Leipzig Coverage 2008

[Drakus]

The purpose of this thread is for community members to post information they find about Mortal Online from the Leipzig GC (20-24 August). This will provide us with a one-stop-spot to archive all the new information in one easy to find location. It will also help reduce unwanted multiple threads appearing containing the same information and flooding the forums.

P.S. I'm also aware there is a thread already called 2008 Leipzig Games Convention, but it's got several pages of off topic posts (mine included) and I felt it was best to start fresh.

[Nuzor]

great idea let's keep this thread clean of spam, this was posted in another thread by Necromantic.

http://www.mortalonline.com/forums/45774-post175.html

[Nuzor]

Some guys blog that i found after googling mortal online leipzig:

20-08: so the press day has ended. What a day it was. Got to meet a whole bunch of interesting people. Because only press and industry professionals were allowed it was easy to check out most games. I'll post full impressions later. But for now I'll make a quick overview.

Really cool + great gameplay:

Mirrors edge

Amazing game. Apart from some small anti alias options in the preview build the game plays amazing. It's a bit hard at first, but findin that ideal route and rushing trough a level feels amazing!

Fallout 3

Awesome game, as expected from Bethesda. I'll post more on this later.

Cod:waw

It's cod that's about all I can say. Yeah it's good. But it's more of the same. I'll have to play another session to get a bit better feel.

Mortal online

Just wow. This game not only looks gorgeous but it's developed by a small Indy team. Their ideas are great. Could be a great community driven game. Really waiting for this.


Big disapointments

Bionic commando

Yeah was looking forward to this. But really wasn't that great. I was expecting fluent gameplay. Instead it was really slow and rigid. Had expected more.

Ok that's all I can remember for now. I'll. Post more impressions tomorrow when I'm not exhausted. Pics and movies will be coming soon.

oh and some quick highlights of the day.

Meeting Paul barnett.

This guy is great. For those that dont kbow him hes the xreative director for mythic. He has so much energy. Really fun guy. I'll uploa his presentation from the ea press conference later.

The ea press conference. This presentation was great. All about the games. Plus a singing and dancing developer. Really good!

Discussing (their) mmo design with the guys from mortal online.

These guys are great. They're really passionate about what they're doing and believe in their game. Their plans sound amazing. I really hope they can pull it off and get a good following!

http://forum.i3d.net/game-blog-news-...pzig-blog.html

[Lialith]

Hello there

As you might know I was at the GC yesterday (Saturday).
What was really annoying were that cheerleader girls at some booths, hyping their games with their really shrill voices.
The booths of the big MMO publishers NcSoft (GuildWars, Aion) and GOA (War) also had quite a show running, their target audience were clearly under 18 years old. They had a guy at their stage, hyping their games almost all the time while throwing merchandise like T-Shirs, Posters, Bags and Buttons into the crowd. What i found interesting is that not only FunCom (AoC) but also Blizzard (WoW) didnt have that kind of "let the crowd hype us" advertisement. Anyway...

What you would like to hear about is MO i guess...
Well, you have already seen some pictures from their booth that Necromantic had posted recently.
http://s5.directupload.net/images/us...1/nefyrn4h.jpg
http://s1.directupload.net/images/us...1/mx4m8ges.jpg

It was a very nice and classy small booth and as far as i can tell, they had a few interested visitors there for almost all the time.

So my fiancé and I talked with our nice guys of StarVault for about an hour and here is what we educed from that conversation. Please dont take what I tell you now for fact until its confirmed :

