Mortal Online = Potentially the first real next gen MMO?

[Teki187]

That doesn't make sense. How can he know that there has been no MMO better than UO if he has only ever played UO? Sort of like saying "There is no better ice cream than vanilla" when you have only ever eaten vanilla ice cream.

Because UO was the only MMO, others are just trying to be.

 

[Tombstone]

lol...

This game sounds awesome, could this be an MMO that will actually be able to rival UO!

I hope so

Awwww...see...now you have gone and jinxed it !

 

[Teki187]

Awwww...see...now you have gone and jinxed it !

No no no!. If and i mean IF the devs stick with the visions above, this game will be ..... i don't know the words to explain better then sex.

 

[Teki187]

Can you tell us anything about the death system and the penalties (if any) associated with them?
When your body dies, your soul is set loose and steps halfway into a plane called the Ether World. As a disincarnate soul existing in both worlds at the same time, you have no physical belongings (they're left behind with your body) and you are very limited in what you can see, hear, and do. The same goes for people in the real world, as they have difficulties interacting with you. The Ether World is a very dangerous place for a Mortal Soul with rules of its own, and you will probably want to get back to your normal self as quickly as possible. To reincarnate, essentially get your body back, you must find a spirit channeler of some sort willing to help you.
More about if and how penalties will affect you later on.

Sounds rather interesting.

 

[Tombstone]

Thats the same idea that Horizons originally had, except in Horizons you had to work your way back to life, and sometimes you may resurrect with a penalty. Like an arm missing etc.

Mind you...Original Horizons had a BUCKETLOAD of awesome ideas like that.

 

[Teki187]

After playing Gears of War and Call of Duty (Bleed mod), I find the notion of being dead at 0% health unwanted. 0% should mean defeated, not dead. If your opponent then wants to kill you then so be it, make it pretty and with lots of blood & gore. Mages engulf entire bodies with flames and what-not, warriors stomp them ala Gears of War, or deliver that final blow ala Assassin’s Creed, The Witcher.
We are working at something very similar to this.

Sounds interesting.

Free PVP:
You are free to attack whenever and whoever you want, but there will be consequences. There are laws in the world to follow or not, this is your own choice to make. This may sound like a “quake match” for newcomers but it is not. There is a system that detects your action in the game that hopefully will balance PVP in an equal way it worked very well in UO. Playing a murderer will be a risky, hard life and they will probably get many enemies as in other players on the good side and from guards in the game. New players will be protected in towns and hopefully by other players.

PVP is very much player skill based. Luck factor won’t interfere in any way it would in real life. The win factor also depends very much on how you read your opponent in combat.

Oh my GOD!.

can houses be accessed by everyone if door is unlocked?
Yes. But you'd be trespassing.

Ahaha, sounds awesome. Makes me want to install oblivion now.

History doesn’t repeat itself:
Is your goal to face a legendary monster? Well, that is usually suicide – if you can find one. But if your guild would actually manage to kill one, it’s dead. Gone. Rare monsters and quests do not resurrect or come again, whether it’s an ancient beast, a crumbling temple, an island rising out of the sea or a great ritual that fails or succeeds. You might get away with an item never seen before, or the unique scar that tells about the experience. There are not many of these opportunities but they are usually important enough to affect the whole world and its history. All you have to do is be at the right place at the right time.

Not sure how i feel about this.

 

[Teki187]

can you eat your mount?
Theoretically yes. If you kill your horse, you can get its meat. And you can eat horse meat.

Hahaha.

 

[Ham]

Looks interesting, though it is early days. Will probably take another look in the new year to see if things are progressing.

 

[Teki187]

Thats the same idea that Horizons originally had, except in Horizons you had to work your way back to life, and sometimes you may resurrect with a penalty. Like an arm missing etc.

Mind you...Original Horizons had a BUCKETLOAD of awesome ideas like that.

Sorry mate, here comes the nail.

Is Mortal Online comparable to any other game out there?
It’s never easy to compare your work to others. The core team comes from the beta days of Ultima Online and wants to build a PvP game in the same spirit but with today’s technology. Some of the very first MMORPG’s had features we have always seen as primary for the genre, and we are surprised to see that so few have developed games based on those features since that time. In short, we find many of today’s MMORPG’s impressive and fun, but see most of them as “cooperative PvE” games with only rudimentary PvP functionality. This makes us even more determined to see our vision come true in Mortal Online.

I remember UOs “golden” days, it took me 2 minutes from I logged on my character and had some really fun moments at the “graveyard” PVP there was amazing. We are trying to capture that essence for excitements when it comes to PVP or thieving etc.
We differ somewhat in our opinion of the best mmo. Henrik would say UO without blinking. Me being more into PvE-with-PtP would say.. ..it hasn't been made yet. At least not in a fantasy setting.

 

[Tombstone]

Still not excited yet, too early

 

[Teki187]

Still not excited yet, too early

Your such a bad liar

 

[iviv]

None. We have no levels and therefore no level restrictions - i.e. certain levels needed to reach an area or to be able to handle a specific sword. You are free to travel the world in any way you like, limited only by the terrain, mode of conveyance or dangers in the environment. In the same way you can use any sword you like, provided you have the necessary skills to wield it.

