I plan on doing a similar style review for Warhammer Online soon.

Introduction

The anticipation for Asheron’s Call 2 was tense.  The game went into public beta and appeased the masses with free accounts and playtime until release.  Beta testing progressed nicely, and the End of Beta event was a great success.  The beta servers shut down, and everyone waited for the retail release of the game they had just enjoyed for free.  In the middle of November, AC2 released much to the dismay of many parents who only saw the aftermath in the grades of the players.

That was the beginning of AC2.  The game has survived 4 months of abuse, and on March 27th the developers celebrated the first 100 days of Asheron’s Call 2.  There are a good number of people dealing with the elder game at this point, and a good deal of information available about the game.  The only problem I see is that there has not been a review that deals with the full range of the game, yet.  This review intends to fix that.

First, I present you a short background on my experience.  I have dabbled in many games, and only really completed or gained a high level in a small number.  Here’s what I think happens.  I play the game until about the middle where things get tedious, and I tend to get wrapped up in something else and forget about the game.  Morrowind was that way, though Neverwinter Nights was not.  Half Life was that way, but Halo was not.  Everquest was that way, but Ultima Online was not.  To the list of games that I have more or less played through, I add Asheron’s Call 2.  I have a Level 49 (soon to be 50) Tumerok Clawbearer on Morningthaw server with my namesake.

I began playing AC2 about 3 or 4 weeks before the End of Beta events.  I am a junior in college right now, so my time was limited when the game came out, and I achieved a mere level 20 before end of beta.  I had done many things on Osteth (the starting, lower level continent), but I barely set foot on Omishan.  I wouldn’t have considered my experience of AC2 Beta to be at all comprehensive, but I knew from playing those mere few weeks that I was going to buy retail when it came out.  This I did, and after much anticipation, Retail went live.

In the Beginning, There Was …

The Shelters

Aah, the  ‘noob island.’  These areas, officially called the Shelters, were where new players could whack on some monsters in relative safety, and figure out the skill set they would start with.  I speak in the past tense about that because this has changed with recent patches.  I’ll get to that later though.  Teaching stones placed along the path to the exit portal tell how to do different things in the world, such as train skills, chat and other basic skills.  Exiting the newbie island through the portal is a one way trip, out into the world of Dereth.

Things Introduced In the Shelters

Basic Skills. The lower level skills for characters basically define what combat class the character will be through the game.  Each character has a choice between Missile, Melee and Magic.  The skills are set up in a tree fashion, so to get to some skills requires other skills to be trained.  Each level gained gives one skill point (SP), and in the early game, most skills only cost one point to train, but later they cost more.  To raise the level of a skill requires spending experience points (XP).  As the level of a skill raises, the effectiveness of the skill also raises.  One of the major perks to the skill system is the ability to un-train skills.  The procedure merely involves earning as much XP as was originally put into the skill.  The XP earned while un-training is saved, and the XP put into the skill is also given back, so no XP is lost.  After the skill is done un-training (it can be stopped at any time), the skill points are also given back.  All of this allows a total change in character type, and a way to undo mistakes in skill choice.

There are two types of skills: active skills (ones put in the hotkey bar to do things), and passive skills (which govern the to-hit and defense rate for that class).  The way the skills are set up is easy to follow and understand, though the descriptions usually are not enough to determine whether or not the skill will be useful.  In general, the lower level skills (with level limits below 15) seem well balanced.

There are also special skills that are not combat oriented.  These are made up of recall skills which transport the character to a certain spot, like the bound lifestone or the last portal used.

Targeting and Combat. The combat system in AC2 is relatively simple.  It’s just a matter of targeting and attacking using auto attack.  The attack skills are a bit of a different matter.  Once these are set to hotkeys, the skills can be used on the target to inflict more damage or do certain effects.  It takes a bit of time to get proficient with the targeting, but it’s not a big deal until later in the game where it is necessary to be careful on what is attacked first.  The hotkey bars could use a bit of loving, something that would be nice would be the ability to assign any key to a skill.  Switching between the hotkey bars (there are 10) is not great.  It’s not easy enough to switch between bars quickly when one gets into the higher levels, and bars start filling up.

