Asheron’s Call Turns 10
I was a bit too lazy to post this to 2BG:
WESTWOOD, MA. – November 2, 2009 – Turbine, Inc. announced today that its award-winning title, Asheron’s Call® (AC) has entered its 10th year of operation. Launched on November 2, 1999, AC immediately set the standard for online immersion, storytelling, and worldwide live event capability. As one of the original Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPG), AC is a fully developed world – complete with a deep history, committed community, and compelling ongoing storyline. Turbine will celebrate this major milestone by running live events throughout the day that will bring back some of the most loved (and feared) signature lore characters and villains of its rich 10-year history.
“Asheron’s Call has served as the foundation on which Turbine was built,” said Craig Alexander, Vice President of Product Development of Turbine. “For a decade, AC has represented one of the industry’s most consistent and well-loved franchises further demonstrating the longevity and quality of Turbine’s persistent worlds.”
Launched in 1999, AC is a critically acclaimed massively multiplayer online role-playing game that draws together thousands of players within an evolving and dynamic persistent world. With an exciting ever-evolving storyline, thrilling adventures, quests, and frequent content updates, AC immerses players in an intense role-playing environment. An extensive system of formal Allegiances and player influence greatly enhances social interaction within the game. AC has received several awards over its 10-year history including being ranked #27 of Gamespy’s Top 50 games of all time. For more information, please visit http://ac.turbine.com.
Asheron’s Call was my second MMO. I chose it simply because I was able to play in the beta. I had actually gotten into the fourth EverQuest beta round, but because EQ didn’t like my video card, I wound up with a nice coaster (these were the days when game devs would mail you a copy of their beta because most everyone was still on dialup). My first MMO was Ultima Online, and while I wasn’t looking for a replacement for that game I, like many early MMO players, was curious about this relatively market that was starting to grow.
AC was the smaller of the first three, and another fantasy-based MMORPG, something the market is still overwhelmingly in favor of (designer-wise, at least). It was my first ever real 3D-engine game, I think, on the PC, so I was very easily impressed. Monsters named after Matt Drudge were my favorite, but the most important design aspect ever was in AC:
Asheron’s Call had the fez, the most important piece of headwear ever designed in the entire universe. Fezes were native to the Gharu’ndin, a race in Dereth, and so I immediately and always played one (sup, Tafiq al-Jafar!).
Initially I was drawn to AC’s unique magic system, which included a personal taper. You had to actually learn what components made which spell, which I found fascinating. I spent a lot of money failing at trial and error magic sessions, and I wish more MMOs included this type of design in their games.
An aspect of AC that is still unique, but one that I didn’t take part in was Allegiances. Allegiances were the guilds of AC, and they were very much a pyramid scheme. Vassals swore to patrons, who received a small portion of the XP their vassals earned. To this day I still get a kick out of this design.
One of the things that endeared me to Turbine was their stance towards bugs. There was a nasty bug that they accidentally introduced into the game; I forget what it was or what it did. But the producer came out and said something akin to, you know what, we made this error, and it’s not necessarily fair of us to completely punish players for abusing this error (within reason). That a game developer pretty much admitted to fucking up, which was unique then (and to a certain extent, unique now) was ballsy, and impressive, and I’ve never forgotten that after all these years, even if the details are very much hazy.
Asheron’s Call was never hugely popular. It was third behind EverQuest and Ultima Online back in the day. In fact, the authors of Dungeons and Dreamers simply ignored its existence, electing instead to put Dark Age of Camelot in its place, a game that was released two years after AC hit the market. Turbine wound up splitting from Microsoft, AC’s original publisher, and failed with Asheron’s Call 2, where I think you could have played drudges as a race. Turbine has done okay over the last ten years, and Asheron’s Call still chugs along despite its age. I did wind up returning a year or two ago, and quit after 6 days… World of Warcraft spoiled me. But I’ll always remember Dereth fondly.
Happy birthday, old friend!
