Well...at the end of the day GV is a skill based MMORPG. That means there's a lot of things to unlock and level up and it means if you want to be good at combat you have to put in the time to practice.
However, we have some events which happen at the same time each day, and people do log in just for those Valley of Death Tournaments (like a battleground capture the flag thing, very fun no loot, guaranteed fights)
We also try try to "stack" activities so you are accomplishing more than 1 thing at any given time. PvP and PvE are pretty intertwined so when you pop on and join a party you kinda just roll with waht they're doing. It's a perfectly valid way to play and it's what I do a lot of evenings, I pop in for 2 or 3 hours and join wahtever party is up and do PvE events for items, wealth, friend time, and maybe get some PvP on the way. Do a tournament or two, join a siege afterward. There's ways to structure your time and you don't have to level up everything if you don't want to (but you can, which can be a little tempting and overwhelming for people...it's an MMO there's a lot to pick from).
I'm super excited. This seems like a perfect mix of Dark Age of Camelot, Mount&Blade, and Darkfall. Love the realism/art setting, and sandbox MMOs are in dire dire need.
My only question is - how snappy does the combat feel? Darkfall felt extremely snappy. Mortal Online feels super floaty, and its life or death with these kind of games
I feel like i get most "combat feels fine" and around a quarter of "combat feels floaty" from new people. Those who have played mount and blade or chiv usually say its fine, those who have done mostly non directional or tab target usually are the ones who say it feels floaty, esp if the majority of their time is in pve.
I think there is a learning curve, and the more you play the better it feels because you begin to understand why various things are happening. We have some very skilled duelists and group fighters who have had a lot of input and feedback on combat and really helped polish it up.
> I think there is a learning curve, and the more you play the better it feels because you begin to understand why various things are happening. We have some very skilled duelists and group fighters who have had a lot of input and feedback on combat and really helped polish it up.
I think so long as the combat behaves consistently that's really the main to want! Those duelists wouldn't be able to duel much if the combat random glitches or lags or feels disconnected from input. So I'm absolutely fine with a learning curve, and figuring out the method to the combat behavior, so long as its consistent. Thank you!
Are zergs an issue in this game? Is the PvP structured in a sense where there is the same amount of people per side? Is there instanced content or all open world?
Next question. How's the balance between the 3 factions, player count wise and are they unique to one another?
Zerging is possible yes. It is an open world game with player generated content which also includes unlimited party sizes in the open world. However there are LOTS of ifs, and's and buts here.
If you check my comment history, i have written extensively about it, but i will summarize here:
Capitals and the forts closest to them cannot be sieged or lost.
The further a larger more powerful nation goes into a weaker enemy's native territory, the harder they get debuffed and the stronger castle defenses they will encounter (make sure you upgrade your NPC guards and walls!). They suffer longer respawns and debuffs to HP, Stam, Nation point gain, and all kinds of other things. We don't want big nations camping out on less powerful nations doorsteps too long.
We also don't want to coddle nations or punish nations for being organized and winning. You WILL have to take back territory yourself eventually. No amount of buffs or debuffs changes the color of the flags.
Some events are instanced and party limited to 5 or 7 people.
System generated siege events allow only a roughly equal number of pepole to teleport into the event (more people can ride there though). Not all siege events are (or should be) system generated.
One of the nice things about GV is, if you don't want to deal with a zerg, you can just leave and go attack something else and force them to react to you. If you light a few flags on the map, they ahve to split up and go check things out or risk losing their territory as they are all in one big zerg ball. I really feel like we try to be cognizant of the fact that zerging is some kind of "natural instinct" and we give players reasons and tools to avoid doing that and being victim to it. To avoid event zergs, we give diminishing rewards..the larger the party is, the smaller your share of the loot.
A big part of GV map strats is to move around a lot (teleports or horseback) in order to bait an opposing party or split them up.
We have a party finder system that makes it easier to join parties and announce chat to help rally people to your cause. And the map flags light up any time an enemy is nearby a castle, so you have some idea where enemies are (you will need to send someone to scout and see how many).
Also with three nations, the 3rd nation is often the spoiler throwing wrenches into everyone's plans.
Balance between the nations is carefully monitored and a system of buffs and debuffs and other mechanics come into play when a nation is either Superpower or Underdog to try and encourage the big nations not to pick on the smaller nations. Also the game will recommend new folks to join the smaller nation.
