Friday, January 22, 2010

MO let down

Well, I participated in the 2nd stress test for Mortal Online yesterday, which was extended for another 6-8 hours due to popular demand, which was cool of them.

While it wasn't for the purposes of beta testing, I had a good enough go of it to get a general sense.

It was bad..... really, really bad. It warrants my blog's name in full.
Just down right painful, from beginning to end.... almost.


Combat was effectively non-existent.
Everything was sluggish and unresponsive, and you just couldn't hit anything.
Seriously, they have this weird, backward ass hitbox system, that just doesn't work half the time.
You end up aiming over your intended target, waiting about 5 seconds before you find out weather anything happened or not.

Easily the most incomplete, arduously painful combat I have ever seen in a game.
Even as far a beta goes.


Even the most basic of tasks was a drawn out affair in frustration.
To mine or gather wood, you had to go through about 3 different windows to find the right skill to use, put it on you skill bar that won't sit still, draw your starter axe, then continue to activate the relevant skill every 2 seconds.

Oh, and after all the, at least in the beginning, you only get 1 piece of word/ore about 50% of the time. Here's the kicker, you need about 500 just to make starter weapons.
Yeah, fuck that for a joke.


Inventory management is also downright painful.
The drop system is weird, requiring you to press about 3 or 4 different keys just to open your loot bag.
And when you gain items, you'd think they'd auto-stack right? Nope, duplicated of the same stuff has to be manually stacked. And due to the lag involved in this, it becomes irritating very quickly.


And don't get me started about the text based taming..... fuck me was that painful.
Thought it was a quaint idea at first, but practice proved it to be otherwise.

I can go on and on about just how freaken bad it is, but it's time I leverage it with some high points.



First, the world is vast and pretty nice to look at. Vacant, but nice.
The only real enjoyment I got out of it was jumping down a 90ft tall waterfall. That was cool.

Second, there we're quite a lot of play made structures, and that gives it a nice feel, and shows that it has something in the long term to work for.

Lastly, while I never got to experience mounts, due to the fucking taming system, they appear to be great fun, as well as being one of the few nearly complete systems in the game.
(minus the fact there is only one type of mount as it stands)



So overall, I'm grossly disappointed.
It sounds so good on paper, but in practice it just doesn't go anywhere.
There are so few good things to say about it, and I'm trying to be generous.

While it is still beta, as many fucktards continue to point out, this is beside the fact that is was a inch away from releasing a month ago. And it has made virtually no progress since.
Unless they fix the parts of the game that matter, combat being chief among them, then MO will likely die right out of the gate.
It's almost unplayable.

Too bad to, it has so much potential.


~Yoh

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