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Man, Mortal Online is absolutely terrible!
HappyFunBall
Member UncommonPosts: 221
I was *really* bored today, so I gave Mortal Online a shot, after hearing about a free trial.
After the huge download, I was expecting, something, at least... The game install directory was a ridiculous 20 gigabytes... and for what?
This "game" felt like a side-project a HS student and his friends made. It *really* is THAT bad.
The graphics felt like a game from 10 years ago. The interface is terrible, the movement, well, everything, was terrible. There are very little cues to figure out what's going on.. if you are interacting with something or not, no sound-effect cues to speak of, etc.
10 mins after starting my ugly-as-hell character, it suddenly turned to night, and I literally could not see much of anything.. only places with torches showed up at all, and as a new player, I didn't even have a torch.. so, I stumbled around for a while, then said screw it and uninstalled.. Before that though, I saw some loot on the ground, so I looted it, then in about 5 seconds, I was dead. I had no idea what killed me. I checked the log and found out a player had killed me.. I was in a town, a guarded town, but maybe the loot set off a criminal flag (b/c there was NO indication of anything), like one of the zillion things they "tried" to copy from UO. What a waste of time.
Seriously, they charge MONEY for this game?
Please, AVOID this trash... do not waste the download time on it. It's total garbage.
[mod edit] You would think after 10 years, one company could make a good sandbox fantasy RPG.
Comments
If you look on their home page, www.mortalonline.com, you will notice on the second post that they don't know the plural form of moderator, and you'll also see some broken HTML below the picture on that post. If they can't even get this basic stuff right, I'm not going near the game.
I tried twice, and just cant do it. I wanted to so bad but its probably the worse thing i ever played. Shame on me for trying it twice i guess...
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
George Washington
If someone with some courage and funding bought MO and threw some real development effort behind it, it could be the sandbox that many of us are screaming for. There are a lot of good ideas that have been poorly implemented. I dont have the patience (or hope) to deal with the current development team. I will of course read the comments here when the Awakening expansion arrives.
Playing: Darkfall New Dawn (and planning to play Fallout 76)
Favourite games have included: UO, Lineage2, Darkfall, Lotro, Baldur's Gate, SSX, FF7 and yes the original Wizardry on an Apple IIe
Agreed, it's pretty much the definition of terrible.
....that's because it is
it's definately buggy, but once you get into it there is just not much like it out there. still i do agree it's very horribly coded.
That sound a lot like my experience with Darkfall.
"You should write a macro to open your inventory".
This is exactly the same experience I had.
I know you need to work things out for yourself in sadboxes, but this game is just rediculous. I persevered for about an hour or so and got absolutely no where. I had no more of a clue about what was going on after playing for an hour than I did when I logged in. I was just clicking things randomly to see what happened. Stupid game.
Cluck Cluck, Gibber Gibber, My Old Mans A Mushroom
It has a learning curve, yes. But if you can get past that... the game is actually a very deep sandbox with a lot of features. It is not for the feint of heart though. If you can't take a little frustration at first and you can't handle actually having to watch your back in the world, you won't make it in Mortal Online.
If you can stomach a little grief and anguish in your games though, MO can give you a feeling of immersion and danger that you won't feel in other games. When you step out of town with your hard earned gear and know that you can be killed and looted at any time and by anyone, it really makes a big difference (at least for people like me). It can really get your heart pumping and make you actually care about what you are doing.
Yup. They charged for early beta access no less. And it was worse than it is now.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
If you fumbled about for an hour and figured out nothing..then ...well..I really don't know what to say. It has a help guide built in and just clicking here and there and some common sense can accomplish a great deal. Not to mention i had no issues asking about stuff and getting a quick..respectful answer. Its not as hard as people make it out to be,,,the learning curve is greater than most mmos but not by much. Just alot of repetition and crafting going on. I was ganked a few times.
That being said it is really buggy as hell and despite having a decent , complex crafting system and a learn by doing skill system..the world just wasn't alive enough. I don't mind the low pop, especially out in the wilds..thats how it should be...but the world just lacked something. I got a few months fun out of it and will check it out from time to time but its easy not to like the game .,
I've done the OB and a free trial week or two of it, and I actually like the game. Agreed it's not worth that high of a monthly sub, though, but it's the kind of game that requires that barrier to entry to negate free-acct abuse.
