Let me preface this by saying that I am indeed leaving Mortal Online and what you can expect to find here is a forewarning so that you don't waste tens or hundreds of hours of your time coming to the same conclusions just because the game has eye-candy and sound effects that entice you to stay.
Reading some of the other threads it looks like I wasn't alone in being misled by veteran players pretending to be ignorant of the problems that they have encountered or how those problems impact the enjoyability of this game or how for the sake of "secrecy and mystery" glaring flaws in the game are being swept under the rug.
First, I would like to start by stating that the complexity that you see when you first look at the skill trees is artificial. This is where I was first led astray. Many of these skills you see aren't even working, and many skills are dependent on others such that you could remove 80% of them and the game wouldn't change at all. Most skills are secondary and level up passively though gameplay and you can't even tell that they do anything at all. This game preys upon people with phone-game tactics of quick easy rewards as you see these nearly inconsequential skills level up rapidly in your chat window. The most meaningful progress you'll make is within the first hour of making your character.
Second, the combat in this game is horribly balanced and very poorly implemented. I have so many complaints about this that I don't even know where to begin. You have this game, with a massive world that almost requires the usage of mounts to do anything and then in this game you have nearly unusable mounted melee combat and a mount-charge system that doesn't even seem to work at all. You have here this game where you run faster with your weapon out, but spellcasters cannot cast without first sheathing their weapon (which does have an animation time). You have a game where the lag is so horribly bad that players have coined a new term for hitting somebody in the back as they run away due to the server thinking that they haven't yet moved. You have this game where, even with being the most expensive book in the library in the tutorial, unarmed combat entirely maxed-out is less damage than using a pig as a pet.
Third, the building and building sieging in this game is unfair. Player houses are indestructible and the limited number of strongholds on the map can't be contested or lost due to player intervention. The guilds that control the strongholds or houses next to valuable resources cannot lose them except willingly by refusing to pay upkeep even if said guild or homeowner has been inactive for a period of months. The first players to claim the territory has secured their advantage for so long as the game continues. New players have been denied opportunity and the sea of unused homes are a blight across the landscape as zerg-guilds continue to add more and more fortifications to their nation without consequence to provide their members easy access to storage or safe haven.
Fourth, the professions and market in this game are abysmal. I spent days gathering hundreds of thousands of materials, tens of hours researching the materials of nave and their purpose and use, and I can only wonder how many times getting killed on the road or around the town(s) only to discover after mining over a million ores and maxing multiple material lore that I would be unable to both craft armor and extract my own ore through mining at the same time any further. The next day when I attempted to begin crafting the steel that I had collected I discovered that the price of a max-lore, max-skill crafted set of armor was unusually low. I investigated and discovered that the ore is actually selling for as much as 2 times or 3 times the price of the crafted piece (which requires a several hundred skill-point investment) and that I had dedicated hours to acquiring and using materials that I would never personally use at a net loss of thousands of gold. People are buying the materials to level their skills, not for the armor that it produces. People are leveling these skills for "fun" and not for profit and forcing those that would gather or craft to earn income to instead kill bandits for the ten thousandth time just like everyone else.
Fifth, the community as you might expect is bad. You might have walked into a town and overheard people cheerily bantering with each other or roleplaying or having fun but largely from what I've seen this is a facade. These are the very same people who once you leave the city gates would enslave you to indentured servitude if they were able to make a profit. I've seen people on more times than I can count on both hands trick others into "grouping up" or "working together" or "being at peace" to stab the other in the back the moment they aren't looking. Half of the fights I've seen in this game involve who can turn around and stab the other in the back faster once they pass each other on the road. Players will herd together in groups to block entire cities with their mounts, block accesses to banks with their pets, and take turns spamming you with shield bash in town (which doesn't flag an individual until they have done so multiple times) to displace afk players far enough from the guards to kill them. I have had multiple people insult me for giving them free armor, my own allies attack and kill me in the wilderness, and more times than I would consider regular tell me that they would meet me somewhere and leave me waiting for 30 minutes before they arrived.
Sixth, the core ideas of the game are being undermined and prioritization of game design is being mismanaged with each new patch. Originally this game was supposed to be a full loot pvp game and I'm sure that is why many bought the game in the first place but with the addition of trinkets (necklace and 2 rings) as well as "blessed" items which cannot be dropped when killed the game is turning more and more into a typical wow-clone every day. Domination, a subskill of the ecumenical (standard practical magic) line of spells was placed lower in the priority than an entirely new specialization of niche magic, necromancy, and still does not function correctly. Upgrading to unreal engine 5 has logistical benefits but it's clear that the game's greatest priority moving forward is to improve the graphics at the expense of gameplay.
Some end thoughts:
- Players are bypassing the single character limit and creating an unfair advantage against players who want to enjoy a single-character experience.
- Melee combat is boring and feels like a slow-paced version of whack-a-mole with only 4 holes.
- Low level materials are extremely time consuming to make but equally worthless (such as bron).
- The directional voice chat system is broken in this game and sounds will come from an area opposite of where it originated.
- Weapons are still being unsheathed as invisible in spite of patch notes claiming otherwise.
- My frames per second actually go down when disabling DLSS (I believe this may be due to forced and poorly optimized anisotropic filtering)
- The colors in this game are way too saturated and the dark is easily avoided and exploited by changing gamma settings.
Veteran players are walking around in armor three times as powerful as you, with optimized builds and trinkets and game knowledge with thousands of gold in their pocket so that they can line up their horses and gank naked players at the gates of the city while they farm weeds for silver. The game is busted and even if you're masochistic enough to try to play catch-up this long after launch you'll find that this is a shallow game with poor design and the entire time you were strung along the only purpose you served was to be fodder for the pkers working on their third or fourth account while they kept it secret from you that the game sucks and that they are just here to grief people new and naive. If you knew that, then they wouldn't have anyone to kill.
