Greetings Mortals,
On Thursday, August 25th at 7 PM UTC Henrik hosted his regular weekly stream over on Twitch.
This week Henrik showed the first sneak peak of Mortal Online 2 in Unreal Engine 5, and the major improvement in global illumination Lumen offers. We will continue to see more updates on this as we get closer to the Unreal Engine 5 update, but this first look is already very promising.
The stream has been archived on our YouTube channel, with some handy chapters and timestamps in the description!
Below are some of the key items Henrik touched on during the stream as well as some information about the next patch:
Next patch
We are planning to release the patch some time this week, provided nothing critical jumps out during the testing and QA process.
If that does happen, we will make sure to let you know as soon as possible.
Some key items from the patch notes
- Tower Shields are being added to the game.
- Shields in general have received an important balance update which will be mentioned in more detail below on this page.
- We have fixed an exploit with the Coin on Delivery Mail service. You should be able to use the mail again once the patch goes out, we apologize for the long wait.
- There is now a keybind for toggling criminal actions on and off faster. The default key is “N”. When active, an icon will appear near your health bar indicating that you are able to commit criminal actions.
- The concentration bonus to ignore interrupts has increased by 10%, from 60% to 70% at 100 Concentration.
- The Mounted Mage cast time penalty has been reduced from 2.0x to 1.5x.
Mortal Online 2 with Lumen
Here are the before and after screenshots of Lumen in action Henrik showed during the stream.
Shield balance update
The introduction of tower shields highlighted some balance issues we have been meaning to address for a long time, and given we are now in Project Polish it only made sense for us to give shields a balance pass as a whole to ensure tower shields didn’t become a problem once they made it in.
As such, shields have received a very important balance update in the next patch.
Here are the changes:
- Shield weight now contributes to equipped armor weight.
- The extra stamina cost of blocking with a shield has been removed.
- Shields now mitigate more damage when blocking attacks that can not be parried from a strong AI.
We have seen a few players with concerns over the initial change of shields contributing to armor weight as a solution to the issue of magic users always wearing large heavy shields for free, with the most common alternative suggestion being to give shields a strength requirement instead.
We wanted to give some insight on why we have made these changes specifically, so below is an explanation for why we chose what we chose.
- An added strength requirement which affects your stamina cost while blocking provided you don’t have enough strength, would not prevent players still equipping the shield on their back for free while running around and benefiting from the valuable protection against arrows. Players could then simply unequip the shield to fight.
- To solve the above problem, if we made it so you can not equip a shield if you don’t meet the strength requirement, this would mean shields would then work differently to every other type of equip-able item in the game. For weapons and armor, you can still equip them if you are under the optimal requirements, you just either slow down in the case of armor or burn more stamina in the case of weapons and bows, but you can still equip them which is a level of freedom we want to keep.
- Having the shield weight contribute to equipped armor weight solves the main problem of magic users being able to wear massive heavy protective shields (particularly the new tower sheilds which can cover almost your entire body) for free, while also allowing us to address the poor state of shield balance as a whole.
With these changes, magic users are still perfectly able to use specialized lighter or smaller shields in combination with light armor while still maintaining above 90% mana regeneration.
The main difference now is that these shields come at a cost, as a larger and more protective shield will weigh more, and therefore affect your mana regeneration and armor weight.
This also means that Humans with the “Cleric” clade gift are able to wear much larger and more protective shields than the other clades without their mana regeneration being as affected.
Likewise, players who wish to use the largest, heaviest tower shields may also need to sacrifice how heavy their armor is in order to accommodate such a shield.
These trade offs are a choice each player will have to make on their own, but we should see a much more varied use of shields due to these changes, and we also expect to see more melee fighters using shields now that the extra stamina penalty while blocking with one has been removed.
Hopefully these explanations have given some insight into the logic behind the balance changes.
Whether you’re a longtime fan of Mortal Online 2 or a newcomer in the world of Nave, dive into the vault with Henrik on Thursdays at 19:00 UTC to get your questions answered by the CEO and game designer.
See you in Nave,
The Star Vault Team