Previewed: April 20, 2003
Previewed by: Aaron Daigle

Publisher
Microsoft Games

Developer
Turbine

Release Date: November 22, 2002
Genre: MMORPG
Players: Online
ESRB: Mature

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The game starts Fallout-style with your character emerging from the vaults where their ancestors took shelter centuries ago. The story is deliberately sketchy from the beginning of the game and will slowly become more fleshed out as players work to reclaim the old cities of Dereth from the wilderness. I personally like the content model that is being used with Asheron’s Call 2. Each month a new “Episode” is released containing new events, minor bug fixes and gameplay tweaks. Since subscribers are paying $12.95 to play, I think that these updates will provide reason to keep playing, provided they keep coming with the same regularity.

You start your game by choosing a server and designing your avatar, choose from three different races, human, the fierce, brutish, Lugian or the monk-like Tumerok. Once you choose what you want to be, customize your character with options, scads of options, for hair, skin shade, gender, height, weight (though this one just seems to stretch your avatar like silly putty), and basic clothing colors.

Another of the things that Asheron’s Call 2 offers up in the gameplay area that is definitely an improvement over its predecessor is its use of skill trees to advance the abilities of your characters. Each race has nine different trees to use to customize their character’s capabilities in combat and craftsmanship. Which brings me to the game’s heavy focus on item crafting this time out, according to the developers, It is possible to have an extremely fulfilling gaming experience while playing as a mostly noncombatant character, such as a merchant weapon crafter. While I haven’t had the opportunity to explore this avenue of play, it certainly does sound intriguing, and would seem to work well with the game’s lack of NPC merchants.

Once you enter the world you have to fight your way through a short newbie dungeon to acclimate yourself with the inventory, command scheme and control setup. The movement controls are just enough off from a standard WASD setup to cause me grief, instead of “A” and “D” strafing(“Z” and “C” do that), they rotate your avatar and this can on occasion lead to difficulty navigating on occasion unless you remap the keys. The space bar makes your character jump and camera angle can be altered via the number keys.

It threw me initially that a game who’s action focused on hacking and slashing used menus on the HUD to control the action, but once I got comfortable with using the keyboard shortcuts, things started to really flow for me. The map’s functionality has also been pumped up, instead of looking like a bland diagram, the map keeps track of important locations, and structures and charts your current location to aid you in completing your quests whether your trying to recover a shard or clear an infested mine.

There are all sorts of ways to join up with other players, you can form a “Fellowship” of several players allowing you to gain experience points as a group. The next step would be to have a player swear allegiance to you, what happens then is that you would earn a percentage of that player’s experience points, the more players you can amass as subjects the faster you can level up your character. For those interested in Player vs. Player combat, the best way to find other players to fight is to align yourself with one of the three kingdoms, the Dominion, the Order or the Shadow Kingdom. Like in Planetside, each of the kingdoms is trying to best the other two and you will be able to take on members of your opposing Kingdoms.

I would be negligent if I didn’t take a moment to remark that AC2’s visuals are the prettiest yet to be released in a MMORPG. Grassy meadows bisected by meandering streams, dark mines illuminated by torchlight and breathtaking views from atop majestic cliffs. This is just about as close as anyone has come to bringing the environment of a fantasy novel to life. Just to see, I dialed down the scalable settings for the game’s graphics to see what those who don’t have a “super system” should expect, and the results were surprisingly good, while a lot of the “oooooo, pretty” factor was removed, I still think the game looked better than Everquest.

I have to say that my initial impressions with Asheron’s Call 2: Fallen Kings have been very positive. While so far the game’s community doesn’t seem as talkative as others, I may just be logging on at odd times. You can look for our full review to go online at the end of this month, but right now I’ve gotta kill me some beetles.