Asheron's
Call 2: Fallen Kings
MSRP: $49.99
Number of Players: MMORPG
Developer: Turbine Entertainment
Publisher: Microsoft
Reviewer: Gregory Pierce
Asheron's Call 2 is the sequel to Turbine's
ambitious and relatively well-received Asheron's Call. The timeline of
Asheron's Call 2 takes you thousands of years into the future of the world of Dereth where civilization has retreated underground as the world above ground has been destroyed by a great cataclysm. The mystery of the fate of the world will be revealed as the story unfolds through monthly story releases. One of the things that
Asheron's Call always did well was building a large, open, and easily explorable world without the idiocy of zoning as is present in
Everquest. Asheron's Call 2 sets out to streamline the game-playing experience by removing
some of the tedium of its predecessor by allowing you to sell loot without having to go back to town or losing items after your character dies.
One of the first things that you will notice in the new world of Dereth are the the new graphics and options.
With vertex-shaded grass, multiple levels of bump mapping, swaying trees, impressive dynamic water effects, beautiful spell effects, and an apparently modest polygon budget for players and creatures,
Asheron's Call 2, when running at its maximum capacity, features the best graphics I've seen on any platform to date. Without a doubt, the first thing you're likely to do is just walk around and explore the grandness of the world and visit some of the wonderful scenic vistas the game has to offer. Graphically, I can find few flaws in the game. This beauty comes with a steep price however. To make the game look its best, you
must have an über-rig to even contemplate playing the game on high graphical
detail settings.
On the test rig (Athlon 2000+, 256MB, Windows XP, nVidia Ti4400, SoundBlaster
Live Platinum), the game recommended being played on Medium detail. While the game looks 'okay' in medium detail,
there is a huge jump in detail if you happen to play it on a much higher end
machine (or, if you're a masochist, simply put the graphics on the best settings
and walk around to get a feel for what the future of graphics for PC games can be.) Granted, the engine is no Quake 3 - but
it's certainly as state-of-the-art as they come at the moment.
The animations for the game's creatures are very believable and you can almost get a sense of their
personalities while fighting them -- all the way up to their very random and sometimes entertaining death animations. All in all, the world is quite believable and there were very
few instances where I thought that the game could have done something
better graphically.
Sound and music are excellent as well. Creatures have their own theme music. There is a soundtrack for the various areas of the world and many of the creatures that you will fight. The only thing about the music system
that is problematic is that it causes performance issues. At first I thought this was a problem with
my soundcard and swapped it out for a Turtle Beach, which exhibited the exact same problems. Looking through the technical support page revealed that people have been having issues with the sound engine and they recommend turning down the number of sounds. For me to get the best performance out of the game, I actually ended up (for testing purposes) having to turn the sound off altogether. If I turned on the sound, there was a
noticeable degradation in the performance of the game. Why this has gone on for so long is beyond me, and there are plenty of people in various forums who are having the same problem.
The servers for the game are still largely unstable. On many evenings I would log on to find massive lag. Indeed, the level 9 lag monster has killed more players than creatures in the game itself. I don't give the developers the out of 'its a new game,' personally. They've been down this road before and this is supposed to be a sequel. Far too many times, I've logged in to see a message about the server having an outage in which entire zones of the game were out of action and you had to contact a GM if your character was in
the effected area so that you could be moved somewhere else. I can understand that some of this has to do with them wanting to have a dynamic world and such, but this is why we have staging and reference development environments! Don't deploy something into the production world if you don't know
it's going to work.
My biggest complaint about Asheron's Call 2, however, is that
it's just not much of a game. In fact, it's incredibly tedious. Games like
Morrowind can be forgiven for having you trek across the world to handle a quest because those quests actually go somewhere. In
Asheron's Call 2, many times quests just don't go anywhere - or have absolutely no relevance at all. There were several times when I went to help person A and location
X only to find that there wasn't a single living soul anywhere in the area. In one instance, I actually found the quest target in another town while doing an entirely unrelated quest. So in a nutshell, I think the questing engine is sub par.
Next comes the most bizarre design decision I've ever heard of: outside of the quest specific people there are absolutely NO NPCs in the world. No shop owners, no bars, no random people to get information from, nothing. This gives the world a very "where the hell is everybody" feel. Fortunately it won't take you too long to find out where everyone is. Unfortunately, they are all involved in the most useless and evil play mechanic hoisted on the gaming public:
crafting.
Since there are no shop keepers and the like, it's up to you to put together your own weapons, armor, etc.
