A game I have been following for a while, albeit quietly, has been Mortal Online. This game being developed by Swedish company Star Vault has been touted as the spiritual sequel to Ultima Online, my first ever MMO and arguably one of my most loved.
Well the game has finally gone into Open Beta and also revealed its pre-orders. Now before I write this review I am going to say that I WILL like this game, no matter what im about to write and I most likely WILL dabble in it come release.
Ok so first off, the 2 gig or so download….. HORRIBLE. The downloader the game comes with is very sub par. The game comes via torrent so you are much better off downloading them yourself manually and then installing them.
I got a few crashes when I first tried to log in but ive managed to fix them myself. It’s a pretty standard login screen, although I had some slowdown (GFX card needs a huge upgrade im aware) I got through the character creation pretty quickly too. There aren’t many descriptions which tell you what race does what so I think in the end it wont really matter.
The descriptions of the job “packages” are nice (more on these later) so I picked a random one (Logger I think) and got into the game.
I had luckily done some research so knew roughly what would happen from the start. First thing let me say the graphics are nice, not stunning on the settings I had them on, but nice. The motion blur which a lot of people dislike is actually liked by me. So I equipped my newbie axe and went woodchopping and mining.
This reminded me of UO all over, the manual working on your character. Well soon I was happy with the amount of wood and ore I had so went to try to make something, I say try because im not overly excited over the way that MO is handling skills you don’t yet have proficiency in.
Back in UO you had all the skills in your scroll and you just either used them or found somewhere to use them and you slowly skilled up. In MO you need to find a book seller selling the skill you want, buy the book then attempt to learn it (Much like training skills in EVE) the first skill book I started learning would take me 5 hours to do. Not great. This means that for the next 5 hours, all I can really do is mine and forest. I did manage to make myself a bow (as it seemed I had the Bowyer skill) but I absolutely suck at using it.
One thing I need to mention is the lag, this isn’t graphics lag where the screen stops moving which can be attributed to my PC, no this is server lag, taking up to a minute to equip items and wield/unwieldy makes the game nigh on unplayable, this is the major thing right now that should NOT be happening in an Open Beta, its not quite cricket.
I went for a wander and out of towns its fine, there just isn’t anything out there though… there is a distinct lack of content to fight against or see. I stumbled across some ruins and do you know what I found there? Nothing! Not even a rabbit. This needs sorting too, UO was sandbox but had things out in the world at least!
Ill end the initial impressions here as that was literally all I did, Lag Craft then wander and find nothing. Id love to give this more time but honestly if the lag isn’t fixed there is little point.
So what would I do if I was Star Vault?
- Get rid of training books. Honestly give everyone every skill at rank 0 and let them raise it like UO proper.
- Give the starter jobs equipment that their job uses. I don’t want to select Mage and have to mine and forest and not be able to cast anything as I don’t have anything to do with it.
- Fix the lag in towns, no explanation needed
- Populate the world. Those ruins I found? Why not place some bandits there, or even some Skeletons and things, put more stuff out there!!!
Although I told you at the start that I will like this game, I still cant honestly advise anyone to play it yet, the only reason I can is that as an old school UO player I can see what it MIGHT become and want to be there when it does.
Twentysomething MMO Gamer 