Mortal Online = darkfall + mourning?

[Malakili]

Perhaps the population is really low, but I haven't gotten camped or ganked yet.  So that's a plus to the newbie experience.

Edit:
How do you know what buffs/debuffs you have on you?  I havn't seen that yet.

Well, you the mechanics don't really let you get camped, but the as for getting ganked, I didn't experience much as a lowbie.  Frankly, most people are too busy working on projects for their clan, or fighting over towns/cities to waste their time on something like that.  I'm sure there are gankers like that out there, but they'd don't seem prevalent.  I think I got killed in PvP twice by people I had no chance against in my first few days, the first time I looked up the guy who killed me and was part of a clan that said they killed all of my race on sight in their description, and for some reason that made me feel better about it.  The second time I think was by players who were trying to teach me a lesson about being more careful, because they knocked me down, but ressed me and didn't loot me.

In the top middle of the screen your buffs and debuffs will show up as icons.

As for tips:  Don't neglect cooking (and fishing as a source of food to cook).  Being food buffed gives your hp regen that works in combat and significantly reduces down time.  As for casting, it can be a little cumbersome, but like looting, after getting used to the key combos you need to press, its really only a minor inconvenience.  Though I do understand that a lot of people are much less willing to put up with that sort of thing that myself.  One possible suggestion is to put your spells on a separate bar and switch to it when you pull your staff.  Making use of multiple action bars is really useful, even though you have to spend the extra key stroke to switch between them, because it helps you stay organized, at least, thats what I ended up doing.

[Draegan]

Hmm I didn't notice the buffs on my screen, I'll look again. 

[ashrik]

I'd advise you to hook up with a guild/clan ASAP. In my experience, and everyone else I had heard from, the game isn't really fun when playing it solo.

[Draegan]

I've only put a few hours into it but that's what I heard as well.  There some newbie clan I guess you can join.

[Speedy Cerviche]

I've been playing Darkfall a few months it's pretty good. Joined shortly before the sea fortress expansion and now have my character at a decent fighting level (50 STR/VIT, just getting mastery wep skills and access to elemental magic). You really can still be effective in fights even as a newbie, with a decent weapon you can hurt people, but just have to avoid situations where you are going mano-a-mano with a stronger character or good player.

Like other guys here have said, you really don't get curbstomped much as a newbie, there's always a few idiots gunning for newbies but they are pests in general and if it's any consolation they get beat down a lot by vets who really dislike these types of players. If you are getting killed a lot you are probably just in too high traffic an area, try changing newbie towns (every race has 5 or so) and moving to different hunting grounds. While hunting near a few highways I could get killed every 20-30 minutes, but if I ran 10 minutes over to another town and selected a slightly secluded spawn I'd see no one for hours.

From what I hear, macroing has been cut down, GMs patrol the map and ban people, I rarely see anyone doing it, only leaving your character auto-swimming overnight for HP gains (not much, but better than nothing especially for newbs) is OK, you only get kicked if a GM catches you, if you try and macro a spell while doing that you get a ban.

I think the devs want to roll out another expansion or two in 2010 before they really gear up marketing (free trials, box edition), they've been talking about one every 4 months. There's still a lot of rough edges to the game that they want to polish up. Here is a link to a recent community Q&A with 2010 plans: http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Paragus1/012010/5564_Darkfall-Community-QA-with-Aventurine
Population seems to be growing though, word must be getting out that Darkfall is a decent game.

The PvP is smooth, there's no game breaking bugs or imbalances. The PvE is decent, nothing special, but it's not awful. If you are looking for a MMOFPS, with a high degree of skill required, and a lot of persistent clan-based elements, this is a very good choice. Could use more polish but the important thing  is the core of the game is solid, and very playable.