Nancy Drew: Resorting to Danger
It’s absolutely no secret that I love hidden object games. I’ve been addicted to them ever since I was a child spending time in pediatrician waiting rooms oogling ancient copies of Highlights magazine. The Nancy Drew series is one I’m not actually familiar with, so I decided to check it out with Her Interactive’s newest title in the series Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting to Danger.
Nancy Drew continues her detective work at an exclusive resort for the rich and famous. As Nancy, you snoop around a lot moving your mouse around the screen until sparkles appear. Click, and you’ve found an object of use on that map. Pair sparkle objects together to advance in the game. Finish the occasional bonus puzzle for extra points, such as diffusing a bomb… oh, yes… bombs. Your job is to discover who a mad bomber is, and why they are all very mad. It’s all very dangerous.
The problem with this particular game is that it adds nothing new to the table. As a player, I don’t want to spend any time moving my mouse around the screen looking for things that will trigger a sparkle event. I want to be in a location with a purpose, and use that purpose to move forward in the game. NDD: RtD fails to do that.
I should, however, keep in mind that the target audience for this particular game is younger girls ages 10 and older. The design, therefore, is probably spot on for that market, however, I’d have hoped there would be some sort of challenge.
In other hidden object news, I just learned that the next game in brilliant Mystery Case Files series is about to be released. Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove is the newest in the series, and is currently available as an exclusive collector’s edition to Big Fish club members. Guess who just reactivated her account 
Wait… what?
Promotion for Champions Online’s next in-game event. It begins, eventually.
Champions Online has 1 million characters
Worlds In Motion reported recently that Cryptic’s Champions Online has at least 1 million characters under its superhero tool belt:
Online game maker Cryptic Studios said its most recent MMORPG, the Atari-published Champions Online, has garnered over 1 million created superhero characters, but the size of the subscriber base is unclear.
Unclear? Hrm.
I sent this news item to Siam, the owner and managing editor of The MMOGamer. Because I’m bad at math, I asked him to do it for me:
You should do math. How many characters can one account have, then half that, and divide that by one million =P
His response?
Max 8 per account. 1 000 000 / 4 = 250 000
That number does seem a bit high, 250,000. I would half that again, maybe a little more. Then I would multiply it all by the number of players who named their characters after famous comic heroes times .045035893845083405 and divide it by some other arbitrary number that I just made up.
I’m honestly not too surprised to find that there’s a million superheros created in Champions. The character creation/development is so complicated, that I’m sure that, like me, many players are rerolling, trying to find something that will get them passed level 20.
I still am playing the game, for what it’s worth.
Facebook to (maybe) change SRPG notifications
This article brings a big smile to my face:
Facebook is meeting with top app developers on its platform to discuss a series of planned changes that could drastically alter the virality of social games, according to Venture Beat. If the report is correct, Facebook plans to alter the way notifications and requests sent by apps (including social games) display on user news feeds and profile pages. The changes would move these notifications to less visible parts of a user’s Facebook page.
One of my biggest qualms (and the qualms of my friends) is how much SRPGs spam news feeds and profiles. I’d love to have all this stuff shoved into a corner somewhere. The whole idea for SRPG designers is to push out all of these notifications to inspire friends to play with friends. But the problem is, and this has happened to me and countless others, not everyone wants to know that you recently reached level 97000 in Cafe Pets War Mafias.
Hopefully Facebook will work on behalf of it’s millions of users and push the devs to understand that there are not a lot of happy people with the Facebook service out there specifically because of game notification spam.
Making right out of wrong
I previously took issue with the way Cryptic failed to handle a major server issue in a timely manner with its Champions Online property. They announced today that they will be giving players one free retcon (opportunity to do a character redesign) with the launch of their Blood Moon Rising event at the end of this month:
Due to this weekend’s server issues, we’ll be granting a free Retcon to all players when Blood Moon goes live on Tuesday, October 27th. Keep in mind that free Retcons do not stack, so players who have not used their previous free Retcon before tomorrow morning’s maintenance will not receive a new one. Also note that free Retcons do not impact purchased ones in any way. Owning a purchased Retcon will not prevent you from receiving a free one. We appreciate your patience this past weekend, and we can’t wait to see you in Blood Moon!
