Filed under: Asheron's Call

In the increasingly diminishing field of subscription-only MMOs, two distinct camps have formed. There is the Old Guard that has its established playerbase and is simply not interested in jumping on board the F2P train, and then there are the New Kids on the Block (which would make an excellent band name, by the way), who argue that their premium features and AAA content warrant a subscription in the F2P age.

A few years ago, doing a list of the final few F2P holdouts would have been a ridiculous proposition, but now it's actually difficult to get to 10 of these. Each company has a different reason that it hasn't given these games more flexible payment options (FPO should replace F2P; pass it on!), and while some have addressed this publicly, others say nothing and leave us to speculate on it.

For today's Perfect Ten, we're going to look at the 10 biggest current F2P holdouts in the industry and muse about what's going on behind the scenes. Will this list be impossible to do in a few years or will subscription-only titles come back in a big way? Hey, I don't predict things; I just make lists.

Back at the turn of the century, you didn't have the equivalent of cable's infinite choices when it came to MMOs. No, you pretty much had the standard Big Three of network programming: Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron's Call. With the subscription model firmly in place, most players had to choose their loyalty and choose it well.

For today's Leaderboard, we're going to pretend that no other MMOs exist other than those three and see how the 2012 crowd divides up between them. Would you fly your banner for Ultima Online and its enormous sandboxy world? Would you cast your lots with EverQuest, the once great and powerful king of the genre? Or would you throw in with Asheron's Call and its monthly stories?

Call it a popularity contest, a trip down memory lane, or an all-out brawl between MMO senior citizens. It's a three-way title fight on this week's Leaderboard, and only one game will live to see next week!

When you have an MMORPG that's well into its second decade, there's got to be a strong temptation to simply keep the servers on and let it ride. The community is probably pretty hardcore -- and they're certainly faithful -- and throwing a bunch of changes at them could be a dicey proposition.

Turbine is taking that gamble with its venerable Asheron's Call sandbox, though, as the title's February update is bringing sweeping changes to the world of Auberean. New skills and new systems are the order of the day, and whether you're talking about the removal of racial skills or the ability to have six additional specialization skills, there's probably going to be an adjustment period after the patch. Head to official AC boards for all the details.

[Thanks to Rehlik for the tip!]

The last time on the Perfect Ten, disaster struck the good ship Poseidon and the surviving readers were running out of air as they tried to escape the flipped-over vessel. Also, we were counting down the top 20 MMO themes, but that's of small consolation to the soon-to-be bereaved friends and families, don't you think?

Because we play these games extensively, it's not uncommon for MMO music -- and themes -- to become vilified by the sheer number of times we've heard them. That's a little unfair to a three-minute piece of soundtrack that slaves every day to feed his wife and kids, doing the best he can in a trying situation. So perhaps we can put aside melodic oversaturation to look at these tracks anew, shall we?

With half of them out of the way, it's time to look into the elite of the elite: the 10 best MMO themes of all time. According to me. A guy you don't know. You've got goosebumps, don't you?

You know what I love about the end of each year? The lists. Man, but I'm a sucker for lists, especially when they come in "best of" varieties. In the lull between Christmas and New Year's, there typically isn't a lot happening in the world of entertainment, so it's a good time to look back before we head forward.

And so it is for The Game Archaeologist. 2011 marks the second year I've been doing this column, and it's been one of my personal favorite series to write. Every week I'm learning more and more about the history of the MMO genre, and I'm encouraged to see just how much passion and interest there are for the titles that started it all and got us to where we are today.

So before we head into 2012, let's take one last glimpse back at the road we've traveled. If you've missed out on any of these columns or want to revisit your favorite classic MMO, I've compiled a huge list of everything I talked about this year, from histories to interviews to player stories. There's also a special request for you (yes, you) at the end of this column, so do me a favor and hit that jump!

Turning 12 is a wake-up call for most people because they realize that next year they will officially be teenagers. We just hope that Turbine's ready for that when Asheron's Call breaks curfew, sasses back, and starts developing a romantic interest in other MMOs.

One of the privileges of writing The Game Archaeologist column here on Massively is that I get to watch over these classic MMOs as they marinate in maturity. Despite new titles being announced or released literally every day, these long-running games are the established old guard that have nothing to prove at this point. It's hard not to be a little in awe of that and gush at it.