• Mounts do have three different gaits: stride, trot and gallop. Rideing faster means that you lose more moveability in turns.
• Realism is a priority so you wont have to spent a fortune in order to aquire a mount.
• There will be mounted combat and as i understod, it works like this: you press the action-button and your character rises his weapon, you aim and the moment you release the button, your character swings his weapon. So you have to time your attack while you ride towards your target and the damage you deal also depends on your movement speed.
• There will be body boxes and hit boxes are separated into different body zones, so that you deal more damage if you for example manage to hit the head of your foe.
• As I have understod it, not StarVault but EpicGames (developer of the Unreal Engine) is creating the netcode for MO. So EpicGames do really know what they are doing there, after all its their engine.
• They do have a playable version of the game but they are still changeing so much every day, and also detailed things about the setting are not definite enough jet, thats why we dont get to see or read new stuff at the moment. Also the netcode is not ready jet, so thats why there is no server version of the game and therefore no beta jet.
• The city you can see as view at their GC-booth is an ingame screen of that big city where the guy on the rino in the trailer rides through the gates. (We could see that gate in the city screen at the booth.)
• At the moment they are working a lot on the realtime fighting system in order to make it feel really great in pvp. I think its importent to them that this feature is going to be really perfect.
• They first thought about creating a low magic world, where magic is something quite special and no every day thing. But they realised that a lot of player want to play characters that are totally into magic. So there will be magic characters in the game but not that flashy and colorfull like in many other games.
• I really dont think there will be a one klick and thats it casting system. A system where you have to prepere your spells and also have to aim and channel your cast some how, and not every cast will automaticly be sucessfull - something like that probably but hey didnt tell us something definate on that topic.
• I also really dont think there will be playable orcs. They did choose half-orcs because they wanted to make that warrior kind of character more concrete. If you think of movies like 300 or Gladiator, thats the kind of direction they were aiming for when they decided to have playable half-orcs. They dont want to have playable "monsters" and also do not want to let monsters become human in some sort of way. I think it will be a realistic fantasy setting as far as it is possible.
• They dont want to have loading screens and dont like them at all, but it could be that it is not possible to totally ban them from the game, so there will only be loading screens at points where its for technical reasons not possible to create that part of the game without them.
• There will not be closed instances. You will always be able to follow other players whereever they are going to. I think to what extent there will be instances is not decided jet.
• Talking about servers, they are thinking about different solutions and havent decided on that topic jet. As far as I can tell, there will be possibilitys to play with people all over the world, even if it means to have to live with lags when you are sitting in the US and decide to play over the European server. (For sure there will be no costs for character transvers if you want to play with your friends and those have their characters on an other server.) So decentralised servers are one possibility, another would be to have one big simulated server. (I think that would be a little bit like the system in Eve)
• They seem to really think that they are going to be able to release the game as planed. But still, if they should run into some kind of unexpected trouble, they would have some buffer left. There was also more feedback than they had expected at the GC, not only from the press but also from some big publishers, and they were quite excited about that.

So all in all we got quite a few information. We were the first ones who were told about the mounted combat system by the way.

So, well I hope we didnt missinterpretate to much and that I was able to give you some new infos that we all were longing for.

[ksberge]

thank you for the news, great post

[Stump]

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!!!! That was worth waiting.
Btw, do you asked them about Destructible/indestructible houses?

[niblick]

amazing Lialith.

The fact that the net code hasn't been done yet is quite disconcerting although I would expect Epic to be able to do a pretty good job of it.

[Lialith]

sorry, sorry, sorry, i forgot to ask about so many things... also about the houses :/

well, fortunately im not the only one who talked to them and so most likely not the only one who comes back with some infos

I think we should talk about that in this thread by the way:
http://www.mortalonline.com/forums/1...onvention.html

in order to keep the info thread clean and more easy to read

[Ondor]

Originally Posted by Lialith

sorry, sorry, sorry, i forgot to ask about so many things... also about the houses :/

Hurry back in there! one hour left!

[Lachrymose]

nice, thanks for the info lialith.

[Asmodeus]

Originally Posted by Lialith

sorry, sorry, sorry, i forgot to ask about so many things... also about the houses :/

well, fortunately im not the only one who talked to them and so most likely not the only one who comes back with some infos

I think we should talk about that in this thread by the way:
http://www.mortalonline.com/forums/1...onvention.html

in order to keep the info thread clean and more easy to read

Don't worry about it, perfect piece I loved reading all of it. Any info is welcomed + rep for you

[rick]

Well I'm a bit bummed that you think orcs won't be playable. But maybe it is for the better. Seeing as humans and orcs have never had lasting peace, it wouldn't be very realistic for an orc player to be able to enter a human city, and that would probably be a lot of content to miss out on. The lore permits the half orc to do this however (even if they are looked down upon). Perhaps the devs are only making playable races that can "get along". Just a thought.

