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Mortal Online 2

Into the Vault #145 – First Roadmap of 2025 & PTR Date

January 23, 2025

Development Update

On Wednesday last week, Henrik our CEO revealed our first roadmap of 2025 during a livestream on the official MortalOnline2 Twitch channel, along with his usual QnA and MO2 key giveaway.

This post will expand on some of the information in the livestream for each of the new roadmap items, so you can know more about what to expect from each one.

Sprint 9 PTR Date

The Sprint 9 PTR is currently planned to be accessible for testing next week on Wednesday the 29th of January!

Optimizations & Backend Additions

This update, although lean on new content, contains some rather important and impactful changes to the backend of the game, as well as several important bug fixes.

These optimizations come in the form of both client and server performance improvements. It is worth noting that server performance does not affect your framerate, but instead things like delayed actions or player movement and position accuracy, which should improve the experience of large battles in these regards.

A lot of work has gone into further improving stuttering while travelling in the world, so we’re hopeful to see a notable improvement there as well.

We have also been working on adding new backend systems for monitoring a large number of things in real-time.

FOV Increase & Changes

Another notable change included in this update are two alterations to the game’s video settings. Sparing the technical details of how this works, we have restricted the ability to benefit from additional vertical view space by using thinner or more “square” resolutions / aspect ratios.

In addition to the above change, we have also increased the maximum Field of View from 110 to 120.

In-Game Survey Questions

As part of the new backend systems, we will also be introducing the ability to answer survey questions after logging into the game. These survey questions will be primarily used for gathering data about various game topics, at times the questions will be very broad and simple while others may be more targeted balance questions. It is important to note that these surveys are to help us gauge community interest in and opinions on a given topic, which we can then use to make informed decisions.  

This is something that we have wanted to do for a long time, and we are very happy to finally have the option for gathering data in a more secure format than say the Google forms questionnaires we have run in the past. 

We will still likely use the Google forms questionnaires in the future where it makes sense, however we can now ask valuable questions and be assured that all answers were given by an account with access to the game. Additionally, we are planning to hopefully have time to add functionality for asking questions to specific demographics of players only, depending on various criteria for more targeted data gathering, however this would be a cherry on top for us this update.

While this update is definitely more on the backend side involving all of our programmers, the rest of the team has also been working on and preparing for the following Sprints, which are quite large in scope.

Adrenaline System

The Adrenaline system is something we have talked about a few times in the past, especially in relation to the Combat Abilities feature which is found in Sprint 11.

As the Adrenaline system is still very much in active development we can’t be too specific about exactly how it will work, hence the intentional vagueness that follows, however we can give a broad overview for now.

As Henrik mentioned during his stream, the Adrenaline system is a new feature which relates to combat, and is designed to not only increase the effectiveness of skillful players, but also to improve the ability for outnumbered players to resist and potentially overcome a larger force.

More specifically, Adrenaline will be a new resource players can generate through fighting, which may then be spent on various beneficial actions. The amount of Adrenaline gained by receiving damage or parrying is currently planned to be greater than the amount gained by dealing damage.

It is currently planned for your Adrenaline to passively generate up to a certain point, allowing the usage of basic actions fairly regularly, however to utilize the more impactful actions, you will need to engage in combat for some amount of time and generate enough Adrenaline.

To start with, we will likely have one or perhaps two basic actions which cost Adrenaline with the release of Sprint 10, however these will be expanded in Sprint 11 with Combat Abilities.

As mentioned above, this system is closely tied to the future Combat Abilities, as you will need to spend Adrenaline to use them. Combat Abilities will be discussed later in this post in a bit more detail.

Lastly, there is another feature included in Sprint 10 which will allow for killing players in mercy mode to be much more impactful, intimate and satisfying, while also being tied to the Adrenaline system.

You will be able to perform what we are currently internally calling Fatalities / Executions / Finishing Moves, which are essentially synchronized animations and effects which you can activate on a player in mercy mode to kill them in a satisfying way while also generating a decent amount of Adrenaline as a reward.

We have a lot of plans for these, and we can’t wait to talk about them more. We will also likely be showing them off in a future stream as we get closer to Sprint 10.

AI Updates & Invasion

AI Invasions are a feature which existed in the first game, and we are excited to finally bring to Mortal Online 2.

Similarly to many other items on the new roadmap which are still being actively designed and worked out, we can not get too much into the specific details about this one yet either.

As an overview, these AI invasions will involve a particular type of AI which can spawn in an area of the map and slowly multiply by constructing additional spawners, eventually resulting in a large group of AI in that location.

As we get closer to this update, we will likely be showing off and discussing more details around how this happens, and what types of AI will be involved.

Additionally, we are planning to explore some changes to PvE interaction, with the intention to improve things such as AI hitting you from further away than seems reasonable. With these changes, the PvE experience should become more predictable and engaging, especially at higher latencies.

New Chat System

It is no secret that our in-game chat system has needed some love for a long time, and in Sprint 10 we plan to deliver that.

Currently we are planning to expand the customization options for the in-game chat, allowing you to do things such as rename chat tabs and select which channels you would like to see appear in each tab.

This will allow you to create your own personalized chat tabs, that each display the chat channels you would like to see in them, such as creating one for Whisper chat. 

Additionally, we will also be adding a new “World” chat channel, which may be used by anyone.

