My Synthetic World

Random thoughts and opinions as inspiration strikes.

Author: mklinic

Introduction:

Yesterday, I decided to take the plunge and try out Mortal Online. I have followed the game (at a distance) for some time and have casually lurked in the relevant forums on this site. I've seen a great number of threads depicting the negatives of the game as well as some defenders. It's mostly these negative posts that have prompted me to try to the game out. With equal parts curiosity and masochism, I want to see if it is really that bad.

This series of posts are my attempt, not to discredit those negative posts, but to record my experience. Any one reading can make the determination as to whether it supports what has been said or provides another point of view. Hopefully, this will also give other people considering the game, an outline of what to expect as they get started.

I will be splitting the post up into sections. One section is intended to try to show the steps I took that day (with minimal commentary) followed by a section giving my commentary and that day's activities.

In a nutshell, you now have my reasoning as to why I am here and what I am doing. Now, on with the show...

The Experience:

Being the first day (4/11/10), or more appropriately, night, of my experience with Mortal Online, I will cover the installation. First things first, I went to http://www.mortalonline.com/downloadbeta in order to download the beta client. The download is just the launcher/patcher and isn't too hefty at about 91 MB or so. While that was downloading, I created my account and forum login at https://account.mortalonline.com/account/new.php. 

Once the launcher/patcher had downloaded I went ahead and executed it. It went in to downloading a pretty large patch which was a little shy of 2 gig. While that was downloading I decided to check out the launcher a bit. I noticed that clicking on the "options" button resulted in an error that not all the files were there that it expected. After the patch finished downloading, the installer launched after a brief delay.  The patch install seemed to go fine with no issues to note. 

At this point, I was excited that I would get to log in to create a new character. I ran the launcher again and was greeted with another patch download. This one was slightly smaller, but still fairly sizable and over 1 gig. This patch went, much like the first, with no real issues to speak of.

Now, the launcher has downloaded and installed two sizable patches. Surely, this time I would get to create a character and try out the game play. Again, I ran the launcher and, again, a patch downloaded. This time, I think it was about 700 MB.

Third time's the charm right? Well, not really. After this patch downloaded and installed, I ran the launcher again. I sort of laughed to myself as if to say "watch, it probably needs another patch." Sure enough...another patch. This one only appears to be a few MB, but I'm done for the night. I'll see how far I get tomorrow.

My Opinions:

The Options button error on the launcher was a bit annoying. Not a deal breaker by any means, but since I spend a good amount of time programming, it seems like a silly issue. I mean, I would think the error could be trapped and not displayed if it was truly not important to the user. Or, it could be presented in a more meaningful manner. For example, if the error is due to the patches not being installed (just as an example of possible cause), why not display a friendly message saying something along the lines of: "Until the game has been fully patched, only limited options are available". As of right now, the error doesn't mean much to me and does nothing positive for the user experience.

Now, the patching....that was annoying. Again, not a deal breaker, but it has be scratching my head. To my knowledge, aside from the collectors edition, there isn't really a physical distribution for the game. With that in mind, why can't a new client just download the latest production build? I'm sure there is a reasonable response to that, but at the same time, downloading a client, that is distributed digitally, once and not having to patch it repeatedly is a reasonable expectation in my opinion.

Don't mistake what I am saying as a condemnation of Mortal Online so much as a glimpse into what I was/am thinking based on my installation experience so far. I am still anxious to get into the game and, to be honest, I expected worse based on what I've browsed on the forums.

Tomorrow is another day and I plan to finish up the fourth patch and (hopefully) log in to the game. :)

Edit: Just to clarify on my error message gripe. My wording was bad. They are trapping the error as I am not getting an exception error. I suppose my point is that, if the error is expected, the text should indicate as much to the user. Perhaps a better description of my complaint is that the error message could be more meaningful is all.