wired.com — What happens when a massively multiplayer game is approaching it's final days? Asheron's Call 2 is doing just that, and Clive Thompson is taking a look into the desolate, anarchic final days of the game which will be turned off forever on Dec. 30
Dec 19, 2005 View in Crawl 4
xoplDec 19, 2005
I think it is incredibly interesting in the context of anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics (among surely other things) to watch virtual worlds. In real life, there are too many real consequences and too many roadblocks to make changes to how things work. There are very few experiments, and when things do change it takes a long time to see the result. In virtual worlds you can watch a political system develop from scratch. You can see the effects on an economy. You can watch a world die.It's really cool. But I'm a geek.
lexomaticDec 19, 2005
From a broad player perspective, AC2 suffered from poor game design. Graphics were great at the time it came out, for sure. The just had too many fundamental design flaws. Level advancement was just stupidly too easy. High level characters could level a low level up in a matter of days. Why? Because quests could be completed by a high level in a party without the low level having to move from a portal area. The layout of the land was terrible. Mobs were just scattered around the place with no purpose. The game just became a safari shoot. Add to that the level-based layout of the continents meant that a new player could walk around the newbie area without seeing a single other player.No NPC shopkeepers. Hell, no real NPCs. No real sense of immersion in a fantasy world. The whole world felt empty of anything except mobs that want to eat you.AC2 just lacked the content that keeps the average MMOG player interest for anything longer than a few weeks.
gtacrimelordDec 19, 2005
"Yesterday I killed a liquid metal slime for 12,000+ XP"Heh, all I have to say is...Metal king slime + Yangus Executioner = XP explosion.
znxsterDec 19, 2005
Interesting read..
eqisowDec 20, 2005
dupe :|<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/gaming/The_end_of_a_world">http://digg.com/gaming/The_end_of_a_world</a>
monfooDec 20, 2005
This is really sad, Adults morning a game really sad.
neosithlordDec 20, 2005
Just resubbed to AC1 and have been playing that off and on for 6 years. So I had to digg this one. The big killer of AC2 was they did absolutly nothing to make it like the first game. Ac1 and Ac2 were apples and oranges. It was a fun game when I played it but few people ever did. AC1 was always the basterd child of MMOG's. Back then EQ and DoAC were the golden children. MS and Turbine tried to draw people away from those games by making AC2 into a clone. I hate to see it die but if it was a clone of AC1 I think it'd still be kicking. MS mismanaged the franchise and Turbine went along for the ride untill they bought it. In the process they pushed away their fan base and no one out side of that would have tried it because of MS ,and to a lesser extent, Turbines handling of hacks, macros and third party software. Once Turbine bought the games back from MS things got better but I guess it was to little to late and AC2 died a quite death. I'm just glad AC1 is still alive it may not be kicking to hard but it's still a great game.-Neo Sithlord TD
galfridus73Dec 20, 2005
monfoo: It's legit to /mourn/ the passing of a game that, within all expectations, was supposed to become THE gold standard for MMORPGs. It's just that AC2 continues to make the same mistakes that we keep harping on the developers for and, frankly, it wasn't a very interesting world. Thus, I don't think anyone is mourning AC2 but mourning the changes in the MMORPG arena that are endangering the genre.As an FFXI player, I have to think that, eventually, there are two things that will kill the MMORPG or force it to evolve:1) The pay-per-month model is an issue. My wife and I both play FFXI, but we haven't been on it in the past two months. That means we've spent $56 or $57 in the past two months paying for something we aren't currently using. We're close to canceling our accounts, but after spending all of those hours online building the characters, we aren't 100% positive. Personally, I would pay more for the game (upwards of $100) and an annual fee ($75 - $100 or so) for each account. That would be easy to budget for and, frankly, it would get the assh**es who aren't serious about the game out of there pretty damn quick. Sure, the revenue stream wouldn't be as large for the developer, but the support costs would be less because they wouldn't have to support the same type of clueless twits that they do now.2) New versions need to stop. If I can't bring my EQ character to EQ2, what reason do I have to move to EQ2? If the world is perpetual, why does the client software /need/ to be changed and the character left behind? The EQ or AC world should be the EQ or AC world, and then the client software can dictate what abilities the character has, where they can go, etc.
balooDec 21, 2005
Hmm I wonder how long EQ2 has? My experience there sounded like AC2... almost nobody around...and considering EQ2 is already in the discount bins in games stores (Including the new expansion) you gotta wonder what life she has?WoW on the other hand goes from strength to strength.