It is tough to make a MMORPG that stands out from the new crop of YAMFRIES (Yet Another MMORPG Featuring Rangers, Imps, Elves or Sorcerers) but Mortal Online, by Swedish developer Star Vault does manage to stick out.
Action-based MMORPG shooters based on the Unreal Engine have been popular recently, with games like Huxley and Crimecraft finally finishing production. Mortal Online seems much more MMORPG than most of the other first-person based, real-time action MMORPGs though.
Here is a couple of the key facts about the game: the entire game is played in first person. PVP is possible through out the entire game world -- you can also steal other player's stuff. The game has no experience levels; it's great to see a developer try out such a different idea-- so this means that all content is accessible from the get-go, and there is no grinding. There are no classes either -- instead, your character is determined by some primary attributes, a skillset, and guild affiliations.
Mortal Online sort of looks like an online version of Bethesda's Oblivion.
The game is in a (reportedly) rough beta state rate now. Star Vault put up 10,000 copies of the game for sale -- each sale guarantying you access to the beta. It appears these 10,000 copies have sold out. Supposedly, Mortal Online will be released in the next few months (Q4).
Some gameplay clips have turned up on YouTube. Check'em out. The first is of mining and archery. Remember: recording game footage is going to slow down your computer a lot, so you can expect more frames-per-second if you play the game (presumably). The second video is of the character creation screen. Apparently that white censored area was done by the user recording the video, in order to make the clip YouTube-friendly -- so that means there is some limited nudity in the game it seems. Which is a bit odd.
The third clip is some PvE action. Some dudes are fighting some minotaur folk.
Minimum configuration (1024x768, detail reduced)
OS: Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows VistaProcessor: Intel Pentium 4 3Ghz or equivalentRAM: 1GBVideo card: ATI Radeon 9800/nVidia GeForce 6600Video memory 256MBHard drive space: 5-25GB Recommended configuration (1680x1050) OS: Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista Service Pack 1Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz or equivalentRAM: 2048MB Dual Channel DDR2Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or equivalentVideo memory: 512MBHard drive space: 30GB
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