Aliens in the Desert

As the new wave started appearing, I applied for every new Beta as they became available. This strategy only gained me entrance to two worlds, and one of them I had visited before.

But now things on Dereth were different. Asheron’s Call 2 takes place after “The Devastation” had occurred and changed the face of the world. Now, it was sprinkled with a few potential town centers here and there, but the cities and towns were more or less gone.

The character creation system was completely re-worked. You still picked skill points, but now you bought skills along a Diablo-style skill advancement tree instead of plopping points into different skills. This seemed a nice design direction, as it stream-lined character creation greatly and was easier to wrap one’s head around then lots of arcane numbers. It seemed like it would be much more accessible to a casual gamer. Now too, you had three playable species to choose from instead of different cultures of humans. And the customization available for the character’s physical appearance was the deepest I had so far seen, so much so that I was eager to make my new alter ego and start exploring.

Kelrynn did not make a re-appearance here. Instead, I opted to play a Tumerok shaman. The reasons were simple: I could make it purple, have crazy tattoos, and kill things with a drum. Works for me. I was quickly delighted by the emotes offered the characters. There were quite a few of them! And my drummer had access to a number of different little songs which were fun to play around with.

This game was definitely aimed at making the genre more appealing to gamers of different levels of experience. The designers seemed very intent on taking most of the biggest annoyances out of MMORPGs, but were sometimes a bit misguided. For example, playing in a party in Everquest could be frustrating as party members would want to run back and forth between town and the fighting area to unload their inventories by selling their miscellaneous equipment to town vendors. Well in Asheron’s Call 2, this problem was “solved” by allowing characters to magically transform any goods on their person into money by simply dragging the items to a special section on their HUD. In addition, why have monsters drop lame useless loot that is only useful for selling back to vendors? Instead, the monsters drop the most amazing things. Giant wasps drop chunks of race-specific armor (though never for my race, I noticed). I am not quite sure where the wasps carried the armor….but oh well. Well heck, now there isn’t any need for vendors at all. Cool. No NPCs are present in the game. Nice. Fits with the post-apocalyptic theme and everything.

Well, here’s what the designers over-looked: those now irrelevant trips to town were useful for bringing characters together. Towns were places where you would go to sell things, but you could also randomly meet other characters there and strike up conversations, then friendships, then alliances. There were still husks of towns in AC2, and the promise was that you would be able to work with other players to re-build these towns into their former glories. But I wondered where exactly you would meet these player characters. Indeed, my second trip to Dereth was some of my loneliest time in an MMORPG. It was a beta, true, but it was very late in the beta. I think I maybe had one conversation the whole week and a half I played, and that was fairly brief.

Well, with no one to talk to and not much else to occupy myself, I turned to the tried-and-true MMORPG occupation: killing stuff. As you have probably noticed if you have followed my adventures so far, this is not on the top of my fun-list. (Eliminating all the other tedious bits of online gaming, you’d think the designers would have given some thought to the issue of treadmill combat.)

Finally, bored to tears, I turned back to the most fun part of the game: character creation. After making a few different characters and killing things in a few different ways, I left Dereth for the second time.

But I was heartened by what I had seen. Sure, the game didn’t hold my interest, but someone was taking some risks and breaking the EQ model in some interesting ways. I eagerly looked forward to my next adventure.