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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. "
It seems like MMORPG sequels have a rough time. Ultima Online's sequel died in the womb, Asheron's Call 2 had a rough time getting customers and is now dying, and Everquest 2 is near the bottom of the population statistics charts.
Meanwhile, the original games continue to chug along, not gaining new users but also not hemorraging their core fans.
Sequels rarely live up to originals in any medium, but I suppose that effect is amplified in a genre where titles are considered a billable service and "persistence" is the main attraction.
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? On the other side of things, why would a new player going to join a game that already has the history and culture associated with it?
It's a shame though. Turbine got a lot right with Asheron's Call 1 that hasn't been seen in other MMORPG's since. AC2 was supposed to be the update that filled in all the cracks of that flawed masterpiece. And the next we can expect from Turbine are derivative medival fantasy franchise titles like Dungeons and Dragons and Middle Earth Online.
I was in the beta from very early on, and it was obvious to me back then that AC2 wasn't going to be a success. It just didn't stand out from the other MMORPGs (and compared to DAOC, it didn't shine at all, except on graphics).
What's really been key, though, is that for it's entire life, AC2 has been dwarfed by AC1: itself not a very big game, but it says volumes about the game when you can't even convert a majority of your AC1 players over to AC2.
-EvilMagnus
WoW!
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong (I don't play MMOGs), but isn't this a case of somebody going out and buying a game in a box, only to have it break completely a few months later?
This is the thing I don't like about proprietary software and service-oriented gaming. You aren't in control; they can disappear at any time. Proprietary software because they inevitably aren't compatible with whatever system you'll be running in the future, and service-oriented gaming because the servers can go away due to reasons out of your control.
It would be great if somebody made a server that could support these games after the service has been dropped, but the last time somebody did that, Blizzard sued them for violating the DMCA.
It seems to me that a lot of Slashdotters bitch and moan about DRM when it's applied to their music and DVDs, but quite happily lap it up when it comes to them in game form. Where are all the complaints that you don't really own your digital media when the subject of MMOGs comes up?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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'
Combat in Asheron's Call 2 consisted of making 2 turrets, then going afk for the next hour. I got 2 max level characters in under a month then quit. Turbine spent no effort on an effective combat system for AC2 as if you fought with anything besides walls and turrets, you just got killed since armor didn't work. The only other effective hunting group besides turrets and walls was mass archers. Mass archers means everyone shoots at the monster, and the unfortunate guy to be attacked just constantly runs away. Picture marine micro in Starcraft where one zealot charges in, you move the one marine away while the rest fire.
Even though Asheron's Call 2 was a failure, I do like Turbine. I'm looking forward to D&D online.
God spoke to me.
What an incredibly short-sighted comment. Turbine makes online game technology and online games. They have two (soon to be one) products running and two more in development. There is no way Turbine wrote a new server system for each of those games. All four of those games have servers that share a codebase to a certain degree. If Turbine open sourced the AC2 server code base they would be, in one fell swoop, giving away a huge part of the value of their company and giving nefarious players the roadmap to cause havoc on their running and future games.
I loved AC2. It was beautiful, solo-able, and had plenty of content for the causual player. [i]And Then[/i]... the developers realized "oh, wait a minute -- people are finishing the game in a month... and then they're leaving..." Their answer? "I know! Adding content takes too long, so we'll just make everyone really weak all of a sudden, and give all the mobs more armor and resistance! Then it will take everyone longer to do the same things!"
The fateful day of that "update" to the game was it's death. Things that I was able to solo before, I now needed a group of 5 players to kill. Everyone I know left the game within about two weeks. Most went back to AC1....
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.
AC2 was not written for the players. It was written by the developers for developers. AC2 had everything their players didn't ask for any nothing they wanted.
There were many hints of discord among the players of the beta. The end of beta event quickly turned into damage control. Turbine introduced items that benefitted PvP players more than regular players. This immediately alarmed many about what the future would hold. They made quite a few changes to the end of beta event to fix that mistake but it was truly a harbringer too come.
Examples of the hubris.
Having the audacity, though they might have though themselves humorous, to have a PR person bring "books" down from an ivory tower.
Having a world where the cities were essentially monuments to the developers. None of the buildings were enterable. There were no NPCs. The cities all looked wrecked at the start and only improved if people used the crafting facilities. What was funny was there were ruins of some of the older cities from the previous games and you could enter those buildings; granted they didn't have doors but you could still get in them!
Inability to code a decent AI led to giving nearly all MOBs a ranged attack. This happened in beta and stunk to high heaven. What hurt them the most was that most of the mobs were new versions of AC1 mobs - and none of them had ranged attacks so they broke lore because they could not make their new AI work.
Inability to code a decent pathing engine into the new system. This led to the mobs being able to go through many objects AND shoot through them.
Starting the live game with a well known and documented exploit in place. Tyrants were AC2's solution to having Dragons. Unfortunately the model was so large it got stuck on the terrain. People used this throughout beta to powerlevel as even moderately level characters could take down a mob that could not fight back. Turbine was warned over and over about it and how if it went live people would abuse it. It went live and people abused the daylights out of it!
Broken chat at launch. One of the requirements of any MMORPG and it was essentially gone at launch. Half the time you could not even fellowship chat, let alone be heard in a city. If you wanted to chat with people not in your immediate vicinity you used IRC.
Horrible interface. Too many fixed windows and conflicting windows. No real player convienences either. Strange issues with the look of running characters, humans seemed have broken backs on anything but flat surfaces. A combat system that relied on visual cues to tell you when to use your special power yet those cues were lost in the other special effects like frill and fixed objects.
No class balance at launch. It was so bad that it was common knowledge that if you wanted to get ahead you only played a few certain classes. One, the Lugian, had a subclass which could place walls and turrets which allowed the player to literally take a nap and level!
Simple quests. Most were nothing more than finding potions on mobs that made you "horny" to kill other mobs. Really that is how it felt. You drank this potion and suddenly you felt the need to kill 10 of some particular creature. Never mind the fact that half the time that particular mob wasn't anywhere nearby.
Half hearted KvK system. Heavily influenced by DAOC, as in there were even 3 factions, but obviously never thought out. PvP/KvK was a joke from the start. Being heavily level focused PvP was no longer skill oriented when compared to AC1. (in AC1 levels became mostly meaningless after a point, not so in AC2 as there were hidden modifiers based on your level). However the biggest screw up was having non-PvP player forced to go PvP to complete some quests. This led to a lot of grief play as griefers would portal camp.
Vaults. No, these were not player storage, something else that was missing from the game. Vaults were special dungeons that told the story of the game. This was the other major f
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
From a thread on VNBoards.
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
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.
Someone already mentioned that perhaps they'd release the backend to the public, and while I didn't play AC2, I'd love to see this with some of the MMORPGs I've played.
Not for any benevolent purpose mind you, like setting up a server for people to use for free, but so I could stride like a GOD across those zones I kept getting slaughtered in. Damn you Kithicor! Damn you!! My revenge is at hand!
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria