Development
In October 2010, approximately four months after its official release, Mortal Online's game engine was rebuilt, making it possible for its developers to implement better graphics, increase performance and introduce advanced features which were previously not possible on the older engine.
In June 2011, the game's first expansion titled "Dawn" was released. It introduced graphical and performance improvements; new features like the need to eat, drink and sleep; health, stamina and mana "reserves", a gene system for mounts, changes to the riding and related mechanics, a task system which allows players to create quests for others to do, a new housing system, character skills, world interactive objects, new pick-able resources including a wide selection of plants, a in-town mail system with cash-on-delivery to ease player trading and an updated game launcher.
The deployment of Dawn suffered many technical issues, leading to extended server downtime and certain game features being disabled directly after the release. Additions such as the gene system and cooking were initially poorly received by some players, especially cooking as raw food is better than cooked food for in-game purposes. This, combined with early balancing issues, lead to extensive weight loss amongst player avatars which in turn cause attribute penalties.
In September 2011, Star Vault formed a "Focus Group" - essentially a test and early feedback group for upcoming releases and patches. Members of the group are active players that have signed a non-disclosure agreement with Star Vault. The purpose of the Focus Group is to augment Star Vault's limited internal resource and act as an additional quality assurance level before new releases and patches reach the general playing audience.
In late August 2012, the game's second expansion titled "The Awakening" was released which promised notable new features like trade brokers, player-written books, revamped GUI, the unveiling of Tindrem, roaming guards of varying ranks, advanced AI for NPCs, illegal items, additional skills and a host of other improvements and fixes. Star Vault advised the community ahead of time that the expansion deployment would suffer from problems, and have released a number of patches post-launch. The expansion introduced a multitude of bugs that affect the game's mechanics, performance and stability.
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