14 DAY TRIAL // Star Vault's CEO and founder, Henrik Nystr?m, announced that his company would develop a first-person MMORPG called Mortal Online. The game will be powered by the Unreal 3 engine and will feature a fantasy world with complete detail and a large backstory.
The developer wants to do away with the classic distinction that exists in MMOs between zones where the player battles creatures of the world and NPC, which are referred as PvE zones, and zones where players can fight other players in open contests of skill, called PvP zones. Star Vault believes this distinction is one of the biggest limitations that MMOs have at the moment.
The game world will be entirely open, without instanced zones where only the player and his enemies are present. Each encounter holds the possibility of player-versus-player conflict, but also the possibility of cooperation. Safeguards will be in place to make sure that players with more developed characters don't roll over beginners, but other than that anyone can decide who he wants to fight and when.
The combat section of the game will be in real time and first person, meaning that not only the skills of the characters come into play but also the abilities that players have in aiming, dodging and strafing. All the fights will take skill to master and there will be special rare monsters in the game that can only be killed once for special benefit.
Great emphasis is placed on cooperation. A lone player can build a house and various other objects that can help him recover from his adventures, but only a guild can set up a keep, which offers its inhabitants more bonuses and only the cooperative effort of a larger numbers of players can get them to effectively rule one of the nations in the game through violence, economics or diplomacy.
Different races and professions will be available for play. The player can craft, trade or mine resources. In an interesting twist, the first player to discover an area will have his name forever engraved in the world map which could make for some cool competitions and bragging rights.
The game seems to include some nice ideas and could prove a rival for WoW, but much depends on how they are implemented so we reserve further judgment on Mortal Online until the time a playable version is available.