Turbine Expansions And Turnovers 42
According to Gamespot Asheron's Call 2 players don't have long to wait before the "Legions" expansion will find its way to store shelves. The content expansion for the graphics intensive game went gold this week. Players of the original Asheron's Call will have to wait until this summer to enjoy their new content, as the expansion has been pushed back for further testing and refinement. Additionally, MMOG industry veteran Jessica Mulligan used the expansion announcements as an opportunity to mention her departure from Turbine. She hasn't publicly stated a reason for her departure, saying only that the decision is unrelated to the expansion titles. Gamasutra has an interview with Ms. Mulligan about the state of the industry up from last week. From the Gamespot article: "Legions will include a new continent, called Knorr, which will increase the size of the Asheron's Call 2 world by 30 percent. Also included in this expansion pack are new playable races (one of which is the much maligned Drudge), three new prestige classes, more than 100 new quests, and 10 new monster types."
Re:AC2 - Too little, too late (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't have this "time-wasting treadmill cycle", simply by capping the level at 20. You don't waste time "levelling", but rather in doing "quests" and gaining new skills.
The game is pretty analogous to playing a game like Magic: The Gathering, since the skills are pretty balanced, and the outcome of battles depends not on how much time you wasted "levelling", but rather on how good you play your skills strategically.
Oh and there's no monthly subscription.
Turbine != AC (Score:5, Interesting)
This has no bearing on your criticism of AC at all, but as far as Turbine, DDO is their future, not AC.
AC is still one of the better engines (Score:3, Interesting)
The ability to DODGE a spell or arrow is one thing I miss in EVERY OTHER game I have played. That made for enjoyable PvE and made PvP truly exceptional. Another great aspect was that damage types actually mattered as did your armor as each type of armor had resistances to each element. People would kill for armors with all above average ratings because IT MEANT something in non-magic combat. You also were not limited in character by non-sensical limitations (like no armor for mages etc)
The part of AC that failed design wise was that they did not cap experience with level. This gave macros a reason to exist and made the game impossible to balance. You cannot balance a game when characters do not stop progressing.
Another issue is that the magic system and combat system were developed separately and then grafted together.
An incredible game whose magic was lost when the developer failed to keep control of the game in their hands and let the exploiters run a way with it.
I would love to play in a 2005 Graphics capable version of the engine with a few of its issues fixed. AC is one game that definitely would benefit greatly from a full blow graphics enhancement. It has all the lore and background already - just toss in industry leading graphics, cap character progression to a reasonable level, fix a few of the balance issues, and finally do not tolerate macros/cheaters/etc and Turbine would have a world class game again.
HOLY COW 100 new quests (Score:2, Interesting)
getting excited by 100 new quests seems to be as silly as getting excited by 10 new mob types... oh wait