Another day has passed in the worlds of Asheron's Call. Everyone has to keep in mind that in essence, Asheron's Call 2 is Asheron's Call after a massive disaster, thousands of years in shelters and the whims of time.
AC had its patch yesterday. Along with the patch came the December Gift Boxes. They are always a challenge to locate and a large amount of effort if you have many active characters and/or accounts.
The current story line continues. The developers put in storylines that stretch over many months and require that a character complete them in order to advance to the next month's story. I can understand that many love this process, however, there are warts on the implementation. As the story line is tough, you must do the quest in a fellow. Once the fellows have completed it, they have no desire to redo it. If you get behind or are late starting the line, you are pretty much out of luck. AC still does not have quest scaleability.
In AC2, the big issue of the starting week was the lag. Sunday, Monday and most of Tuesday you had to play in remote areas to have a fighting chance. Tuesday afternoon the developers had a bunch of adjustments ready and shut down the world for about an hour. The lag was pretty much gone when the world returned.
Last night and today the game is very enjoyable and the players are back to looking at the future. The questions now are about creating or using a WIKI, what the business model will be and moving forward.
If you go to the forums, there is a link to a great article that explains the what, when, where, and how of AC2. It makes for great reading and will help everyone understand the history of the game.
And so much for history. AC2 is about the future. It can be tough, the handholding is very limited, the world is dangerous, and everyone is starting fresh at level 1. There are already some players that are up in levels as there always are in these kind of games. They will be levelling for a long time. There is no way to get to the endgame in a few short days.
The developers are actually blessed with a very stable and solid foundation. There are always improvements that can be done to every area, but they have a real need to add on content at the 60+ level areas. They can do this without being pushed as it will be some time before the players arrive.
On the other side of the coin, the engine and game are pretty new to them and there will be a learning curve. They also have the features of LOTRO and DDO to loook at and see how they can be applied to AC2. I expect they will be recruiting some assistance from those teams and the experts of those functions to add to the game.
Somehow, I expect that it is an exciting time to be a Turbine employee with all of the IPs that they are responsible for maintaining and enhancing.
Meanwhile, I will be working diligently on my Human Ranger, Drudge, Lugie Smasher, and Human Mage. They all need to get to Omishan and have fun!!!!!
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