Definitely join a guild ASAP. Joining NEW may not be such a great idea, the NEW guild is protected by powerful neighbouring clans, but it is still a magnet for anyone who wants to become some kind of griefer superstar. You are much better off joining one of the many newbie friendly guilds that has a holding, a solid core of veterans, they'll take care of you since they are motivated by the prospect of you becoming a loyal and dedicated long term member. A guild will also give you easy access to advice, high level crafters for gear, and group events to break up any character grinding tedium you experience. If you are an Orc for example, a guild like Black Ork Assassins is medium sized, isn't involved in any mega wars (still gets local PvP, you want some after all), has a port city bordering the NPC ork lands, and has a core of vets that keep nearby Orc NPC cities clear of griefer wannabees.

[Draegan]

After a few days playing Darkfall I got sucked back into the loot train that is WOW.  But I still want to play the game some, but it can wait.

[Malakili]

After a few days playing Darkfall I got sucked back into the loot train that is WOW.  But I still want to play the game some, but it can wait.

Regardless of quality, this is why Darkfall (or games like Darkfall), will never compete with WoW.  Whether or not thats a good thing isn't really my point here, just the reality of the situation.

[Speedy Cerviche]

There's no rush to play Darkfall right now unless you're really tired of WoW style games and/or really want a skill based MMOFPS style game with much different kind of challenge. It will probably be much better to jump into in a year anyways for anyone who isn't craving a twitch based MMO right now. If you are tho, DF is solid enough right now. But yeah Darkfall definitely isn't a !!ding lewtz!! type of game.

[Cadaverine]

Darkfall was better than I expected, not that that is saying a whole lot.  I still ended up heading back to WoW after a day or three as well, because I was tired of fighting against the UI.  It's like Ms. Wells special group of 6th graders tried to copy Oblivion.  Tack on some overgeared cockpuppet killing me while I'm just 20 minutes out of the gate, and I can begin to see why it's such a huge success.

Which is why anything beyond painless sport pvp in MMOs is destined for abject failure. 

Except Eve.  Apparently, the players in Eve actually learned not to eat their own young, and allowed the game to grow. Having the inclusion of "safe" space to start out is a large part of that.  Unlike DF which fostered some bullshit, harder-core than thou attitude from the get go, so drew in those players that think running 'carebears' off the server the instant they log on is a keen idea.

[DLRiley]

EvE lets you choose between the forever safe and perfectly reasonable (as in your not forced to venture out of it) care bear land of empire and 0.0 space. Darkfall there is no choice, your always in 0.0 space as far as the game design is concerned, players can feel free to impose a safe zone but that's a big meh.

[Malakili]

EvE lets you choose between the forever safe and perfectly reasonable (as in your not forced to venture out of it) care bear land of empire and 0.0 space. Darkfall there is no choice, your always in 0.0 space as far as the game design is concerned, players can feel free to impose a safe zone but that's a big meh.

I guess it can never be perfect, people always complain about the fact that EVE has "carebear" space, and then a game comes along without and people complain there isn't enough safety. 

[Kageru]

No care-bear space for people to train up or recover from loss -> a *lot* less subs.

I think it's safe to divide PvP people into two groups. The "good fight" group don't mind that much because they realize more players is good for the game and there being more fights. The "grief" players consider a player quitting the game in frustration the ultimate victory so they hate it.

As a designer I'd be after the first people. As a player I love games like Mortal Online, it's like a sump for the other games I want to play.

(Of course since Eve has some notion of territorial control it also has "somewhat safe" in a dangerous area zones.)

[LC]

The first time I attempted to play this POS it crashed every time i logged in and took a few steps. The second time it crashed at character creation. People who ordered boxed copies can't even get the installer on the dvd to run. They are supposed to be launching in about a week.

There are interesting posts like "20 steps to download the new patch" in their forums.

[Draegan]

I downloaded the client and I had it up and running in less than two hours.  No problems what-so-ever.

[LC]

I downloaded the client and I had it up and running in less than two hours.  No problems what-so-ever.

That's what happens when you pick beta testers by their credit card numbers, not their system specs.

