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The End of an Era -- Asheron's Call 11/2/1999 - 01/31/2017
Rankenphile
Passersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderator mod
Passersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderator mod
A few hours ago the servers were shut off for the last time on Asheron's Call, one of the original 3D MMOs in existence.
Back in the day, this was my motherfucking jam. Everquest was the big popular game, but AC was so, so different. Unique world lore, magic system, creatures, skill systems. Completely open world. You could run from one side of the main map to the other, which would take hours and hours to do, and never hit a loading screen. Built-in patron/vassal system for guilds.
For about four years, this was my obsession. I lived in AC. Living in Eastham on the Frostfell server, running up to the portals to Arwic to hit the subway. The Shadow Wars. Portal Tie exploits allowing me to power-level in the Focusing Stone dungeon. Doing the Towers run over and over again to farm the chests. Creating my Hollow Hunting suit by collecting marble and buffing up the bludgeoning resistance to farm keys from virindi.
This game was something special, and it was around for a long, long time. It's longevity is remarkable, but now it's gone.
Pouring one out tonight for a very special game.
Back in the day, this was my motherfucking jam. Everquest was the big popular game, but AC was so, so different. Unique world lore, magic system, creatures, skill systems. Completely open world. You could run from one side of the main map to the other, which would take hours and hours to do, and never hit a loading screen. Built-in patron/vassal system for guilds.
For about four years, this was my obsession. I lived in AC. Living in Eastham on the Frostfell server, running up to the portals to Arwic to hit the subway. The Shadow Wars. Portal Tie exploits allowing me to power-level in the Focusing Stone dungeon. Doing the Towers run over and over again to farm the chests. Creating my Hollow Hunting suit by collecting marble and buffing up the bludgeoning resistance to farm keys from virindi.
This game was something special, and it was around for a long, long time. It's longevity is remarkable, but now it's gone.
Pouring one out tonight for a very special game.
+7
Posts
Holy shit that was a long time ago.
It's only now going offline?
I do believe I quit forever after I kept dying while trying to corpse run and I ended up losing basically all of my gear. I was in the...9th grade at the time? Maybe 10th?
I'll never understand why they don't just release the server code to the wild once they decide they don't want to support anymore. There's still people who play these games and the old mmo communities were always very strong.
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/the-74-year-old-grandpa-who-doesnt-want-asherons-call-to-shut-down
Let this old man play his game
Serious though. I had no idea Asherons Call was still around. That's some Damm longevity!
I get the feeling that's probably gonna be quite a lot of people with WoW at some point.
Wow still has more subscribers than most mmos combined. It ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
lots of people complain about city of heroes being dead constantly around here
That's just @The Geebs That Knows Everything About Animorphs and his hundreds of alt accounts
I don't see it so it can't be real! I hope they do though. PA groups were the best groups! Seriously miss playing with so many of you goofballs.
I made a full set of super high AC bludgeon-resistant armor for hunting Hollows. Hollows were creatures that would do bludgeoning damage, but their damage ignored magic buffs to bludgeoning resistance, meaning crafting was the only way to increase resistance.
Eventually I ended up with one of the highest bludgeon resistance armor sets on the server. This was a big, big deal. Hunting hollows meant farming virindi keys, which were used to open virindi chests, which contained the best loot in the game at the time.
One night, suuuuuper late, I was fighting some hollows and got myself in trouble. I quickly Lifestone Recalled (cast a spell to return myself safely to my respawn point), but was killed right as I was portalling out.
When I spawned, my corpse was underneath the lifestone. Inaccessible.
In Asheron's Call, when you died you dropped a number of your most valuable items. This meant most players kept a bunch of death items -- super valuable trophies, usually orbs, wands, gems, low weight/high value objects. Otherwise you risk dropping your weapons or armor and being in a shitload of trouble.
I select my corpse and examine it. On it, of course, is my armor. My insanely, insanely valuable armor. I could have sold it for $500 or more, easily. I press the key to get my items and my character walks toward it, but can't get close enough to pick up the items.
OH FUCK.
No matter what I do, I cannot get ahold of a server mod. It's like 3 am or later. Nobody is on. I spam global channel. I start server hopping. People come from all around to see if they can get it, either to help or to try and steal some insanely valuable gear.
After an hour, my corpse vanishes. Gone forever.
I was broken hearted, and quit the game for months after that.
I remember quitting games out of rage for losing an hour's worth of progress.
I would have openly wept.
It's a very different and far more complex market than most other games are, and it's a shame that the only one I played a whole ton as a kid, Guild Wars, is basically dead - GW2 is one of the rare successful MMO sequels but I'm not a fan of it because it's such a differetn game to GW1
Hah, oh shit, that's fucking tragic.
Holy shit! I don't know if could even deal with that.
I don't have it installed but I still have a ton of boxes and cds maps and other stuff. I would snatch up cheap box copies whenever I saw them for the time codes and to support the game further. Don't think I'll throw those away.
and that's mostly for the fact that you could goof around and do weird shit and not actually fight monsters
I think I may have made it into the mid teens as far as levels, every time I tried.
