Mortal Online is the latest in a small stint of hardcore, open PvP sandbox MMOs that have been coming into the limelight recently. This one, from Star Vault, runs on the Unreal Engine 3, and over time garnered a massive amount of attention, slightly less than that of which it all but lost during testing phases.

Setup

Mortal Online’s setup process was so long and monotonous that I felt it required its own section. Upon starting up Mortal Online, you’ll be faced with what will most likely be a good 8 hours of patching. For me, it took close to 24 hours to patch the game entirely, and I’m still left with a bad taste in my mouth after that. You could easily go into your Mortal Online folder, open the torrents it uses in your favorite BitTorrent program and move on with life, but you’d still have to revisit the launcher after each patch to get the next torrent. You’d also have to manually patch the game, as opposed to simply letting the launcher do it for you.

Gameplay

Upon logging into Mortal, you’re faced with a character creation screen. You can have 5 characters, each entirely unique, and you can create and delete as many as you want without penalties. In fact, you may have to several times in order to find your favorite starter build and starting zone. Unfortunately, starter zones are now race locked, and you may not get your favorite combination like you could have in beta (I couldn’t get Toxai and be an Oghmir) but you’ll most likely not notice unless your starter area is just plain irritating.

Once you’ve chosen your race (as stated above, I chose Oghmir) and chosen your age (it actually affects stats!), you are faced with a few character customization options. Unles at the absolute extremes, other players may never notice any difference between you and the next guy other than hair style, but you can still do a little fine tuning and make it at least look good to you. To some people, that’s enough.

From there, you can place your starting attributes. You get something like 25 points to spread out over 10 or so attributes. Unfortunately, unless you want to start with a definite build, your efforts here seem all but useless, as you can easily train and detrain these attributes later on during actual gameplay. After that, you choose a specific class which defines your starting skills (again, pretty much useless, as you can learn just about anything else for a price by buying a knowledge tome) and defines how you’re going to be grinding for cash for the majority of your new game experience.

It should be noted that by this point it’s clear that the game is extremely NSFW, as your character is naked with full frontal nudity the entire time you’re creating him/her.

And so it began. I started as an Armorcrafter, mined some granum, and after exploring my skills, came to realize just how screwed up the newbie experience was. Thought you were confused before? Try to explain why you have mining and armor crafting, but not refining. Wait, what? At this point, I almost gave up in frustration (in the beta, you automatically had all skills, and you just had to put your extremely limited skill point pool into a skill to improve it), but I soldiered on. After spending half an hour mining granum (and yielding very little of it), I went to a vendor. Upon trying to sell it, another change became apparent to me. It’s not worth anything to vendors. Sigh. I now had to either craft my own armor and weapons with skills I didn’t have and sell them, or buy them with money I didn’t have from other players.

Back in beta, I had actually made it decently far in the game, but at this point in time, as a less hardcore player than Mortal apparently demands, I was completely lost. Without the skills I needed, I felt I was trapped.

It’s not like I really was missing much at this point in time, though. Once getting to a point where you’re viable against the PvE monsters, you can fight them (orly?) and, possibly, beat them. However, the PvE is a rather lacking experience and isn’t very rewarding at any point in time. There are apparently world bosses in the game, or still coming soon, but I was never able to experience them.

Other than that, you can either build, or you can fight other players. Again, other than the feeling of might some players get when destroying the property of others, or when killing another player, there’s really no reward or motivation for doing such acts. You can build yourself a nice little house, but I don’t really know if there’s all that much reason to, due to a lack of customization.

Graphics

The graphics are slowly getting better. They’re not stellar, but at least the textures are getting to the point where they’re all of high resolution. Other than that, the trees are of specific notablity, due to the fact that they’re absolutely horrendous.

The first person viewpoint, however, did feel very immersive. There was all sorts of motion blur, and even when doing mundane things like mining, chopping trees, or even attacking someone, the camera followed your character’s face almost faithfully.

Sound

There’s really not much sound in the game, and the sounds don’t change much throughout the game. After hearing the stepping noise for the thousandth time, or the swoosh of a weapon, or the chopping of wood, it might get a bit annoying, especially since there isn’t any background music. At all.

Community

The community is…well, to say it straight, the community, especially in the newbie areas, is absolutely horrendous. There are PKers, thieves, and even all sorts of people that “push” you to get you to attack them, then call the guards to kill you, and steal your stuff. There are schemers, there are loud mouths, and then there are the people that will ignore every plea for help just to advance their own agenda. I never once saw anyone really “friendly” even after saying “hi” to about two dozen people.

Value

Given that the game is European, and it’s not “re-priced” for people in the U.S., it has the enormously high price of $58. For some people, it could be worth it to relive the days of hardcore MMOs in a new place, with more modern graphics. However, for the rest of us, it’s just an overpriced indie game that probably should be a budget title. Even with a free month, it can’t come anywhere near competing with games like Xsyon, which will run you $40 for the client and 2 months of free play after release, as well as a unique item.

Overall

The game, like EvE in its release days, is very, very bare bones. There are only very basic systems in place and they’ve hardly been fleshed out to where they could be. It’s also easily just as confusing and, even in the later game, features very little direction at all. A lot of people are hoping this might be the next Ultima Online, or go the way of EvE, but it’s yet to be seen if it will even survive its first year. I’d be hard-pressed to say it will, though, seeing as the company has already had a few financial issues and the game was released in an inadequate state.

Final Score: 4/10