Mortal Online is a very difficult game to grasp, it’s large, unwieldy and complicated. This has always made it very difficult for brand new players to get started.
A couple of years ago we tried to make the starting experience easier by building a simple tutorial that teaches the players the very basics of the game.
This tutorial however only scratched the surface of what the game has to offer. But next week all of that changes.
During the last months we have been building a brand new separate starting area called Haven.
Haven is a large island with several different biomes that is completely separate from Myrland and Sarducca. Players that create their first character are forced to go through Haven before they can enter Myrland.
On Haven new players are protected by the yellow fledgling flag. This means that the new players are a lot safer from being killed by other players. They get to try out the game and earn some gold in a place where they don’t constantly have to worry about getting killed by other players. Players may however drop their fledgling flag at any point to try out being blue or even a criminal or murderer.
Once you leave Haven you can never come back. Players can choose to leave Haven at any point, when they leave they will bring everything in their inventory and all the skills they have acquired. The banks in Haven are also connected to the banks in Tindrem so any banked item you had on Haven will be available for you in Tindrem. When leaving all players also lose their yellow fledgling flag and are no longer safe from open PvP. At this point the players murder counts are also reset so any murders the players might have committed on Haven is forgiven.
Haven is full of tutorial NPC that teach you everything from fighting to crafting and extraction.
Tutorial NPCs can give skills and set waypoints for you to follow.
Haven also features a special guild recruitment system. We have noticed that players that get into a guild at an early state stay for a lot longer. The support you get from being in a guild and having real people to ask questions to help out new players a lot.
Guilds have 3 options when it comes to Haven guild recruitment.
1. Opt out
They may opt out entirely and not show up on the recruit UI.
2. Contact
Guilds that are set to contact will have a contact button in the recruit UI. When pressed the highest ranked online member of that guild will get a whisper and the two players are allowed to whisper to each other. This way guilds have control over who gets invited.
3. Auto-join
Guilds that are set to Auto-join show the contact button in the UI but also have a Join button.
Haven players that press the join button will automatically send a join to the guild and if there are free spots in the guild they will join in.
To make the game slightly easier to get started in for crafters some balance changes have been made. Low level crafting will no longer for example have a drastic impact on the damage of the weapon, instead it will impact the durability and materials needed. This way crafters that are starting out can make items that aren’t completely useless for other players. The full list of changes for crafting will be in the patch notes.
Some basic skills have also been made to level up a lot faster to avoid too much grind for new players.
On top of all of this Tindrem has gotten a slight graphical update with new buildings. Some of the new buildings feature fancy new interiors and you can now enter the great library of Tindrem. Also all gates to Tindrem have been opened (because the garden is no longer used as a tutorial area).
The patch feature so much more but these are the big changes stay tuned for the full patch notes on October 7th when Haven goes live.