Stupid materials and spellcasting was the worst. Just the worst. Attack, fizzle, burn a mat. Always being encumbered and broke because everything had to be spent on mats. All the time.
I am kind of sad to see it go, but it hasn't really been relevant to me for a long time.
I do have friends who I'm sure were playing it up until it finally went down.
Wow is a whopping five years older than Asheron's Call.
Five Years.
Five years.
I want to get the choppiest choppers.
One of those things that I'm very happy to experience at a distance.
And that distance is YouTube videos making fun of it.
Warhammer online tried to implement too many things from WoW rather than borrow heavily from the fantastic MMO they had already developed, all to the detriment of the PvP that was supposed to be the centerpiece of the game.
The things it did well, like separate offense/defense targets so healers could more easily participate in combat while still healing, should totally be borrowed by other MMOs.
really it's me and the entire mod staff, basically
I played FFXI in the old G&T linkshell but again... Never made it far.
Once it starts taking FOREVER to accomplish things I lose interest.
Going from AC to FFXI was utterly mindblowing.
Magic worked differently in Ac than it did in any other game I've ever played. Spells required components. You only knew a couple of spells, based on what magic schools you trained on character creation, but you could spam attempts at casting a spell all you wanted to try to cast them. If you did so successfully, you got XP in that skill and it went up a little. You put them in a certain order in your spell tab, and if you were high enough level in that school of magic and had them in the right order, you could cast a spell.
It's been a long time, but here's what I recall:
SCARAB: Metal object, determined level of spell.
HERB: Various flowers and plants
GEMS: Powdered gemstones. Can be purchased or made by grinding up stones.
ALCHEMICAL: Quicksilver, brimstone, etc. From what I recall, these determined the element of the spell
TALISMANS: I believe these determined the form of the spell (cone, bolt, wall, etc)
TAPER: Colored candles. These were the real kicker.
See, you didn't know that many spells to begin with. Depending on the components combination, you could cast all kinds of different spells. Buffs, attack spells, you name it. You could use War Magic to cast ranged attack spells in various forms (walls, bolts, volleys, etc) in each of the seven elements (Fire, Cold, Acid, Lightning, Piercing, Bludgeoning and Slashing). You could use Creature Magic to buff or debuff every skill in the game. You can use life to heal or harm or cast protection or vulnerability spells to every element in the game. You can cast Item Spells to buff stats to be stronger or weaker to every item in the game on nearly any item, and also Item Magic meant portal spells for some reason.
But the formula for each spell was the same for every caster -- when you cast Fireball, it always had the same components, regardless of level, except for the Scarab. With me so far? You could even get a hint at what that spell combination was from the "magic words". You see, casting a spell meant you said those words in chat. That meant that, if you figured out the combination you could learn any spell in the game.
Except for tapers.
Each spell required a taper for level 1, and 2 tapers for level two or higher. And those tapers were unique to each player. What tapers I used for Lighting Bolt 3 were different from what you would use. That meant that you had to try combinations over and over, hoping you had enough skill in that school, to successfully learn that spell. Once you cast it, you could keep it in your spellbook and cast it whenever you wanted.
The order of the tapers was the biggest mystery in the game when it launched. It was a huge, huge deal. And if you figured it out, you were incentivized to keep it to yourself.
How? Spell Economy.
For the first six months to a year, from what I recall, there was a Spell Economy. That meant that the more people were using a specific spell, the less powerful it would become. Magic secrets were jealously hoarded, and people would learn high-level spells that were totally unknown and protect them at all costs. It was brilliant.
I remember spending an entire three day weekend with two friends, huddled around notebooks, working together to figure out the combination. Eventually we cracked it, and it was incredible. We were gods.
Eventually the combination was cracked. It turns out the seed for the randomizer was your account login. A tool was created called SweetPea, and you enter your account name into it, it tells you the exact combination for every spell in the game. Once that cat was out of the bag it didn't take long for the spell economy to no longer make sense and it was removed. But for a while? Magic felt arcane. You literally studied your craft, working out bizarre combinations of obscure elements, cracking the code of a magic language, studied how other casters were able to weave these spells together so that you could harness the secret power for yourself. It was brilliant.
It was called SplitPea
Cooler than anything anyone would do in an mmorpg today...
Make those Mages Guilds useful
I dunno it depends on how essential it is to the gameplay to know specific spells, it obviously doesn't make sense in a class-based game where you have your wizards and your clerics decided at character creation but it would have been rad to have a system like that in a game with freestyle character development game like ultima online.
I'm more looking at the Spell Economy and things that incentivize your community based game to not act like a community, and to have to worry that their spell that they have been relying on suddenly lose distinct effectiveness because too many people on the server were using it.
That and reagent based spellcasting is just the worst in MMOs.
EDIT: I don't mean to harp on AC too hard or anything. It was a pioneer at the time it came out. I just got two distinct feelings when I read Rank's story (because I remember some of those aspects he mentioned even). Those were:
"Wow, that's a fucking awesome story!" and
*shudder* "Oh, God, I am glad that we have made advancements past that period."