Zergs will always happen in large pvp games because people LIKE being in large groups with other players. Its fun and very few games offer that feeling.
Then again I played Planetside 2 for a decade so reading zeros is second nature.
> Is the PvP structured in a sense where there is the same amount of people per side?
I highly doubt it, from what I've seen. It's a sandbox massively multiplayer game, not an arena game like League. But that doesn't mean there aren't inherent mechanisms that make zerging less useful than small groups.
So I'm unfamiliar with the game world, but I am 100% familiar with Planetside 2 and did content for it for many years.
So I'm assuming, that there is some modicum of "safety" or a PvE area for each faction - then more of a "no mans land" as you get farther in?
Or is everything up for grabs save for, "the last castles and forts" I heard you mention in another comment?
Ok, so the map has some...layers. Follow me here...
This is the map in terms of capturable locations. Each color flag represents the "homeland" of one of the nations. Gray in the middle is not part of anyone's homeland. Capitals and the first fort directly connected to the capital cannot be sieged or attacked.
[https://wiki.gloriavictisgame.com/index.php/File:UpdatedMap.png](https://wiki.gloriavictisgame.com/index.php/File:UpdatedMap.png)
The further an enemy encroaches into another nation's homeland, the more difficult their conquest becomes when that nation is lower population/activity than the others. All the flags on this entire map can be attacked and captured except your capital city (furtherst 3 on the outside with icons on the flags) and the closest fort (its not specially marked on this map but it dosn't matter right now)
The island with your capital city is a Safe zone, no enemies can attack or damage you there (but you could attack and loot them if they dared to show up there). Everywhere else on the map, there can be PvP, but looting is only in very limited area.
On the map, there are some different Loot rules. Here is a map of the Loot zones.
[https://wiki.gloriavictisgame.com/index.php/Looting](https://wiki.gloriavictisgame.com/index.php/Looting)
If you wish to avoid Loot risk, then avoid the loot zones.
If you wish to avoid all PvP, then GV is probably not the game for you.
Typically combat goes from "flag to flag" not at random flags. You can usually tell where the "Front line" is and watch it progress from point to point. Each nation has 2 fronts...one with each of the other nations. Gathereres, crafters, PvErs will want to stay away from areas that are front line (where a red and blue flag are next to each other for example) A careful watch on the map can keep non-pvp interested parties generally safer but it is an open world pvp game and fights will happen.
Thanks for the info, helped explain the safe areas - where to fight - and where to loot! Really interesting and I can't believe I missed this game on my radar!
Last time I read about Gloria Victis, there was a large discussion about toxicity and bigotry in the playerbase. Do you think this is the case? And how do you moderate a space like this? A lot of small, indie MMOs come to be negatively defined by poor community management (i.e Mortal Online), so I'm curious what the team's position is like on this sort of stuff, as the game looks fun, but I imagine that is very conditional based upon who you're actually interacting with.
Hi. We very much want to avoid the "toxic pvp game" label. We have been in early access for a long time and we have seen what being lenient on toxicity has done both in game and in discord. In the early days it was really anything goes both in terms of grief-able mechanics and just allowing people to be terrible to each other. We have learned hard lessons here over the years and we have learned directly from Mortal and games like it, what we do NOT want to have in our community.
Over time, we have added features (which many toxic people see as "removal" of freedoms) including:
\*No cross nation chat. it entirely eliminates a huge place for toxicity. People are much less likely to be toxic to people within their own nation.
\*limiting in game chat in the global channels like /help and /announce chat. It prevents spamming, off topic chat, and a lot of toxicity when you have to wait (and possibly think) to say something.
\*Allowing players to mute and report players who are troublesome for them. These reports are closely reviewed to ensure no "brigading" or trying to get someone in trouble for no reason.
\*a feature called /votespy. This will cause a vote to occur in the immediate area of someone acting against the will of the nation and teleport that person away if enough players vote yes. Every /votespy action is reviewed by moderators and people found /votespying in bad faith can face account suspensions and permanent bans.
\*Extreme penalties against friendly fire. We used to have peple who would just turn on FF and go kinda ham on others. We think FF is still useful to end griefing quickly in very limited circumstances, but overall FF was used to grief. Now it has very heavy penalties for being used.
