One of the upcoming MMOs that I’m anxious to see and play is Mortal Online. For anyone that doesn’t know — it’s a sandbox fantasy MMO, full loot, PvP everywhere, in-depth crafting, etc. It’s being developed by Swedish studio Star Vault and planned for a summer ’09 launch. To further preface my actual post, here’s an article on it from IncGamer that was done last week.

Now, many of the features they’re sporting can already be found in other games — EVE Online definitely comes to mind — but one of them I’m especially happy about…

Any guesses?

That’s right, non-pocketable horses! Horses can’t be stashed away in MO; you will have to watch them in case they try to wander off… or someone tries to steal them. Yup, horse jacking. If they can get the announcer from Unreal Tournament to do a “HORSE JACKED!” sound byte similar to the “CAR JACKED!” one… well, needless to say I’ll be quite satisfied. I plan on making, or having an alt make, a living stealing and re-selling people’s horses. Something I wish could be done in EVE Online.

The other feature that I’m quite happy about is the crafting. It sounds like it will be pretty in-depth — at least customization-wise — with, potentially, millions of item combinations to craft. Crafting has been one of those areas that’s rather… lacking, in most MMOs and I hope they do it some justice.

The last feature that really caught my eye, and I’m hopeful for, is the truly unique raid content. From what they said, a raid boss would be extremely hard to take down and could only be killed once. (also, they’re dev/GM controllable)  This might pose some problems — or fun — in a full PvP world, what with the competition, but it does provide a possible solution to the raid grind end-game seen in many games, like World of Warcraft. With the permanant death of raid bosses, there will have to be a steady stream of new ones to take their place. A steady stream of new raid bosses is what many games could use — world bosses, some unique loot tables… that sort of thing. I guess it would be far harder to do with sharded MMOs, though, as nothing is truly unique.