Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The friend of mine who got into Mortal Online used to try and sell me on it with the strangest stories. “There’s this one naked player who stands on a bridge all day and night and when players try to cross it he beats the crap out of them with a stick,” or “It’s so cool! At night you can’t see anything without a light.” And so on, and on. If you, like me, never ended up giving this hardcore sandbox MMORPG a shot, now is the time to try. Blues has word that developers Starvault have just started offering free 14 day trials, with no credit card required, and you’ve got to love an online game which has “Long-term wounds” and “Cooking” as the two most prominent items on its upcoming features list. Vids & info after the jump.
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Our more handsome and interesting readers will recall that we spent some time arsing about it the Mortal Online beta a while back, and ended up chatting about it at length. It was a fun time. If you like incredibly hardcore sandbox MMOs, which we seem to, for some reason. Anyway, the open beta has come an end and it’s all live over there. You can watch all the trailers your series of tubes could hope to gather on the main site. Expect some reviews soon. Although I don’t know if we’ll do one, because we’ve all got our digits caught in Chinese finger traps. I’m typing this with my knees.

We’ve been playing the unusual MMO Mortal Online for the past couple of weeks, and Phill and I took some time out to talk about it. Read our thoughts on this strange spiritual successor to Ultima Online below.
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RPS Beta Army, you are hereby required to conquer Mortal Online, which goes into open beta today. “But what is Mortal Online?” Well, I’ve only gone and answered that particular inquiry over at Eurogamer by performing the ritual of the preview ritual here. In it I explain:

Mortal, being developed by Swedish studio StarVault, is focused on creating an experience that lives up to the legacy of Ultima Online: returning to that philosophy of freedom and player co-operation while at the same time carving out its own niche with modern tech. Mortal Online is powered by the Unreal 3 engine – employing a new landscape engine to create an immense terrain – and is played with a first-person camera. While StarVault has evidently been galvanised by the Ultima way of doing things, its game has a look and feel of its own. You might be able to grind up resources like in UO, but exploring a 3D world is quite a different experience.

And so on. Anyway, go, see, beta, conquer.

Once we get past early summer things get a little hazy. We enter a nether-realm of shifting dates and unclear prophecies. By then we’ll also have a whole bunch of games I haven’t previously mentioned show up in the intervening months, stuff that we didn’t have release dates for to place them in our line-up. This final post in our preview attempts to survey them all. To the future! (And check out part one and two if you haven’t seen them already.)
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Until a fantasy-themed MMO crashes and burns quite as disastrously as Auto Assault did, it’s likely that wizards’n'warriors will remain the prevailing trend for experience point-gobbling. So, it’s not surprising that’s the tack taken by Mortal Online. See here:

A few details on the game lurk beneath the cut.
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