Overview

View complete game info

Review

Release Date: 11.22.2002
Platform: PC - Windows
Developer: Turbine Entertainment Software
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Reviewed by Ryan Keough on 8.28.2003

Review Rating: 8/10

Your world has been overrun by hordes of creatures, and your family has been forced underground for several generations. With the defeat of the great sage Asheron, the planet has no protection from the rampant evil aside from the wits of its inhabitants. After all these years, hardy adventurers find the courage to travel to the surface and reclaim that which has been taken from them.

You assume the role of one of those adventurers, and the journey ahead of you will be long and arduous. By fighting countless enemies and fulfilling heroic quests you hope to achieve the power required to fight back for the freedom of your people.

There are three available races to play: Human, Tumerok and Lugian. While Humans are pretty self-explanatory, the other two races are completely unique in the realms of role-playing. Tumeroks are spiritual beings, and they resemble what can best be described as a combination of feline and insect-like properties. Lugians are the stalwart big blue guys on the block, and they make excellent fighters, although many of them are known to be fearsome casters. You can pick a variety of features, from hair to skin designs, so most people will have no trouble distinguishing between characters.

As soon as you exit the creation process, you immediately enter into the story by protecting your underground home from a Drudge scouting party. This attack serves as an excellent tutorial that not only provides the basics of game play; it also grants the player reasonable experience towards gaining the first level. Having proven yourself in battle, you can leave your den and begin forging a legacy of your own, fighting to retake the surface from the evil that has washed over the lands.

Upon exiting the tutorial, you find yourself standing atop a vast landscape, with an almost painting-like quality. The view was simply stunning; the best I had seen in a game –ever- at that point. Sadly, I had to proceed downwards towards a broken down city to figure out what I am supposed to do. Essentially, where can I begin farming experience points, loot, and lots of adventure? Nearby were many wandering beetles and such of low level that provide little challenge for the beginning player, and do well to help further your knowledge and abilities.

Aside from gaining levels for experience, your skills, spells and abilities advance along a complex skill tree. Each race is divided into melee, ranged and mage, and each school branches into two specialized classes. For example, the base mage school offers its own skills, but you can also pick from the enchanter or sorcerer school. Other classes, like archers, can pick abilities from those schools as well, but you can only have one specialized class. Archers with enchanter spells are very popular, as the abilities to enhance your weapon damage and attack speed prove very valuable. For every point of actual experience you earn, you get that same amount to spend on various skills. Two people can both have fireball, but one person may have advanced it to 40th level while the other person only trained the first so he could train the next spell on the tree. If you want to undo your allotment of points, you can choose to untrain, and all experience you would have gained as spending points would instead be taken away from that particular skill. Once you are back to first level, you can choose to remove the skill altogether.

Players can reach up to the 50th experience level before they need to turn to PVP and guild management for entertainment and purpose. Reaching that plateau is deceptively easy for the average power-gamer, and the result is a lot of bored and unhappy l33t d00ds. For the casual gamer, however, this is a double blessing. Not only are most of the hardcore players removed from play, it also lets the gamer feel like real in-game power is attainable for anyone who only puts in an hour or two every other day or so.

Scattered throughout the zoneless world are hundreds of creatures with many distinct, well designed models. The world itself is divided into three continents and each progress in difficulty. Without exploiting some summon issues at launch, a character could not even reach the final continent, Linvak, until he had reached the 30th level. People can form groups of up to 10 people, so finding one is incredibly easy and quick. Experience is divided accordingly, but 10 people fighting together can be incredibly effective with no downtime whatsoever between pulls. Soloing is also a viable form of adventuring, so players who only have a short time to play can still have a feeling of accomplishment at the end of a session.

In a long called-for move, questing takes a dominant place in the adventuring process and players can progress almost entirely using the experience gained from an extensive, fun quest system. Various NPCs scattered throughout the world offer items, buffs and experience for completing a wide spectrum of quests. The run-speed buff quest is particularly useful, as it lasts a long time and the world is very large. Even with a ring-like system of teleportation between main areas of each continent, you still have to move from place to place.