Besides the OP's tastes in 'graphical fidelity' (I still consider MO one of the best looking ones of the current load), most of his issues seem to be based on lack of knowledge. He didn't know the flagging system when he looted, didn't know how guards work, and didn't know how dark night gets. I don't expect anyone to read a whole wiki of a game before jumping in, but when you know that, at it's core, it's nothing like you know from current games - you do a little research. The game has it's share of bugs, for sure, but I see enough people misunderstanding how the damned thing works and calling their mistakes "bugs".
Face of Mankind is another game people will say "sucks" if they have no idea how it works. Wurm, ATitD, etc, etc, as well.
I for one love these kinds of games.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
Usability contributes to quality. It is not a separate thing.
Some players actually take pride in playing games that lack in this respect saying the game "demands skill",it is "hard mode", "sorts out the riff-raff" or whatever. I study usability and user experience and i shake my head bemused when I read stuff like this. Would you say that I'm wasting my time?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
First off, Usability =/= Quality, it's akin to Ergonomics (and the game does fine to that respect)
Secondly, the word you are looking for is Familiarity. It's not impossible to learn how to navigate the UI, and combat works great when you gets some points invested in relevant skills, and use anything *other than* the noob hatchet. You can apply this phliosophy to ALL games you think are too complicated for their own good.
I had plenty fun spearing rabbits with a short sword... once I figured out that [alt] primes a stabbing attack. My point with that, again, it's not that hard to figure out or research. People just have zero patience for that which isn't familiar, and then tend to bore quickly with that which is.
That is why I love games like this.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
From what I have read this game is in dire need of a tutorial.
Needs one for almost every mother skill, and for the pk/political systems in place. Wiki is the poor man's tutorial... but people get offended when you refer them to one.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
most sandbox are low cost projects sadly .
They could do an ingame tutorial for first time players.
Game starts you in a safe zone and with windows and arrows shows you the UI, how to interact with npcs(and how to know you are interacting with one), show you, once, to the safest place you can go to start playing. How to fight and use skills. How to move, etc.
Then as you play and unlock other features it does the same thing.
Just because a game is sandbox doesn't mean it does not have to show you how to play it.
I think even EVE figured that out in 2007
Psh, do you have any idea how many versions they've had since then?
People keep giving bad feedback, when imo, they have always been fine. It's just a hard game to grasp, and not everyone can have a guy in the room explaining it.
Mortal doesn't even have the staff to handle it *and* continue working on new/existing features. Don't use that as an excuse to cry wolf, though. Everyone already knows this isn't an EA game.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
I agree with you, but considering how buggy and unfinished the game sounds, they probably couldn't afford it.
Unfinished MMORPGs with massive potential are so depressing....sigh.
I didn't say usability is the same as quality, I said usability contributes to quality. And what you understand familiarity is included in usability too. Every miss-click, every wrong key, wrong menu, skill, item or feature that is unknown to the player after the tutorial can be viewed as a failure for a usability engineer.
You don't get any points from me by playing a game with piss-poor documentation, UI and lacking a proper tutorial. You don't want to lose customers over those.
Eating a soup with a fork. Thats what that is.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Reading the fanboy responses in this thread, and then people are surprised sandboxes aren't popular. It's because of crap like this.
Yeah I've had a couple friends try to suck meninto this game. Tried it out and hated it.
I kind of followed the goings on with the game for a bit out of curiosity and to see why they liked it. Not only is the game all messed up, but the company behind it is ran really poorly it seems. They get involved in the territory wars sometimes and have actively interfered with battles for keeps and stuff, it seems.
That alone was a huge red flag. When the company is showing bias to some players in a full loot territory control PvP game, something is seriously wrong.
Shadow's Hand Guild
Open recruitment for
The Secret World - Dragons
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http://www.shadowshand.com
No they haven't.
There are reasons I don't play MO, but they sure don't include its very typical disk space requirements or night-like nights.