So congratulations to Asheron's Call, one of the first batch of 3-D MMOs that hit the scene back in the late '90s, for reaching its 12th anniversary! How bizarre is it to think that Asheron's Call came out the same year that we were freaking out about Y2K, seeing how far George Lucas could fall with The Phantom Menace, and paying about $1.22 a gallon for gas in the U.S.? AC almost seems legendary when you realize how far back it stretches.

Join us as we sing the praises of Dereth and its citizens after the jump!

Time machines are expensive, and with gas the price it is today, it's not always viable to fuel up your DeLorean and travel back to the early 2000s just to check out some of those long-gone MMOs. Fortunately, jawing about them with former players and developers is the next best method of revisiting canceled MMOs.

It's been a personal treat to spend the month covering a game I never got to see when it was live. Asheron's Call 2 seems like it was a special game that tried hard and resulted in spectacular ideas and flaws alike. We've gotten to hear from former fansite owners and a developer on the team, which leaves just one group to check in with: the players themselves.

So today it's all about reminiscing over AC2 with the players who still carry a torch for this title and perhaps have a poster of it on the ceiling over their beds. I wouldn't be surprised if there's one or two people out there who made "children" out of discarded Asheron's Call 2 boxes and have enrolled them in elementary school only to be declined because they couldn't be authenticated. That's just how much love there is out there for this game.

You can see where this is going.

Once I learned that, I knew I had to get him to contribute to this series. I began a multi-year wooing campaign that involved skywriting, cupcakes, celebrity kiss-o-grams, envelopes stuffed with unmarked bills, and all the tea in China. Of course, this was well after he'd already said "yes" to it, but I like to keep up appearances.

So hit the jump as I talk to a guy who was on the flipside of Asheron's Call 2 as a producer and generally swell fella!

Back when I covered Asheron's Call for The Game Archaeologist, I got an impassioned email from a former fansite operator who made me promise that I'd drop her a line when the time came to talk about Asheron's Call 2, as she was not only a huge fan of the title but still in contact with many former players who carry a torch for Turbine's long-departed MMO. One thing led to another, and I ended up talking to both her and a fellow AC2 fansite manager about the ups and downs of covering the second coming of Dereth...

The Game Archaeologist: Please introduce yourself, your current job position, and how you got involved with Asheron's Call 2 back in the day?

Kiersten Samwell: I'm Kiersten Samwell, Community Relations and Social Media Manager for KingsIsle Entertainment, the creator of Wizard101. I used to be the Site Manager for Warcry's Crossroads of Dereth/Asheron's Call site as Ellen Ripley, so it was natural to work with the site manager of their Asheron's Call 2 fansite as well. His name is Roberto, and he was just an incredible site manager. Of course, being an avid AC1 player, I enjoyed AC2 for both its similarities to and its differences from AC1.

Robert Hackett: Hi, I'm Robert Hackett, the Managing MMO Editor of GamersInfo.net. I actually got invited to one of the betas along with a friend of mine. The lag was so bad (the day I logged in may have been a stress test; I can't remember) that I told my friend that there was no way my rig could handle that. Fast forward to the month after release and Ophelea from the old AC Crossroads site begged me to come over to AC2 and be an editor for the database she was trying to build. Logged in and the game was a million percent better. I stayed to work on the database and eventually fell in love with it beyond "work!"

MMO sequels are funny animals. Sequels (along with prequels and "reimaginings") are ingrained into the entertainment industry so deep that it makes sense that MMO studios would follow suit. And yet these types of games -- with their ever-growing nature and heavy involvement with loyal playerbases -- are not always conducive to such projects. More often than not, a sequel to an online game becomes its ancestor's main competition, which is not a desirable outcome for the studio.

Perhaps back in the early 2000s, studios simply didn't know better. There's good evidence that the typical "hit video games need a sequel" mindset ran rampant across the industry, from the multiple attempts at Ultima Online 2 to the release of the don't-call-it-a-sequel sequel of EverQuest II. Perhaps developers didn't realize that MMO players didn't necessarily want to be uprooted and moved to a new game every few years.

While sequels, spin-offs and remakes are still present, the genre learned a hard lesson with Asheron's Call 2 in the first half of the decade. Asheron's Call was a success on Microsoft and Turbine's behalf, and a sequel -- with vastly improved graphics and deeper gameplay -- seemed like a logical next step. Unfortunately, it was a Greek tragedy in the making, destined for a short but memorable life in our world.