[admiralnlson]

arg, I haven't learned anything new... all this have been said on IRC already.

But thanks anyway, Lialith.

[yXXe]

Originally Posted by Lialith

Hello there

As you might know I was at the GC yesterday (Saturday).
What was really annoying were that cheerleader girls at some booths, hyping their games with their really shrill voices.
The booths of the big MMO publishers NcSoft (GuildWars, Aion) and GOA (War) also had quite a show running, their target audience were clearly under 18 years old. They had a guy at their stage, hyping their games almost all the time while throwing merchandise like T-Shirs, Posters, Bags and Buttons into the crowd. What i found interesting is that not only FunCom (AoC) but also Blizzard (WoW) didnt have that kind of "let the crowd hype us" advertisement. Anyway...

What you would like to hear about is MO i guess...
Well, you have already seen some pictures from their booth that Necromantic had posted recently.
http://s5.directupload.net/images/us...1/nefyrn4h.jpg
http://s1.directupload.net/images/us...1/mx4m8ges.jpg

It was a very nice and classy small booth and as far as i can tell, they had a few interested visitors there for almost all the time.

So my fiancé and I talked with our nice guys of StarVault for about an hour and here is what we educed from that conversation. Please dont take what I tell you now for fact until its confirmed :

• Mounts do have three different gaits: stride, trot and gallop. Rideing faster means that you lose more moveability in turns.
• Realism is a priority so you wont have to spent a fortune in order to aquire a mount.
• There will be mounted combat and as i understod, it works like this: you press the action-button and your character rises his weapon, you aim and the moment you release the button, your character swings his weapon. So you have to time your attack while you ride towards your target and the damage you deal also depends on your movement speed.
• There will be body boxes and hit boxes are separated into different body zones, so that you deal more damage if you for example manage to hit the head of your foe.
• As I have understod it, not StarVault but EpicGames (developer of the Unreal Engine) is creating the netcode for MO. So EpicGames do really know what they are doing there, after all its their engine.
• They do have a playable version of the game but they are still changeing so much every day, and also detailed things about the setting are not definite enough jet, thats why we dont get to see or read new stuff at the moment. Also the netcode is not ready jet, so thats why there is no server version of the game and therefore no beta jet.
• The city you can see as view at their GC-booth is an ingame screen of that big city where the guy on the rino in the trailer rides through the gates. (We could see that gate in the city screen at the booth.)
• At the moment they are working a lot on the realtime fighting system in order to make it feel really great in pvp. I think its importent to them that this feature is going to be really perfect.
• They first thought about creating a low magic world, where magic is something quite special and no every day thing. But they realised that a lot of player want to play characters that are totally into magic. So there will be magic characters in the game but not that flashy and colorfull like in many other games.
• I really dont think there will be a one klick and thats it casting system. A system where you have to prepere your spells and also have to aim and channel your cast some how, and not every cast will automaticly be sucessfull - something like that probably but hey didnt tell us something definate on that topic.
• I also really dont think there will be playable orcs. They did choose half-orcs because they wanted to make that warrior kind of character more concrete. If you think of movies like 300 or Gladiator, thats the kind of direction they were aiming for when they decided to have playable half-orcs. They dont want to have playable "monsters" and also do not want to let monsters become human in some sort of way. I think it will be a realistic fantasy setting as far as it is possible.
• They dont want to have loading screens and dont like them at all, but it could be that it is not possible to totally ban them from the game, so there will only be loading screens at points where its for technical reasons not possible to create that part of the game without them.
• There will not be closed instances. You will always be able to follow other players whereever they are going to. I think to what extent there will be instances is not decided jet.
• Talking about servers, they are thinking about different solutions and havent decided on that topic jet. As far as I can tell, there will be possibilitys to play with people all over the world, even if it means to have to live with lags when you are sitting in the US and decide to play over the European server. (For sure there will be no costs for character transvers if you want to play with your friends and those have their characters on an other server.) So decentralised servers are one possibility, another would be to have one big simulated server. (I think that would be a little bit like the system in Eve)
• They seem to really think that they are going to be able to release the game as planed. But still, if they should run into some kind of unexpected trouble, they would have some buffer left. There was also more feedback than they had expected at the GC, not only from the press but also from some big publishers, and they were quite excited about that.

