Mortal Online

Our top donor for January 2013 was michaels, who had a chance to ask some questions of CEO Henrik Nyström.

Is the donation system working as you expected? If worse, how were you hoping it worked out? If better, do you feel you can keep a reasonable time-frame with the donation goals?

Donation goals were actually over our expectations. We carefully chose what could be a suitable goal which does not change our current schedule and roadmap. What every donation goal does is allow for content that can be implemented separately from our current road map. It is put on external outsourcing to give the players an option to add new content for free. This way, it will never push bug fixing or polishing aside. Instead, the players are presented with an option to donate for the package we present.

I haven't seen much lore regarding Mortal Online, does this mean there is still the possibility for changes? For example, new races, nations, governments, etc...

Lore has suffered a bit since launch due to limited resources and time to both handle and translate the lore we have. Mats has created a very inspiring and exciting lore for the game, but it was written in Swedish, very advanced Swedish which needed to have a correct translation to get the same content as it does in Swedish. This process was put on hold soon after release, due to the extreme workload encountered due to the premature released game. We do get frequent requests asking us we have and have really not got a solution to handle it. We are currently looking at gathering all our old lore to see if we can start translating it. We will may also see about sharing some of the lore on our website.

However our player races have been set since years ago, and there will be no other races to choose from in the game. These races belong to continents that are planned for future content.

When can people expect any additions to guild mechanics, like the ability to create alliances, and possibly large factions.

We are working on some major fixes and additions on the Test Center. Guild mechanics is slated for after the current patch we are working on. This will both improve some of the world issues we have with housing, security and Ai in relation to it. It will bring new functions and security to players to control land, place walls and gates including gatekeepers to have full control over who will get access or not. This system will allow for free placement of walls gates towers and houses. This means we can finally offer full npc city functions to the players, to design and build their own cities. With the help of a city planner players can place and build these different structures. We will take the first step with building the free wall placement gatekeeper and being able to track the “zone” inside these walls, where the players can then plan their city.

Has Mortal Online been progressing in a time frame you are happy with? Or do you wish it could progress either slower or faster?

Most people that have been with us since early development and release, know that we weren't kidding when we said this was going to be a rough release, which sadly was premature and also got lots of issues along with it. We wish we had more options to handle the release better or get more development time, but that was simply not an option. It is not easy to be a small independent company without a publisher covering the development and marketing. Release was indeed a tough period for both the developers and the players. It’s been a long road to solve the issues we had over the years, but the recent month has been very fruitful and exciting due to we are finally getting to a point where we have stability, control and know what works for us when it comes to developing Mortal Online. We now have the tools, pipeline and experience to progress the game further and to get rid of the current “last” issues we have in the game.

The coming patch will deal with one of those long time issues regarding node changes and node stability, so we are very happy to see those parts finally solved and working in game. Since we are getting to a desired stability level and game breaking bugs get removed from the game, we can slowly continue to add new content into the game with proper testing and polishing on it, before it goes live. We have a long way to go before we have half of the features in the game that is in our game design. The game has many exciting years ahead.

Besides the recent string of released information, anything more you can tell us about that will soon be added to the game?

I don’t want to discuss game features that are slated too far down the road. Instead, let’s focus on the closer game features ahead which we mentioned before. TC, Character system, and Magic system are just around the corner. The magic system is one huge task to fully implement. We may choose a few schools at the time, since we are looking to have 13 total magic schools, it will not be a fast process to add all of those, since they differ a lot in game play style and purpose. We will start adding a few schools to make sure they work well and are fun to use, without changing the entire balance in the game, not all schools are combat related. We may also need to work on some other areas in between some of the magic schools, since it will be a long road before we have all schools implemented.

Is mortal online what you wanted it to be when you began?

Mortal Online is taking the shape we wanted it to be. Of course, as I mentioned before, the launch did not really represent the vision of Mortal Online and we had a long road before we got to where we are today. We believe that today, Mortal Online is finally living up to what we want Mortal to be, of course we have more work to do, more polish to do, and lots of interesting game features to add over the years. It is really a never ending project, and as long as we have such an amazing community that’s slowly growing, we will be here developing the game to become a truly great and unique sandbox MMORPG.

Thank you for this amazing experience and this amazing game.