OMG!

And how do you go about getting the skills?
Sounds to me like a different take on the level system. Its still levels, just in a different name.

However, this all sounds extremely interesting, though they could well be biting off way more than they can chew.

Finally, I do like that idea of one off monsters. It would be amazing to be in the right place, and to fell one with your clan. You'd need something to show for it, though. Or maybe create some stonking huge monster from the very beginning. Everyone knows where it is, and that its stupidly powerful. And watch the slew of players rushing to be the ones to kill it. Would be interesting to watch, at least.

 

[Tombstone]

Your such a bad liar

Hehe, nah...I just dont really listen to the dev words anymore. I'll keep an eye on it, and hopefully get the chance to play it (beta or release), at that point I might be excited but not before I've had a chance to get hands on

 

[Teki187]

And how do you go about getting the skills?
Sounds to me like a different take on the level system. Its still levels, just in a different name.

Basically its like this.

You make a human for example, male, choose his looks, choose 4 primary skills like 1h sword, light armour etc etc.

Then you spawn and the more you swing your 1h sword the better you get at using it. Your str will increase with it also.

Areas will be limited to your skill, so if you have 50 skill in light armour and you went to a "high level" area the mob would destroy you because of your low armour rating.

 

[ins0mn1ac]

These MMO concepts have been around for a long time, someone has just used his head and put them back in action, most people these days only know of WoW when they hear MMO, Lvl, dungeon, gear - end. I know UO came before SWG but SWG is my all time fave, and the features this game promises is what made SWG legendary, and UO of course!

So I for one look forward to something with what "seems" a winning idea!

Edit, when I say SWG I mean PRE-CU. Obviously.

 

[Teki187]

Just found out they wont be having any AH's!

 

[ins0mn1ac]

Just found out they wont be having any AH's!

AH's made me a very rich man, well my exceptional hammer hitting elders heads did too but still!

 

[Teki187]

Mounts do have three different gaits: stride, trot and gallop. Rideing faster means that you lose more moveability in turns. Yes, this is true for horses. Other mounts may have different gaits.

Realism is a priority so you wont have to spent a fortune in order to aquire a mount.

Correct. We will not put an insanely high price on mounts just to use them as money sinks

Acquiring a specially trained or uncommon mount might get a lot more expensive though. Moreover, a mount in MO is far from being just a way of increasing your speed after reaching a certain level or earning enough resources.

There will be mounted combat and as i understod, it works like this: you press the action-button and your character rises his weapon, you aim and the moment you release the button, your character swings his weapon. So you have to time your attack while you ride towards your target and the damage you deal also depends on your movement speed.

Yes, but the rather in-detail description of hold-aim-release is just one of the ways to attack, and only true for weapons designed to perform such an attack (swords, axes etc.). And yes, damage is dependent on velocity.

There will be body boxes and hit boxes are separated into different body zones, so that you deal more damage if you for example manage to hit the head of your foe.

Yes, this is definitely what we are going for (but this is really intense in a mmo, remember no promises). This also means the more regions we manage to have the more the individual armor pieces will affect the outcome of a blow, not just adding to some "general Defence/Resistance/AC stat".

As I have understod it, not StarVault but EpicGames (developer of the Unreal Engine) is creating the netcode for MO. So EpicGames do really know what they are doing there, after all its their engine.

Yes. This is one of the main reasons we can manage with such a small team. Another one being the core Unreal Engine, of course.

They do have a playable version of the game but they are still changeing so much every day, and also detailed things about the setting are not definite enough jet, thats why we dont get to see or read new stuff at the moment. Also the netcode is not ready jet, so thats why there is no server version of the game and therefore no beta jet.

Yes, the in-house prototype (limited no# of players) has been up and running since long, and it's also in there we constantly test and change stuff that has to do with combat and player features. However, we're now in the middle of the process of moving all that stuff to the constantly changing server solution in collaboration with our partners. It's a turbulent time, meaning it's very hard for any of us to know what has to be changed, limited or sacrificed. Unfortunately this also makes it very hard to give sincere, confident and detailed updates or answers in the way we want them to be

The city you can see as view at their GC-booth is an ingame screen of that big city where the guy on the rino in the trailer rides through the gates.
(We could see that gate in the city screen at the booth.)

Yes, it's a ridiculously huge in-game screenshot with only minor tweaking for print. Honestly when working with it I didn't think you would see the "small" flaws and lack of props, but it turned out even the barrels some 500 meters away got 2cm large when printed

I have to say I'm very pleased with the final result though!

At the moment they are working a lot on the realtime fighting system in order to make it feel really great in pvp. I think its importent to them that this feature is going to be really perfect.

This will be tested and tweaked until release, and then some.

They first thought about creating a low magic world, where magic is something quite special and no every day thing. But they realised that a lot of player want to play characters that are totally into magic. So there will be magic characters in the game but not that flashy and colorfull like in many other games.

