Monsters & Memories - An Old School Indie MMO

[sajbert]

Still got no invite but tried the stress test a couple of times.

Positives
- Lovely character models, textures and music. Some areas look truly great like one of the dungeon entrances. Gives a nice vibe and identity to the game.
- Dedicated small community

Negatives
- Unnecessarily crude map designs and some world textures look like blatant placeholders.
- Some parts are just archaic or cryptic by design to the point there's really no way to solve it without wasting your time or having a dev leak information on how to solve a quest. I.e. lack of direction in quests or problems where you have no means to figure out the solution.
- Too many classes with many rough drafts with severely limited sets of abilities. Sadly the best and most fleshed out classes are bastardized versions of their EQ and WoW counterparts.
- Poor optimization. WoW Classic is prettier and runs on a toaster. This game "sorta" runs on a toaster but looks pretty bad with jaggies and the monsters and mobs stuttering across in the distance as if it were literally Classic Everquest.
- One prominent dev got booted from the project, M&M team didn't wanna disclose why and that's typically not good. Another prominent devs rubs me a bit the wrong way.
- Missing/bugged/broken tradeskills.

Now that's a lot of negatives but the dev issue may not even be an issue and everything else is fixable. I only fear that they won't be able to get the classes ready enough in time. That seems like the tallest order to me right now.

This is game is much more promising than Pantheon. I do think it will take off if the dev team doesn't implode.

[Wakanda]

Originally Posted by sajbert [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

- Unnecessarily crude map designs and some world textures look like blatant placeholders.

- Poor optimization. WoW Classic is prettier and runs on a toaster. This game "sorta" runs on a toaster but looks pretty bad with jaggies and the monsters and mobs stuttering across in the distance as if it were literally Classic Everquest.

I know no one asked for my opinion, but a lot of the textures are blatant placeholders [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] you probably already know this, but I watched in live-time as they started to add more and more textures to certain zones and dungeons. Also I was shocked at how much Faelindral changed between my first play test and the second play-test.

I also feel like... MnM requires more than a toaster PC. I have a 4080 and had a 5800x and this combo ran MnM pretty well, but I would drop down to 30-40 FPS in Night Harbor and stuff like that. I have to assume my friends with lesser PCs would be chugging in the same areas. Saw quite a few people in-game complaining about it. Upgrading to 9800x3d definitely solved all FPS problems, but that's not really a toaster processor.

And I'm not really sure if Classic WoW existing will be a huge reason why people don't play MnM. And I'm not a WoW hater either. I still play an unhealthy amount of WoW even in 2026, but when it comes to Classic WoW... I feel like that ship has sailed for a lot of us. None of my WoW friends get crunk for Classic WoW .... even when Nightslayer launched... I couldn't get any of them to play with me. So it's hard for me to envision MnM launching and people being like welp, I decided Classic WoW looks better so I'm going to go play that instead.

Also to me, MnM is the best looking MMO I've ever played. The lighting and environment feel so real, I find myself sitting along the coast in Oasis drinking coffee and staring at the sunrise reflecting off the ocean. Glancing at huge landmarks in the distance and wondering what's over there because I realize that it's a real place in the game. I just don't get that in WoW at all. I was thinking about that last night... how the new Silvermoon City would look epic if it actually had night time, but lighting doesn't even exist in a game like WoW.

[Autotune]

If one of you have a spare friend closed beta key and would be willing to send it to me I'll love you forever and ever amen.

[Cecily]

Originally Posted by Wakanda [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm curious which other MMOs are on the horizon? I know Ashes of Creation imploded [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] I am having a blast playing MnM though, but was curious what else might be out there that I haven't heard of.

Not a whole lot on my radar ATM. This was a pretty good video though for April MMOs. I'm gonna be checking out the betas for Hero's Destiny (April 1st key on disc) and Scars of Honor (Late April). Those are both PvP games that promise to not have P2W monetization. I do not enjoy MnM, so hopeful one of these games turns out promising. There's another 2D game Dimraeth I've been playing playtests for that's been pretty fun.

[Cecily]

Originally Posted by Belambic [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I had such high hopes for Ashes of Creation.

Yep. Sucks. I've been wanting a modern Lineage II experience for so long. Throne and Liberty was sorta close and I had fun with it, but god dammit that game had some glaring issues.

[Zukan]

Hey everyone, we put out an update today with some important info. I'll post the link here but also put bullet points on some of the major notes and if anyone wants to check the details there is more in the official post.

https://monstersandmemories.com/upda...october-1-2026

TLDR:

* Early Access launch moved to October 1st, 2026
* Early Access starting locations will be:
--- Night Harbor
--- The Underdocks: Night Harbor’s seedy harbor district in the Deep
--- Faelindral: Home of the Wood Elves
--- Ail’vorith: Capital of the Deep Elves
* Deep Elves and Deep Gnomes will be playable at launch
* Open Playtest Friday, May 29th - Sunday, June 7th


It's certainly a bummer that the date is moving back, but hopefully folks will see it as us identifying things that we still need to work on so we can have a strong start. And adding content from the deep will allow people to have more stuff to explore and kill. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Also here is the vod on youtube if anyone would like to hear the announcement from aLovingRobot himself.

https://youtu.be/V0odjEP4aUU?si=aIf-1lv_TOUG0rQP

[One Tin Soldier]

I take the delay as a good sign because I didn't think it was ready.

Personally, I think they could stop working on two or three classes for now and remove them as choices then maybe sometime later add them back in with an expansion or something.

I also feel like they need to do some serious thought about the long term vision for the game. Right now it almost feels like they are trying to recreate project 99 but with a subscription fee. P99 was fun while leveling up when there were lots of other low and mid-level players but then it turns into a shit-fest at the high end. Now, there aren't enough players going through the leveling part of the game to make that enjoyable and the end is still the same old shit-fest. If MnM is going to be the same thing why would I want to pay money for that?