Inventory and Equipment. Pretty standard fare for an RPG, the equipment and inventory panel is simple.  There are different types of amour or other magical items that fill the different slots for equipment.  Drag an equip-able item from the inventory onto a slot or onto the character paper doll and it gets equipped and the opposite action for un-equipping.  The inventory is simple, just a grid of slots for items.  Maybe it’s too simple though.  There are a limited number of item slots, no magic bags, and because there are no banks or NPCs in the game, the inventory presented is the limit throughout the game.  Some items stack, dye and a couple quest items, but it feels like a kludge.  All in all this adds up to a poor inventory management scheme.

Hit Points, Vigor and Death. Hit Points are pretty self explanatory for anyone who’s played … most any video game.  Vigor is equivalent to mana or stamina for most other games.  Combat skills and swimming are the primary uses of vigor.  As levels are gained, the maximum points for both of these stats raise.  Death is pretty forgiving.  After death, the character is resurrected at the last lifestone bound.  There is no experience or items lost, but a percentage of the health, vigor, and it is told, combat skills, is taken away.  This is called vitae.  To get vitae back to 100%, some experience needs to be gained.  As the character gains back the experience needed, the stats go back to their original state.

Changes Due to Patches

The size and time spent on the newbie island has been greatly reduced.  Entry to the game now progresses right through a series of small training quests that give little to no time for experimentation as the old newbie island provided.  What the new shelters do provide, however, is a better introduction to the world through story and guidance through the quests and teaching stones.  I do believe, though, that being able to refine the basic skills on the larger island was beneficial, and I would have liked to see a combination of the two.  The inventory has been split into a couple different packs for better organization, and apparently there were slots added, but it is very hard to tell.  In fact, it almost seems like there is less room now.

Into the Real World

The Continent of Osteth

Upon entry into the real world, players are dropped into one of the cities of Osteth.  No immediate quest was given, so players more or less had to fend for themselves to find things out.  What to do?  Kill stuff, of course.  The variety of monsters to kill on Osteth is not very diverse, but there are enough things to run into that it keeps it interesting in the early part of the game.  The drudges rule the land of Osteth, and most of the quests are geared around them.  There are things out there that will eat most characters alive at lower levels, but plenty that is interesting prey.

Osteth is a reasonably big island.  The terrain on Osteth varies greatly, and there are some interesting things to find for the explorers out there.  I had a lot of fun just exploring the island (and killing on the way of course).  Most people end up congregating in the major cities of Arwic or Cavendo.  The lag in these cities grew as populations grew, of course, but it was mostly confined to those cities. Osteth is the home of the humans, and the architecture is indicative of that.

Things Introduced on Osteth

Quests, Vaults and Dungeons. The easy way to gain extra experience is to run the first quests, involving more or less introductions to the systems available on Osteth.  There are some quests that involve killing things, some that merely involve travel, and some that involve a number of things. At level 12, the vaults are open to players, offering interesting dungeons, and a bit of story at the end.  The combination of the first set of vaults can quickly gain a character 2 or 3 levels rather quickly.  The vaults are mostly designed as group dungeons, one of the things that start to enforce grouping in the game.  There are also other dungeons scattered around the land.  Mostly these are inhabited by one type of monster (since it’s usually labeled as their home), with the difficulty of monsters growing as the player goes deeper.  These are easy places to be able to kill a lot of stuff without having to camp a spawn or area.  Before patches, that was the only reason they existed, however.

Fellowships and Allegiences. Grouping becomes more and more essential as the game progresses, and fellowships are groups in AC2.  Mostly it’s just a way of sharing experience among a group of people, and having a private chat channel between the members.  Experience and loot sharing are both options that can be turned on and off for the situation.

Allegiances are the equivalent of guilds in AC2.  They follow a very strict hierarchical organization with a monarch, then a number of vassals, and each vassal can in turn have more vassals.  Experience pass-up is present in AC2 as it was in AC1, though the exploits are gone.  A certain percentage of a vassals XP is copied to their patron, based on common playing time and a number of other factors that nobody is quite sure about.  This is another incentive to create allegiances, though many think that it is the only reason.  Allegiances get a private chat channel to talk amongst themselves, but little more than that.  My allegiances in AC2 have treated me quite well, and I doubt I would have enjoyed the game at all with out the great people I’ve met within them. (Hi Arkenstone and the rest of GoG!)