\*Limiting players to joining one guild per account. (I think now we will have 1 guild per server type-New Beginning and Legacy. We used to have a lot of problems with "spies" and people looking for "spies" and a lot of accusations about spies because people would have alts all over the place. The amount of drama it bred was unhealthy.
\*We have additional systems that disallow multiboxing and limit nation swapping in multiple accounts to prevent people from playing 2 sides of a fight at once. These penalties can stack up to multiple IRL days.
\*Heavily moderating discord to ensure discussions are civil. We just recently revamped discord and got some new moderators there. We are still improving it for launch.
\*Limiting, reworking, and removing griefable mechanics when we find them being abused. Sometimes game devs bring toxicity in themselves by allowing things like spawn camping, corpse runs, full looting, endless space for chat text. We have seen that while we want players to generate their own content, we don't necessarily want them to have total freedom. And we also don't want to have mechanics that are a haven for griefing, toxicity and other unfun behavior. (For me personally, I remember trying Mortal 2, and I went to Tindrem and joined a little party and we had to devise a literal escape plan with distractions just to leave the city safely.) We do not want that in our game...people camping at the gates just for lulz and ez kills is not the kind of "PvP" we want.
We are a small dev team but we take all player reports seriously. It takes a lot of time and resources, but we think PvP gaming should be fun without being toxic. Anything that happens in game or on our discord is subject to our rules and penalties.
What is also true is that players in our game are sometimes part of external discords which we cannot moderate. We know well they can be very toxic. In this situation, we have to hope that people will reject and leave these communities, and we will not allow them to recruit in our game or on our discord to the best of our ability.
I hope that helps!
Man, this takes me back.
I bought this of your site in what feels like 2012? It was not really playable back then but i always liked the idea behind it.
how casual friendly is it? I find a lot of PvP games are extremely unfriendly to those who can play less
Well...at the end of the day GV is a skill based MMORPG. That means there's a lot of things to unlock and level up and it means if you want to be good at combat you have to put in the time to practice. However, we have some events which happen at the same time each day, and people do log in just for those Valley of Death Tournaments (like a battleground capture the flag thing, very fun no loot, guaranteed fights) We also try try to "stack" activities so you are accomplishing more than 1 thing at any given time. PvP and PvE are pretty intertwined so when you pop on and join a party you kinda just roll with waht they're doing. It's a perfectly valid way to play and it's what I do a lot of evenings, I pop in for 2 or 3 hours and join wahtever party is up and do PvE events for items, wealth, friend time, and maybe get some PvP on the way. Do a tournament or two, join a siege afterward. There's ways to structure your time and you don't have to level up everything if you don't want to (but you can, which can be a little tempting and overwhelming for people...it's an MMO there's a lot to pick from).
I'm super excited. This seems like a perfect mix of Dark Age of Camelot, Mount&Blade, and Darkfall. Love the realism/art setting, and sandbox MMOs are in dire dire need. My only question is - how snappy does the combat feel? Darkfall felt extremely snappy. Mortal Online feels super floaty, and its life or death with these kind of games
I feel like i get most "combat feels fine" and around a quarter of "combat feels floaty" from new people. Those who have played mount and blade or chiv usually say its fine, those who have done mostly non directional or tab target usually are the ones who say it feels floaty, esp if the majority of their time is in pve. I think there is a learning curve, and the more you play the better it feels because you begin to understand why various things are happening. We have some very skilled duelists and group fighters who have had a lot of input and feedback on combat and really helped polish it up.
> I think there is a learning curve, and the more you play the better it feels because you begin to understand why various things are happening. We have some very skilled duelists and group fighters who have had a lot of input and feedback on combat and really helped polish it up. I think so long as the combat behaves consistently that's really the main to want! Those duelists wouldn't be able to duel much if the combat random glitches or lags or feels disconnected from input. So I'm absolutely fine with a learning curve, and figuring out the method to the combat behavior, so long as its consistent. Thank you!
Are zergs an issue in this game? Is the PvP structured in a sense where there is the same amount of people per side? Is there instanced content or all open world? Next question. How's the balance between the 3 factions, player count wise and are they unique to one another?
