I recently convinced my lifetime best friend and Twitch streamer, FlexChapman to dive into his first session of Mortal Online 2. For this session we both created Oghmir footies and ran through Haven together. Here is a list of my key takeways as a player with 4k Hours starting off with a day 1 player.
Travel: Travel in Haven took up most of our time and definitely turned haven into a walking simulator.
Character Creation: The list of Clades on the character creation list should probably be redone so that it looks similar to the in-game list. That way new players can visualize the pathing for the different clades. Flex noted that all the sliders on the faces basically didnt do anything and he barely had any ability to be creative with his character. The character creation menu was very clunky and left a bad first impression of the game.
Having to restart the game: I cant fathom how the bug still exists where players have to restart steam when switching haven instance or leaving haven to enter the game. This was a time sink for us and left a worse impression of the game. Fix this?
Tutorial missions: The tutorial system is bad, we only had four hours to do our session and the walking + gathering part of the tutorial would have taken the bulk of the four hours. I didnt bother taking him through it and gave Flex my own version which was better and more informative. Perhaps the tutorial should be a separate world where you take new players very quickly through crafting, gathering, fighting, and taming. Then the player enters with a horse and the basic items they gathered/crafted. This could take 5 minutes and significantly increase the New player experience.
Combat: Honestly, Flex has a lot of Gamer sense so this wasnt much of a learning curve compared to asmongolds stream on MO2. I taught Flex how parrying worked and he got it really easy and didnt have much trouble at all. His main issue seemed to be more with the clunkyness of blocking in the right direction because the click and drag/drag and click mechanic takes a LOT of muscle memory to get down. He got better at it, but its still a garbage system for new players. As a vet player I was struggling to undertand how he was having issues
Haven clade farming: The dungeon and ratcave were both being farmed and the bandit camps were empty. Should consider adding a handful of bandit camps in haven to give players more options so new players and streamers arent just wandering a wasteland for hours. Increasing spawn times here is probably a good idea too. We shouldnt need to leave a haven instance just to experience haven. Additionally, the recent glory nerf is TOUGH on the new player experience. Rat cave gives 6 clade a kill. It would take Flex around 5 days in Haven before he can actually PLAY the real game. This isnt how haven should work. A tutorial island itself should only really be a brief 1, MAYBE 2 afternoon experience. Increase the clades here and make the leveling speed for basic things much faster.
Haven instances: Flex noted that haven was kind of empty and voide of players. Probably should consider adding more POIs to haven and reducing the number of instances so the place aint so lonely.
Leveling speed: Honestly, the biggest issue and takeaway from flex was that if he wanted to dedicate any time playing this game, he would, but leveling is too slow and tedious for people with busy schedules, or for people who play other games besides mortal. At most, he can do one day a week on Mortal Online 2. But at that rate with the slow leveling speed it would take months before his character is ready to fight in the real world.
Explaining the nuances of MO2 to my friend in a Guided haven experience was somewhat stressful. It made me question why I even play this game in the first place. Thankfully, Flex plays during Late Evening NA EST timezone so we were able to roam Fabernum sewers without any griefers or PVP. But I cant imagine what his experience would be like if he logged in right now and attempted to leave town/get a horse. Seems like we have a long way to go before this game can actually attract and retain new players. Id love to hear what starvaults plan is here...
Travel: Travel in Haven took up most of our time and definitely turned haven into a walking simulator.
Character Creation: The list of Clades on the character creation list should probably be redone so that it looks similar to the in-game list. That way new players can visualize the pathing for the different clades. Flex noted that all the sliders on the faces basically didnt do anything and he barely had any ability to be creative with his character. The character creation menu was very clunky and left a bad first impression of the game.
Having to restart the game: I cant fathom how the bug still exists where players have to restart steam when switching haven instance or leaving haven to enter the game. This was a time sink for us and left a worse impression of the game. Fix this?
Tutorial missions: The tutorial system is bad, we only had four hours to do our session and the walking + gathering part of the tutorial would have taken the bulk of the four hours. I didnt bother taking him through it and gave Flex my own version which was better and more informative. Perhaps the tutorial should be a separate world where you take new players very quickly through crafting, gathering, fighting, and taming. Then the player enters with a horse and the basic items they gathered/crafted. This could take 5 minutes and significantly increase the New player experience.
Combat: Honestly, Flex has a lot of Gamer sense so this wasnt much of a learning curve compared to asmongolds stream on MO2. I taught Flex how parrying worked and he got it really easy and didnt have much trouble at all. His main issue seemed to be more with the clunkyness of blocking in the right direction because the click and drag/drag and click mechanic takes a LOT of muscle memory to get down. He got better at it, but its still a garbage system for new players. As a vet player I was struggling to undertand how he was having issues
Haven clade farming: The dungeon and ratcave were both being farmed and the bandit camps were empty. Should consider adding a handful of bandit camps in haven to give players more options so new players and streamers arent just wandering a wasteland for hours. Increasing spawn times here is probably a good idea too. We shouldnt need to leave a haven instance just to experience haven. Additionally, the recent glory nerf is TOUGH on the new player experience. Rat cave gives 6 clade a kill. It would take Flex around 5 days in Haven before he can actually PLAY the real game. This isnt how haven should work. A tutorial island itself should only really be a brief 1, MAYBE 2 afternoon experience. Increase the clades here and make the leveling speed for basic things much faster.
Haven instances: Flex noted that haven was kind of empty and voide of players. Probably should consider adding more POIs to haven and reducing the number of instances so the place aint so lonely.
Leveling speed: Honestly, the biggest issue and takeaway from flex was that if he wanted to dedicate any time playing this game, he would, but leveling is too slow and tedious for people with busy schedules, or for people who play other games besides mortal. At most, he can do one day a week on Mortal Online 2. But at that rate with the slow leveling speed it would take months before his character is ready to fight in the real world.
Explaining the nuances of MO2 to my friend in a Guided haven experience was somewhat stressful. It made me question why I even play this game in the first place. Thankfully, Flex plays during Late Evening NA EST timezone so we were able to roam Fabernum sewers without any griefers or PVP. But I cant imagine what his experience would be like if he logged in right now and attempted to leave town/get a horse. Seems like we have a long way to go before this game can actually attract and retain new players. Id love to hear what starvaults plan is here...