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.

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.

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.

Swords and Sorcery

Then again, in most online RPGs, towns traditionally are where everyone goes to perform the "un-fun" duty of selling off their loot items and stocking up on supplies, like arrows for their bows. Then they scurry away to do "fun" stuff, like fighting more monsters or going on quests. Asheron's Call 2 will change that by giving ranged weapons like bows and javelins unlimited ammo. You will never again have to stop everything and tell your companions, "Sorry guys, but I'm out of arrows. I'll go get some from town, it'll be about 20 minutes, can you wait?" Better still, Asheron's Call 2 won't even have merchants in towns to buy and sell from. Instead, the game will borrow an idea from Microsoft's other fantasy RPG, Dungeon Siege. You can immediately convert any item in your inventory into money by dragging the item into the "convert into gold" section of your inventory.

But for players who want to congregate in town and socialize and who might want to do something other than fight all the time, they'll also be able to convert their hard-earned loot into trade items. Picked up a shield you can't use? Don't worry--you'll be able to use whatever wood and metal is in the shield by melting it down in a trade forge in your nearest town and then forging the raw materials into armor, weapons, and other material for yourself or to sell or trade to other players. The better the loot, the higher the quality of the materials--and the better the weapons, armor, and items you can make from them. Trade skills in Asheron's Call 2 will be completely independent of your character's level, experience points, and skills. In the original Asheron's Call, players often created alternate characters for the sole purpose of spending skill points on trade skills. It was pretty common (and pretty silly) to see players go off on adventures, run out of supplies, then log their character off, log in with an alternate character that was skilled in trades, create supplies, then log off again. So if you want, you can spend your entire career as a tradesman in Asheron's Call 2 without fighting a single monster, but you can do the same with your primary sword-swinging, spellcasting character, too.

Making items in Asheron's Call 2 will be simple--the game will have a streamlined skill system in which each individual item will be tied to a skill. So instead of having a tailoring skill that governs all your clothing and leatherworking ability, you'll have a "make patchwork gloves" skill--one that advances every single time you successfully make a pair of patchwork gloves. Once you've mastered patchwork gloves, you'll be able to move on to better types of gloves--it's a simple process that will give you the option to become a highly specialized artisan without having to blow lots of your character's money on unnecessary skills. The most unusual of these will be the gambling skill, which will let your character get rid of excess loot and money in exchange for a random beneficial effect. A good gambler might part with a few gold pieces, make a successful roll, and be granted a temporary magical armor bonus, for instance.

But the most popular path to fame and fortune in Dereth will still be by pounding a lot of monsters into oblivion with arrows, swords, and powerful magic spells. Rest assured that in Asheron's Call 2, there will be plenty of monsters to slay and plenty of ways to slay them. Though players will still have three general ways in which to do battle--close combat with melee weapons, ranged combat with bows and thrown weapons, and magic--each of these abilities will be considerably different from the first game. In Asheron's Call, players would invest skill points into different skills, like proficiency with a sword or with a bow, but unfortunately, this led to the "killer template." Players would tinker with their skills to come up with the single most powerful combinations of skills, and then lots of other players would follow suit. Asheron's Call 2 will instead use a skill tree system, which, like in Dark Age of Camelot, will let you invest skill points into low-level skills to unlock higher-level skills.

The New World

Combat skills are all different for each of the game's three races--humans, tumeroks, and lugians all have different forms of melee, ranged, and magical abilities, and each of these races will also gain access to two additional race-specific skill trees once they reach level 15. The new skill trees will still provide plenty of diversity for different kinds of characters, but you won't have to worry about spending every last little scrap of your experience points in the most powerful skills. And even players who do want to create the most powerful skill set around will be accommodated by Asheron's Call 2's skill system, since the sequel will let you reinvest spent skill points. If you happen to buy a skill you're not happy with, you can untrain the skill at any time, then reinvest those skill points later, after you go adventuring and earn some additional experience points.

As you might expect, there will be plenty of players who will be satisfied to go after big game, hunt down monsters, and haul back treasure. There will be others who will want to seek out the biggest game of all--other players. For those players, Asheron's Call 2 will have four levels of player-vs.-player (PVP) conflict. Naturally, the game will have completely safe zones in which there will be no conflict at all, but Asheron's Call 2 will also have contested areas that contain resources--you can capture these on behalf of your friends and associates. The game will also have a few very rare free-for-all PVP zones, which will let all players attack each other freely, but most competitive players will be drawn to the conflict areas, in which players from competing kingdoms can do battle with each other.

What are friends and associates, and what are kingdoms? Asheron's Call 2, like any good online RPG, will have a number of features to support social interaction between players, including the ability to create fellowships and allegiances--the game's equivalent of hunting parties and player guilds. Like in the original Asheron's Call, you can swear fealty to each other--a vassal who swears to serve a patron will be able to call upon other members of the allegiance for aid, while the patron will receive a small experience bonus. But in Asheron's Call 2, you will also be able to align yourself with one of Dereth's three great kingdoms, the noble Order of Dereth, the sinister Shadow Kingdoms, and the lawful Dominion. Choosing to ally with a particular kingdom is a bit like choosing an ethical alignment of good, evil, or neutral in traditional RPGs. Choosing to serve in an allegiance will let you capture territory, while serving a kingdom will let you participate in kingdom-vs.-kingdom conflict.

One of the most compelling reasons to put together a group of characters is to explore the Vaults of Dereth, Asheron's Call 2's brand-new series of challenging, monster-filled dungeons, which will be tied to various quests in the game. Quests can be as simple as fetching an item and carrying it to a certain character or as complex as exploring and conquering a huge dungeon full of tough monsters. As a reward, your character may receive a brief beneficial magical spell effect or powerful new items and lots of bonus experience points. In any case, Asheron's Call 2's larger, more-complex quests will tie directly into the game's story and will undoubtedly change as the game matures and the world of Dereth changes over the course of the coming months.

Will Asheron's Call 2 be the next big thing in online RPGs? We'll find out when the game is released later this year.