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Mortal Online

Hah! I knew if I waited long enough I would find something to post about today. It only took until 8pm. *looks around* anyone still with me? A new mmorpg…

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Mark Jacobs on the recent Stealth debacle

Uh oh, he looks pissed.  Picture from Gamasutra.The Paris event from last week has caused a lot of controversy and stirred up a hornets nest of PR problems for Mythic. Right now there are fingers pointing every-which-way but rumors are that GOA is to blame for the leaks about stealth, CTF, and whatever else is causing the uproar. Personally I don’t care who is to blame. I’m somewhat irritated that the “no stealth” stance Mythic adopted early on in development has been scrapped, but I’ll talk more on that this week in a blog post I’m working on. For now here’s what Mark Jacobs had to say this evening regarding stealth:

“Folks,

I’ll comment more when appropriate on this issue but for now what I’m willing to say is simply this. The stealth that we had in DAoC or that can be found in WoW and/or other games is not in WAR now and I still have no intention of allowing it into the game. As some people have commented here and in other places, what they have seen is a system that allows for two of the lightly armored classes to close quickly with a target. There will be no combination of stealth + long-range damage dealing in the game. Two quick FYIs for ya. Some of the leaks regarding stealth have been, quite frankly, BS. During our last phase of testing there were some bugs in the implementation (“Gee, really Mr. Wizard, you had bugs in a Beta Test? I’m surprised!”) of the classes closing/survival ability. Second, as our beta testers know, I have said that I will take out any system or sub-system that I believe is a net negative in terms of RvR enjoyment. And this is one of those sub-systems that would certainly be looked at amazingly carefully before we committed to it. One of the best parts of beta is the ability to iterate on existing systems as well to try other systems to see what works and what doesn’t work.

The FYIs are the big reason I don’t want to go into any more depth regarding what we are doing with this system. It is subject to change based on what I see over the next few weeks. Considering that we are about to begin a couple of major RvR test cycles, nobody should get worked up about what we have, don’t have, might have regarding this issue, it’s truly pointless.

Mark”

Whether or not stealth is here to stay appears to be up in the air. The feedback has been extremely negative so far regarding how the information was delivered to the public and the fact that stealth is in the game at all. It doesn’t look pretty any way you look at it. For what it’s worth, at least he’s saying it’s not going to be like DAOC or WoW stealth.

I’ll keep you guys updated on any interesting tidbits I find.

PS Mark: I approve your choice of cold beverages. mmm Diet Coke.

Update #1: Another quote tonight from Mark. Click that “More” button to see the updates. (more…)

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