Reviewed: April 30, 2003
Reviewed by: Aaron Daigle

Publisher
Microsoft Games

Developer
Turbine

Released: November 22, 2002
Genre: MMORPG
Players: Online
ESRB: Mature

9
10
10
10
9.5

System Requirements

Now Microsoft has offered players an opportunity to return to the land of Dereth, where the story of Asheron’s Call has been laid before players for over three years. Asheron’s Call 2: Fallen Kings takes place generations after the “Devestation” wrought by the epic “Battle of Kings.” Venture forth from the vault that has been your ancestral home and reclaim a feral world for your people.

Next choose the physical attributes for your character, height, weight (the least refined of the bunch, altering, this just stretches and distorts the player model like silly putty), skin shade, hair style and color, and a basic set of clothing in which to start your adventure. The game eschews from a traditional class based character system utilizing instead skill trees to allow nearly unlimited customization of your avatars. By spending skill points earned through play you can which branches to explore as you progress up the skill tree.

You start your adventure in a Fallout style vault that has been your people’s home for generations. When the Drudge invade your vault you must defeat the raiders and in the process familiarize your self with the game’s basic controls and the HUD features. Your life, experience and vigor bars are located at the top left of the screen, vigor is expended when you use weapons and some items and will gradually refill as time passes.

The radar/compass is located in the upper right corner and displays your relative position to enemies, important locations and other points of interest. The bottom of the screen is home to the main chat window, it is possible to setup the chat so that different channels are displayed in different windows. There are actually enough pop up menus that going into each one would be a massive under taking so I’ll leave that to the game manuals, suffice to say that they are all well constructed and have strong gameplay utility.

The game’s control scheme is completely customizable and does feature the options to use the Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot control set. These are definitely good things as far as I’m concerned, newbies can learn the modified WASD default setup with aid of the oh-so-helpful quick reference sheet and players seasoned by one of the other titles can feel right at home in a new world. Mouse-look can be toggled off and on by clicking your mouse wheel and the number pad is used to adjust the camera view, though I will say, that the default camera has a high degree of utility with no necessary adjustments.

The plot of Asheron’s Call 2 is deliberately shrouded and nebulous at the beginning of the game. As you play, you’ll receive quests that help to get you up to speed as to the state of the world. Completing one of the much talked about Vault Quests results in a good chunk of plot being revealed, unfortunately these vaults act like tourist traps and are often choked with players. In fact, every point in the game that is fairly mandatory is often so full of player characters that it’s difficult to navigate.

One cool thing that Turbine and Microsoft are doing is releasing monthly “Episodes” that add new quests and events along with welcome gameplay and bug fixes. It makes me feel like my $12.95 is going a little further knowing that I won’t have to wait for an expansion to be released to find more quests to enjoy.

The recovery from the cataclysm has only just begun, the towns of Dereth are still largely deserted and there are virtually no NPCs to encounter. At this point player owned structures haven’t been implemented yet and towns serve mostly as landmarks and places players can gather to trade items. Items can be procured both by trading, slaying some monsters or you can Craft something. Nearly all items in the game have an elemental materials rating, using recipes acquired throughout your adventures in Dereth you can use one or more simple items to create objects, weapons and armor to aid you in your quest, alternatively you can convert looted items to gold to use as a trading supplement.

Combat can be entered by simply selecting a hostile target and clicking it. As your avatar dishes out the damage, your progress will appear in negative numbers over the head of your victim, same goes for you however as there are few inhabitants of Dereth that will just sit idle as you carve them up. Usually after landing some solid blows on your foe they will start to glow orange indicating that they are stunned, any of you attacks that land while during this time will inflict more damage and usually finish off your opponent. After your adversary is no longer among the living you will be rewarded with some experience points and an opportunity to loot the quickly cooling corpse, sometimes killing specific monsters will result in a quest being offered to you.

Completing quests is usually worth some serious XP and at the end of the day Asheron’s Call 2 is just like every RPG in that you’re just on a experience treadmill till you max out. There are three weapon types in the game, melee, ranged and missile. In an attempt to create a “ranger” I’ve allocated skill points to build up my ranged and melee skills, Drudge everywhere fear my archery skills and my blade is the bane of beetles across the land. Player killers and other PvP enthusiasts will likely want to align themselves with one of the game’s three kingdoms, the Dominion, the Order and the Shadow Kingdom, once aligned with a kingdom you will be able to attack those loyal to either of the other two.

Since in the more difficult areas it is advisable to travel with others, Asheron’s Call 2 offers several ways to team up with others for your mutual benefit. The most basic way to team up is to join a fellowship or party, which is simply a group of players that have banded together for the short term. You can keep track of the experience you earn through the fellowship via a popup window. Something else you can do to join with other players is to swear aligence to a player. How this works is sort of like a pyrmid scheme, you declare aligence to someone then they get a percentage of your XP, make things work to your advantage by getting people to join up under you, then you get a cut of their experience and more flows up to the headman.

Surprisingly, I found the other players in AC2 to be relatively mute on my server. In other MMOGs I’ve taken part in, most notably DarkSpace and Planetside, there were times that so many people were talking I thought I was going to go nuts! Here, other than the occasional trader, getting people to talk to you is like pulling teeth. Maybe there’s just too much to see, and in time people will slow down and we’ll see the sort of interaction that is common in other titles. I will say though the folks currently populating the Thistledown server are polite enough, being healed mid-melee by a stranger is not uncommon and I ran into several “twinkers” when I was just starting out.

Despite a abnormally laggy connection on my part, the game still played pretty smoothly leading me to believe that even those on a 56k connection will be able to roam Dereth with relative ease, though PvP combat may be something those with slower connections will want to avoid. Honestly the only issue I have with Asheron’s Call 2’s gameplay is the fact that it just seems like a series of hacking and slashing broken up by bouts of crafting and leveling up; not that everyone will see this as a bad thing.

Grassy fields, lichen covered walls, flickering flames, excellent character models, it’s just pixel shaded, anti-aliased, dynamically lit, multilayered wall to wall, awesomeness people. The character animations aren’t quite up to snuff with the rest of the game; they look a little stiff, but are still pretty great and in no way detract from the experience.

It sort of goes without saying that all that pretty comes with a price, my 1.4 AMD T-Bird, GeForce 3 ti500 box at a little over a year old is just about as low as you can go and still get decent performance at 1024x768. Folks with a regularly upgraded, dedicated gaming box probably shouldn’t encounter any hitching visuals.