Any game, and really any concept in any medium, follows the same path. At the early stages, the developers dream up all kinds of stuff they want their players to be able to do in their world. Drunken bar brawls? Awesome! Skill based combat with no lag on an MMO? Brilliant! Full PvP with no restrictions? Blockbuster!
Eventually, either before or after release, the developer hits a brick wall and like any decent sinking ship, some of the furniture must be thrown overboard to keep stable. Thinking players would protect one another in cities, negating the need for NPC guards? Didn’t happen. Player owned housing non-instanced? Not possible under your engine. Epic sword of goat-slaying? Wasn’t as overpowered before someone decided to add half-goat half-human as a player race. Holding a Cataclysm style event? The established community would never accept it.
This week, Star Vault is coming to that basic understanding of reality by publicly announcing their plans to not only have their cake, but preserve it until a later time in which they may eat it. In this case, Star Vault’s own Henrik Nystrom has posted a new thread on the official forums detailing plans for the server lag. He stresses that this is not the desync we once knew, that has been eradicated. This lag, on the other hand, has to do with the way movement and attacks are predicted on the server’s end, namely that the server is not updating said figures fast enough (at least that’s what I got out of it).
On one hand, it appears that this update is going to be a last-ditch effort to fix the lag before less desirable updates have to be considered, either through localizing servers or completely changing the combat so that the current hardware can handle the combat.
“If this doesn’t bring us to an “acceptable” level when it comes to real time combat we may be forced at looking into localizing servers, which we really want to avoid at all means, or we simply have to look at “nerfing” the complex way of fighting, which of course is something we want to avoid.”
This is good news, and hopefully this effort by Star Vault to stamp out desync, or whatever term they call it, will go by without having to resort to splitting up an already small community, or changing the charm that Mortal Online holds to many of its players.
Mortal Online is one of those games I can’t wait to try…when it is finished and as lag free as they’re going to get it. Until then, I’m a college student with 12 grand in college loans, another 6 in my car, and another 15 grand on the way over the next two years for even more collegical goodness. I don’t have any disposable income.
MMO Fallout 