As a player, I love free stuff. Any time I can get free stuff from a game developer I’m a happy camper, and with the difficulty in designing a Champions character that is effective down the road, getting a free retcon is a bonus. But, there’s also the cynical part of me that says that they’re just bribing me because I was pissed off at them. I was. They are. Free retcons for everybody!
That’s 8 point 6 million with an “m”
Holy crap! That’s my response after I read a post on Raph Koster’s site (I’m playing feed catch-up) which quote from/linked to this article regarding Zynga’s Cafe World:
[Cafe World] has grown from 0 to 8.6 million users since it launched a week ago, according to AppData, based on a combination of cross-promotion from other Zynga games (including FarmVille) and advertising on Facebook.
The article goes on to say that Cafe World is not a clone of Playfish’s Restaurant City, but it is. It just takes all the bad things out, such as having to refresh your workers every hour, and not making you go through hoops to collect ingredients for recipes.
Speaking of RC’s design, that whole ingredient collection thing is absolutely evil. You can’t really progress in the game per se, although you do get more space and the opportunity to hire more of your friends to work for you. The real thing that keeps you playing is the desire to collect more ingredients so that you can learn more recipes and raise their levels. But ingredients are devilishly hard to get: you either pay an arm and a leg for them on the market, spend $2000 and 2 days minimum (assuming you keep the plants watered) growing them in your garden (and you don’t get things like milk or ice, etc.), or wait for your chance daily to earn an ingredient by correctly answering the question in the daily quiz, as well as earning one ingredient daily. The way those clever bastards at Playfish have done it is that you want desperately to get ingredients as much as you want to make a really phat-looking restaurant. These two design elements combined make players more likely to spend money on microtransactions than they would in some other games, especially because in-game money is pretty much fixed if your restaurant is running 24/7 at the top of its game.
Zynga’s CW, on the other hand, has no current reward features, is somewhat illogical in its “buzz rating” system, and doesn’t have that level of pinache that RC does… yet. But, it’s Zynga, and they make better copies than everyone else, so I’m sure there will be a lot of great things down the line with the game that will make Electronic Arts ponder if it should have considered starting rumors about purchasing Zynga rather than Playfish instead.
This bit of the above article is also interesting:
To get a sense for what Café World means for Restaurant City, take a look at what happened to Slashkey’s Farm Town before and after Zynga launched FarmVille in June. As FarmVille grew, Farm Town’s traffic leveled off, even though it is staying steady with nearly 19 million monthly active users. The same may be happening for Restaurant City, as its traffic has also leveled off in the last week.
Players tend to forget about the original, and move to the next best clone out there. This is one of the reasons why the SRPG market lacks some serious innovation at this time. The good thing is that (hopefully) as the market continues to skyrocket, there will be developers out there who will explode SRPG game design, making it much more exciting for gamers, and more World of Warcraft-like profitable for the developers themselves.
Facebook SRPG experiment continues to FAIL
So far, my Facebook social roleplaying game experiment is an absolute failure. I wonder if it’s because I’m not as proactive as I could be, playing 10,000 games within my experimental Facebook account.
My iPhone experiment, however, is going along nicely, but it really depends upon the game. You can see the myriad of games that I’ve been playing on the iPhone below:
SRPGs on the iPhone
Swabs Online and Agency Wars are two new additions to my small stable of SRPGs. I only began checking them out today. The remainder I have been playing for a while, but unfortunately individual game data is not stored anywhere for most of the games, so when I had to swap my iPhone to “change the battery” at the Apple Store, I wound up losing all of my account data.
Gameplay for these games are mostly the same: press, press, press. Agency Wars seems to be slightly different in this regard, and Storm8’s World War III is the one that I’m enjoying the most, mostly because I like, well, World War III scenarios. Some of the games listed above don’t have mission leveling, and I find that I tend to like those a lot less than I do the ones which have it. This is because I don’t really feel as if I’m accomplishing anything when I’m playing these kinds of games–the whole button smashing game design seems a lot more obvious because of it.