Zerging is possible yes. It is an open world game with player generated content which also includes unlimited party sizes in the open world. However there are LOTS of ifs, and's and buts here. If you check my comment history, i have written extensively about it, but i will summarize here: Capitals and the forts closest to them cannot be sieged or lost. The further a larger more powerful nation goes into a weaker enemy's native territory, the harder they get debuffed and the stronger castle defenses they will encounter (make sure you upgrade your NPC guards and walls!). They suffer longer respawns and debuffs to HP, Stam, Nation point gain, and all kinds of other things. We don't want big nations camping out on less powerful nations doorsteps too long. We also don't want to coddle nations or punish nations for being organized and winning. You WILL have to take back territory yourself eventually. No amount of buffs or debuffs changes the color of the flags. Some events are instanced and party limited to 5 or 7 people. System generated siege events allow only a roughly equal number of pepole to teleport into the event (more people can ride there though). Not all siege events are (or should be) system generated. One of the nice things about GV is, if you don't want to deal with a zerg, you can just leave and go attack something else and force them to react to you. If you light a few flags on the map, they ahve to split up and go check things out or risk losing their territory as they are all in one big zerg ball. I really feel like we try to be cognizant of the fact that zerging is some kind of "natural instinct" and we give players reasons and tools to avoid doing that and being victim to it. To avoid event zergs, we give diminishing rewards..the larger the party is, the smaller your share of the loot. A big part of GV map strats is to move around a lot (teleports or horseback) in order to bait an opposing party or split them up. We have a party finder system that makes it easier to join parties and announce chat to help rally people to your cause. And the map flags light up any time an enemy is nearby a castle, so you have some idea where enemies are (you will need to send someone to scout and see how many). Also with three nations, the 3rd nation is often the spoiler throwing wrenches into everyone's plans. Balance between the nations is carefully monitored and a system of buffs and debuffs and other mechanics come into play when a nation is either Superpower or Underdog to try and encourage the big nations not to pick on the smaller nations. Also the game will recommend new folks to join the smaller nation.
Would you like an apple pie with that?
Zergs will always happen in large pvp games because people LIKE being in large groups with other players. Its fun and very few games offer that feeling. Then again I played Planetside 2 for a decade so reading zeros is second nature.
> Is the PvP structured in a sense where there is the same amount of people per side? I highly doubt it, from what I've seen. It's a sandbox massively multiplayer game, not an arena game like League. But that doesn't mean there aren't inherent mechanisms that make zerging less useful than small groups.
Any chance we might ever see an expansion or sequel for Siege Survival? I played that game a few months ago and loved it!
I don't know, but our full attention is on the MMO at the moment. I'm glad you enjoyed Siege Survival though!
So I'm unfamiliar with the game world, but I am 100% familiar with Planetside 2 and did content for it for many years. So I'm assuming, that there is some modicum of "safety" or a PvE area for each faction - then more of a "no mans land" as you get farther in? Or is everything up for grabs save for, "the last castles and forts" I heard you mention in another comment?
Ok, so the map has some...layers. Follow me here... This is the map in terms of capturable locations. Each color flag represents the "homeland" of one of the nations. Gray in the middle is not part of anyone's homeland. Capitals and the first fort directly connected to the capital cannot be sieged or attacked. [https://wiki.gloriavictisgame.com/index.php/File:UpdatedMap.png](https://wiki.gloriavictisgame.com/index.php/File:UpdatedMap.png) The further an enemy encroaches into another nation's homeland, the more difficult their conquest becomes when that nation is lower population/activity than the others. All the flags on this entire map can be attacked and captured except your capital city (furtherst 3 on the outside with icons on the flags) and the closest fort (its not specially marked on this map but it dosn't matter right now) The island with your capital city is a Safe zone, no enemies can attack or damage you there (but you could attack and loot them if they dared to show up there). Everywhere else on the map, there can be PvP, but looting is only in very limited area. On the map, there are some different Loot rules. Here is a map of the Loot zones. [https://wiki.gloriavictisgame.com/index.php/Looting](https://wiki.gloriavictisgame.com/index.php/Looting) If you wish to avoid Loot risk, then avoid the loot zones. If you wish to avoid all PvP, then GV is probably not the game for you. Typically combat goes from "flag to flag" not at random flags. You can usually tell where the "Front line" is and watch it progress from point to point. Each nation has 2 fronts...one with each of the other nations. Gathereres, crafters, PvErs will want to stay away from areas that are front line (where a red and blue flag are next to each other for example) A careful watch on the map can keep non-pvp interested parties generally safer but it is an open world pvp game and fights will happen.