Reading some of the other threads it looks like I wasn't alone in being misled by veteran players pretending to be ignorant of the problems that they have encountered or how those problems impact the enjoyability of this game or how for the sake of "secrecy and mystery" glaring flaws in the game are being swept under the rug.
First, I would like to start by stating that the complexity that you see when you first look at the skill trees is artificial. This is where I was first led astray. Many of these skills you see aren't even working, and many skills are dependent on others such that you could remove 80% of them and the game wouldn't change at all. Most skills are secondary and level up passively though gameplay and you can't even tell that they do anything at all. This game preys upon people with phone-game tactics of quick easy rewards as you see these nearly inconsequential skills level up rapidly in your chat window. The most meaningful progress you'll make is within the first hour of making your character.
Second, the combat in this game is horribly balanced and very poorly implemented. I have so many complaints about this that I don't even know where to begin. You have this game, with a massive world that almost requires the usage of mounts to do anything and then in this game you have nearly unusable mounted melee combat and a mount-charge system that doesn't even seem to work at all. You have here this game where you run faster with your weapon out, but spellcasters cannot cast without first sheathing their weapon (which does have an animation time). You have a game where the lag is so horribly bad that players have coined a new term for hitting somebody in the back as they run away due to the server thinking that they haven't yet moved. You have this game where, even with being the most expensive book in the library in the tutorial, unarmed combat entirely maxed-out is less damage than using a pig as a pet.
Third, the building and building sieging in this game is unfair. Player houses are indestructible and the limited number of strongholds on the map can't be contested or lost due to player intervention. The guilds that control the strongholds or houses next to valuable resources cannot lose them except willingly by refusing to pay upkeep even if said guild or homeowner has been inactive for a period of months. The first players to claim the territory has secured their advantage for so long as the game continues. New players have been denied opportunity and the sea of unused homes are a blight across the landscape as zerg-guilds continue to add more and more fortifications to their nation without consequence to provide their members easy access to storage or safe haven.
Fourth, the professions and market in this game are abysmal. I spent days gathering hundreds of thousands of materials, tens of hours researching the materials of nave and their purpose and use, and I can only wonder how many times getting killed on the road or around the town(s) only to discover after mining over a million ores and maxing multiple material lore that I would be unable to both craft armor and extract my own ore through mining at the same time any further. The next day when I attempted to begin crafting the steel that I had collected I discovered that the price of a max-lore, max-skill crafted set of armor was unusually low. I investigated and discovered that the ore is actually selling for as much as 2 times or 3 times the price of the crafted piece (which requires a several hundred skill-point investment) and that I had dedicated hours to acquiring and using materials that I would never personally use at a net loss of thousands of gold. People are buying the materials to level their skills, not for the armor that it produces. People are leveling these skills for "fun" and not for profit and forcing those that would gather or craft to earn income to instead kill bandits for the ten thousandth time just like everyone else.
Fifth, the community as you might expect is bad. You might have walked into a town and overheard people cheerily bantering with each other or roleplaying or having fun but largely from what I've seen this is a facade. These are the very same people who once you leave the city gates would enslave you to indentured servitude if they were able to make a profit. I've seen people on more times than I can count on both hands trick others into "grouping up" or "working together" or "being at peace" to stab the other in the back the moment they aren't looking. Half of the fights I've seen in this game involve who can turn around and stab the other in the back faster once they pass each other on the road. Players will herd together in groups to block entire cities with their mounts, block accesses to banks with their pets, and take turns spamming you with shield bash in town (which doesn't flag an individual until they have done so multiple times) to displace afk players far enough from the guards to kill them. I have had multiple people insult me for giving them free armor, my own allies attack and kill me in the wilderness, and more times than I would consider regular tell me that they would meet me somewhere and leave me waiting for 30 minutes before they arrived.
Sixth, the core ideas of the game are being undermined and prioritization of game design is being mismanaged with each new patch. Originally this game was supposed to be a full loot pvp game and I'm sure that is why many bought the game in the first place but with the addition of trinkets (necklace and 2 rings) as well as "blessed" items which cannot be dropped when killed the game is turning more and more into a typical wow-clone every day. Domination, a subskill of the ecumenical (standard practical magic) line of spells was placed lower in the priority than an entirely new specialization of niche magic, necromancy, and still does not function correctly. Upgrading to unreal engine 5 has logistical benefits but it's clear that the game's greatest priority moving forward is to improve the graphics at the expense of gameplay.
Some end thoughts:
- Players are bypassing the single character limit and creating an unfair advantage against players who want to enjoy a single-character experience.
- Melee combat is boring and feels like a slow-paced version of whack-a-mole with only 4 holes.
- Low level materials are extremely time consuming to make but equally worthless (such as bron).
- The directional voice chat system is broken in this game and sounds will come from an area opposite of where it originated.
- Weapons are still being unsheathed as invisible in spite of patch notes claiming otherwise.
- My frames per second actually go down when disabling DLSS (I believe this may be due to forced and poorly optimized anisotropic filtering)
- The colors in this game are way too saturated and the dark is easily avoided and exploited by changing gamma settings.
Veteran players are walking around in armor three times as powerful as you, with optimized builds and trinkets and game knowledge with thousands of gold in their pocket so that they can line up their horses and gank naked players at the gates of the city while they farm weeds for silver. The game is busted and even if you're masochistic enough to try to play catch-up this long after launch you'll find that this is a shallow game with poor design and the entire time you were strung along the only purpose you served was to be fodder for the pkers working on their third or fourth account while they kept it secret from you that the game sucks and that they are just here to grief people new and naive. If you knew that, then they wouldn't have anyone to kill.
