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Alas, I blame you not; for you are [Mortal Online] New Thread! Mod approved(tm)!

LibrarianLibrarian The face of liberal fascismRegistered User regular
edited February 2013 in MMO Extravaganza
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All hail the mighty monarchs of the forum, who have allowed me to make a new humble thread for this game(Screenshots are shamelessly stolen from older threads, as I am a noob to the game and wasn't able to find the screenshots folder under my Desura client install yet).


What is Mortal Online?

Glad you asked. It's a sandbox MMO that launched in 2010 and from what I read on these here forums had a really bad start. Lots of bugs and lag and not enough content.
Almost 3 years later RockPaperShotgun is currently running a feature about the game you can find here

That made me curious and for the last couple of days I have been trying this game and having a lot of fun. I had little to no lag, most of the bugs seem to be fixed and the game runs pretty well on my PC.

IT IS ALSO FTP, so if you don't believe me just check it out.

So what is Mortal Online? Think a real Elder Scrolls first person(only) MMO where your skills level up with training.
Throw in a dose of EVE, you can buy and read books for skill levelling, crafting is SERIOUS business in this game and all equipment is player crafted.
Add a bunch of oldschool UO or maybe Darkfall(except it is not an utterly terrible abomination like that game) where you can attack everyone. And also loot them. And eat their head and corpse.

There are towns with guards and killing will eventually turn you into a murderer that anyone may slay on sight, so it's not all bad. Fear not!

Features:

Races:

Yeah you got the dwarvish people, the somewhat elvish people and humanish folks. And halfbreeds. And you have several subtypes of these. And you can make your own little family tree by deciding what race your ancestors belonged to.
That influences your max attribute points. Min Maxers can already have fun here.

Classes:

There aren't any. Go figure.
The game is purely about picking your favorite skills and levelling them. You level through using the skill, or by buying and reading a skill book(these are available at vendors and do not have to be crafted), or by reading the book and using the skill at the same time to level it even faster.
Attributes also level over time through use.
This sounds like it could be a huge, painful grind, but I can tell you that since I have been playing(last sunday) I already maxed out all my attributes and some of my most important skills.

Magic:

There is magic. It is hard to become a real mage. That is all I know so far.

Housing:

YES, there is housing, but I am new and poor, so I wasn't able to save up my 300 gold. You also need a house to place your guildstone in it, if you want to form a guild, so no guild yet.

Pets & Mounts:

There are pets and mounts in the game and you can only get them either through taming them yourself or by buying them from another player, that is a tamer(has the taming skill and the other needed skills).
I have not tried taming yet, but the system looks like fun.

Crafting:

Oh yes, the crafting. Once again, I am a dirty nub, so no real crafting experience yet. But crafting seems to be absolutely crazy in this game.
There's
Alchemy
Butchery
Bowmakery
Weaponsmithing
Armorsmithing
I dunno, probably a lot of other things.

All crafting skills need INT and maybe some other attribute and then tons of different skills like Material Lore, Botany, etc.
You have to find your own combinations for succesful high quality goods and there are really not that many resources online to be found.
From what I could learn through the ingame /help chat for new players, most high lvl crafter keep their recipes secret, for example rumor has it that only one guild so far has perfected healing potions and theirs are a lot better than anything else on the market.
So if you are into crafting, I guess this game can keep you busy.

Dirty Thieves:

In this game you can become a thief(currently only for players with subscription) and once you levelled your dex and thievery skills you can snoop through other players pockets and steal their stuff(there is a weight limit on what you can take).
But if they notice the thief(they get a message if he is that good), they can push him and that will flag the thief, to be killed either by guards or players.

PVP and Flags:

Not done much of that, only tried to stay out of it so far.
There are player controlled towns and contested territories and technically you can kill everyone in this game.

Your normal flag color is Blue. That means you are innocent and in good standing with the guards.

If you commit a criminal act(get caught stealing or kill a player or loot another player's stuff) you turn Grey for a couple of minutes and will be attacked by guards/can be attacked by players.
This can also happen if some jokers try to run into your swordblows while you are fighting, so be careful.