Crafting and Transmuting. Killing stuff gets boring quick if there’s no reward other than experience, so the loot system in AC2 is important.  Not only does it provide equipment more or less tailored to the specific character’s needs, but it is a source of cash and crafting components.  Almost all items are transmutable, converting the item into the assigned cash value automatically.  Items make crafting possible through their components.  Each crafted item needs a certain level of certain components to make the item.  Crafters can make nearly anything that can be looted, but for the most part, crafted items are better per level requirement than looted items.  This makes crafted items highly desired in the early part of the game.  Forges and tools make crafting easier by reducing the number of failures.  The problem comes in the very late part of the game, where crafted items do not match up with dropped items, or are prohibitively expensive.

Portal Systems. Running from place to place not only takes a bit of time, but it can be dangerous too.  For this reason there is the portal system.  Ring portals transport from place to place within a region, and there are also portals that transport from region to region.  With the portal system, getting around the island is a breeze.

Changes Due to Patches

Osteth itself has changed in climate and foliage due to the seasons on Dereth.  Snow has come and gone, and the look of the trees has changed.  Another major thing is that the cities, which were once ruined, are now being rebuilt to their glory by a measure of the previous activity in that city.  There is now a series of quests that are given as the  ‘Real World’ is entered that help to further introduce the concepts I presented above.  This is nice, since the time available on the shelter island is very limited.  Dungeons now have ‘troves’ at the bottom, usually guarded by some sort of boss or otherwise special creature.  Keys for these troves are dropped by most of the monsters on the continent, and each key allows for one opening of the trove full of items.

Another major reward added with recent patches are mounts.  These creatures can be  ‘crafted’ (crafting the summoning saddle) and used to travel across the land quickly.  They are limited by a timer, and combat is not available from the back of these creatures at all.  The mounts from different continents have different boosts to run speed, and there are three durations of the mount available for crafting.

Fellowships now get a bonus to experience earned. Before the patch, fellowship experience was distributed equally between all the members.  Now that experience is raised, so the total amount of experience earned for the group is higher than 100%.  This is a great incentive for grouping, and the more members there are, the more extra experience is earned for the whole group.

Middle Management

The Continent of Omishan

At level 15, the portals in Cavendo and Shoushi to the continent to Omishan are open.  The terrain of Omishan is significantly less varied than Osteth.  It is primarily swampland and rainforest, with a pervasive dark green color.  The cities are built in the trees with platforms and bridges. It is an interesting looking architecture, but it is hard to see how they could have been cities.  This is the land of the Tumeroks, a lizard like creature that calls the swamps of Omishan home.  The monsters and content here are obviously geared towards the middle levels, because of the level limit.  There are a few new species, but again, not a whole lot of diversity.  In fact, there is somewhat less than on Osteth.  The rulers of this land are the Burun, which tend to be tough monsters until around level 30.  Again, the landmass is large, but seemingly not too large.  The portal systems make it easy to get around.  One of the problems that rears its head on Omishan is the issue of ‘rubberbanding’, or landscape holes.  These places cause you to get stuck (and likely killed) in a spot until you can back out of it.  Its a bug that continues to annoy me across the continents.

Things Introduced on Omishan

Kingdom vs. Kingdom combat. Yes, this is present on Osteth too, but it starts to become more important and widespread on Omishan.  Back on Osteth, at level 10, characters could have chosen a kingdom if their hearts desired.  Omishan is the first realization of what that means.  There are certain regions that have been declared kingdom vs. kingdom zones, and within these zones, players from the different factions can battle each other.  Some of the zones are protecting valuable mining resources for components.  In these areas, a guardian stands as protector of the resource, and it attacks everything but the faction that defeated it last.  The specific aspects of player combat are better left for the player vs. player section later.

Specialty Skills. Upon reaching level 15, the first of the specialty skills are available for training.  These are subsets of the basic skill trees, and mostly extend the skill set available.  For some of the specialties, however, this is a complete replacement of the basic skill tree, because there is a special weapon required to use the upper skills, and the usage of the special weapon disables the lower skills.  Only one specialization may be trained at a time.  In general, skill point and XP costs in the specialty trees are greater than those in the basic trees, but the skills in these trees are more powerful.  More or less, to be a successful character, one must choose a specialty.  Luckily, the specialty trees are not limited to the base class chosen; so many hybrid characters are possible.

