Asheron's Call 2 resurrected
Ho ho ho! And what does Santa Alice have in her sack for you this year? She's been watching you all year and knows exactly what you want and deserve: for Turbine to resurrect Asheron's Call 2 seven years after its MMORPG shut down. Shh, shh, don't say a thing, sweet one. Santa Alice just knows.
Ho ho ho! And what does Santa Alice have in her sack for you this year? She's been watching you all year and knows exactly what you want and deserve: for Turbine to resurrect Asheron's Call 2 seven years after its MMORPG shut down. Shh, shh, don't say a thing, sweet one. Santa Alice just knows.
Turbine released Asheron's Call 2 in November 2002 but shut it down only three years later, in December 2005. The original Asheron's Call is astonishingly still up and running, however, charging a monthly subscription fee of $12.95.
You'll need to be one of those curious AC1 subscribers to play the revived AC2, Turbine explains in the announcement, but pay no additional fee. The MMO's back up on a new server, where sadly veterans can't access any of their old characters.
"Please note that this is a beta, the environment might have some known issues that we will be working on," Turbine says. "The friend's list functionality, for example, will not be available when this new server goes into beta. As can happen during a beta release, the server might be taken down for maintenance or troubleshooting at some inconvenient times if deemed necessary."
Christmas miracles are rarely predictable.
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Shacknews
replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, Asheron's Call 2 resurrected.
Ho ho ho! And what does Santa Alice have in her sack for you this year? She's been watching you all year and knows exactly what you want and deserve: for Turbine to resurrect Asheron's Call 2 seven years after its MMORPG shut down. Shh, shh, don't say a thing, sweet one. Santa Alice just knows.-
Visions of Santa Alice dance in my head. But why are there tentacles? Oh god...
Also, yay Asheron's Call news! I played the original for about 2 years, favorite MMO ever. I wish they would go free to play with it. I'd love to revisit Dereth but Guild Wars has spoiled me. Can't have them sub fees anymore. -
Wait...what?!!??!
I don't think many of us would want our old characters back anyhow, unless they rolled the character data back from pre-endgame since we all basically got boosted to max level+gear. This is very weird though. Are they planning on continuing this "beta", what is the purpose here? Either way I'm keeping a very keen eye on this one as I don't subscribe to AC1 atm. -
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After the chat window fiasco was fixed, it was a great game. I never unsubbed from it the whole 3 years and it always kept me going. I know it wasn't for everyone though, and wished it had more subs, I think a F2P version of AC2 would do well enough.
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Id expect this to go F2P as long as the beta works out, using AC1 current subs to test is an awesome idea though.
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Wish they let any turbine sub try it out since I am currently subbed to LOTRO. Probably end up buying AC1 just for nostalgia if nothing else.
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You should sign up and send them a message(I'll probably send them a note too), I actually think there's nothing stopping them from doing this today for active subscribers. Would probably get me to re-sub to LOTRO rather than AC1.
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Since I never played either game, what mad AC2 so cool?
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It was ahead of its time I think, the world was incredible for the time period. I've always felt that Blizzard took some design queues from AC2 when they made WoW. The problem I had with AC2 was that they basically redesigned all the classes and some other elements within the first couple months, the MS chat system was terrible initially as well. Really it was released too early and got negative reactions and just was never able to recover.
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My problem with AC2 was how much more constrained your character progression was. In AC1 you could invest your points into whatever skills you wanted, allowing you to produce pretty much any character concept you could think of (kind of like Dark Souls, where you can progress down any path you want regardless of your initial class). AC2 tended more toward a pre-defined class structure.
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Yeah definitely was more class based, I think that is something they changed shortly after launch too, I recall the class system being more flexible, as you had a number of skill trees and you could mix and match them to make somewhat more unique characters. Then a couple months in they redesigned it and locked down the options more, and that was the reason I quit . The combination I had made and was enjoying was removed completely and it was basically like having to play a completely different class. Fuzzy on the details cause its been so long but if I remembering correctly I think it was something along those lines.
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They didn't really change the classes that much from what i remember. It was always much different from AC1, and since a lot of the playerbase was AC1 players coming to take a look, it caused some bad taste in their mouth. Too bad too because aside from the chat issue, it really was a stand-up game.
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Way I am remembering is that each race had a selection of skill trees to choose from and initially you could choose freely between them, so could take a magic casting class tree and mix it with a defensive melee tree. Later they locked that down and only allowed certain combinations. But its been so long I don't remember all the details, I just remember them doing something that totally changed the class I had and I got sick of all the changes and quit.
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sad thing is that wasn't even Turbine's fault, lot of their problems seem related to the partnership with MS.
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ya basically if you didn't have your connections through other chat/voice channels going, you were just destined to quit. It was borked for about 3 weeks but those 3 weeks were 20 days too long for most people. I sat through it because my guild had a good chat option outside of game but ya, it wasn't good.
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i am not going to lie about this. the game was flat out broken. there were so many exploits it was unreal. but...
on Darktide we made our own content and we had wars non stop. the politics amoung the guilds was intense and the ANTIs and the PKs raged on the server over and over and over. i was in Serpents, and we killed everyone. RED = dead!
it was the best 3 years of my entire MMO career. EVE is the only game that filled my PK hunger....until now. I WANT MY DARKTIDE BACK
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Hm. I did not write that blurb.
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Bought ac1 last night for $10 so I could try this out. Get 30 free days, etc. So far, it's interesting.
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Thanks Santa Alice! You're way cooler than the other Santa
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Naw not huge, but like 2 day rollback i think was the worst. The annoying thing was it "launched" fine. It was about 2-3 months in the chat system started to brake apart and another 3-5 month which caused all the wonderful subs to go bye bye leaving the dedicated players to keep the game running for another 2.5 years. Also due to the crash in subs the dev team was reassigned to LOTRO or laid off.
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Graphically, it's surprisingly good. The animations however, are very bad. And the terrain...it's just HUGE spaces of nothing..just nothing...not even grass. I've never seen a more barren MMO landscape, ever. It's a curiosity at this point and not much more, unless they are willing to flesh the engine out, there's no point. People playing insist there's content..but man..it's hard to find.
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This is great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Y3xHDTTe8
Free PSN Codes, i used 4 so far :>
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