So all in all we got quite a few information. We were the first ones who were told about the mounted combat system by the way.

So, well I hope we didnt missinterpretate to much and that I was able to give you some new infos that we all were longing for.

*takes a print-screen and uses the post as desktop backround*

[Nuzor]

let's keep this thread for new information only if you want to discuss more about the leipzig GC go here:

http://www.mortalonline.com/forums/1...onvention.html

[Trixxer]

Thanks for the info.

Nobody cares if mounted combat is in or not if the meele/spell combat system isn´t great. Soo I hope they make mounted combat after the important stuff is done ...

[bluealien1]

nvm

[rackam77]

Hello everybody.

Nice news. I hope MO will not be instanced.

[Kaorn]

Thanks for the info.

[Drakus]

I hope everyone gave Lialith some rep for her great GC write up.

Thanks again!

[golani79]

Nice information you have gathered!
Thx a lot!

[Drakus]

dbltnk's GC write up.

Originally Posted by dbltnk

Yeah ... I just can't see you guys suffering from having no news anymore. These are the points that I managed to memorize during my two interview sessions on wednesday. Instead of posting them cluttered here, I've uploaded them into the intarweb.

DISCLAIMER:

a) There may be some things which I simply misunderstood. So don't take everything 100% guaranteed.
b) A lot of this stuff is in concept. So it may not be ingame yet, or it may be changed until release or it may never even make it into the game.
c) A lot of this stuff may not be new for real fanbois. For me, most of it was. =D

Thanks to Mats and Hendrik for the long time you guys spent answering my questions. Even those I could've answered myself if I had read the website more thoroughly. If you wanna correct some of my mistakes, you could just post here if you like.

To everyone else: Feel free to ask questions on those points you don't understand or where you're intrested in more. Maybe I'll be able to remember some more details.

http://mo.open-pvp.de/

[Stump]

Thnx for info, but it is dissapointing...

Houses are supposed to be “save spots”, they cannot be attacked/destroyed. (no destructible houses *cries*)

There will be player housing, but no guild cities like in Age of Conan or Shadowbane. (No destructible houses, so no need for Guilds protection...)

There is ressource mining. Just like in UO. (so, they mean that there is going to be mines, where players can come and mine their materials, and materials respawn after some time? )

There will be guild crests. They might not be customizable. (I really hope that there will be no Nicks and crests flying in the air, something like Lineage 2)

So, all that warfare and things like "rule an entire nation" get serious hit...

[Shadowland]

Originally Posted by Stump

Thnx for info, but it is dissapointing...

Houses are supposed to be “save spots�, they cannot be attacked/destroyed. (no destructible houses *cries*)

There will be player housing, but no guild cities like in Age of Conan or Shadowbane. (No destructible houses, so no need for Guilds protection...)

There is ressource mining. Just like in UO. (so, they mean that there is going to be mines, where players can come and mine their materials, and materials respawn after some time? )

There will be guild crests. They might not be customizable. (I really hope that there will be no Nicks and crests flying in the air, something like Lineage 2)

So, all that warfare and things like "rule an entire nation" get serious hit...

Yup, no massive guild vs guild raids on massive guild cities, /fail to Mortal Online on that one.

[Reclusiarch]

Glad to hear about no destructable houses. Phew. Good call Mortal Online! /success on that one.

[Zenir]

I'm requesting a clean up for the thread from a mod, please. Only information, talk in http://www.mortalonline.com/forums/1...onvention.html

[dbltnk]

Originally Posted by Stump

</i></b>(I really hope that there will be no Nicks and crests flying in the air, something like Lineage 2)

I think this is what they intend. No nametags and stuff flying around on characters. So your guild membership should be seen on your characters equip.