This month we're going to look at the brief shining star of Asheron's Call 2 and get all sorts of misty-eyed romantic over it!

Turbine may be best-known to modern MMO gamers for its F2P games Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online, but veteran gamers know that the company has a tiny little subscription sandbox game operating a bit outside of the limelight: Asheron's Call. Yes, AC is still chugging along, thanks in part to the devs' interaction with their small but faithful community. In fact, to reward that community, the development team has in the past asked its players for ideas on how to enhance the game. The catch is that said enhancement has to be something the devs can do in a single day.

Today, Turbine has posted up the best of the best ideas from the recent round of submissions from the playerbase, and apparently, AC players want their team working on everything from casino tweaks to tailorable undergarments (really!). Check out the whole list of itty-bitty incoming enhancements on the official forums.

I've always thought that rulesets are a golden opportunity for MMO developers to get creative with their products and try something fresh and exciting. Unfortunately, most every MMO these days, new and old, adheres to the four "vanilla" rulesets that have been in place since Pong. You have your default PvE, your same-as-PvE-except-we-have-a-naming-policy PvE-RP, and the two player vs. player variants: PvP and PvP-RP.

Those are all well and good, but... y'know... couldn't rulesets be used to create fascinating variations on these games? It turns out that yes, yes they can.

While the vanilla rulesets are the vast majority, there does exist a group of fringe rulesets that dared to walk the different patch, er, path and made versions of MMOs that are a bold and refreshing flavor. Like blue! Sometimes these new rulesets were whipped up to inject new life into an aging title, giving players a valid reason to come back and see the game from a different perspective.

In this week's Perfect Ten, we're going to check out just how wild 'n' wacky server rulesets can get!

I like lists. Lists help keep my candy-coated brain functioning. I see so many games, devices, and developers that I need to write things down periodically or become lost. Not so long ago I made a list of 25 games for your shiny new laptop, but I wanted to update it with other devices as well. I'd like to clarify the devices I have, though, especially since it was brought to my attention that a lot of players use laptops as their primary gaming machines. When I refer to a laptop, it is far from a gaming machine and could not run games like EverQuest II or Age of Conan.

So here are some stats: I have an HTC Inspire, an iPhone 3GS, an iPad, a Phenom Triple-core PC desktop with an Nvidia 9800 card, six gigs of ram and onboard sound. My laptop is an HP G62 with an AMD Athlon II P340 dual core processor, three gigs of ram and an AMD graphics chip built in. I also have a more powerful gaming PC, but that is often referred to as "the wife's machine" around here, and it is so packed with her items that I rarely touch it. So most of these games can be run on their native devices, and if they are meant for PC, probably on netbooks as well. When I'm playing on netbooks, resolution is often the major issue. Some games just will not fit on the tiny screens without some slight modding.

Anyway, click past the cut to see the list. The first 11 are my favorites, the ones that I play often, if not every day. The rest are in no particular order, so keep that in mind as well. Remember that this year is going to be an incredible one for mobile, thanks to the new games I found at E3. So this list will change!

While Asheron's Call players have a while yet to wait to get their hands on new playable races, Turbine has a bright shiny ray of good news to share: The May event is tentatively set to hit the servers on May 17th.

According to the site, this event includes a new hunting area, a pair of additional dungeons, more quests, and "a couple of surprises." The Asheron's Call team boldly states that this will be "one of the most exciting updates" that players will see this year.

The May event announcement ends with a sneak preview of sorts: two pictures showing off new sand textures surrounding a desert town. We've known for a while now that Turbine's been working on updating the game's graphics, so this is a welcome sight indeed. You can read the full article over at Asheron's Call.

Elves. Dwarves. Humans. Halflings. Gnomes. Hobbits. Dark elves. High elves. Half-elves. Wood elves. Keebler elves. Elvish impersonators.

Are you as tired as I am of the endless regurgitation of stock fantasy races in our MMOs? It seems inconceivable (I do not think that means what you think it means) for a new fantasy title to come out without most of the above races infesting the character creation screen with moldy unoriginality, putrescent stank, and dusty boredom.

That's why today I'm standing up to praise 10 MMOs that dare to go above and beyond the stale by offering mostly unique and different races than the rest of the market. Hopefully future games will learn from their example and throw off the yokes of generic oppression to give us something bold and refreshing!