Changes due to Patches

The landscape bugs have reduced somewhat.  There are still some spots I purposefully avoid because I know the consequences, but in general most have been fixed.  There are now continent recall skills, much like the lifestone recall skills.  These skills are unlocked after completing all the vaults for the continent, and visiting the continent’s nexus.  These skills ease the transportation time between continents greatly.  The changes of season apparently don’t affect Omishan in the slightest, as they do Osteth.  The later patches have concentrated on Omishan content, and they have brought quite a few different quests to the Omishan region.

End Game

The Continent of Linvak Massif

Upon gaining level 30, characters can use the portal from far-east Omishan to get to Linvak.  The smallest, most geographically boring continent yet, Linvak is the cold, snowy home of the high level content.  The number of trees and other interesting landscape is quite low.  This land is the home of the Lugians, and the architecture here fits in well with the large creatures.  The numbers of types of monsters are also the lowest of the continents, with the gurog being the dominant race.  Difficulty is raised a notch or two here, but so are the rewards.  XP, items and gold are easier to come by in Linvak.  The number of dungeons and quests are slim, but most of those give good rewards.  Again, the portal system helps a lot in travel, but distances between important places are, in some areas, a bit longer, so the various run buffs come in handy.

Things Introduced on Linvak

Player vs. Player combat. Linvak Massif is the first time player vs. player combat areas are almost necessary to pass through.  In these areas, any player can attack any other player.  The dynamics of player vs. player (and also kingdom vs. kingdom) combat is not what I would call the best.  Levels are the key.  If two players are not within 5 levels, or so, of each other, the higher level person wins hands down.  There is always debate on what skill set is the best for player vs. player combat, but there are myriad different combinations so it’s hard to nail down.  The main problem with player combat is the reward.  There are PK points given per kill (and taken away per death), and those points buy skills based on the kingdom.  The problem is, the PK point costs of skills in those lines are prohibitively high, based on the points gained per kill. Portal camping can be pretty bad.  It is quite possible for one character to kill another before they have even materialized out of the portal.

‘Epic’ Quests and Monsters. Linvak introduces some of the most challenging creatures in the game.  There are a decent number of monsters that can only be soloed by a select few classes.  These monsters usually require a diverse or simply large group to bring them down.  The best examples of these monsters are at the ends of the  ‘epic’ type quests.  Those are quests that more or less require a group to complete, and even then it can be a dangerous undertaking.  The bosses of these quests tend to have attacks that can decimate an entire group who was not careful.

Changes due to Patches

The already sparse landscape of Linvak has become even more so, because of the removal of many of the trees and crystal rocks because of monster pathing problems. My hope is they have removed these features temporarily until they can make pathing much better, but there has been little word on that.  The other thing the pathing problems have caused is the drastic cutting of experience on some of the biggest monsters in the game.  Because of the high number of people exploiting the pathing problems, Turbine decided to cut the experience to make it ineffective while they fixed the pathing.  The XP is back now, but only because of the lack of landscape, as far as I can tell.

Player vs. player dynamics have yet to change because Turbine has said they are concentrating on the content of the game right now.  There has been a few new quests in the last couple patches, and the rest of the quests have become harder, mainly because of the pathing adjustments mentioned above.

Wrapping it Up

The Ratings

Gameplay: The easy answer is that the systems are nice and simple, but the content is lacking.  The more complex answer is that as patches keep coming, content is growing, but not for everyone.  The patches have concentrated in specific areas of interest, or just not added a whole lot globally.  The patches are also complicating the skills and other systems by seemingly changing them constantly.  It is quite understandable that Turbine is trying to balance things in the game, but it really detracts from the gameplay.  My grade comes to somewhere in the C+ range.

Graphics: The incredible graphics is what initially caused many people to start playing, I think.  It is, by far, the best looking MMOG on the market.  Models are well done, and the animations are smooth for the most part.  Good usage of shaders, textures and other advanced features make it a pleasure to look at.  Some of the higher graphics options are almost too much, and cause even my computer to start losing framerate.  Maybe this is just a sign I need a better processor and more ram!  My grade is an A-, only because it is so demanding on the system.