Getting more players in your team is not as easy at it is in most SRPGs when it comes to the iPhone. In order to recruit, you need to give people your character code. This means that you need to have other friends with iPhones and actively tell them your code if they decide to play the game as well. This can result in not a lot of people on your team if you don’t have a lot of iPhone-enabled friends with a need to play SRPGs while they are waiting for their latte machiatto espresso chai tea doubleshot at Starbucks.
Another design flaw? Possibly. Except players in many of these games have come up with a way to inspire others to invite them to their teams. Since all of these games have some sort of player versus player feature, many participants have taken to naming their character after their game code. This allows people to quickly scan the PvP list, find those who want to be recruited from the list, and send an invite. As an alternative to this, some players, after fighting another player, will leave a combat on their victim’s account with their character code.
Not all games have this level of recruitment agency. On Playdom’s Mobsters, I’m having no luck finding anyone to recruit, but so far World War III has been pretty good to me.
Of course, if I wanted to spend money, I could simply pay for points, which would allow me to acquire NPCs to fill my roster. Until recently, Apple didn’t allow microtransactions for free iPhone apps; recently, they changed their policy, allowing game developers to earn revenue via both microtransactions and adverts. I am not a Rockerfeller, so my SPRG gaming is going to be as free as I can get it.
How not to not handle issues
Okay, it was a Saturday night when this happened, but still. As MMO developers, we all know that it’s important to keep our services running as close to 24/7 as possible, even on patch and expansion days. Our players want to play, and we want them to. I would hope.
I’m already iffy on Cryptic’s Champion’s Online, their second superhero-themed MMO. I’ve played their City of Heroes/City of Villains, now owned by NCSoft, for a couple of years and enjoyed it. Champions? Not so much. Granted, the game is still very much new, so there’s a whole lot of balancing that needs to be done to the game. As it stands, I’m stuck on level 19 with a fire character who can’t seem to do much except die. A lot.
Anyway, I was playing Saturday, or rather: I wanted to play Saturday. It was the afternoon, several hours after my early morning playing session, and I decided to pop in again and see if I could get far with a new character I created. Only I couldn’t log in. It took about 20 minutes for the character selection screen to display, and then another 10 or so for the map server to pop up. I simply assumed, at first, that the problem was with my connection, or even hardware. But later that evening, when I tried several more times, I popped onto the forums to see if others were having the same issue.
Tons of players were having the same issue I was. Not only that, at the time of this screenshot, the problem had been going on for over four hours. I can only imagine that either CO’s community team is off over the weekend, or maybe their CS didn’t notice that their login server was shot to shit. All sorts of bells and whistles should have gone off within, say, 15 minutes of the problem making itself known. To be honest, I don’t know if any did, or didn’t. But what I do know is that on a busy Saturday night, players couldn’t play a game, and it took almost five hours before the game’s developer communicated with its players that there was an issue, and they were trying to resolve it.
They did wind up taking the server down, doing whatever magic operations at Cryptic does, and gave players a two hour downtime window. But they got the problem resolved within an hour, and heroes began cleaning the streets of Millennium City soon after.
Always keep your community informed. Even if it’s just a “we’re looking into reports” post. Otherwise you lose the trust of your players, and losing trust means losing subscribers, and no one wants that.
Infocom Book in the Works
This news item from GameSetWatch excites me. Not that someone is making sexy hi-res photographs inspired by Infocom games… by that Rick Thornquist is writing a book about Infocom, and plans to interview a number of Infocom people for the book. I don’t know who Rick is, but he’s my new game history hero.
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Infocom games. They were some of the first ever video games I played on a PC and their ingenious packaging matched their more than ingenious games. I am still trying to remember what to do when you first get on the Vogon ship in the classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (designed, in part, by Steve Meretsky). I can’t wait to get my hands on this book. Sadly, Amazon doesn’t yet have a product page for it, but when they do, you can be sure that I will pre-order it!
Here’s some good Infocom-related links for you to peruse and enjoy:
- Wikipedia
- A brilliant white paper on the history of Infocom
- The classic Infocom unofficial home page
- Play Infocom games online
- GSW article on Steve
- Infocom collection torrent