[Draegan]

How old is your gaming rig?

[tmp]

Open beta starts today*.

Starting on Monday, February 1st, Mortal Online opens it's doors to the public with an open beta.
We invite the whole gaming community to step in the wonderful world of Nave. Join Mortal and experience a fantasticly immersive, beautiful and brutal sandbox MMORPG.

To join the open beta, simply create a game account (a forum account will automatically be created).
Download the client, install and play.

The open beta will run on one cluster server based in Stockholm (Sweden). Please keep in mind that, depending on the onslaught of new players, we will have to cap the server at a certain point.

*) for reasonably flexible definition of "today"

[Ixxit]

Their installation/patching instructions amuse me:

Step 1

Remove the old client files you have on your computer

Step 2

Go to here
http://www.mortalonline.com/downloadbeta
click on the download link

You can also download from atomic gamer (around ~200kb/s)
http://www.atomicgamer.com/files/833...t-v-0-12-16-18

NOTE: You will be downloading v 0.12.16.18B, which is not a rar file.


Step 3

Point the download (torrent) at the folder you want to have the files in

Example:

C:\MObeta\

It will start to download the v 0.12.16.18 client, along with the new patcher in total 4.9 Gigs.

Step 4

Wait for it to finish downloading, once done copy and paste it into another place so you have 2 versions of it.

Step 5

Go into the files, find the Updater.exe, it should be in the file folder you pasted.

Step 6

It should start a 450mb download, and now wait for it to finish downloading

Step 7

You will go past the 450mb mark and you will get a error that there was a error with the download, exit out of the updater, and restart it

Step 8

The updater will not work again, you will get it non responsive, there should be a error that says it stop working. Close it and restart the updater again.

Step 9

The patcher will start to dl a small update (size unknown). After it downloads there will be a install screen that pops up, hit next to start installing. You might get a can not rename error when installing.

Step 10

You will get a error that you can't rename a file, hit ok, and repeat step 10, till it stops giving you that error and you move on to the next step

Step 11

You will start to download a 10mb patch

Step 12

You will get another error, restart the patcher

Step 13

Hit play

[Malakili]

 

Maybe I'm just not hardcore enough to be in their target audience. 

[HaemishM]

Fuck that noise. 

[tmp]

Steps 7-10 are

[raydeen]

Gawd it's slow to download and patch. I've gotten 14% in about 4 hours. I'm uploading at 2 KB/s and downloading at +/- 0 KB/s. Sure hope someone is getting good bandwidth off of me. 

[ashrik]

If you guys had problems seeing the fun in Darkfall, I'd advise you just to steer clear. This is much less of a game and much more of a crazy crafting system + adlibs.

[raydeen]

If you guys had problems seeing the fun in Darkfall, I'd advise you just to steer clear. This is much less of a game and much more of a crazy crafting system + adlibs.

So it's Fallen Earth with swords?   j/k. MO sounds like the game I've always wanted to play. I have to try it just to see how badly my dreams are going to be dashed against the shores of Despair. That and the full frontal nudity of course.

Edit: Went lurking on the forums and found that the solution is to bypass Star Vault's patcher and just use uTorrent (or any other BT client I guess) to download. Night and Day. I might actually get to play the game before OB ends. 'Course I also read that character creation is supposedly down atm so...who knows.

Edit 2: Finally got it up and running and it's crushing my GPU's soul. Even on the lowest settings it's running far worse than AoC did on my machine. Ah well. One of these days I'll get a new machine.

[ashrik]

Have you tried turning off shadows?

[raydeen]

Yeah, everything is either low or off. I'll try tweaking some more but it ain't looking pretty for my rig.

Edit: Ok, I finally got in and it performs much better than at the character creation screen (mouse was slow and jerky, sound was stuttering). I'm sort of having flash backs to Fallen Earth where the tutorial ran like ass but the regular game runs fine. I'd love to know what's eating up all the CPU/GPU processing at the top of this game.

