is widely successful. It is hard and unforgiving. Their single ez-mode feature is insurance, which just lessens the pain of losing your expensive hard to get ships (relatively). It does not remove the risk of losing almost EVERYTHING you have worked for if you do something stupid. Mortal Online went this route. They said here is a hardcore experience, and then proceeded to add carebear requests into the game to make it worse over time, not better. Their focus was hardcore, and by virtue of greed they went against their principals and ruined the game. They didn't love implementing those casual-mode features. They just heard the outcry of needing vendors, and needing more NPCs, and needing more guards, and didn't listen to the silence from the actual players who were too busy enjoying the game to bother complaining. So they added casual mechanics and progressively made the game easier, and worse off, with little peaks of interesting content to keep a news feed going, but never delivering on their original promise of hardcore.
I am really starving for a hardcore game of true intention, one that realizes the initial months of release are going to be shit, but that, like EVE, sticking in it, sticking to the idea, yields great long term results. Because the hardcore game is the game you go back to every now and then. You get hooked, leave for a while, see some new shiny game, realize it is too easy, search for a hard game, and bam, you realize you were playing that hard game just a few months ago. Back you come, this time ready to spend money on cool new features that were added in the meantime. Guild Wars 2 for a counter-example, is a 10/10 in my book. One of the best games ever made, period. But I no longer play it! It is too easy! PvP is too easy! I would rape huge groups of enemies in WvW PvP. I ran a 5-man group that would engage 15 man groups and slaughter them. And that was the peak of the game, almost. The real peak was when I developed backdoor strategies to get into all the keeps and towers in WvW, but that is another story... The point is, the WvW was a glossy carebear experience but fun in that I could push limits... immensely fun, but still, nothing meaningful unfortunately.
I want to point out that I am playing one of the most hardcore games I've seen in a long time: Salem. Salem is actually a good game, and extremely hardcore, and extremely fun in the scale of things. It is a shitty Java based game - it is 3D at least - but lacks tons of features that could have made it amazing. The single-server, the huge scale of the world, and the difficulty in doing almost everything in the game is so appealing. The problem is actually some of the ez-mode features that gives hardcore players a bigger advantage over newer players, rather than vice-versa. In any case, it is not a game for everyone, but it has amazing complex systems in place that are needed to 'level up' in the game. It is literally too hard for most gamers to play. It is mainly due to the fact that it is not a 3rd or 1st person FPS game, and so there is little immersion in the accomplishments you make, but beyond some slight failures in design choice (on purpose, because of a limited development team), it is super hard, and super rewarding. Everything is risky, and one bad choice could mean the permanent death of your character.
WALL OF TEXT
It is not F2P. Free to play means enjoying the game to its full potential for free, while perhaps being at a slight disadvantage in getting to the end-game, or maybe just not as fast. Unless things have changed since greenlight, they are still limiting free accounts.
I understand why; free accounts can lead to a large number of alts performing specific tasks for main characters. How this is bad, I have no idea. In a time where AAA titles are competing with our attention, understanding that by getting a huge number of players, you bring in money by offering character customizations, thus becoming profitable (see Planetside 2, a completely F2P game), Mortal Online is still stuck in offering you a half-assed character that cannot compete at top levels at doing anything besides a worker alt.
So basically, they are just dumb, saying you can have worker alts with free accounts, but free accounts cannot be full-stat players because they would become worker alts, thus limiting anyone who creates a free account to try out the game, maintaining the standard that the free accounts make up mostly worker alts rather than actual players...
Well, I had to get this out. Really, MO is worth a look, but that is it. As soon as you think of paying that monthly fee with its foreign currency transaction fee by your bank, stop playing. That is the height of the game... BUT, I know you will pay for a few months and enjoy it. I hope it lasts for you, I really do. I hope you don't get caught in the illusion though. See through it. Embrace the next game that promises everything and doesn't deliver - at least there is some progress there. At some point, there will be a delivery of features that matter, and we will all rejoice for years again on that hard game.