To add to the immersion of the Asheron’s Call world, Dereth, players can participate in a series of plot-related quests called the Vault Campaign. Numerous dungeons on each continent cater to different styles of play, and they are incredibly fun. At the end of each dungeon is a boss, and they are obviously much harder than the standard fare you fight to reach him. Many times a player is able to solo all the way to the boss, only to get a quick ride to the bind point from the creature. Having a full group in all of the latter Vaults is a necessity if you want to complete the dungeon at an early level for maximum experience benefit.

As previously mentioned, the world is divided into three continents: Osteth, Omishan and Linvak. Each continent is vast in both area and content, and traveling around could be a real hassle at times. Thankfully, each main town is connected by a portal system, and each area surrounding the towns is connected by “rings”. If you are in Arwic, you can travel the Arwic Ring to the four quadrants of this large area. I’ve walked the whole way before because I thought the portals may be excessive. They are not…

Creatures can drop any type of equipment reasonable for their level of difficulty, for any race and any class. The probability that a mob will drop something usable by you depends on who killed the beast, as that is taken into account and raises the percentage of getting usable loot by that person. A Tumerok spellcaster is much more likely to get Tumerok robes than Lugian plate mail.

Each item also has a component rating, like 65 Iron / 24 Wood, which can be used to fuel crafting of all sorts. Even though you can farm for these separate components, it is faster to just use the junk items in your inventory to craft with. Recipes have various levels, and the lower level of the item created, the lower the required component rating. Crafted items tend to be more powerful than similar looted items of the same level, so people are encouraged to make goods for each other and further the in-game economy, which is entirely player run. This is a risky move, but it was not a total failure as many people had predicted.

Several areas throughout the land were designated as Player vs. Player spots, so traveling through them required more caution than normal. This is great for the times when you want to go take out your frustration on some gimp several levels below you, but in the later game many quests require you to traverse through these areas. People being people, many folks get their kicks by preying on questers. Many times you can easily take out the quest boss, but that level 50 mage standing between you and him has a few words, and spells, to say before you could even think about advancing. PVP balancing was terrible; you either had an awesome class or you were worthless. One person could take out full groups of the same level just because of a certain ability or spell.

The launch for Asheron’s Call 2 was pretty rough, and clearly balance testing in beta was shoddy at best, nonexistent at the worst. Archers could exploit pathing issues to solo mobs ten levels higher than themselves, and several skills were either worthless or not working at all. Only after the first few months were these issues fully addressed, and even then many people felt that the game had lost its chance to make a proper niche in the industry. Lag was also a major issue for any polygon-heavy area, so several cities were best avoided if at all possible.

Other gaming companies, take notice of AC2’s monthly update system. Your players love it, it makes sense, and it is simply the best idea for patching and content ever implemented. For players who have been in the MMORPG genre for a while, I’m sure you’re familiar with ‘emergency patches’ and the fun they cause. Everyone loves getting kicked off the server right in the middle of camping that ub3r item, don’t we?

Well, Turbine plans every patch in advance, and they happen once a month. You know far ahead when you won’t be able to play, and you know that cool stuff is going to happen because of it. From everything to new quests, monsters, equipment and mounts to the actual rebuilding of the most traveled cities, monthly patches are a –great thing-. Each patch also comes with a little movie cut scene that goes along with the plot of the world and makes you feel like you really are making a difference. Serious Kudos.

Aside from a rocky start, AC2 stakes its claim on a significant portion of the MMORPG market. The game looks better than most in the genre that are currently released, even though we all know that looks aren’t everything. Is it fun? For the casual gamer, this is what you’ve wanted. For diehard players, this probably isn’t your best option, but it will probably provide a couple of months of entertainment. The bottom line is this is a good online game, and at the very least you should check out the fan sites to see what Dereth might have to offer you.

Box art