Greetings Mortals,
On September 27th Henrik hosted his Bi Weekly QnA stream, which will be archived on our YouTube channel and posted below when it’s available:
Stream VOD coming soon.. check back later
Unreal Engine 5 Progress Update
Henrik was planned to hop in game on our internal test server to show how it’s looking in UE5 with Lumen, however we upgraded to Unreal Engine 5.3 yesterday just before the stream and unfortunately the in game lighting needed to be adjusted again and became not ready to show in that build.
We will hopefully have that fixed for Henrik’s next stream, and we look forward to showing you that.
The team has made some great progress with optimization on Lumen, and we are now seeing some quite healthy framerates. There is still much to do here though, and optimization will continue right up until the patch releases.
The team has also made some nice improvements to make rendering characters and AI less expensive at a distance, which should help to improve framerates in large battles.
We have also officially completely moved over to the new engine internally and are no longer working on the UE4 branch.
As far as we are aware, Mortal Online 2 is still on track to be the first MMORPG running on Unreal Engine 5 with a planned release time of the end of October 2023, which is very exciting for us!
TC Balance
We now have one of our talented programmers focusing solely on fixing Territory Control related issues, with a nice list of balance updates and improvements at the bottom should he have time for them.
To summarize a few of the key changes,
- Supply Storehouses will need to be built close to your Chancery as was intended.
- Changing the Claiming Stone in a player house to be one of another guild’s to benefit from higher Guild Defence will no longer work. We are looking at the best way to acheive this, however it will likely involve either a cooldown on placing a new stone in the house, or a delay time on when the Guild Defence becomes active on the house after placing the stone.
- When purchasing items from a TC vendor, the amount of “tax” earned by the owning guild will be increased to make vendors more profitable.
- The price of Production Goods will be lowered slightly to lessen their impact on vendor profitability.
- The rate at which Guild Defence increases will be lowered to be the same rate that it decreases (2% per hour) to create more of a “tug of war” scenario.
- We are looking at removing the instant gain of Supply Structures when they’re placed, to lessen the impact this system has on active sieges. The Guild Defence system’s main goal is to prevent surprise offline sieges, not to interfere with an ongoing siege by allowing the defenders to coordinate building multiple Supply Towers at the same time to gain a significant amount of defence instantly.
- The Guild Rank required to withdraw Production Goods will be reduced from 4 to 3, to allow guilds the ability to deligate Supply Running activities without allowing those same people the access to spend Prominence.
- We’re looking at ways to allow upgrading the Guild Supply cap, via increasing your Guild Tier, as well as potentially by placing or upgrading certain structures such as the Supply Storehouse, Supply Line and Chancery. We’ll have to see if we have time for this one as it’s not as simple as we would like, however in the worst case scenario we can always simply increase the base cap to alleviate the issue of many guilds feeling that 1000 Guild Supply is not enough.
- We’re looking at implementing something to mitigate the viability of out repairing manganon damage to buildings during a siege, as we want promote sieges being an active gameplay scenario, with the “meta” tactic not being to have a large group repairing to counter the siege.
We have many more items on this list, however it’s important to understand that due to most of the team’s focus being on the UE5 migration, there is the small possibility that not everything here will be completed, tested and verified in time, but we want to let you know what we’re working on nonetheless.
We have also updated the Territory Control UI to look much nicer:
What’s Coming Along With UE5?
While a large focus is on the new engine migration, we are also hard at work on the addition of some not at all insignificant new systems, such as the Task Expansion, New Zone Rules, and some important changes to being a murderer as well as general balance tweaks and a long list of bug fixes and quality of life updates.
What is the Task Expansion?
One of the things we have always wanted to work on is the new player experience, specifically in regard to the new player’s transition from Haven to Myrland.
Although our game has many sandbox elements which we love and are proud of, it’s no surprise that many new players instincts are not to create their own goals to chase, and end up logging into the game and asking themselves the question of “what should I do?”.
This is something we aim to address with the Task Expansion, which will eventually allow players of all types to engage in various activities with higher rewards for completing them faster, time limits, and in doing so earn Renown, which represents your reputation and dare I say prominence throughout the realm for that activity.
For example completing hunting tasks will increase your Hunting Renown, which will grant you access to more difficult tasks with higher rewards. One such reward is a unique currency used by hunters throughout the realm, which when you have enough of can be redeemed to purchase a unique cape which is not tradeable to show off your acheivement as a great hunter.
This same concept is then applied to different types of activities, so eventually there will be Fishing tasks for you to increase your Renown as a fisher, earning rewards, unique currencies and gaining access to vendors who sell interesting items provided you have enough Renown for them to talk to you.
So whether you’re a new player looking for some handy direction or a little nudge to get out into the world, or a long time veteran who knows exactly what they want to do and uses these tasks to compliment and improve their normal gameplay, we should have something for everyone eventually after this expansion.
Bounty Hunting is also included under the general “Task” umbrella, and so will receive some long needed improvements as well such as distance limits on Bounties and the ability to name a partner, and if there’s time, hopefully some interesting rewards as well.
The Bounty Hunting titles have also been rewritten to be more interesting, apart from the 50 bounties title which we left alone as that was the one most people wanted.
New Zone Rules
The Epic Games Store / UE5 release patch comes with the introduction of the Wilderness.
The Wilderness is a new type of area where players can not be reported for murder or lose Nation Standing. Certain areas on Myrland will become Wilderness, such as the Gaul’Kor area, the jungle, and most dungeons which contain bosses.
These Wilderness areas will be marked on the map, as well as barriers in the world both natural and crafted such as mountain passes, tunnels and chokepoints, as well as fences, old ruined walls or stakes in the ground. You will also receive a chat message and potentially a fanfare when entering the Wilderness.
If you die while inside the Wilderness you will not be able to report your killer for murder, so come prepared, at your own risk, and with the knowledge that you will be in significant danger with no recourse from the NPC Nations.
To contrast this Wilderness, the areas around all Guarded Towns will become patrolled by guards of that nation. Although they will be significantly weaker than the guards found inside towns, they will still pose a threat to any would-be bandits who brazenly attack innocent people too close to the town or by a road being patrolled.
The density of these patrols will fall off rather quickly as distance to the town increases, and they will mostly only be found on defined roads.
Red Names for Murderers
We are bringing back the red name for being a murderer.
This means if you have more than 10 (this number may change) murder counts, your name will change from blue to red.
With a red name, other players will be able to attack you without turning criminal themselves, however the guards will not attack you on sight as a murderer. This means you are free to attempt to enter a Guarded Town you have positive Standing with, however the guards will not defend you if the players living in that town decide to attack you.
This change is something we know many of you have been asking us about and have wanted for a long time, so we’re happy to say that it is happening.
This also means murderers are no longer favored by the flagging system, as you will instantly know if someone is a murderer or not when encountering them outside of a town.
This will allow more people to make better informed decisions about what they should do when encountering other players, while making the gameplay as a murderer feel more like your actions have had a tangible effect on your reputation within the world, along with bringing more action toward you.
Whether you’re a longtime fan of Mortal Online 2 or a newcomer in the world of Nave, dive into the vault with Henrik every second Wednesday at 8:00 PM CET to get your questions answered by the CEO and game designer.
See you in Nave,
The Star Vault Team