They say your first MMORPG is always your favorite, but I'll tell you why this might be the most underrated MMORPG ever.
Maybe it was the fantastic skill system that allowed you to level ANYTHING! Want to jump like Kobe Bryant? Just spend all your experience from killing monsters on your jump skill! You may not be able to do anything else, but hey, at least you can jump on houses in the center of town. AC (Asheron's Call) still holds the best skill system of any MMORPG I've played to date. No one started out with any particular class. You chose every trait the way you liked and hybrid classes were everywhere as opposed to most MMORPGs that want everyone to be a super-specialized subset. Neither did it have an easy-to-use system with few skills like some of the newer MMORPGs, because it divided everything into specific skills, and unlike Ultima Online which allowed anyone to macro a skill to death (i.e. continually doing the same action to increase it), it did reward repetition but mostly the killing of nasty things was what increased your expeience points. AC was the first MMORPG to establish a monthly content update system. I remember the popular websites at the time would be overrun by AC players as everyone waited the 12 hours or so as the servers were shut down and the newest monthly content was installed. Turbine would release a small poem or tale and we as gamers had to decipher it and figure out the clues that pointed to new hidden items and quests that would be installed after the monthly content. I remember the collectable action figures installed in one monthly patch. Every popular creature had its own action figure and the game felt like Ebay as people tried to complete their collections. At Christmas, holiday themed items were added. I remember when the Lugian Citadel was installed. It was a HUGE castle that contained the biggest, baddest giants in the realm who spawned like crazy. The floors of the citadel were littered with dead bodies as gamers tried to risk the fortress because it was a power leveler's dream. I could go on forever about the creative and memorable additions in each monthly content add-on that always made the game feel like a living and changing environment.
AC was the only MMORG that made people care about the lore and stories behind the game. You could find websites dedicated to ancient text found in the game. Quests always had some significant tie-in to the story. And speaking of the story, it was fantastic! We once logged in after a monthly update only to find one of the most popular towns in the game completely destroyed and a large crater in its place. When one of the most feared menaces in the game returned, a developer controlled a 100' tall creature who would roam from city to city destroying gamers who stood in his way. Turbine (the developers) even had a sense of humor and placed the infamous killer bunny rabbit from Monty Python & the Holy Grail in one of the highest level lands. Someone once aggroed the bunny to town and you've never seen anything more hilarious in your life! The highest level characters on my server were jumping on rocks, running for their lives, and doing anything to try and stay out of the way of this killer rabbit that would strike for 1000 damage and appeared virtually unstoppable. ROFL!
AC's biggest knock were its graphics, but I always found the engine beautiful. While I didn't have teh l00t pixels, nothing beat climbing up a large hill and watching a virtual sunset. Because of dyes and completely random items, AC characters all looked different. It was certainly one of the most colorful games I've played, as some MMORPGS seem to be full of a drab world of character creations. Even the monsters were unique. The odd sounding extremely fast sprites. The annoying drudges. The ground-stomping golems. The bug-like extremely powerful olthoi. And who could forget the ghost-like black shadows? It was always fun being a level 15 character and running into one of the random level 60 shadows as they tried to take over the online world of Dereth. (Which leads me to another monthly content story that I just don't have time to tell.) In the world of AC, "The Subway" is still one of the most unique locations in MMORPG history. Let me draw a picture of this place. You entered a cavern only to find a huge arena where hundreds of characters gathered and your text screen flowed at a million lines per hour as people tried to publicly pawn their items. Want to find ANY rare item in the game? Simply enter the subway with your best loot, and see if you could work a deal. Then..... continue down the cavern until you stop at a 200 feet drop. This is what separates the mice from the men. If you were a high level, you could take your chances and endure the fall. If you didn't think you were high enough, you could buff your stats hoping to surivive the fall. If you did make it to the bottom of the pit in one piece, you would find another meeting place in the subway, only this one was full of the game's highest level characters, and had 20 portals that went to all the best places in the game. Consider it an exclusive society for those that put the time into the game. Mixed in-between the chat of some of the most powerul monarchies (what served as guilds in AC) in the game were dead bodies of aspiring characters who had hoped to finally view the bottom of the Subway but couldn't quite survive the fall.
It's no wonder this game outlived its sequel. It was such a unique world, there was no way to ever match the beauty of the original. I think what impresses me the most about this game is it had no one to copy. It was one of the earliest big MMORPGs, and unlike some of the more recent popular franchises, it had no history of success or failure to base its strategy on. It was all new ground when Turbine developed this MMORPG. I wish some of today's MMORPG newbies who are having fun with World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI could have experienced Asheron's Call in its prime. It was truly a novel experience.