Asheron's Call

"Great concept, poor execution"

Asheron's Call is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), a world in which thousands of players play simultaneous and are able to freely interact with each other, hunt together, or even kill one another. AC takes place on the island of Dereth, a huge, seamless land mass with a large variety of terrains, towns, and dungeons. The plot basically revolves around humans popping in via portals from their homeworld and taking up arms against the oppressors of their new homeland. Every month a fairly large update occurs, in which new dungeons, creatures, and items are added and the all-encompassing storyline advances. This review is being written a few months after AC's first ''expansion pack'', Dark Majesty, was released, which added a new island, a housing system, and a bunch of new quests.

AC is the product of a bunch of RPG fanatics and gamers with little real-world game development getting together and creating their ideal MMORPG. The result is a game that plays exactly the way it was created: it's a whole lot of fun for a long time and allows for massive amounts of experimenting and skill-combining, but the whole formula falls apart when you get to higher levels. In the testing phase of the game, no one thought that anyone would really get higher than level 60 or so (even though the level cap is 126) so they created formulas for characters' stats that level off pretty dramatically if they get reasonably high... a stat that used to cost 10,000 experience to raise 1 point suddenly costs half a million only 10 or so points later. The result are characters in their hundreds that are only slightly more powerful than those in their 40s and 50s, despite the fact that they have hundreds (or thousands) of times the experience accumulated.

AC's second big fault is a total lack of balance amongst ''classes'' -- and I use the word ''classes'' loosely as there's no set class system. Any character can take any skill (if they can afford the Skill Points), which results in a potentially huge variety of characters. The only problem with this is that since the skills are poorly balanced against one another, there have emerged ''templates'' -- guides to character development -- that tell you what to train, what to specialize (like training except a little better), and what to train after character creation. These templates are optimized to deal with skill imbalances, so any character that doesn't fall in line with one of them is noticeably less powerful at higher levels. Many people choose to ''reroll'' when they realize that their character is a ''gimp'' (meaning they took a skill that isn't very powerful), and after rerolling a few times, you're so sick of the lower levels you want to scream.

GRAPHICS (5/10) - AC's graphics are nice, but horribly dated. Character models have fairly low polygon counts, but they make up for this by letting characters choose their facial features. Some creatures have really low poly counts as well, but they're slowly replacing these with much more eye-pleasing models as time goes on. The landscape is BEYOND enormous (comparable in size to Rhode Island), with an eye-popping variety of locales, but the dungeons are rather monotonous and unimaginative -- many use only 2 or 3 textures TOTAL and very little lighting. Newer dungeons tend to be more creative or attractive, though.

SOUND (3/10) - AC's sound engine is partially to blame for its substandard sound. Sound effects play at a volume relative to your position vs. the position of whatever's making the sound, but that's about the extent of it. Many creatures' sounds are unimaginative, all spells sound IDENTICAL when casting, and there's no music. They've been good at adding ambient sounds in certain areas, but these sounds can be intrusive rather than pleasing.

VARIETY (6/10) - While characters that you play are all horribly similar (you can only play a human, and although you can choose their race -- asian, white, or african -- the differences between them are negligible), the variety of skills are pretty impressive. Ranging from trade skills such as cooking, alchemy, and fletching, to weapons like bows, crossbows, swords, maces, spears, staffs, daggers, and unarmed weapons (a contradiction?), there's plenty of variety. Unfortunately only a few of these classes are powerful, so the vast majority of players take only a few select skills. The spell system is immense, though, and there's 4 classes of magic you can take (though even the most hardened warrior takes at least one, and sometimes 3 magic classes). There's a beautiful variety of locations, too, and the landscape is so enormous that when you're out in the wilderness, you can literally go hours without seeing another player.

BALANCE (1/10) - Currently, the game has such an enormous problem with balance that if you don't pick one of the ''good'' skills as your primary offense, the game's almost unplayable and you'll have people 15 levels your junior outkilling you easily. Magic is ungodly powerful and a wizard with life magic (to cast certain vulnerabilities on enemies) and war magic (to cast war spells that take advantage of those vulnerabilities) are by far the most powerful characters in the game, able to kill almost anything. There's a couple of melee-based skills that are somewhat close to life/war magic in power, but the rest languish so far behind, you wonder why they're even in the game anymore. It's so bad that they should put warnings on the box that say ''Prepare for massive frustration if you don't pick the right template from which to create your character!'' Because of the unrestricted ability to pick disparate skills, almost everyone in the game has at least one magic -- usually Item Enchantment, which not only allows one to increase one's weapon damage or armour strength up to eight-fold, but also cast and recall portals. Without item magic, your only option for travel is running, memorizing the permanent portal system, or seeking out ''portal mules'' (characters whose creators run a macroing program that summons a portal to a set place every 3 minutes or so).

ENGINE (8/10) - AC is probably the most stable of the MMORPGs right now (though this is debatable depending on whom you ask). Unlike EverQuest, you can alt-tab out to your desktop to look stuff up on the internet or answer instant messages while the game runs in the background. And the developers have a very hands-off approach to 3rd party plugins in the game, so a very nice variety of programs have popped up to complement the game experience with tips and statistics (though some still consider this cheating). The biggest problem with the AC game engine is that you have to log in through Microsoft's incredibly annoying and intrustive .NET Passport system to play. This requires you getting a .Net Passport, and needlessly and hopelessly complicates the theoretically simple process of logging in to play. A big warning to potential players: never share your login name (which is different from your character names) because the system is quite easy to hack. Microsoft hasn't spent a buck on security for their players, and the result can be that you log in one day to find most of your items missing and your character in a strange, out-of-the-way location.