Sound: The game supports DirectSound3D and EAX, and it works.  In my surround configuration, the burning of torches can be heard where they are supposed to be heard and the sounds of an approaching monster are quite distinct.  The quality of all the sound samples seems to be high quality, and the ambient noise has not bothered me except in a very rare few instances.  I really like how each monster has its own sayings.  Hearing a Burun yell “Tumerok!” and run at me is still a thrill.  Sound gets an A.

Music: This probably would have received a worse score than it did, but for one thing.  The normal area music is not annoying or startling, but it’s not real interesting after a while as there is little variety.  Some of the dungeons and special areas have some interesting background music.  All in all the normal music is of good quality, but nothing to write home about.  The thing that makes the music in AC2 so interesting is the player music.  Instruments are one of the items dropped, and there are 10 different tunes to play for each of the different instruments.  Even early on, waiting for a group to form, I was standing around and grooving to the music produced by my own drum and the other instruments in the area.  There are some music dynamics that just need to be heard.  Music gets a B+.

Fun-factor: This is one of the harder ratings.  I had a lot of fun until a certain level where it became a chore for a time, then it got fun again, then boring, then fun.  It’s possible in any MMOG to get yourself into a place where it is no fun to get to the next stage, and really this exists in every game.  One problem in AC2 is that one of the not-fun stages is when one hits the level cap, which is level 50.  Because of how the game works, XP is not earned, so there is not a whole lot of inspiration to actually do anything anymore, and since one character is already that high, it is not as much fun to bring a new character up through the ranks.  The major problem, however, is the lack of story and general content.  Doing the same quest over and over, week after week, does not constitute a fun game.  I have kept my self happy by screwing around with my guild and doing other things that don’t advance my level, but I might consider myself lucky that I have that opportunity.  This gets a C, because though it can be fun, one has to try pretty hard to make it that way.

Usability: I think our reviewers have differing opinions on what this category means, but for me it is the way the non-combat features and the interface works.  There are some pretty annoying bugs involving the sampling of keypresses.  It is a bit hard to explain, but when you are typing out a message, it seems that some keys are not picked up, or when in combat, some keys seem stuck down.  It is a problem that is hard to nail down, but it should not exist in the first place.  There are other sort of random bugs that cause getting stuck in combat mode after recalling and things like that, which can be a pain at times, but it seems those are getting less and less.  Chat and emote commands are simple enough, and the help file in game is pretty good.  The interface is good except for two things, the inventory window, which in addition to the things discussed above, has bugs involving the moving of items, and scrolling the chat windows, which was bugged for a while, but now they force the scroll back to the bottom whenever there is a new line, making it almost impossible to scroll up and read a conversation.  Usability gets a C.

Stability: When AC2 was released there were some issues with certain soundcards and video cards and such that caused crashes.  Nearly all of that has been cleaned up.  On the client side of things, one problem remains, and that is the memory requirements and probable memory leaks.  One of the biggest problems is trying to play in windowed mode, because the performance of the game degrades slowly until the game is unplayable.  The main problem now, however, is the stability of the server side components.  The way Microsoft has set up the chatting and authentication services has caused all kinds of problems getting into and using the game.  Firstly, authentication is based on Passport, and for whatever reason, those servers are quite unstable, causing players to be unable to get into the game.  The chat servers have had periods of ridiculous instability, and in my opinion, an MMOG without some sort of chatting function is a failure.  Server stability has been reasonably good, compared to other MMOGs, though it seems downtimes are always at the most inopportune moments.  Because of the troubles more with Microsoft’s servers than with Turbine’s code, I have given Stability a C+.

Reviewer’s Tilt: Here’s what I love about our ratings system, I get to tweak the grade to my own choosing a bit.  I want badly to like this game.  It really is one of the first MMOGs I’ve spent a lot of time on, and I do still enjoy playing, though sometimes I do get frustrated.  There are plenty of people badmouthing the game, and some (even many) have good points, but I’m not giving up faith.  Maybe it is a long shot, but I’ve still got hope that AC2 will bring things to the MMOG table that no other game has been able to do.  I want to give my support to the hardworking guys at Turbine, and in any way I can help them to accomplish their goals.  I think they’ve had some setbacks and hard times, but hopefully they can pull through and make AC2 the game it can and should be.  My tilt is an A.