[Dexter27]

Nice! Thanks for the information pieces, especially Lialith.
(You got some nice exklusive infos from them!)
We ve also been there and we ve made a video interview (about 16 minutes) with the CEO, Henrik Nyström.
Currently I am capturing the video footage from the camera. As soon as we finished the editing it will be released at www.mmoszene.de.

So stay tuned!

greetings,

Dexter

[yXXe]

That's amazing. Thank you, Dexter27. And welcome aboard the forums!

[Dexter27]

Originally Posted by yXXe

That's amazing. Thank you, Dexter27. And welcome aboard the forums!

Thank you for the warm welcome. Nevertheless I fear that the video-interview will not reveal any brand-new information for you "hard-core forum members". ;-)
It is more a basic interview about Mortal Online, how it differs from other mmos, some personal questions, loot-questions, etc..

Nevertheless we think it will have a nice viral effect on youtube and we hope to get more peaople attracted to MO through this vid.

I promised Henrik to show him the vid before we release it for public few, so might take some days until we get the OK to release it.

Dexter

[Necromantic]

Thanks for all your efforts.

Now that the community is soothed with some "non-official" info, we can go back to the daily non GC related spam. :P And I can go back to IRC. *g*

Btw. nice group photo you took there: http://www.mmoszene.de/index.php?opt...ml=1&Itemid=97
And the site looks nice, maybe I'll browse it some more.

[Reclusiarch]

Originally Posted by Necromantic

Thanks for all your efforts.

Now that the community is soothed with some "non-official" info, we can go back to the daily non GC related spam. :P And I can go back to IRC. *g*

Btw. nice group photo you took there: http://www.mmoszene.de/index.php?opt...ml=1&Itemid=97
And the site looks nice, maybe I'll browse it some more.

Oooh, my girlfriend went to the same school (SOFE) as one of the developers! Good photo! Going to be nice seeing the video when it comes up. Good work Dexter!

[Veith]

Thanks for infos, especially @Lialith's!
For me fewer and fewer discussions are needed, more now some presented realisations, but for that i have more than only some patience .
I want fine results.
More than in past i wish the devs are able to realise their plans without also for themselves foul compromises. Ok foul compromise would be the normal MMORPG but i think devs are mad enough to create a real Phoenix.

[Kryten]

Appreciate the news. This news definitely gives me hope.

Im surprised and very excited that Epic is doing the network coding. From my understanding at least with the older builds of the UnrealEngine, coding for an MMO with the UE was a monumental feat. It can be accomplished, from what I have been told, but requires solid resources and know how. Who better than EPIC. I guess with the current version of the UE the process is easier for MMO developers to code for the network.

Fingers crossed it will be released as planned and sometime next year.

[Drakus]

Originally Posted by Dexter27

Thank you for the warm welcome. Nevertheless I fear that the video-interview will not reveal any brand-new information for you "hard-core forum members". ;-)
It is more a basic interview about Mortal Online, how it differs from other mmos, some personal questions, loot-questions, etc..

Nevertheless we think it will have a nice viral effect on youtube and we hope to get more peaople attracted to MO through this vid.

I promised Henrik to show him the vid before we release it for public few, so might take some days until we get the OK to release it.

Dexter

I'll be looking forward to watching the interview once it's finished being edited.

[Dexter27]

Originally Posted by Drakus

I'll be looking forward to watching the interview once it's finished being edited.

Well it is finished already. Can`t release it yet because still waiting the confirmation from henrik Nyström if he`s fine with the interview. (wrote him an email)
I promised him to give him a preview of the interview before we release it for public view. ;-)

cheers,

Dexter

[Traceur]

it's Wednesday over and no editing no dev' replays or changes requests...

is it possible that we can take lialith's post as fully confirmed now or should we wait for some dev' comment? can we take their silence for a stamp of approval?

[Sebastian Persson]

Originally Posted by Traceur

it's Wednesday over and no editing no dev' replays or changes requests...

is it possible that we can take lialith's post as fully confirmed now or should we wait for some dev' comment? can we take their silence for a stamp of approval?

Wait for comments..

[Lyllyth]

...Loading, Please wait...

[Drakus]

Originally Posted by Lyllyth

...Loading, Please wait...

Grrr... I hate loading screens.