HOUSING AND STORAGE (2/10) - A new feature to Asheron's Call (added with Dark Majesty), housing is basically what it sounds like: players can buy houses for a set fee, decorate them, and use them for storage. Unlike competitors like Ultima Online, however, the house locations are pre-defined by the developers, and houses go up ''for sale'' at totally unknown times. As nice as it is to have in theory, however, the system is massively flawed in its execution. First, the number of houses is very, very low, and although the developers have promised to add enough to make it so everyone who wants one can have one, it's still very far from that. The result is horrible side effects: houses can be ''camped'' meaning that characters will sit at an unopened house day and night until it opens, which can take days (or even weeks), and a hearty ''sucks to be you'' goes to anyone unfortunate enough to log out to go have a real life or something. Houses are ''commodities'' which, once bought, can be sold for exhorbitant prices (in-game or even real-life money). Although only one character per account can own a house, many players maintain multiple accounts (requiring an extra $10/month per account), which allows them to buy up muliple houses. If you're rich, lucky, or devious enough to acquire a house, it can be a fun experience decorating and inviting friends in, but your spirits will be dampened somewhat when you realize your storage chest holds a comparatively small number of items, making your ''mule'' characters (characters that exist solely to hold stuff) still necessary. Houses come in 3 sizes: Cottage (ridiculously small but affordable), Villa (ridiculously huge and pricey), and Mansion (unnecessarily gargantuan and prohibitively expensive). Mansions are intended for large allegiances, though (allegiances are groups of characters who have sworn allegiance to one another to exchange experience, items, and quest information), and it takes quite a large allegiance to get together all the items and money needed to buy a mansion. AC would benefit greatly from a house size somewhere between Cottage and Villa, as well as a few more artists to design interiors that aren't totally identical. They have also promised to increase the size of the storage chest, but it's highly doubtful that it will ever be large enough to be more than moderately convenient. AC has no bank system, so items and money can only be accessed from your one storage chest (if you own a house) or stored on your mule characters. One of Dark Majesty's big selling points was housing, but in its current state, it's a laughable failure and a good lesson (along with Ultima Online) to other developers on how NOT to implement housing.

DEATH AND PENALTY (7/10) - When you die in AC, you ressurect at the last Lifestone you touched. A lifestone is a big blue stone that you can double-click to set your ressurrection location. Lifestones are scattered about the landscape, but are most often found close to towns. When you die, you lose a certain amount of items (the higher the level, the more items you lose) as well as half your gold. Items are chosen by their value, so only your most expensive items will consistently drop on death. To counter this, people usually carry enough ''death items'' (items that are useless but have a high gold value) to cover at least one death. When you die, you are given a ''Vitae penalty'', which temporarily reduces your stats 5% with each death. Vitae is easy enough to work off when it's low (10% or less), and once it's gone, your stats are back to the way they were. A lot of vitae can be a real pain, though, and with a bunch of vitae and all your armour on your corpses, you'll be hard-pressed to work it all off before your bodies decay and your items are lost. You're given plenty of time to recover your corpse, though (5 minutes times your level, minimum of 1 hour) and no one but you can loot your corpse (unless it was a fellow player who killed you, which can only happen if you went out to become a player killer). A new addition to the game is that you can allow a friend to loot your corpse for you and retrieve your items, which makes recovering items a lot easier, especially in nasty dungeons. Given the horribly inadequate amount of Hit Points you'll have throughout your life in AC (even at high levels), death comes easily and quickly, and can be very frustrating. Over time you'll learn where you can fight and when it's time to heal (or run), but it's a painful lesson.

FUN (6/10) - Asheron's Call can be a whole lot of fun for a long time. There's so much to do and see at the beginning, that you sometimes wonder if you'll ever be able to see half of it. There's plenty of variety in creatures, skills, and locations alike. The fun level starts dropping as you get higher in level, though, and the game becomes less a game and more a contest to see how high a level you can achieve. If you're able to resist the urge to level mechanically and heartlessly, you'll have a much better experience. However, the developers don't really help you out much with this, because they put level caps on almost every interesting thing to see, meaning that you have to be level XX just to see it. The social aspects are great in AC, and you'll meet a lot of cool people. But you'll also meet a lot of jerks (I mean, a LOT of jerks) as the in-game support staff is constantly stretched way too thin, and there's a lot of people in this game who get off on making your experience less enjoyable because ''it's not a real world.''

Overall, AC is a fun game, with great imagination. It would, however, benefit enormously from a much larger development budget and staff. AC is developed by a small Massachusetts company called Turbine and published by Microsoft, a company usually associated with high-budget, high-profile software... but for some strange reason, AC is kept at barely-alive level constantly. The advertising for it is very limited, the budget is tiny, the development team at Turbine is a skeleton crew, and issues like bugs and new content are numbingly slow in coming. Microsoft has proved time and again that they can clobber the competition with even their most mediocre products, but for reasons no one seems to be able to explain, Asheron's Call is kept in the dark like a crazy aunt in the attic. They feed her occasionally, and let her out on special occasions, but most of the time they just try and forget she's there. This is the very noticeable attitude Microsoft has taken towards Asheron's Call, and unfortunately, Turbine, the creators of AC, have already signed over the sequel to Microsoft. So basically, once real competition emerges (and not barely-adequate alterantives like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot), AC and most likely AC2 will fall flat on their faces and Turbine will probably starve to death.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/29/01, Updated 12/29/01