I wasted Sunday running around in Asheron's Call 2. I have no desire to switch from my current brand of MMORPG, which is DaoC, both because of tepid early reviews of AC2 and the amount of time I have "invested" in my DAoC characters. I was more curious about how the AC2 designers solved certain problems plaguing most games in the genre.
About the review
12 hours of play on the Frostfell server, taking a human archer (Zakalwe) up to level 10.
2GHz P4 with 512MB ram, Geforce 4 Ti 4600, Soundblaster. Win98 SE with all updates applied.
Engine
The Turbine engine is graphically lovely. It is clearly the prettiest MMORPG available today. Of course, this is a genre of game not known for pretty graphics-- you'll see more eye candy in UT2003 by a long shot. MMORPGs sacrifice some graphics quality for the ability to render dozens and dozens of customized player avatars on screen at once. AC2 sacrifices less, and thus its hardware demands are enormous. Even with a GForce 4 Ti 4600 graphics card (pretty high-end), I can only run the game on "medium" graphics quality. Even so, it's pretty. Moonrise across a vast landscape is gorgeous.
The engine has its good points and bad points otherwise. Like DAoC, most travel across the world is possible without "zoning", that is, interrupting your game to watch a "loading level" progress bar. Travel into dungeons requires watching a loading animation. Teleportation from one area to another also does (unlike DAoC). Load times are moderate, and seem to depend on your texture quality choices.
One area in which the Turbine engine is lacking is in character data integrity. The message boards are full of stories about people getting bounced out of the server and returning to find that their character ~~has been moved back in time~~, losing quest progress. This is a monstrously bad sin for a persistent world to commit. I would call the problem a show-stopper in any of my own projects. Possibly it's an architectural problem. How else to explain why they shipped with such a unforgiveable bug? Anyway, DAoC, with its custom-written servers running on Linux with a MySQL back end (of all things), does not have this problem. In an environment where the only thing the player owns is his character, failing to hang on to that character's state is a terrible betrayal.
The servers also have serious lag problems. "Lag" in this case refers to slowness in responding to user input, far beyond the slight delay one would expect from network latency. During my fairly short playing session, I experienced several episodes of very bad lag, with animations freezing and response from the server stopping. Amusingly, the network connection indicator in the top left of my screen would register a bad connection only just before it cleared up, long after the mere human had noticed. Lag is, in this engine, accompanied by time-warping, where your character is moved back several seconds in time, to wherever he was before the episode began. This was on a server with a mere thousand characters logged in!
I would often click on an item to examine it, only to read text in the examine window telling me that my client was waiting for a response from the server. It would sometimes take five seconds or more to retrieve a few bytes of text about the item. Coming as I am from DAoC, I was surprised and dismayed to find the servers so slow.
Audio performance in the client is surprisingly bad. After every "vault" dungeon, the game shows a slide-show with voiceover, showing static scenes from the backstory. The audio during the slideshows is choppy. And yet, this is at a moment when my CPU is presumably not as busy as it was while rendering a full-window 3D scene.
Characters and classes
Avatar creation offers the usual range of choices: pick one of only three races, male or female, pick hair style and color, pick beard style, choose among a number of pre-set faces, choose body height and build. The female models suffer a bit from over-testosteroned modelers, who apparently feel that breasts are secretly helium balloons. The aliens are inventive, though.
AC2 offers character advancement through skill trees, rather like Diablo 2's. Each race has its own skill trees, so that a Human magic-user isn't exactly like Lugian magic-user. However, they were not able to completely get away from the character class concept: some skill tree choices make others in unrelated trees inaccessible. The freedom of choice within the skill tree is hiding the fact that there are fewer overall options here than in the other two big MMORPGs.
It's likely too early for any problems with skill tree balance to show themselves. Certainly my experience was too shallow to turn up any problems with my level 10 human archer. I did feel as if some choices were denied me-- what if I wanted to play a stealthy rogue? The game doesn't offer me that choice at all. The answer might simply be to choose another game if that's what I want.
