Paean to Asheron's Call
Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2010 3:32 am
For the first time in six years, my router is successfully able to negotiate a connection with the MMO Asheron's Call.
I can't even begin to tell you what this means to me. AC1 was my first MMO, but it's more than that. It's been so, so long since I was able to log in ...
(A note on terminology. The game is Asheron's Call, but the abbreviation tends to be AC1 to distinguish it from the sequel, AC2.)
This game is ... well, retro is putting it kindly. The executive producer many years ago, Jessica Mulligan, was trying to get Turbine to use the slogan "Ugly as sin, fun as hell!" to advertise AC1. That's a pretty good description.
The graphics as utterly awful. The UI is pretty nice once you get used to it but completely non-standard (since it was designed before MMO games had a stanard UI). The implicit UI -- the way that you interact with items in the world -- is oddly truncated. As an example: when you talk to an NPC, the text is spewed to the chat box, not contained in a nice dialog window.
And many of the game systems are very retro as well. Combat is much simpler than we are used to today: physical combat has no real special attacks (like Raptor Strike or Arcane Shot) and the magic attacks are largely confined to direct attacks and very mathematical buffs/debuffs. Your run speed is a function of your Run skill and any excess weight you are carrying, because each and every item in your inventory has a weight. Of course, you can also increase your Strength in order to carry more weight without being overburdened.
But the game is ... expansive. I once hear that that Dereth, the land of Asheron's Call, is about half the size of the state of Rhode Island. That doesn't sound so impressive these days, but the entire area is one uninterrupted chunk of land. If you start in Hebian-To, along the eastern coastline, you can wander generally westward until you hit the inner sea, then follow the coastline north or south around the sea and into the Direlands, then further west until you hit the western coastline. Or you can follow the coastline south then west to avoid the inner sea all together.
No zones. No mountains separating one playground from another. (Sure, there are mountains, but most of them can be climbed. None of them serve as fake boundaries, if you will. They are all real boundaries.
And there are islands off the coast that you have to portal to get to. But if the ocean weren't unnavigable, you could swim there. Well, except that characters can't swim in AC1. Afraid of water, I guess.)
On a technical note, even the dungeons and houses exist as part of the one, uninterrupted physical world. Most of them are hidden along the western side of the grid that makes up the world, under the ocean, but some are hidden in the inner sea.
Oh, and there are houses: cottages and villas on the landscape, plus mansions for allegiances (guilds). Or you can rent a cheap apartment underground, surrounded by apartments belonging to other players. Houses can only be minimally decorated, but you can hand up some trophies -- including pack dolls, which are like little animated statues. They don't follow you around like mini-pets, though. But there are true mini-pets now -- like the gearknight I just got for the game's 10th anniversary.
Yes, 10 years.
And you can thank an engineer called srand for the mini-pets.
There aren't any hunter-style pets, which is a pity because AC1 has some really neat monsters. (Ugly, but neat.) Many of them are relatively original for a fantasy game: three legged predatory armored fish-reptiles called reedsharks; three-legged abominable-snowman-style vulture-yaks (a lot of the creatures on Dereth were originally from a planet where the main life forms were three-legged); floating squid-nautili; beings of pure enemy that try to mimic humans by wearing creepy puppet masks and long robes; four-legged armored spiders ...
The game systems are expansive also -- by which I mean that they are largely undirected. Want to learn to cook? Start trying to combine foodstuffs until you find some recipes. (Hint: start with water and flour.) Want to do some quests? Wander around town talking to various people until one of them tells you to go do something. Or ask the town crier -- he'll often have some hints. Or find the right vendor and look for notes and rumors that mention nearby points of interest -- chances are that if you go there you'll find some item that wants to be returned to its owner for a reward.
(Mind you, I've only logged back in long enough to check out my house, wander through the newbie portal circuit, and pick up a commemorative gearknight pet. So things may have changed. I doubt the fundamentals of the game engine's capabilities have changed that much, though.)
The best thing about AC1, though, are the monthly updates. Imagine if Blizzard put out a major content update once a month. Scale it down so that it can be accomplished by a team that numbers about 4 total, instead of hundreds, but toss out all the constant rebalancing and replace it with straight content and story. The major characters in the world of Dereth are always moving, and the players are pushing them along. The world story changes every month -- allegiances shift, new threats and powers appear, players defeat old menaces and inadvertently free new ones ... It's a whirlwind.
It a living world.
I miss it.
....
There is a 14 day free trial, if you are interested in checking the game out.
