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Why was asherons call 2 cancled?
Melendu
Member Posts: 159
Can any one tell me why it was cancled/stopped? Did it have more of a player base then AC1? if so why not cancle AC1 and focus all on AC2?
Comments
AC2 was completely different game from AC1. AC2 was a huge move forward into wow-type game. Very user-friendly with best interface up to date. It was the first MMO that brought up different death penalty instead of XP penalty (you losed health and some skills for a short duration of time after you died or until you got to your corpse from graveyard) It had easier crafting (still quite complex), lots of quests, solo content, 1-2-3 combat system, pve raiding and pvp-kind of battleground faction grind system. All those things were later re-used in WoW. Problem with AC2 was it came in amazing bugged state. It still got high reviews (82% at metacritic.com, ign 90%) but the number of bugs turned off lots of players.
REALITY CHECK
ive been watching the AC2 films and I'm so grieved to see such a graphically superior game go downhill. i never played it but this is madness. AC1 is still running lol. its funny how sometimes the first version of an MMO outlives the updated version. players have a funny way of communicating their desires to devs
of course there may be many other factors that I and others dont know. like if the server was jsut too expensive to maintain what did they say I wonder?
Yes i guess the bugs n all and after the player base dropped it never picked back up since most were occupied by EQ, DAOC and AO, was a dark time in MMO history, kinda like nothing picking up right now because of WoW.
I thought AC2 was great, the classes and races were unique and the gameplay was easy to hop into and get going, even with a fun little tutorial.
It wasnt as big lose for Turbine as it may seems. They used the engine later in DDo and Lotro, to which I'm subscribed and that I enjoy.
REALITY CHECK
The Asherons Call 2 team suffered issues interally with their dev cycles, loss of staff, and funding. This led to a greatly diminished team left to support the live product while the dev team (which was forced to release a feature incomplete game due to pressure from their microsoft funding) was moved onto another project (presumably LOTR since we heard about LOTR while we were still early in WoW's development).
Asherons Call was a fun game, I played it for about a year till it's eventual cancleation.
Let me list it's pro's:
Some of the con's:
The game started off lacking much content, and players blew throught he content quickly demanding the promised features such as world evolution, a more robust tradeskill system, more interaction with the enviornment and player housing, decay and other such things which were hyped in the PR for the game. Allowing the players to impact city growth was a big one Turbine tried to sell but never got around to doing. Alot of negativity brewed in the community for the game, while at the same time alot of hope for the eventual maturity of the game.
Turbine hired a new community relations manager who tried to open a dialogue with the player base, but while this tamed them for a while the lack of significant updates or features each month left many players bored and wanting more of a challange. Some classes like the defender were grossly overpowered able to solo group mobs while others like the alchemist could barly kill a drudge. More class changes made the zerker the top dps class, and then tacticians could set up turrents and go afk and come back level 50. (Ok that's a bit of an exageration, it took some minor upkeep but they did very little work overall the turrents did all the killings, finding a fast spawning location was the big challange).
Players got the ability to respec so they'd make a tactician, get to 50 then respec to zerker. Flavor of the month became commonplace and there was a great sense of unfairness. Lack of features, feeling your class was being ignored, fluff updates like a 10 minute dungeon which gave you a reward of a pair of bunny ears on your head verses anything really challanging left people bored.
Turbine added hero classes but again they were unbalanced and slim on content. It took 10 levels to unlock the first hero ability. Then another 10 for the next, each could be used only once or twice before you had to recharge them by killing tons of group mobs. It was more like a one trick pony each class got that most didn't use because the refresh time took so long.
Lack of content, imbalance, lack of interest in the game was what ultimatly led turbine to close it's doors. The server pops dwindled to nothing, people kept waiting for some patch with tons of new content but nothing came. There was a last ditch effort made to create an expansion which introduced the empyreans as a playable race but the just didn't spur enough interest. The content was mostly 1-50 again and all the people with level 50 toons were bored with nothing to do. Ontop of that the 1-50 empyrean classes also suffered from balance problems and lacked any significant differance in play style from the core classes.
Hope that answers your question.
Arioc Murkwood
Environment Artist
Sad but true.
What I remember most is at the time I was playing DAOC and my neighbor and his daughter were playing AC 1. He got into the beta early for AC2 and played the heck out of it. He then told me that he thought AC 2 wasn't all that good and he decided to stay with AC 1.
So I guess it lacked appeal to its predecessor's audience and its internal issues as documented above couldn't draw new ones.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I am a big fan of Asheron's Call 2 when the game was in beta I played it religiously till 6-8 months after the game went live. I have a level 50 max level tumerok invoker. So how come the game failed and Turbine cancelled the game? There are a lot of reason:
1. When the game first started (from beta to early release), the game was deemed too easy to solo, Turbine made the bold move of making the game tough to solo (mobs that used to be soloable now requires a party of 5 ppl) and requiring a party to level up effectively. This is a big mistake, a quite a lot of the players got pissed and quit the game as high level soloing is effectively impossible although some class still managed to do so it is unreliable and inefficient.
2. Turbine continues the tradition started in AC1 of releasing monthly game updates to the game and content patches. Players deemed the content updates too few and unsatisfactory as the game continues to lose players every month.
3. The game requires significant game processing power and a lot of the players who migrated from AC1 does not have enough PC power to run AC 2. If you compare the 2 games... AC2 is a significant step up from AC1 in terms of graphics and system requirement.
4. Lack of promised feature. One of the most touted feature is AC2 crafting system. The original crafting is bug ridden, hard to use and is basically useless. The crafting system was revised multiple times each time the system was scrapped and rebuilt from scratch. By the time it hit Craft 2.0 the game has lost too much customers for people to actually care.
5. Broken Classes. A lot of the classes have abilities that are totally unusable or buggy. A lot of classes are redundant and is worthless, by the time Turbine finishes balancing the classes it's too late.
6. Problems with the chat server, very frequently the chat system would bug out and crash and people can't chat. I guess people got fed up as they can't talk in game (can't do tells, chat, announce or anything) and quit.
7. Competition with AC1, well AC2 is competing customers with itself. This is bad as it doesn't add customers instead it merely transfered customers who pays for AC1 to paying for AC2. The game simply didn't get to the critical mass to become self sustaining.
I think Microsoft are a big part to blame from what I can understand. Lots of little issues like chat not being available for months? problems with billings stuff like this. Its a shame as when I played it, it had overcome many of these problems and seemed like a very decent game just unfortunately starved of population.