I was thinking, and I realized I never stated the one thing I felt most strongly about: the most glaring problem with Mortal Online, the reason that, no matter how many 'come back to us!' trials they give me, I won't play:
When you start the game, you start in a town. In that town... there is nobody. Not one living soul. Not even an NPC soul. The only animals are round you are rabbits. You can kill them and take their guts. You can mine the rocks. What can you do with rabbit guts and rocks? Well, not a whole lot, since there are no players to trade with or NPCs so sell them to. There is not even a global chat, and, as far as I can tell, there isn't a private chat, either. Maybe there's a guild chat.. but I don't think people who start the game start in a guild. As far as I can tell, every time I log on to Mortal Online thinking "well, maybe this is it," I can't seem to figure out if there's anyone else playing the game with me.
I'm alone, in a "massively multiplayer" void.
Quests are Killing Co-op
I saw a quote recently that drove me into a philosophical frenzy.
the quest driven MMO faction is slowly killing the co-op MMO faction
Here’s the context, though it’s meant entirely as it sounds.
Quests are killing co-op play. Wow, that’s a thinker. I’m more prone to believe that some popular MMOs opted to do what would make them more money by allowing classes that were previously limited to only playing in groups to be able to play alone. Then, those MMOs opened their doors to a larger market by making their game appeal to people who wanted a single-player experience with social tools like chat and buddy list built in.
Then every other game under the sun took notice of their ridiculously huge numbers (because big numbers means success, right?) and started stealing ideas from it. “Let’s put the MMO tag on our game even though it’s lobby+instance based and you can only have 5 people in an instance at once.” “Let’s make all the mobs weak so players feel really powerful and want to keep playing because they ROCK!” “Let’s exclude PvP from the game entirely since it’s such a small portion of Successful Game X.”
That’s how it works with movies, isn’t it? One zombie movie spawns and ten more follow to capitalize on the craze? One decent time-travel movie reports record breaking box office sales and soon every theater has ten more sub-par time-travel movies? Video games are just like any other media outlet: capitalizing on what works. So don’t blame the game: blame the customers who keep it going.
I’m Not Playing Vanilla WoW Right Now, But If I Did...
- Not enough rage. Not enough rage. Not enough rage. Not enough rage. Not enough rage.
- Not enough rage. Not enough rage. Not enough rage. Not enough rage. Not enough rage.
- Woo, 1 silver! I’m rich! Oh, looks like I have a new skill to train. Let me just… hm, down to 5 copper. Well, it’s 5 copper farther than when I started!
- Questgivers don’t show up on the minimap, only quest hand-ins.
- How do I turn on autoloot? Or even shift-to-autoloot?
- The rare warrior set has spirit on it, but not a drop of defense, dodge, or parry.
- Spells can’t miss, but they sure do get resisted often.
- Aggroed three grell in a cave and died. Not getting out of this one without another two deaths, at minimum.
- No vendor prices in tooltips.
- No clock up by the minimap!
- Battle Shout COSTS rage!
- Your dagger skill has increased to 2.
- Your dagger skill has increased to 3.
- Your dagger skill has increased to 4.
- Zero quest tracking whatsoever.
- Your dagger skill has increased to 5.
- DISHONORABLE KILLS OMG YES
- No class name coloring in /who
- As a warrior, I don’t start with two handed sword proficiency… and it can only be learned from one major city, which is not Darnassus.
- Daily quests don’t exist.
- No netherdrake mount.
- No flying mounts of any kind.
- Where’s the ban’ethil barrow den? Ah, forget it, this game isn’t even that great and I’ve already stayed up until 3am playing it!
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