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Asheron's Call 2 Goes Sunset
In the wake of so many new MMOGs, it was inevitable that one would sink beneath the waves. Turbine's Asheron's Call 2 has called it quits, with a message on the official site stating that AC2 will close as of the end of December. The move comes at a somewhat confusing time, only three months after the release of Legions, the newest expansion for the two and a half year old gameworld. Gamespot has a report as well. The notice on the site reads: "In spite of our hard work and the launch of Legions, AC2 has reached the point where it no longer makes sense to continue the service. We will be officially closing the Asheron's Call 2 service on 12/30/05. Until then, we plan to run live events, but we will not be adding any content or features. We deeply appreciate the many dedicated fans of AC2 who have stood by us over the years. You have our sincerest gratitude. "
They ought to open source (or at least release) their server software so the community could pick up where they left off...
It was Microsofts fault that it flopped
It had an enormously successful beta but was down to a few thousand players within 6 months. I'm sure the game set all kinds of records for the fast decline in playerbase
They seemed to have almost no support after launch to fix bugs, add content, or even get the game to a state where it would have legitimately been ready to launch.
I liked the game, but it was completely unplayble for the first 3 months because they couldn't keep the chat servers up, and it had absolutely no end game at all
One of their biggest problem was that AC2 was not a sequel to AC1, they took the world and lore and made a completely different game. This of course completely aliented their existing users. Combine this with the fact that microsoft did almost no advertising at all, and there was no word of mouth advertsing due to their lack of pre-existing fan base.
The game never had a fair chance, and it probably only lasted as long as it did because they didnt' want to admit the game was a flop as they're gearing up to launch their 2 new games, Middle Earth Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Still, I guess it was a good business decision on MS's part to sell it back. Though Turbines real intention was to get back the rights to their franchise.
The AC1 players are pretty worried right now too though. The Dev team got told today that they are being moved back to boston after having been in california for a year or less.
AC1 is getting double xp weekends and even triple majors(good loot) now. AC2 was getting stuff like this before dying. Whether or not it's a sign it's making a lot of the high level players annoyed that leveling up has been made incredibly easy.
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
Competitive Upgrades.
Give the company running the new game the username/password to your old service, they login and analyse your character/inventory (perhaps in an automated way) and give you starting benifits in their new game based upon what you had in the old, then destroy/delete your character from the old game...
That is so wrong, and such a bad idea, someone is absolutly going to try it.
What I really want is an invite-only MM game, like G-mail, with invites being per-server.
the bonus part being, assuming a basic Everquest style interface, that you can target another player, and rate them Positive or Negative, and your rating, as given by other players, would help determine if/when/how many invites you get, as well as being publicly viewable (I suppose a bit like Slashdot moderations).
while this conflicts with the idea of getting as many subscribers as possible, you would also hopefully get a higher quality of subscribers, with better retention, and maybe lower support costs, due to reduced griefing/exploiting.
it also has a 'Cartmanland' marketing appeal, where the simple fact of it being hard to get in, makes it even more desirable, and if the game is any good, you'll have a nice viral marketing effect, like when g-mail was new, I continually saw message board posts along the lines of 'first 3 people to PM me get invites'
It seems like MMORPG sequels have a rough time. Ultima Online's sequel died in the womb,
That is not true. Both UO2 (known as Origin) and UX:O were not meant to be sequals to UO. UO2 was canceled because they finally realized it would canbalize the current playerbase of UO, potentially causing both games to go under. UX:O fell apart after most of the developers working on it did not move to California when their studio was moved. EA decided it would have been too costly to and time consuming to hire and train enough to work on the engine.
The problem with some of these things isn't as much that they're sequels, but that they're not that much fun as a game.
E.g., I just started on EQ2 and I can already tell that WoW is simply a much more fun game.
So maybe it's not that sequels have a hard time, it's that the better games thrive and the worse ones die. Being a sequel to a successful game, or based on a successful franchise can only do so much. But in the end, if the actual game is lacking, it can't save you.
"If the game never ends, why would a player pull up the stakes in a game where so much time and effort is invested just to move into a newer, shinier world and start all over?"
Actually, that happens all the time. Even Sony plans around the average player sticking around for only 6 months or so. Sure, some get bored and leave before even their free month is over, and some go nuts and hang around for 8 years in UO, but the vast majority don't.
So the problem isn't that people never leave EQ1. They had more than a milion that came and left. (Although by now it's probably populated mostly with those that don't leave. They tend to accumulate.) But when they leave, they won't automatically just move to the sequel, and won't automatically stick around if the sequel isn't that much fun.