Graphic design
I like the weird sensibility of this world. Morrowind remains my favorite for a consistent, thoroughly-executed, beautiful design, but these guys are doing okay. The landscape is a tad fey to my taste: too bright and pastel, not gritty enough. But I like the variation. I like the buildings. They did a good job of getting across the post-apocalyptic setting, with ruined cities everywhere. I haven't yet investigated the continents populated by the other races, to see if their architecture varies from human architecture.
Water effects are lovely. If you jump from a height into water, your character will somersault and dive, then do the crawl with bubbles streaming behind. Landscape fluff, such as grass, is lovely too.
Game design
AC2 originally had no NPCs at all. It does now, about a month after release. I wonder if this represents a backing-off from the original design philosophy. Certainly they want their player economy to be purely player-driven, without NPCs to buy equipment from and sell loot to. Gold exists in the game, though I'm not sure what purpose it serves. Perhaps they expect their player economy to evolve past the barter stage. Bartering is all I witnessed happening, however.
I read a number of puff-piece articles about AC2 game design on the marketing site Microsoft put up for this game. (Ugh.) One of the choices they tout is the choice to eliminate "annoying" things like the need to return to town to sell loot, buy arrows, and so on. You can craft in the field, transmute unwanted loot items into gold in the field, train new skills in the field. You have an invisible infinite supply of arrows. Your spells require no preparation. Something I learned in a play session last night is that those town breaks are valuable, and I missed them when I didn't have them. Where are the natural pauses in the action? Where's the sequel for each scene? How does my group (yes, I actually managed to put together a group, or in AC2-speak, "fellowship"-- more about this later) find a moment to stop, take a stretch break, grab a new beverage, and so on? I don't claim that adding back the concept of selling loot to an NPC is the right thing to do here, only that restoring the concept of returning to a "home" spot might be good. (Some possibilities: require trainers; borrow Morrowind's idea of needing to sleep in a safe spot to gain a level; give the character a true home.)
The NPCs that have appeared all seem to be needed for quests. You get a series of quests that send you from NPC to NPC, forcing you into a tour of the world. You're led into exploring the ringways (teleport spots equivalent to local routes) and the gateways (interstate teleport spots). Then you're taken on a tour of the various large towns. I found the quests a good introduction to travel and to the world.
Travel by teleportation has its problems. Jumping around chops up the world, robbing you of a sense of how large it is and what is connected to what. Min-maxing players would complain, but I think teleporting is a bad idea. I'd love to see a game where the distance between places mattered, where it was a big deal to leave your home village and find a new place. Restore that sense of adventure! Also, restore a sense of geography, space, and place. DAoC's horses are a nice compromise, but DAoC isn't large enough for this to really matter. This, however, is wishing for a game that AC2 obviously is not.
The stated intention of the designers is to let the players rebuild the world gradually. They don't appear to mean "though direct player action", however. They will rebuild the world for the players, by changing the areas where players often congregate. This is nice, in that my hangouts will improve, but frustratingly passive. It doesn't empower me, or instill me with a sense of ownership of the improvements. It'll take several months of updates before anybody has a real sense of what the designers intend here, though. It could be pretty cool.
Activities
There are only three things to do in AC2: kill stuff, craft stuff, and play music.
Killing stuff: snoooooooore. Select mob. Press back-tick. Once in a while press a special attack button. Mob AI is incredibly, mindlessly bad. They don't run away when overwhelmed; they don't gang up on you or call for help; they get stuck on terrain all the time. Healing up afterward takes less than a minute. Combat is almost the only way to gain experiences (aside from a few quests), and is the only way to get loot for crafting. Get ready for a lot of combat.
Crafting stuff: the usual exercise in tedium, exacerbated by a bizarre material system that thinks "leather gloves" are made from "stone" and "iron". All objects are crafted from loot items. Each item has a "trait", that is, a rating in a specific material type. Each crafted item requires components that meet minimum trait requirements. Feed the loot into the slots on the item craft summary, press the craft button, wait. Sometimes an item comes out. Using tools improves your chances of success, as does standing next to a fueled forge. Everybody can do low-level crafting. High-level crafting gets expensive fast, and requires incredibly rare loot drops, so rare that the supply has become a bottleneck to the development of crafters.