Conclusion

Overall, the game seems to still be new, even after its 4 month run to this point.  Rough around the edges, but the goals seem to be pure.  Asheron’s Call 2 boasts one of the simplest skill systems available, and one of the better death systems around.  Sure, nothing is perfect, but there are still some great things.  There are also some problems, mainly lack of content and some nearly show-stopping bugs.  These are problems that have been fixed or are being fixed with each months patches.  Like I said in my tilt, the game has potential, and it may still take some time for it to be realized.  The game is still easy to get into, and easy to play, but at higher levels it needs help.  I would recommend the game to the more casual MMOG and RPG players at first, because of these facts.

More info about AC2 can be found on Wikipedia.

Though I’m probably keeping all the old articles (including the junk Quickyfeed posts), I’m trying for a Blog Reboot here.

The idea is to actually start posting to the blog about things I’m doing, playing, or watching; or about actual topics!  Amazing that!  I’ve already got a few ideas cooking about things I’ve been working on, so unless I really lose The Drive, I’ll be posting somewhat more regularly.

If you’ve ever seen the blog before, you will probably notice a new theme – Pixeled – which I’ll probably tweak a bit later.  I haven’t tried it in a great many browsers so if you run into issues let me know.  I also switched to IntenseDebate for commenting because they totally rock!

If you’re new to the blog, either through FriendFeed/Twitter or some other site, welcome and enjoy the stay.  If you never noticed that FriendFeed widget on the right – that’s mostly replaced my short one-off posts and the ‘QuickyFeed’ posts since its so easy to post quick stuff there.

So yeah, we’ll see how it goes this time.  This type of post is the typical clichéd ‘OMG I need to post more’ post, in a way, I know, I know.

I was searching around Photobucket and Google Images for some high rez shots of Mass Effect and couldn’t find any that were big enough (likely because 1, its hard to capture images off the outputs of the Xbox 360, and 2, the resolution only goes up to 720 or so… I’m looking for bigger than that to run native resolution on my 24″ at 1920×1200).

So, first person that gets Mass Effect PC – I would love to have the following shots for backgrounds:

• Citadel Rapid Transit loading screen (the view of the whole Citadel)
• The Normandy Dock (where you can see much of the citadel), the below image, but bigger!
  
• The loading screen or captures of one of the shots of the Mass Relay, (like the below, but obviously much higher quality)
  
• Some of the planet skies were just awesome, those would be cool too

There are plenty more awesome scenes that would make good high-rez backgrounds.  I mean, I love my current backgrounds (color-tweaked images from Hubble), but I’d love some good Mass Effect ones.

I noticed after upgrading to Leopard, OS X stopped automatically attaching to wireless networks I’ve logged into before, and said ‘remember this network’.  I loved that behavior as I could just turn on airport at work or at home, and connect up to the wireless.  I tried creating new connection profiles, clearing those items out of my keychain, etc etc, to no avail.

I then read this article on macnn forums.  I would link to the specific post if their forums let me, but down near the bottom, a little nugget of info finally caught my eye.  If you’ve moved your System Preferences.app file out of Applications (like, into a subfolder like Utilities), none of the wireless network saving works right.  So, follow the instructions by moving System Preferences.app to /Applications directly – delete all your current saved networks, check the keychain and remove any networks from there too, reboot, and join a new network and save it.  You’ll be able to reconnect automatically from now on.

I guess this is what I get for being a organization freak – I’ve got all my apps compartmentalized into folders cause I hate having to scroll thorugh lists of apps (I do the same thing on my windows machine too).

The other thing I was dealing with was Entourage.  Entourage (even 2008 with the latest service packs) doesn’t have an autoarchive function like Outlook does.  This makes the Exchange overlords unhappy and they start locking your account for going over the storage limit.  On Tiger and Entourage 2004, I was using the autoarchive applescript from the Entourage Help Page on mvps.org.  It worked all fine and dandy until I upgraded.

This autoarchive applescript file is based on that script, but updated to work properly with Leopard and Entourage 2008.  It is set up the exact same way as the script from mvps.org (Drop it on your machine (~/Library/Scripts seems to be a good place), add a schedule in Entourage to run that applescript). Be aware, it does use the Spotlight search feature – so if you get errors about missing messages, be sure to run the ‘Rebuild’ from the Entourage->Preferences->Spotlight menu.  If you want to configure the number of days it archives back from (it’s currently set at 15 days), you can edit the scpt file and recompile.

Hopefully that helps some people.