Back in 1999 some friends got me into playing Asheron\u2019s Call \u2013 one of the first three Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) to hit the market.\u00a0 Originally developed by Turbine Entertainment \u2013 a company formed to create this game \u2013 and originally published by Microsoft on the MSN Gaming Zone.\u00a0 I played the game to varying degrees from its launch in 1999 until it was shut down at the end of January 2017 getting involved in two official volunteer corps \u2013 the Zone Online Team (ZOT) and the Jolt.co.uk live events team and contributing to various third party add-ons and emulation projects.<\/p>\n
Almost one year after AC was shut down, the Hey You Video Game podcast decided to do an episode on AC featuring interviews with LOLcifer and Tee Ess, aka me.\u00a0 I had a bit of a cold at the time of the interview but it was awesome to talk about and reminisce about a very unique game.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to forget how unique the game was; some of the concepts it pioneered are now in every new MMO to hit the market while others haven\u2019t for reasons which could be debated for a long time.<\/p>\n
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The true irony of Asheron\u2019s Call is that the development team was very ambitious and tried to push the genre as far as possible which involved pushing the server-side hardware beyond its limits, causing the game to get delayed before release making the graphics system at release (and throughout the life of the game) quite outdated.\u00a0 While the developers created a replacement game engine which featured much better graphics and sound a few years later it was released as a sequel and not an update.\u00a0 The sequel not only featured much better graphics but greatly changed the game mechanics and systems.\u00a0 Was this done to try to appeal to a wider or different user base or to align themselves closer with the mainstream games?\u00a0 In either case the sequel didn\u2019t attract many existing players to it due to the game system changes nor did it attract a large market of new players leading to the original game greatly outliving the sequel.<\/p>\n
Hopefully new DMCA exemptions will be made to allow for the community maintenance of abandoned online gaming properties and I\u2019ll have a chance to demonstrate what made this game so unique.\u00a0 No matter what the future holds in store for this groundbreaking game, I can\u2019t deny that it helped pique my interest in various topics I otherwise may never have delved into.\u00a0 While I had played many games before AC and have played a variety of games since, AC is responsible for making me learn a lot about the subjects of game design, interactive storytelling, distributed computing, and hybridized data systems.\u00a0 Perhaps I\u2019ll write more about these subjects in order to highlight how the game intrigued me so.\u00a0 The podcast is no longer available, however the original post can be viewed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in 1999 some friends got me into playing Asheron\u2019s Call \u2013 one of the first three Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) to hit the market.\u00a0 Originally developed by Turbine Entertainment \u2013 a company formed to create this game \u2013 and originally published by Microsoft on the MSN Gaming Zone.\u00a0 I played the … Continue reading “Looking back on Asheron\u2019s Call”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25],"tags":[36,35,37],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":456,"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions\/456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timspekkens.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}