Gold is worthless. You can transmute all loot items into gold in the field. Some crafting recipes require gold. But you can't buy anything with it: offer some to a crafter in exchange for a weapon, and you'll be laughed at. Rare loot drops are the true currency of the game right now.
Playing music: original and utterly cool. Musical instruments drop as loot items. I've found two so far, a bass lute and a regular lute. Wield the instrument and type /music#. You begin playing a musical line. Stand around with a group of other players, everybody on a different instrument. Turbine's composers have written music that harmonizes with all the other lines on all the other instruments, and doesn't clash with the background music either. Excellent! Seeing and hearing a group of players jamming together for the first time is one of those sensawunda moments that is rare and wonderful in gaming.
But what about quests? Yes, there are a few. Most of them are of the kill N mobs type. Just more combat, with a bit more XP than usual.
Social structures
AC2 provides interface for managing three kinds of social groups: fellowships, allegiances, and kingdoms.
"Fellowships" are groups or parties, temporary associations of players who are sharing experience or loot while working toward some common goal. Or usually working toward a common goal, anyway. The first fellowship I was part of didn't do anything except share experience. I don't believe I ever saw the other people in it after the initial invitation. I would just periodically move forward in a quest I didn't even realize I had (kill n wasps). AC1 was notorious for its lack of player grouping, and AC2 seems to be the same way. What does one get from grouping? There are no specialized support classes who make me much more effective, at the cost of being ineffective themselves on their own.
The second social group is the "allegiance". This is a one-way feudal system in which vassals pledge themselves to lords, who gain experience from their vassals. Nothing is required of the lord, who has no choice about whether to accept the allegiance. A lord who is not a vassal himself is called a "monarch". This is the rough equivalent of a guild in other MMORPGs, with a lot of extraneous hierarchy included. Possibly this opens the way for more player politicking, an always-satisfying human activity. I did not explore this part of the game.
The third player social structure is the "kingdom". This concept appears to be borrowed from the DAoC "realm" idea, which segments the player population into three groups whose only interaction is fighting each other. AC2's kingdoms do not have unique graphics, classes, or territory. Instead they are a player-chosen affiliation. You start off neutral, then after level 10 you can choose to join a kingdom. It's unclear to me if there are any differences among kingdoms other than the rather thin flavor text. Most of the time, kingdom affiliations do not matter. However, in "kingdom versus kingdom" areas of the map (and in all areas on the low-population Kvk server types) you can kill and be killed by members of other kingdoms. The marketing articles also claimed that kingdoms can take control over certain forge or mining resources. I haven't seen this in action yet.
This part of the game does interest me. RvR in DAoC is incredibly exciting. I'm not sure what the stakes are for KvK conflict, however. Is there a formal game mechanism for controlling a resource or area? Is a change in control announced to the entire server, the way it is in DAoC? What do I lose when my kingdom loses control of an area? What do I gain when I kill a member of another kingdom? Or is this just a type of controlled player-killing?
No AC2 server is entirely free of player-killing, by the way. Some server types have player killing allowed everywhere; some have kingdom-vs-kingdom killing allowed everywhere; most have zones where each type is allowed. Turbine does not offer a server type with no player-killing at all. Some game content can be found only in PvP zones, required for progress in certain quests, so you cannot escape it.
User interface
AC2's user interface did not impress me. It was designed by graphic designers, not user interface designers. It never uses a clear word where an ambiguous picture would do. Even the character selection screen hides character names!
The inventory management is terrible, just terrible. You get a single inventory page that's a scrolling grid. You can see only three rows at a time. Items are not in fixed spots-- new items drop in at the top, pushing all the others down. If you pick an item up and move it (say, by equipping it or trading it away), the items below it in the list move up to fill the gap. The icons for each item are hard to tell apart. No labels are shown, making it harder. Since crafting consumes loot items in quantity, your inventory will often be full, so you'll experience the shuffle early and often. I lost track of my preferred weapon every time I swapped between it and a crafting tool.