I warn you though, that AC1 is very close to my heart. (So is Ac2, for that matter.) If you say mean things about either of them here, I may react badly. Just a warning ...
I can't even begin to tell you what this means to me. AC1 was my first MMO, but it's more than that. It's been so, so long since I was able to log in ...
(A note on terminology. The game is Asheron's Call, but the abbreviation tends to be AC1 to distinguish it from the sequel, AC2.)
This game is ... well, retro is putting it kindly. The executive producer many years ago, Jessica Mulligan, was trying to get Turbine to use the slogan "Ugly as sin, fun as hell!" to advertise AC1. That's a pretty good description.
The graphics as utterly awful. The UI is pretty nice once you get used to it but completely non-standard (since it was designed before MMO games had a stanard UI). The implicit UI -- the way that you interact with items in the world -- is oddly truncated. As an example: when you talk to an NPC, the text is spewed to the chat box, not contained in a nice dialog window.
And many of the game systems are very retro as well. Combat is much simpler than we are used to today: physical combat has no real special attacks (like Raptor Strike or Arcane Shot) and the magic attacks are largely confined to direct attacks and very mathematical buffs/debuffs. Your run speed is a function of your Run skill and any excess weight you are carrying, because each and every item in your inventory has a weight. Of course, you can also increase your Strength in order to carry more weight without being overburdened.
But the game is ... expansive. I once hear that that Dereth, the land of Asheron's Call, is about half the size of the state of Rhode Island. That doesn't sound so impressive these days, but the entire area is one uninterrupted chunk of land. If you start in Hebian-To, along the eastern coastline, you can wander generally westward until you hit the inner sea, then follow the coastline north or south around the sea and into the Direlands, then further west until you hit the western coastline. Or you can follow the coastline south then west to avoid the inner sea all together.
No zones. No mountains separating one playground from another. (Sure, there are mountains, but most of them can be climbed. None of them serve as fake boundaries, if you will. They are all real boundaries.
And there are islands off the coast that you have to portal to get to. But if the ocean weren't unnavigable, you could swim there. Well, except that characters can't swim in AC1. Afraid of water, I guess.)On a technical note, even the dungeons and houses exist as part of the one, uninterrupted physical world. Most of them are hidden along the western side of the grid that makes up the world, under the ocean, but some are hidden in the inner sea.
Oh, and there are houses: cottages and villas on the landscape, plus mansions for allegiances (guilds). Or you can rent a cheap apartment underground, surrounded by apartments belonging to other players. Houses can only be minimally decorated, but you can hand up some trophies -- including pack dolls, which are like little animated statues. They don't follow you around like mini-pets, though. But there are true mini-pets now -- like the gearknight I just got for the game's 10th anniversary.
Yes, 10 years.
And you can thank an engineer called srand for the mini-pets.
There aren't any hunter-style pets, which is a pity because AC1 has some really neat monsters. (Ugly, but neat.) Many of them are relatively original for a fantasy game: three legged predatory armored fish-reptiles called reedsharks; three-legged abominable-snowman-style vulture-yaks (a lot of the creatures on Dereth were originally from a planet where the main life forms were three-legged); floating squid-nautili; beings of pure enemy that try to mimic humans by wearing creepy puppet masks and long robes; four-legged armored spiders ...
The game systems are expansive also -- by which I mean that they are largely undirected. Want to learn to cook? Start trying to combine foodstuffs until you find some recipes. (Hint: start with water and flour.) Want to do some quests? Wander around town talking to various people until one of them tells you to go do something. Or ask the town crier -- he'll often have some hints. Or find the right vendor and look for notes and rumors that mention nearby points of interest -- chances are that if you go there you'll find some item that wants to be returned to its owner for a reward.
(Mind you, I've only logged back in long enough to check out my house, wander through the newbie portal circuit, and pick up a commemorative gearknight pet. So things may have changed. I doubt the fundamentals of the game engine's capabilities have changed that much, though.)
The best thing about AC1, though, are the monthly updates. Imagine if Blizzard put out a major content update once a month. Scale it down so that it can be accomplished by a team that numbers about 4 total, instead of hundreds, but toss out all the constant rebalancing and replace it with straight content and story. The major characters in the world of Dereth are always moving, and the players are pushing them along. The world story changes every month -- allegiances shift, new threats and powers appear, players defeat old menaces and inadvertently free new ones ... It's a whirlwind.
It a living world.
I miss it.
....
There is a 14 day free trial, if you are interested in checking the game out.
I warn you though, that AC1 is very close to my heart. (So is Ac2, for that matter.) If you say mean things about either of them here, I may react badly. Just a warning ...