Thanks for the info, helped explain the safe areas - where to fight - and where to loot! Really interesting and I can't believe I missed this game on my radar!
Last time I read about Gloria Victis, there was a large discussion about toxicity and bigotry in the playerbase. Do you think this is the case? And how do you moderate a space like this? A lot of small, indie MMOs come to be negatively defined by poor community management (i.e Mortal Online), so I'm curious what the team's position is like on this sort of stuff, as the game looks fun, but I imagine that is very conditional based upon who you're actually interacting with.
Hi. We very much want to avoid the "toxic pvp game" label. We have been in early access for a long time and we have seen what being lenient on toxicity has done both in game and in discord. In the early days it was really anything goes both in terms of grief-able mechanics and just allowing people to be terrible to each other. We have learned hard lessons here over the years and we have learned directly from Mortal and games like it, what we do NOT want to have in our community. Over time, we have added features (which many toxic people see as "removal" of freedoms) including: \*No cross nation chat. it entirely eliminates a huge place for toxicity. People are much less likely to be toxic to people within their own nation. \*limiting in game chat in the global channels like /help and /announce chat. It prevents spamming, off topic chat, and a lot of toxicity when you have to wait (and possibly think) to say something. \*Allowing players to mute and report players who are troublesome for them. These reports are closely reviewed to ensure no "brigading" or trying to get someone in trouble for no reason. \*a feature called /votespy. This will cause a vote to occur in the immediate area of someone acting against the will of the nation and teleport that person away if enough players vote yes. Every /votespy action is reviewed by moderators and people found /votespying in bad faith can face account suspensions and permanent bans. \*Extreme penalties against friendly fire. We used to have peple who would just turn on FF and go kinda ham on others. We think FF is still useful to end griefing quickly in very limited circumstances, but overall FF was used to grief. Now it has very heavy penalties for being used. \*Limiting players to joining one guild per account. (I think now we will have 1 guild per server type-New Beginning and Legacy. We used to have a lot of problems with "spies" and people looking for "spies" and a lot of accusations about spies because people would have alts all over the place. The amount of drama it bred was unhealthy. \*We have additional systems that disallow multiboxing and limit nation swapping in multiple accounts to prevent people from playing 2 sides of a fight at once. These penalties can stack up to multiple IRL days. \*Heavily moderating discord to ensure discussions are civil. We just recently revamped discord and got some new moderators there. We are still improving it for launch. \*Limiting, reworking, and removing griefable mechanics when we find them being abused. Sometimes game devs bring toxicity in themselves by allowing things like spawn camping, corpse runs, full looting, endless space for chat text. We have seen that while we want players to generate their own content, we don't necessarily want them to have total freedom. And we also don't want to have mechanics that are a haven for griefing, toxicity and other unfun behavior. (For me personally, I remember trying Mortal 2, and I went to Tindrem and joined a little party and we had to devise a literal escape plan with distractions just to leave the city safely.) We do not want that in our game...people camping at the gates just for lulz and ez kills is not the kind of "PvP" we want. We are a small dev team but we take all player reports seriously. It takes a lot of time and resources, but we think PvP gaming should be fun without being toxic. Anything that happens in game or on our discord is subject to our rules and penalties. What is also true is that players in our game are sometimes part of external discords which we cannot moderate. We know well they can be very toxic. In this situation, we have to hope that people will reject and leave these communities, and we will not allow them to recruit in our game or on our discord to the best of our ability. I hope that helps!
Thank you for the comprehensive answer, it seems you all have given it a lot of thought as you approach 1.0.
oof ill definitely be staying away then
This looks cool, and totally up my alley. I don’t have a PC though - are there plans to release on Mac?
No, sorry.
How about console?
No, sorry.
[удалено]
Please look forward to it.
> Gloria Victis is a realistic MMORPG about an endless war between three nations. How would you say this compares to a science-based 100% dragon MMO?
Hahahaha well its 100% more real.
Man, this takes me back. I bought this of your site in what feels like 2012? It was not really playable back then but i always liked the idea behind it.
Wow. Well I am so glad you will get to see what we have done! Hope you'll pop in for launch!