The decision not to have a global World chat was one made back in Mortal Online 1, before the age of widely used communication platforms such as Discord. The intention behind that decision was to allow players to experience a feeling of regionality, as being unable to communicate with anyone on the other side of the continent freely meant all interactions (outside those in your guild) were more localized, immediate and intimate.

With time passed, we now find ourselves in the world where widespread communication is possible for all players of the game, even via our own official Discord server.

Additionally, many players often attempt to use the in-game “Help” chat channel as a global World chat, which is less ideal for players legitimately needing and asking for help with gameplay. This results in the Game Masters frequently sending reminders in the Help chat of what its purpose is.

We find that it is time to solve these problems, and introduce a global World chat channel which all players may use at their leisure.

Lastly, we also want to add a new chat channel for Alliance chat, however this comes with a few considerations.

Currently, Guilds may ally with a number of other guilds individually, which causes hiccups when we want to display one Alliance chat channel.

Consider being allied to three different guilds, and each of those guilds is in turn allied to a further new three guilds which your guild is not also allied to. 

This raises the question of “who should be in the Alliance channel?”

Although there are many, one potential way we could make this work is to restructure the way Alliances are made, to be more like a “Guild of Guilds”, where an Alliance can be formed between two Guilds, and if another Guild would like to join that Alliance, they would then automatically become allied to all other guilds which are already in the Alliance. You would also only be able to be a member of one Alliance at a time. 

We would then be able to have a single “Alliance” chat channel, and all the guilds within your Alliance would be able to talk to each other in it. 

This is quite a significant change compared to how Alliances currently work, and so we are planning to use the aforementioned new in-game survey system being added in this patch to gather data about how everyone feels about it.

Something else to note, is that doing so would allow Alliances to have official names.

Combat Abilities

Combat Abilities are a feature we have discussed a few times in the past, and even appeared on a previous roadmap of ours. However we made the decision at the time to delay their release, due to the highly sensitive nature of combat balance, and how we do not want to introduce a new combat-sensitive feature without ensuring we have enough time to give it the attention it needs.

Fortunately, we now believe Sprint 11 is a good candidate for this feature. However with that said comes an important disclaimer and clarification:

We are not guaranteeing that we will release the Combat Abilities feature in Sprint 11, in the event it needs more time in the oven and isn’t quite ready yet. A feature like this needs to be perfect before we can consider pushing it to the live server, and we plan to hold several iterations and PTR tests before that happens.

With that said, what follows is an overview of how this feature is currently planned to work.

As mentioned earlier in this post, Combat Abilities will be closely tied to the Adrenaline system.

You will need to generate enough Adrenaline to perform a Combat Ability, be that from regular fighting, or performing an execution / fatality / finishing move on someone.

These Combat Abilities are planned to be unique per weapon group, meaning each weapon will have its own set of abilities which can be activated by spending Adrenaline, and will perform different functions.

As an already mentioned example, one of the abilities for the Axe is planned to be a “Cleave” which can pass through and damage multiple opponents in one swing. Another might be performing an attack with a bladed weapon which adds a Bleeding Debuff onto your opponent.

These abilities are currently planned to have custom animations, with variations in how they affect your movement speed and even camera turn-rate for balance depending on the ability used.

In addition to the abilities which perform attacks, we also plan to have abilities which instead add a buff to yourself, such as a temporary boost to stamina regeneration as an example.

We are very much aware that some members of the community have expressed concerns about these combat ability attacks being “overpowered”, and we would like to address those.

Most of these abilities are being designed to be used fairly frequently during combat, and are not being designed in such a way that they could be compared to for example an “ultimate” from a game like Overwatch. They are intended to be actions which if chosen to be used at the right time, can potentially offer a large benefit, but not a guaranteed one.

As mentioned above, we will be hosting several PTR tests for these, so you will all have ample time to give us your feedback about the system before it goes live.

New AI Technology

As Henrik mentioned during his livestream, we have a specific planned stream in the future where we will be discussing and showcasing more about this, so we will not discuss it further here, although we are very excited about it.

TC System Updates

Territory Control has long been in need of attention, and although we have made several balance adjustments to Sieging in recent months, the broader feature of controlling and perhaps more importantly benefiting from territory is something that we have wanted to tackle for some time.

Currently Keep territories grow outward in a circle from the Keep’s location, colliding with and preventing the growth of any other Keep circles they bump into. The intention behind this system was to fuel conflict between Keep owning guilds, as the only way to further grow your Keep’s Territory once blocked was to siege the Keep who owned the Territory which is blocking yours from growing.

Additionally, Keep owning guilds not only receive taxes from all Player Houses located inside their Territory area, but are also able to build Territory Control structures anywhere inside their Keep’s Territory area without needing to first construct a Player House and add a Claiming Stone to it.

The above benefits, although useful in their own ways, are simply not appealing enough to fuel a desire to own a Keep and engage with the Territory Control systems, and so we are revisiting Territory Control to address that.

One of the changes we are currently planning to make, is to remove the Keep Territory circle system entirely, and replace it by splitting up Myrland into specific regions in a grid-like fashion. Keep owners will then be able to contest and claim these regions in such a way that is designed to facilitate a fight at a specific time and location within the region, and in doing so benefit in various ways depending on which region was claimed.

We will be able to talk about this in more detail in the future, and the planned changes are already looking extremely promising for making Territory Control much more engaging and fun.

Note

Please keep in mind that as development progresses, any details described above may change or be adjusted where necessary.

 See you in Nave,

The Star Vault Team

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