Home » Member News » My Impressions of MO - Depressing.
So, there have probably been a million of these threads already, but the fact of the matter is that Starvault needs to see them. They need to know what people think, even if they have to see the same threads popping up over and over.
Onto the main course.
My first impressions of Mortal Online, after seeing it mentioned on another website and being described as something like Elder Scrolls Oblivion, but online, I was instantly curious. I began to look into it, viewed some trailers, looked over the site and did my research. "Wow!" I thought, "A skill based, open-world, 100% player driven MMORPG?! This is like every MMO-nerd's fantasy!" Then I saw it was in open beta, and I leaped in.
Patching problems followed.. finally got the game running and I got right into it. My excitement died quickly.
Let me put it this way; MO's basic features, its core mechanics and systems, are quite awesome! Brilliant really! The way you can beef up your character through using the skills which also get raised through being used. Fantastic! It's everything surrounding this great mechanics and this great interplay of skills and attributes that sucks.
There is missing info everywhere. The game is a f***ing enigma wrapped in your own bloody entrails which were just randomly ganked out of you by some veteran ultra-armored jerk off on a horse. There is no direction and even the help files are useless. Even the player-updated wiki is devoid of any useful information other than the fact that there are things int his game that you can only get through blind faith and dedication.
And once you do have an idea of what you should do, its almost always broken. The only options you really have are to chop wood, mine ore, or kill pigs. Chopping wood, at least in the area I played in, gets you no money at all. Mining Ore can get you some money, but not every background gets that at start. Killing pigs means you have to go out into the field, meaning that anyone can gank you and fighting back for even a moment will bring down the Lictor's questionable wrath.
On that subject, the flagging system is a broken mess. I've been killed multiple times for seemingly no reason at all. Of all of the things to implement, I don't think giving the players an unstoppable revenge NPC was the best idea for creating immersion and realism. At any given time, you may think you are protecting yourself, but the second you kill off someone, there are 3 people waiting for you to slip up so they can send the guards after you and steal everything from you. The game encourages players to be bloodthirsty, greedy, and put everyone in a position of stagnation. Only a few players get to progress and everyone else is stuck killing each other and losing everything they own.
Also as everyone else has pointed out, this game has no economy. It's a mess. If you don't play a crafter or have a group of friends to play with, you'll be stuck in rags forever, grinding away at pigs until the chump who decided to play a crafter without a guild or group (me) makes an attempt to sell some robes made out of the same crap you've been piling up for hours. Oh yeah, and you can't sell the extra armor and shit you've made to NPCs.
The summary here is that there is some cool stuff at work, though it is flawed and could use tweaking, but the sheer emptiness and confusion that you deal with just to get to a point of semi-fun is crippled by a dozen other factors.
What I've spent the past few days playing is a game that is of alpha-quality, this is not a game that is on the verge of release. While a few small groups and guilds can enjoy this game together, the rest of the playerbase is suffering at the hands of basic in-game features.