I often needed to have two windows open at the same time (crafting and inventory), but those two windows share the same spot on the right. They can't both be open at once. They can't be moved, either. And because my keyboard was half non-functional (more about this later), switching between the two was cumbersome. Another pair of windows I often wanted open at once were the map and examine windows. They're both on the left, so again I had to switch over and over.
Chat can be displayed in four separate chat windows, each of which can be configured to display whatever you want. I had trouble with the configuration-- it took me a while to realize that I had to use the options window to configure each chat window, and that the chat windows themselves afforded no way to customize them. I was also unable to figure out if it was possible to dedicate a window for, say, group chat. I got sick of typing "/f" at the start of every group message, and would have preferred a chat window that automatically sent all messages to the group. A shared window with tabs for fast switching would have been preferable to four separate windows, all taking up screen space. In the end, I left only one chat window open, with all chat traffic displayed in it.
Customer service
Here I have to rely on taking the temperature of various bulletin boards, factoring down a bit to account for the usual board flame factor. Asheron's Call 1 had a terrible reputation as the game played by griefers, exploiters, and player-killers, who had their fun without interference from the game administrators. AC2 is having similar troubles at first. Some examples follow.
Mob AI is poor, creating opportunities for players to kill certain mobs with little risk. They get stuck on basic terrain geometry, are unable to move, and are thus easy to kill with a ranged weapon. Many players have out-leveled early game content by exploiting these mobs. The game designers promise a fix.
Certain quest content is found only in areas where player-killing is allowed. Players will portal into those areas and find themselves dead before they emerge from the portal. Amazingly, the zones immediately around portal exits are not safe zones! This is not considered to be a problem by the game designers.
Pets survive their summoner's exit from the game. A common high-level griefing act is to set up pets in a low-level area, and then log out. The pets will slaughter everything that comes near, preventing the low-level characters from hunting. This is not considered to be a problem by the game administrators.
So it seems to me that AC2 is destined to share the griefer's paradise reputation of AC1.
Since Turbine as a matter of policy patches only once a month, the lead time on all fixes can be painfully long, probably 2 months in most cases. (Contrast with Mythic, which patches servers when needed, and has procedures in place to make this fast and painless.) However, these monthly patches are supposed to always contain new game content, which should keep the game fresh.
Stability and bugs
AC2 seems unstable and buggy. My very first experience in the game was pressing movement keys to step my character forward, and discovering that the keys latched on. My character ran backwards in circles helplessly, changing direction now and then as I hammered on the WASD keys trying to get him to stop. Eventually I found that hitting RETURN to get into chat mode stopped the motion. Keypresses in chat mode worked just fine. Keyboard shortcuts for bringing up interface windows do not work at all, however.
My attempts to report my keyboard bug through the in-game bug tool were futile. The tool gave me an error message about a database being inaccessible every time.
My keyboard, a veteran of many many other games, has never before given me a moment's trouble. I've found other reports of this bug on the official forums and on the IGN Vault boards, so this might bite you, too. I very nearly quit, cancelled my account, and deleted the game from my drive at this point. I discovered that the arrow keys on my keyboard did work for movement, so that at least I could play with my hands in an unnatural position. It's not pleasant.
Quitting the application usually leaves Windows in an unstable state, forcing me to reboot after nearly every game session.
Decisions
It's beautiful, but there's no game there yet. Why am I on the level treadmill? Once I've portalled all over the world, why log on again? I run around in the world, happy with its appearance, but wishing fiercely that I had access to this engine so I could do something interesting with it.
I'll probably cancel my account at the end of my free month. I see no sense in continuing to pay while hoping for a fix to the keyboard bugs plaguing me. Also, my husband has no desire to play at all; he likes playing Lurikeens in DAoC, and AC2 offers him no comparable experience.
I'll probably check it out again in six months, to see if bugs are fixed, griefing is reduced, and game content has been enhanced with something interesting.