Crafting allows you to build equipment much better than what you'd normally find and you're likely to build stuff with special properties (that usually last for a few days or so). You craft by taking raw materials such as iron ore, wood, stone, acid, etc. and selecting a crafting recipe that you've learned. Crafting is
-- in all honesty -- a complete skill system all its own. As you successfully
create a certain recipe a certain number of times you learn a new recipe - which requires better quality raw materials and so the quest begins to find better items with better quality raw materials or find better equipment to try to mine better quality raw materials. So, in most towns, you will find that everyone is huddled around trying to craft things - anything to give people something to do I guess.
While Asheron's Call 2 is supposedly a complex and dynamic story, there is
absolutely no evidence of that in the game. Over the coming months, the game is supposed to deal with how the world of Dereth is going to be rebuilt and take on new challenges and such, but the way the game is right now - its
mind-numbingly boring. Writing this review of the game is actually more fun than playing the game.
I cannot honestly recommend this game to anyone in its current state. While the developers call this the evolution of the world through story, it feels more like "play this and we'll finish developing it while you play." What more can I say... I loathe and despise this game - and I was a staunch advocate of the original
Asheron's Call. I thought it was light-years beyond Everquest, yet
Asheron's Call 2 is actually a step backwards in many ways. This is tedium on a massive scale and something that should be punishable by law. For all the value of this game being a massively multiplayer game - I would strongly recommend instead picking up a copy of
Morrowind and playing that until the folks at Turbine Entertainment make this a game worthy of both your time and money, because at the moment it is worthy of neither.
Graphics
9.5
Probably the best graphics in any game currently available on the market. You have to have a beefy rig to run them, but without a doubt they are state of the art.
Sound & Music
9.0
Nice to have a soundtrack that isn't an annoyance and theme music for some of the various creatures. Performance problems with sound means that you may not be able to experience the game at its best without some tweaking.
Control
7.0
Nothing
spectacular, nothing particularly wrong.
Replay Value
6.0
This game is a step in the wrong direction. The necessity of the crafting system slows the game to a glacial pace. I won't even get into the disaster that has become the combat and party systems. Simplification is not always a good thing. If I wanted to click
something and go watch "The Simpsons," I'd be playing Everquest.
Fun Factor
4.0
Spinning around in my computer chair is more fun than this game. I wish I didn't have to be so harsh but this game simply fails to be entertaining and is more of a chore. When you're asking yourself,
"Why am I playing this game?" after only a week of play - something is wrong.
Overall
6.0
I simply cannot recommend that anyone play this game until
it's come much further along. This game is about as mediocre as they
come.
Asheron's Call 2 is the sequel to Turbine's
ambitious and relatively well-received Asheron's Call. The timeline of
Asheron's Call 2 takes you thousands of years into the future of the world of Dereth where civilization has retreated underground as the world above ground has been destroyed by a great cataclysm. The mystery of the fate of the world will be revealed as the story unfolds through monthly story releases. One of the things that
Asheron's Call always did well was building a large, open, and easily explorable world without the idiocy of zoning as is present in
Everquest. Asheron's Call 2 sets out to streamline the game-playing experience by removing
some of the tedium of its predecessor by allowing you to sell loot without having to go back to town or losing items after your character dies. 
On the test rig (Athlon 2000+, 256MB, Windows XP, nVidia Ti4400, SoundBlaster
Live Platinum), the game recommended being played on Medium detail. While the game looks 'okay' in medium detail,
there is a huge jump in detail if you happen to play it on a much higher end
machine (or, if you're a masochist, simply put the graphics on the best settings
and walk around to get a feel for what the future of graphics for PC games can be.) Granted, the engine is no Quake 3 - but
it's certainly as state-of-the-art as they come at the moment.
The servers for the game are still largely unstable. On many evenings I would log on to find massive lag. Indeed, the level 9 lag monster has killed more players than creatures in the game itself. I don't give the developers the out of 'its a new game,' personally. They've been down this road before and this is supposed to be a sequel. Far too many times, I've logged in to see a message about the server having an outage in which entire zones of the game were out of action and you had to contact a GM if your character was in
the effected area so that you could be moved somewhere else. I can understand that some of this has to do with them wanting to have a dynamic world and such, but this is why we have staging and reference development environments! Don't deploy something into the production world if you don't know
it's going to work.
Since there are no shop keepers and the like, it's up to you to put together your own weapons, armor, etc.
Crafting allows you to build equipment much better than what you'd normally find and you're likely to build stuff with special properties (that usually last for a few days or so). You craft by taking raw materials such as iron ore, wood, stone, acid, etc. and selecting a crafting recipe that you've learned. Crafting is
-- in all honesty -- a complete skill system all its own. As you successfully
create a certain recipe a certain number of times you learn a new recipe - which requires better quality raw materials and so the quest begins to find better items with better quality raw materials or find better equipment to try to mine better quality raw materials. So, in most towns, you will find that everyone is huddled around trying to craft things - anything to give people something to do I guess.