Well, the original design was much more of a Lord of the Rings-setting when it came to magic, meaning very few dedicated spellcasters or magicians in the world. However that meant we had to introduce very strange and artificial limits on who could be a mage or not, and after feedback we decided to go in another direction. The flashy and colorful stuff will never be in though

I really dont think there will be a one klick and thats it casting system. A system where you have to prepere your spells and also have to aim and channel your cast some how, and not every cast will automaticly be sucessfull - something like that probably but hey didnt tell us something definate on that topic.

We'll of course reveal more of this but later on. What I can tell you is that we decided to skip schwifty-five million different spells, buffs and counters pretty early on as the 1st person view and realtime combat made mage-duels unplayable, or at least completely random. Although we had a really complex and thought-through system, not even we ourselves could stand it as it became inpossible to keep track of all combinations and counter measures - every "duel" ended with people throwing random stuff at eachother as you couldn't read your opponent. A typical example of what sounded good on paper but really didn't work out.

It wasn't until we reduced the direct battle/counter spells to around 20-30 that we started to find the balance. This may not sound like much, but believe me when I say it takes days to learn and months to master. When you add other factors to that like melee and ranged weapons (as many mages will put more than one point in those skills too) every duel between skilled players is extremely demanding and intense!

Magic doesn't end with "direct battle spells", however. Magic schools and things like the 10-pointed Correlation Spinier (!?) are of course still in but their focus tend to be on direct spells for other uses, more complex spells, enchantments, rituals and of course a lot of PvE-specific spells as well, some of them being battle spells.

I also really dont think there will be playable orcs. They did choose half-orcs because they wanted to make that warrior kind of character more concrete. If you think of movies like 300 or Gladiator, thats the kind of direction they were aiming for when they decided to have playable half-orcs. They dont want to have playable "monsters" and also do not want to let monsters become human in some sort of way. I think it will be a realistic fantasy setting as far as it is possible.

Orcs will not be playable. This is a desicion we made as we like their feats/abilities and society to be very different from the "playable" ones: Having to implement such a totally different kind of society (without regular reading/writing, without regular spells etc) would be very costly as it would have a huge inpact on everything from skilltraining to character setup. Even more importantly, the Orcs are at war with the civilized world and are one of the constant dangers to it, and letting people play them would encourage race-wars in a way we don't want to. (That will be up to the players, not by some pre-determined allegiance by the game.)

They dont want to have loading screens and dont like them at all, but it could be that it is not possible to totally ban them from the game, so there will only be loading screens at points where its for technical reasons not possible to create that part of the game without them.

Very true.

There will not be closed instances. You will always be able to follow other players whereever they are going to. I think to what extent there will be instances is not decided jet.

There seem to be a lot of confusion regarding the term "instance", and I won't even try to clear it out here. In short, we are staying as far away from "WoW/AoC-instances" as possible, and will do our utmost to keep it that way. You will always be able to follow any player everywhere as long as there are no natural obstacles (locked door, a cave-in etc). If there's 100 people in a city, every player will be there, not 50 in City A and 50 players in City B. If your group goes down a cave to face the rare Pink Sebastaclor, other groups might already be there, and groups may enter and enter and enter until there's a big happy lagfest in the Pink Sebastaclor cave.

Talking about servers, they are thinking about different solutions and havent decided on that topic jet. As far as I can tell, there will be possibilitys to play with people all over the world, even if it means to have to live with lags when you are sitting in the US and decide to play over the European server. (For sure there will be no costs for character transvers if you want to play with your friends and those have their characters on an other server.) So decentralised servers are one possibility, another would be to have one big simulated server. (I think that would be a little bit like the system in Eve)

Regional servers and a (more laggy?) World server with the possibility to play on whichever one you like sounds the most reasonable. The one-server solution simply isn't possible for this game unless technology and it's implementation in the world jumps at least 10 years forward, as even a regular fantasy-mmo would have severe problems doing that.
Also, I don't recognize the "no-cost-to-transfer" in the case of several servers. As things look at the moment, we would have to do that manually, and that would have course cost money. Henrik, help me out here?

They seem to really think that they are going to be able to release the game as planed. But still, if they should run into some kind of unexpected trouble, they would have some buffer left. There was also more feedback than they had expected at the GC, not only from the press but also from some big publishers, and they were quite excited about that.

Yes, although we are not actively looking for a publisher, that kind of attention is always good, and we are open for suggestions.

So all in all we got quite a few information. We were the first ones who were told about the mounted combat system by the way.

So, well I hope we didnt missinterpretate to much and that I was able to give you some new infos that we all were longing for.[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]

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Well, I guess Henrik told you a lot more about the mounts than just the hold-aim-stuff, didn't you Henrik?

This is a lead developer confirming a recent internet interview at the GC. LOADS of great info.

 

[Trox]

Just found out they wont be having any AH's!

Hopefully some sort of Brit Bank equivalent in the game

 

[Hedge]

Unfortunately I feel that no new MMORPG is going to hold a big user base for at least 3 years. In that time WOTLK will still dominate.. Which is a situation that I dont like, but WoW is too addictive and people wont leave it.

Unless it burns out anyway.. which WOTLK is only going to prolong.

Its crap but wow is definately far too dominant in this market. I honestly think everything will die in its way