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Asheron's Call Evolution
Turbine and Microsoft continue to take the game where no MMORPG has gone before.
By - Christopher "shaithis" Buecheler
This Spire is Quite Dead |
I'll be honest, I never really liked massively-multiplayer online RPGs... until Asheron's Call. Those of you familiar with
my editorial from last year, "I Want Plot, Dammit!" will already know that I consider
most MMORPGs to be heavily lacking in the plot department, and I'm annoyed by the way nothing ever seems to be resolved or
changed in them. Asheron's Call changed that pretty heavily, and it's kept my interest for much longer than the other titles
out there.
That said, it's been awhile since I played, as I've been too busy with newer games that have come out. I was recently invited,
however, to attend a preview showing of this month's AC event. Anxious to see how the game world has changed, I jumped at the
opportunity. Note: The changes will go public at 11am, Tuesday, September 12th.
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Its corpse, now in rocky chunks the size of large houses, lies out in the river next to
the town, still smoldering and giving off billows of steam.
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Asheron's Call is not a static game. Unlike the city of Queynos, in Everquest, which has been plagued by Gnolls since the
game's founding, cities in Asheron's Call metamorphosize. The threat changes. The world changes with it, and sometimes
they can do some pretty heavy plot tweaking within those changes. This is one of those times.
Last year, in December, the temperature of the world started dropping. Snowflakes began to fall in the lower plains,
as opposed to simply near the tops of mountains. By January, the world was blanketed in snow, and new monsters
(magic-wielding snowmen, in fact) had shown up. Eventually players discovered a quest that led them to the source
of this problem, and they defeated it.
Once a Town, Now a Pit |
Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't a one-shot deal. Any player of high enough experience could defeat this quest during
the month that the storyline was occurring. The first players to do it, however, won prizes, and got their names in the
Dereth history books that one can purchase in libraries or find in catacombs around the AC world. This trend has
continued on through the months, as the earth thawed and the mysterious crystal fragments showed up, presaging the
arrival of the giant, destructive Shadow Spires that hover high in the air and lay waste to the area around them.
Players eventually fought back the force behind these pillars, the Nexus Crystal, but some of them remained behind,
and now they're on the move again...
This is where things get interesting. My guide for the event set me up with an uber-character on their testing server,
and showed me through the areas that had been most affected. We started in Cragstone, a town in the northeast of
Dereth. One of the spires had attempted to destroy this town, but was stopped by adventurers. Its corpse, now
in rocky chunks the size of large houses, lies out in the river next to the town, still smoldering and giving
off billows of steam.
Next: Oh, The Destruction...
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