[Falconeer]

I have a beautiful original metal box, and I still can't run the game. Hangs at "getting revision". Looks like I am not alone.

[DLRiley]

You guys do remember the super hardcore pre-internet chat system right...

[Yoru]

I decided to try this because I felt like getting azzr4p3d by B0N3D00D and pLaTeDeWd while trying to bake bread.

After a while, I got it to install. Took a while longer, but I got it to update the launcher. Several hours after that, I got it to download the nearly-two-gig "0to05" patch. Now the patch file can't find my game directory and refuses to let me specify where to install the fucker.

This is the most clownshoes tech experience I've had in ages, and I've tried a lot of bad Korean F2P games.

[LC]

I reinstalled from scratch again to see if it would help me get past character selection. Now I crash at login, after typing the first letter of my username.

[Cadaverine]

I reinstalled from scratch again to see if it would help me get past character selection. Now I crash at login, after typing the first letter of my username.

You are not missing anything.  However bad Darkfall may have been at release, the argument could be made that there was at least a game there.  I installed, and tried MO the other day, and in all fainess, there may have been a game there.  If there was, I couldn't find it thanks to the UI.  I hesitate to call it a UI, though, as it was really more of an obstacle course created in the 7th circle of Hell.

The highlight of the 20 or so minutes I wasted on this drek was that after getting killed by a guard for unsuccessfully trying to speak with the NPC in front of me, I finally get respawned some 5 minutes away, only to be killed again by a guard.  For what, I have no idea.  I did see another player run by and yell 'guard', though.   

[Yoru]

I got it to patch eventually, created a character and got dumped in some hills somewhere. After about 20 minutes of hitting random keys to do stuff, another player told me to hit 'H' to open the help. Using that, I eventually figured out how to mine some ore. It involved opening the skill sheet, navigating down 3 levels of menus to the 'Mining' skill, then dragging the mining icon to my hotbar.

Then waiting five minutes, because apparently putting stuff on your hotbar requires a server check or something and there was some wicked lag going on. After that, I walked over to some rocks, opened my inventory (I), right-clicked on my noob axe (which equipped it), closed the inventory, hit X to go into Combat Mode, faced the rock, and hit the mining button on my hotbar.

Seriously.

After selling some ore and doing about 20 minutes of forum searching, I found out that I couldn't actually use the ore without walking 25 minutes (through open PVP territory) to another town to buy a skillbook. Which would take about 4 hours of real-time to train.

Then I logged out and uninstalled the game.

I would like to stress this - after 10ish hours of setup time, including torrenting >4 gigs of stuff, spread over 3 days, I uninstalled the fucker in under an hour from first login.

I played Wurm Online and Seed longer than that.

[jakonovski]

I'd say that's the purest ragequit I've seen/read in a while. If you really wanted to play, you did a bit of a disservice to yourself there.

[Lantyssa]

The only disservice he did was downloading the game.

[Yoru]

I'd say that's the purest ragequit I've seen/read in a while. If you really wanted to play, you did a bit of a disservice to yourself there.

You're assuming I really wanted to play. I'm long past "really wanting to play" any MMO that isn't incredibly novel; I mostly wanted to see what was up with one of the newer MMOs that was at least somewhat offbeat. Sample the lore, tech, art and systems to see if any interesting new paths were being trod.

Then I ran a gauntlet of technical blunders and questionable UI decisions, smack into the stark reality of the game. Once I saw the Matrix, I said fuck it and quit. This is pretty common for me; I fire up a lot of F2P or open beta games just to sample their fruits and quit within a day or two.

The indignation, in this case, is because just wasn't enough interesting stuff to justify the setup headaches; it's kind of like walking into amateur hour comedy without the benefit of tequila.

And, to be honest, it's not the shortest start-to-quit time I've had in an MMO; Age of Conan still holds that crown, and will be hard to beat.