Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings Preview

Hopefully you know what an online RPG is by now. Games like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot let you create a character and then bring that character out into a huge online world to explore, fight monsters, and meet other players just like you. You may even have heard some of the common criticisms leveled at online RPGs--they take too much time, they're too repetitive, and they focus too much on fighting. Turbine Entertainment's Asheron's Call, which was released in 1999, was among the first crop of graphical online RPGs, and since then, the developer has taken careful notes on what worked, what didn't, and what its fans were saying. Later this year, the company will release its next game, Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings--a very promising sequel that will improve greatly upon the first game. We were fortunate enough to be admitted into the game's prerelease beta test, and from what we've seen, Asheron's Call 2 is shaping up to be a very impressive game indeed.

Asheron's Call 2 looks much better than its predecessor.

The original Asheron's Call was a distinctive game for a number of reasons--and not all of them were good. Asheron's Call wasn't much to look at back in 1999, especially compared with EverQuest, but Turbine had decided to scale back on graphics to improve the game's performance, and the decision generally paid off. However, judging from what we've seen of the impressive-looking sequel so far, Turbine isn't pulling any punches. The game isn't done yet, but as you might expect from a next-generation game such as this, Asheron's Call 2 looks terrific. Even in its beta state, it's one of the best-looking online RPGs we've ever seen, and the beta clearly trumps any other retail online RPG in terms of sheer graphical quality, detail, and special effects. At a glance, these improvements are most obvious in the game's highly detailed environments, which are populated by 3D trees and procedurally rendered tall blades of grass that sway in the wind, and in the game's gorgeous weather and animated-sky effects.

You'll have to help rebuild a shattered world.

But Asheron's Call 2's new graphics engine has also addressed another common criticism of the first game--that everyone looked the same. In the original Asheron's Call, you could play only as a human character, and all characters had the same height and build--they had different skin colors and slightly different facial features and could wear different clothes, but that was about it. Asheron's Call 2 will still let you play as humans, though it will also let you choose to play as the heavyset lugian race and the lanky tumerok race--both of which were originally monsters in the first game. And Asheron's Call 2 also lets you adjust your character's height and build, in addition to skin color, facial features, and hairstyle. And since every last item of clothing, armor, and weaponry that a character carries is reflected on the actual character models, Asheron's Call 2 will clearly do a much better job of letting you create distinctive-looking characters.

But looks aren't everything. They weren't for the original Asheron's Call, which inspired its most loyal fans to constantly keep abreast of the events in the ever-changing fantasy world of Dereth. In the original game, the face of Dereth changed practically every month, since the Asheron's Call development team constantly changed the look, climate, and the monster population of the land, adding in new dungeons and quests to advance the game's story. Asheron's Call 2's powerful new game and graphics engine will take the original game's dynamic story to the next level. The world of Dereth is home of the mighty wizard Asheron, whose powerful magic summoned adventurers to aid the beleaguered land in the original game, but Dereth has been laid to waste by an unknown force of invaders, and again, Asheron himself is nowhere to be found. As new players answer the call and step through portals into Dereth, they'll begin their careers in the ruins of the original Dereth--the towns of the land, including Arwic, Shoushi, and Cragstone, have been smashed and burned to the ground. Yet over the course of the game, as more players have their first adventures, beat back the tide of new enemies that are attacking the world, and solve their first set of quests, the land of Dereth will slowly rebuild itself. Towns gradually will be restored to their former state as centers of trade.