If Joe Average leaves EQ 1 today, there are a lot more games than EQ 2 competing for Joe's time and credit card. And Joe might as well end up on WoW instead, if that's the better game.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
1. You seem to assume that everyone joined from the start, and got a full 3 years out of it. Which is just false.
I'm pretty sure it was still on the shelves at EB Games, together with its expansion pack, last weekend. In fact, I almost bought it. (But ended up getting EQ2 instead.)
I know I'd be a tad pissed off if I bought a game _and_ its expansion pack, and 5 days later someone pulls the plug on it. Not "the sky is falling" kind of pissed off, but still.
2. I don't think even the "but you got 3 years out of it" argument holds much water anyway.
The point is, in an ideal world, it should be up to me when I want to stop using something. Whether I want to still use my old screwdriver after a decade or still read Shakespeare some centuries after those plays were written, it should be up to me. I still occasionally play games, or use programs, that are a _lot_ older than 3 years. E.g., I occasionally still play Playstation games or even SNES games.
There is something that just doesn't feel right that someone can remotely pull the plug and cause something I bought to stop working. (Again, not in a "the sky is falling" kinda way, but nevertheless, just not right.)
3. One problem I've already bitched about in relation to copyright, is basically that something can be "unpublished". Effectively taken out of our common cultural heritage. I've argued that copyright was supposed to help get that stuff published, and using it to basically bury a book, a movie or even a game, is contrary to the very spirit of it.
This kind of thing is to me 10 times worse. It's not just stopping any further copies, but causing all existing copies to stop working. It is this time _really_ unpublished.
If I'll want to show my grandkids what books I've read in my youth, I can get a copy out and show it to them. But if I'll want to show them what online games we played back then, one of them just ceased being available. It just won't exist by then any more. There'll be no way to even launch it. Not in an emulator, not on an ancient PC in a museum, etc.
That's in a nutshell my biggest concern with this kind of stuff, and with DRM: it can "unpublish" stuff from our cultural heritage. And AC2 is in a sense a grim landmark: while we all knew that such stuff was theoretically possible, now we can see just that happening.
E.g., if a song was published on (unprotected) CDs and the copyright holder decides to bury it by not allowing any more copies, at least the existing CDs can be ripped. With DRM and/or such subscription based services, it can be totally wiped out. Not only there'll be no more copies, but even the existing ones can be effectively shredded into a bunch of no longer usable junk.
I'm not against companies using either subscriptions or DRM to make money. Money is why this stuff got made in the first place, plus there's nothing wrong with people being paid for their work. But we should have _some_ legal safeguards against using it to effectively erase something as if it never had existed.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I was asking the same question: "why on earth would anyone want to play a Massively MULTI-PLAYER game solo? WTF is the point of playing it as a Massively SINGLE-PLAYER game?"
When the gods want to punish you, they give you what you asked for. In this case, the MMO gods made me understand. After a couple of months of doing pickup-groups in COH, I ended up with a severe case of misanthropy.
The problem in a nutshell is that functioning as a group is, more or less, like making a watch out of a bunch of cogs. They have to fit together. Throwing together some random cogs isn't always going to work that well.
Some of the random pickup groups I've been in, to borrow someone else's expression, bordered on traumatic.
Some people were just literally unable to function in a group. Some people lacked even the basic skills or clue to play the game at all. (Somehow they had gotten a character to level 50, but didn't yet figure out how tanking works or how EOE attacks work. Did they buy that level 50 character on ebay, or wtf?) And then there were those with a major attitude problem.
At some point I was actually at the point where groups were what got me killed and into XP debt, and soloing was what I had to do to actually repay that debt and eventually level-up. _Literally_.
I know, so I'm supposed to find a group I can play with, and avoid pickup groups, right? Trust me, I thought of that too.
The problem there are the levels. E.g., in COH, by the time my character was level 35, some of my online friends were level 20 (those who weren't as hardcore players as I was), but on the other hand some were already level 50. (Being a teenager on vacation and playing 16 hours a day can have that effect. Even I can't compete with that.)
And then there's another aspect: sometimes I just don't have the time to group, or none of them are online at the moment. E.g., I've been known to play some half an hour in the morning before I went to work. The problem there is that:
1. that's just not enough time to put together a group and do anything meaningful together. I can run bash a few NPCs, maybe even do a quick solo quest, but that's it.
2. it's a pretty crappy time by anyone's standards. The chances of anyone I know being online at that hour, are rather low. Heck, even for grouping with strangers it's pretty bad on games with a low-ish population. (E.g., in EQ2 last time I've grouped in the morning in the newbie area, there were exactly two people there: me and a rogue.)
So any game where you can't solo, is inherently one game I can't play at all in that time slot, or in any situation where I don't have at least half the evening available.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.