Mortal Online - My thoughts

I’m done with Mortal Online, atleast for now. This game is far from ready for an Open Beta. I can accept that yes this is still in fact a beta and that Star Vault has a limited staff and budget. However they can’t expect me to think this game is going to drastically change between now and when ever their official launch is going to be, can they? An Open Beta is meant to advertise your game. The excuse “it’s still beta” holds little ground when it goes Open.

For all intents and purposes the game has launched to me. I received my hard copy of the game last week. It came in a very cool metal box; the only drawback was that the game on the disc was an older version of Mortal Online and didn’t work. I still had to go to their website and download then install the game via Torrent. If I have an actual copy of the game in my hand shouldn’t I consider it launched?

After four days I was finally able to down load and install Mortal Online by using a backdoor method that the developers disapprove of, whatever though it worked. After the game was finally installed I made a character and logged in.

The character creation screen was alright. Nothing to fancy, the typical sliders you see in most MMOs now days. The sliders themselves seemed to work in a…. well not really work. You don’t get a gradual change in appearances when you move the slider; it’s as sudden and drastic as just clicking next from a preset number of selections. An interesting feature MO has done is lineage, which allows you to pick what race each of your grandparents were so you can create alternate sub races. After 20 minutes I settled on a Veela which was actually really ugly, but everything I tried to make came out ugly.

I finally logged in as Eppy the male Veela. I was glad to see that Star Vault finally added clothes so my man parts weren’t hanging out for the world to see. There was no sound, which appears to be a common problem with people who have Realtek HD on their computers.

I got to mess with the UI and move around for a bit, well 30 seconds. Then I crashed to desk top with a gamenow error. Every time I log in now I get the same error after 30 seconds. I did get to see a few people walk around me before I crashed each time. That was over the weekend.

Last night I was able to log back in and after modifing some files I prevented the CTD from happening. The game lags alot, but it's an open beta which is typically a stress test so that I can let slide a little... plus the server is hosted in Europe. The character models are still ugly. The UI is very bad. I really hate to say it because I wanted to love Mortal Online but the game just isn't very good.

From what little I could tell about Mortal Online the graphics appear to be fairly dated. The character models are all ugly. I’m fine with not everyone being super models but they are just downright ugly, everyone looks like a hung over troll who lost a bar fight.

Mortal Online is going to be one of those games that is enjoyable to read about. It has a lot of very cool ideas and features, but in the end I just don’t think it is a very polished game. The early adopters of Mortal Online are going to have to sacrifice a lot of things just to play this game. I’m almost torn as to what I think is better, Darkfall or Mortal Online. I think Mortal Online has cooler features but it just feels like Darkfall was a more complete game at the time of its launch than Mortal is now.

Some people are going to see past the dated graphics and bugs and only see an innovative beautiful and fun game. I think those will be the minority of people who try this MMO out but they will be there. For me Mortal Online is not the game I thought it would be. I would rather go back to Darkfall than give Mortal Online another try.