If you commit more than 5 murders you will turn Red. Congratulations, you are now officially a murderer and can be killed by anyone, anywhere with no penalty for them.
Not sure if you can come back from being a Red, of course like always in these games there are your standard red griefers and PK guilds, etc.
but at least in towns you are somewhat save from them and if you band together with some other players or are quick on your feet, the wild is manageable as well(from my limited experience).


Bad Things:

I want to be honest with you, potential players, not all is great.
Well, I have not played that much. I have no idea how the „endgame“ will turn out.
Maybe I will end up getting killed again and again till I don't feel like playing anymore, who knows?

The game has almost no quest content, you make your own fun. If you don't like sandboxes it might not be your thing.
Though I have found NPCs where players can create their own „quests“ to give to others.
Not sure if and how good they work.

The character design is set to ugly and the NPCs all look very much the same(so far it's like they had about 15 different models they use over and over). Animations are a bit behind the times and melee combat is a bit off, but that is to be expected from a FPS/RPG. People say it compares to Chivalry, but I have not played that.

Interface is not even remotely optimized(you have to drag and drop stuff a lot), though it is far from the horrible abortion of an interface that Darkfall had.

The music in Tindrem is horrible(well the singer is).


How FTP ís it?

You can level your skills up to a maximum of 60 as a FTP player(normal max is 100) and you got no access to thievery. You can play as FTP for as long as you want and there are no other restrictions I am aware of.
You only have 1 character slot, others need to be bought, this also applies to subscribed players.
1 slot will cost you 9 dollars or about 7 eurodollars.


Things I wish they had told me the first time I logged and I will now in my generosity share with you:

You can and will be killed and your stuff will be taken if that happens, so bank it early, bank it often.

Using money is tricky. The money tooltip will show you that you don't have the skill to use this(for gold and silver etc. can also be used in crafting) and combined with the fact that you have to drag money into the vendor window to buy stuff, this can make for some amusing confusion for new players(no, you do not need the „buy“ skill, just drag and drop).

Tindrem is something like the „official“ starter town and I would advise you to begin there, because it has a very short quest chain for beginning players the other places lack and will set you up with some very basic gear and 50 silver you can use to buy books.
For this reason Tindrem is also a hive of scum and villainy(see: thieves and griefers), so do not stay to long and do not expect the whole game to be like Tindrem. Fortunately it is not.

You have a cap on how many skill and attribute points you can learn. You can not learn everything with 1 char. But you can unlearn both attributes and skills.

As a fighter, you probably won't need to buy the books for the skills you intend to use all the time anyway, so save that space for other skills.

You can only read 1 book at a time and the time it takes will be shown in the lower right corner of the screen. Raising INT and the Reading skill lowers that time. The timer will also count down if you are logged off.
You can delete the book you are currently reading, if you decide to read something else.

Mining and woodchopping are fast ways to raise STR, DEX and CON.

The pet menu opens with „k“. You can feed your pet from their or issue commands.

There is no ingame map. Go to http://www.mortalonlinemap.info/

Screenshots:

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And finally:

You can get the client at the official site or through the Desura client. You can also currently vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
I think it is enjoyable enough and different from your standard MMO, go give it a try, this game deserves some more players.
If you care to form a guild, let me know in this thread and we will see if we can set something up.

Librarian on

Posts

  • vhzodvhzod Registered User regular
    I'm trying this game out. It's interesting but... rough. It took me a lot of fiddling just to get it to run. Still I'm going to give it a shot.

  • LibrarianLibrarian The face of liberal fascism Registered User regular
    It runs fine on my system, but I read that other people had some issues as well.
    The game is definitely not as polished as the AAA MMOs on the market, but if what I read is true, it was made by a team of about 12 people, which is pretty impressive.

  • LibrarianLibrarian The face of liberal fascism Registered User regular
    Forgot direct link to client download:

    http://www.mortalonline.com/download-game-client

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