Lifting the NDA
The last months have been a real rollercoaster ride here at Star Vault, albeit a very positive one. Most of the core features planned for release have been introduced and tested in a controlled manner, and we’ve been extremely eager to see the reception each time. We are now at a point where we feel that although there is still a lot of work to do, it’s time to increase our efforts of marketing the game, and part of this process is the lifting of the NDA.
Mortal Online isn’t easy to market in a very straightforward way. The rules surrounding the game and its design are complex in their nature and sometimes very hard to explain to players with no or little previous experience of concepts such as “full-PvP”, “full-loot”, “sandbox” etc. Therefore we need the help of you, our faithful player-base, to help spread the word and reach places we can’t due to lack of resources and time. The NDA is now lifted so that you can start sharing videos, screenshots, go public with your personal sites full of information (we know they exist
), and of course, be able to freely talk about and discuss the game on our own forums as well as all over the web. This phase will end with an open, free-to-play Beta where we hope that as many players as possible will find and decide for Mortal Online.
We have aimed for Q4 and the last features we promised for launch will be there before the end of the year. Mortal Online is a niche game and we feel certain that these features will make for a great start while we continue the development. However, we would be lying if we didn’t admit we want more before official release. More polish, more tweaking, and of course, be able to walk those couple of extra miles that do make a huge difference, especially in an open-ended game where every new option is multiplied and multiplied again.
With this in mind we are approaching release, but the release date is not written in stone. Cynically speaking, the more people interested in and buying the game, the more time we will be able to invest in tweaking, polishing and even add more features before launching it. In turn, each day working on the game before release will mean more players stay thereafter. This will make the launch more stable, and a good economy base would enable us to progress the game even faster.
We hope you have enjoyed the Beta so far, thank you for your support and dedication. Now go out there and spread the word!
Regards,
the MO Dev Team
November 24th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
The last line of the post… for some reason, my brain originally thought it read, “Now go out there and spread your seed!”
It was a rather odd feeling.