Asheron's Call 2: Legions marches on stores

Just days after it announced that Asheron's Call 2: Legions had gone gold, Turbine has shipped it to stores. Legions is the first expansion pack to Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings, the acclaimed 2002 massively multiplayer online role-playing game published by Microsoft and developed by then-Turbine Entertainment.

Since then, Turbine has bought future publishing rights for Asheron's Call 2 and the original Asheron's Call and assumed all support responsibilities for both games. Legions is the first AC game to be totally self-produced by the company, who provided the budget, did the development, and published the game solo.

"Launching Asheron’s Call 2: Legions is the beginning of a new era for Turbine," said Tom Nichols, Turbine's vice president of marketing, in a statement. "Not only will we continue to develop great games based on some of the world's most compelling properties, but as a publisher we will now be able to oversee the entire process."

Like most MMORPG expansions, Asheron's Call 2: Legions adds a lot of new content to its predecessor--in this case increasing the size of the game some 30 percent with the addition of a new continent. Besides a new storyline that sports 100 new quests, Legions will include new character races and many new monsters. In addition to being able to equip their character with a host of new weapons, players will be able to train them in 300 new skills as part of the game's Hero System 2.0.

Though its rating was still pending as of press time, Asheron's Call 2: Legions is priced at $29.99. It includes the "complete contents of the original Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings plus dozens of previous content updates," according to Turbine.