I have been keeping tabs on Mortal Online for quite a while now. At first I almost lost complete faith in the project due to its use of the Unreal engine and my previous experience of a MMO who tried to use the engine and failed. Though when I found out that the game was for sale and purchase of it would get me in to the beta, I really couldn’t help myself.
Mortal Online is geared for a niche group of gamers, some even say it is the spiritual successor of Ultima Online, as Mortal has adapted a lot of Ultima’s Mechanics. Being developed by Star Vault, The world of Mortal is a brutal, unforgiving, dangerous, and amazing place. Your options are almost unlimited to what you may become in this game. If you want to be a bowyer, you can and it in itself is detailed and complex and a game on its own. You could become a creature tamer, taming mounts and pets and selling them off for profit. You could simply be an all out warrior putting all your training in to combat and specializing in a certain weapon. You could mix and match any of these things. Learn and unlearn all skills with time. The possibilities are over whelming.
I’m going to do a quick break down of my experience with this game.
Purchase: I bought Mortal online right before Christmas Eve, which was probably a mistake. The devs had released a patch that literally made the game so really laggy and pretty much unplayable for almost 2 weeks.
Character Creation: Character creation is extremely important in mortal online. Your decisions here will affect your character in the long run. Here you have many options, Race being the first. Your race will affect your maximum stats (your stats being Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Psyche, and Intelligence.) you can mix and match your heritage, to create the perfect character for how you plan to play. Next you choose how your character looks. This is highly customizable, once you get past the shock of full frontal. Next, you allocate your given points to your stats and height (which affects your HP pool) and choose a name and starting location and jump right in.
In game I realized that I had no clue what I was doing, after a bit of running around and control learning, I figured out how to equip and draw my weapon. Then I noticed I was attacking at an extremely slow speed. Also compared to everyone else I was running really slowly. After checking out my stats and my various skills, I realized I just needed more training. I harvested some wood to increase my stamina, and strength. Ran to other cities and fought various mobs, to train my dexterity and combat skills involved with speed. All this in one session and I hardly covered maybe .5% of all the skills and features of this game. I then decided that I wanted to tame creatures. I haven’t seen a taming mechanic like this for quite some time and I actually enjoyed it a lot. First off in order to tame you actually have to type the word “tame” while having the creature as your target. Once its tamed (which takes various attempts… and might anger them and instigate an attack) you can issue various commands to control and make the creature happy. You do the same with horses, once they become friendly enough with you they will let you ride them. Really quite an awesome system, and unfortunately that is where my personal experience ends.
I have high expectations for this game, and I hope it will reach its full potential and not be bogged down and become another slaughter house with no skill caps. Currently it seems they are headed in the right direction controlling, controlling the risks and consequences of becoming and evil player. Making a sandbox mmo like this is quite a balancing act and it takes a lot of time effort and man power to really get it all right. In a world with so many theme park mmos I hope to be playing this for years to come.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
“You could become a creature tamer, taming mounts and pets and selling them off for profit.” So basically, you can play Pokemon for adults
Um…not to sound like a noob, but what is a “skill cap”?
basically, when a player gets x amount of skill points to put in to the greater then x amount of skills, so you can only learn and master a small portion of skills.