Is Mortal Online the Oblivion-like MMO we’ve all been waiting for?
I am not a regular MMORPG player. Why? Because I have a life and friends here in the real world. But also because I tend to compare MMOs to one of my all time favorite RPGs, Oblivion. When comparing MMOs to such an awesome game, they usually fall quite short. Their graphics are stale, their combat is passive. But most of all, Oblivion allows me to be the evil son of a bitch I’ve always wanted to be. If I don’t like the way a guy looks at me, I can rip off his head a steal his wallet. MMOs simply don’t offer the overall quality, polish, and freedom that Oblivion does... yet. All that might change with an up and coming MMO called Mortal Online. Here's a quick teaser trailer, courtesy of Yours truly, YouTube:
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The Combat: Mortal Online will be one of the few MMOs to have a first-person view, much like Oblivion is one of the few RPGs that had a first-person view. This means combat won’t be clicking on an enemy and hitting F1 to throw a fireball at him. You’ll have to get up close and personal, dodging and blocking attacks while trying to hit your opponent where it hurts. No more letting your stats determine the outcome of a battle, you’ll have to have skills to. This should make fights far less predictable and thus far more exhilarating.
The Mortality: even though the graphics and first-person view are very appealing, they are not enough for me to forfeit my life in the real world and join millions of others in the MMOTRIX. What just might do the trick, however, is the fact that Mortal Online allows you to kill anybody, anyway, anytime, anywhere. This will completely change the way you play the game. In many current MMOs, if you come across somebody in a cave, you wave and carry on with your quest. If he wants to kill you because he’s fifty levels higher than you are, you decline his request to duel and that’s it. But in mortal online, if you’re all alone in a cave and spot a badass with a bigger sword than you, you’ll immediately start to panic. What do you do? Confront him? Run away? Hide in the shadows? He may not want to hurt you, but is it worth the risk?
This add a whole new layer of depth to how you interact with other players. If you’re the head of a clan of bandits, you have to be constantly on the lookout for traitors and backstabbers. And if you’re a double agent pretending to work for the ruler of a dangerous clan, well, you get the picture. Suffice to say that this level of freedom opens up a whole new world in terms of politics and intrigue.
Mortal Online is currently in its beta development phase and is scheduled to release during summer 2009. This could very well be the Oblivion-esque MMO we’ve all been waiting for. Here’s hoping Swedish developer Star Vault gets it right.
you’ll be scavenging around sewers like so:
The Graphics: for all those who think that graphics don’t matter, please, don’t waste your time with this article. Go along and play on your Atari 2600. For all those who appreciate great graphics but realize they don’t necessarily reflect the quality of a game, you might be interested to hear that Mortal Online is an MMO running on the Unreal Engine 3 (the first MMO to do so if I’m not mistaken). This means that, like Oblivion, you’ll be exploring environments so beautiful and so dripping with atmosphere that you’ll wish the screen your playing on was twice as big. This makes exploring a lot more enjoyable, something that is crucial to the wide open world of an MMO. Instead of running around caves like this:
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