Interview: A Chat With Mortal Online’s Creative Director

By Siam Choudhury | December 2, 2008 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Interviews | Tags: gc08, Interview, Mats Persson, Mortal Online, Star Vault

The MMO Gamer: The website also mentions that there will not be any respawns of epic monsters for quests?

Mats Persson: This is correct. I don’t want that to be misunderstood that there won’t be any monster respawns at all, of course there will be. But we don’t have any quests per say meaning you don’t do any quest grinding to get skilled up. Quests are more like epic adventures where you as a solo player or as a group can find in the world and as such, the epic encounters will never respawn; they become a part of the world’s history meaning that if you manage to find for example the Great Lich King in his cave or whatever and slay him, he will be gone forever.

The MMO Gamer: Very interesting. How will Star Vault keep up with raiding guilds who go through these sort of encounters rather quickly in other MMOs?

Mats Persson: I would say that as a sandbox game you have to rethink the way you play an MMO. It’s not that you level up your character until you reach level 60, 70, 80 or something and then you on these mass guild raids on instance raid bosses. And you do them one at a time to, I don’t know, get some extra skill points or to get an epic item. The game [Mortal Online] is not based on items, as that would ruin the balance from player to player. There’s really no need for super epic encounters or for them to be that common. There will be adventures of course and there will be bosses but not in the raid sense.

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned that you will be self-publishing as much as possible, are you going for digital distribution or retail distribution?

Mats Persson: For now we are going for digital distribution only but I think it’s too early to tell, a lot of things can happen along the way.

The MMO Gamer: How many people are working on Mortal Online?

Mats Persson: We are a very small team consisting of about 10-12 active developers and on top of that we of course have around 10 people involved as contractors.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you, it sounds like an interesting game and we look forward to trying it.

Mats Persson: Thank you.