Today, January 25th, marks our one year anniversary on Steam.
To commemorate our first birthday, we’re making this post as a “Year-in-review” to summarize how we went, as well as running a 25% off sale on Steam until January 30th!
If you have been following the game since release you’ll know that this past year has been a rocky road to travel, however we are very happy with the massive progress we have made since then.
Each section contains the major patch note points or key events of that month, however they are not complete lists. If you’re interested in reading all of the patch notes of the 11 major patches we have released this year as well as numerous hotfixes in detail, you can view them here on our website where we post all of our news updates.
January – February 2022, Release month
As we all know by now, the launches of mmorpgs in recent years have not been without issues. Unfortunately Mortal Online 2 on January 25th was no different, and we experienced a massive surge of players trying to log into the game which far surpassed anything we have had in previous stress tests.
This influx of login attempts revealed some problems in our server structure and code that we sadly were unable to catch with the numbers we tested with in the past, which resulted in extremely long queue times.
Our programmers got to work on it right away, but after several successful hotfixes to increase the main server capacity by a few hundred at a time, we still weren’t supporting the amount of players trying to log in, so we needed to make the call and start working on alternate servers, which we called the Myrland Instances.
Territory Control Pushed Back
At this point we realized that our initial post-launch intention to focus on the sieging and territory control systems wasn’t viable anymore as we needed to be all hands on deck to fix the server and capacity issues. We chose to delay the release of these new mechanics so we could be sure that by the time they’re ready, our server infrastructure would be as well, supporting hundreds of players in a single battle.
By February 10th we had deployed the Myrland instance servers which allowed everyone to log in to separate instances of the main game world, and transfer between them. Over time we slowly improved the main server and cut down the number of instances until we could remove them completely.
March
We released one major patch with 52 fixes and quality of life changes, and removed 2 of the Myrland instance servers.
April
We released one major patch containing 25 bug fixes.
- Added chat commands for interacting with vendors, banks and brokers when there are lots of people around
- Added portable equipment such as campfires and extraction devices which can be placed on the ground
- Added passwords and locked chests to the housing system for controlling access
- Added the ability to have a stable or priest in player strongholds
May
We released two major patches with 35 bug fixes between them.
- Added Trinkets to the game. Players can find, identify and charge them to modify their characters with increases to skills, attributes and combat bonuses
- Added Buy orders to the trade broker. This allows players set orders for items they want and other players can fulfill them
- Added additional Alchemy Effects to potion making
- Added a large batch of new house decorations
- Added the Bounty Hunter system, where players can lawfully hunt down other players who are murderers.
- Added a new and improved war and alliance system where guilds can declare war on another guild, removing the murderer penalty for killing one another. War is illegal in cities and guards will take action against warring players. Guilds can also enter alliances with other guilds.
- Added expanded crafting options for weapons
We also updated our ban policy in May, moving to a 3 strike system to further combat any wrongdoing in the community and make sure players who are breaking the rules are promptly removed from the game.
June
We released one hotfix with several changes and 6 bug fixes.
July
On July 5th we announced codename “Project Polish”, in which we would dedicate time to fixing as many of the core issues which players were dealing with at the time.
We also released one major patch containing 68 bug fixes as well as numerous quality of life changes.
- Added the Necromancy magic school, allowing for a whole new repertoire of spells to harness such as summoning undead walkers or constructing your own abomination from the flesh of multiple different creatures.
- A new Necromancy dungeon, boss and new enemies
- Added expanded shield and armor crafting
- Improved AI functions and states
- Added a system where we can place in game books and lore into the world for players to find and read
- Added clade experience sharing for healers
August
We updated our community guidelines and pledged to take a stronger stance against harassment and toxic behavior within our community.
September
We released 2 major patches, with 64 bug fixes between them.
- Added a new dungeon under Fabernum with a new boss
- Added 30+ new Points of Interest to the world
- Fixed a long-standing issue with Domination allowing many unique pets to be dominated
- Added a new shield type, the tower shield
- Added a Criminal Action keybind toggle for QoL
- Added many new earnable titles in-game for profession skills
October
We released one major patch, containing 29 bug fixes and the Halloween Autumn Hunt event.
- Overhauled the way archery aiming works
- Points of Interest Batch (30+)
- Added 5 new creatures to the world
- Increased the range of VoIP so you can hear and talk to players from much further away
- Revealed the new development roadmap
- Updated internal policies for our Game Masters to increase in game support efficacy
Fixing the server limitations
After gathering some valuable data from a stress test where over 500 players gathered in one small area, we were able to tackle a bottleneck in how our server handled players moving around. This fix allowed us to comfortably support battles of hundreds of players without worrying about the server struggling.
You can read more about these fixes here.
November
We released one major patch containing 20 bug fixes.
- Major improvement to the render distance of players including their armor, equipment and animations
- Introduced the “Combine” tool, which can be used to combine different items to make something new. This tool also allows pouring liquid from one container into another.
- Major changes to pet following behavior, allowing pets to follow you better and have less issues getting stuck in terrain
- Point of Interest Batch (30+)
- Expanded the hotbar functionality
We also had a rather large ban wave in November in which over 300 accounts which we had identified for exploiting and cheating were deleted.
December
We released 2 major patches containing 29 bug fixes between them, along with loads of changes and new content.
- Added a new dungeon, the Morin Khur sewers
- Added a new skill, Beast Mastery. This came with 100 new AI attacks, 47 more skills and 50 more buffs and debuffs
- Completely overhauled the weather system, adding lots of variety to the game world
- Added many more POIs to Myrland
- Added a new mount, the Molva
- Added player house trading and demolishing
- Improved the way pets follow players to reduce issues with pets being left behind
- Improved animation CPU performance on player/NPC characters by roughly 30%
- Added Krampos Buccus and the Raffle of Caerus event
January 2023 – The Present
This brings us to now, where we’re currently hard at work on the next major patch containing the Elementalism magic school, a new batch of alchemy effects and some quality of life changes.
In total over the past year we have released 11 major patches, numerous hotfixes, fixed 328 bugs (with countless more unmentioned in the patch notes), added many new systems, Points of Interest, Dungeons, new AI, and much more.
The game is in a vastly different and improved state to how it was only one year ago. However there is always more to do and ways we can improve the game, and we will not stop until we reach our goals.
Our next major milestone is the release of the Territory Control and sieging systems which we weren’t able to focus on at launch. As we have addressed the server capacity issues and now support huge battles at a scale never before seen in a game like this, we are very excited to deliver these systems that we know many of you have been eagerly waiting for. We can’t wait for you to get your hands on it and start claiming areas of Myrland for yourself.
After that we have the final step on our current roadmap, which includes the transition to Unreal Engine 5 along with the release on the Epic Games Store, when we will be ramping up marketing efforts which have been paused since the launch, inviting everyone to come and see how far Mortal Online 2 has come.
We would like to thank each and every one of you who has decided to come along on this journey with us, whether you have been playing and supporting us from the beginning or only found the game recently. We know it’s been a rough ride, however we are very happy with what we have been able to achieve in just one year and we can’t wait to show the world what Mortal Online 2 is meant to be.
Thank you,
The Star Vault Team
P.S
If you haven’t experienced Mortal Online 2 yet, we are currently running a -25% sale on Steam ending on the 30th of January!