Asheron's Call - PC

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Product Description

Amazon.com Asheron's Call is an online-only role-playing game that immerses players in an original fantasy world, where they must choose to compete or cooperate with thousands of other players. Players can create characters that are truly unique with extensive combinations of visual appearance, attributes, and skill sets. A detailed and extensive system of allegiance facilitates a dimension of social game play never before experienced in a computer game. The online nature of this game provides the ability to create an evolving and dynamic adventure inside a persistent universe. The game will never be solved because there will always be more areas to explore and more quests to complete!NOTE:Gaming Zone membership is required to set your Asheron's Call account. A monthly service charge is applicable after your trial period ends. Zone Membership is subject to the terms of the Zone License agreement. Review At a glance, Turbine's massively multiplayer online RPG Asheron's Call may not seem very attractive; its uninspired presentation, esoteric setting, clumsy combat system, and cluttered interface do little to recommend it over its competitors. Yet despite these weaknesses, Asheron's Call has a number of even greater strengths, and it's these strengths that let it stand both on even footing with and apart from any of its contemporaries. As mentioned, Asheron's Call probably won't make a very good first impression on you, particularly if you're familiar with its competition, Origin's Ultima Online and Verant's EverQuest. Though Asheron's Call's characters' clean lines and motion-captured animation beat Ultima Online's diminutive, washed-out sprites handily, their uniformly simple, blocky models and equally simple textures can't compare with EverQuest's diverse pool of expertly textured high-fantasy inhabitants. As in Ultima Online, every single playable character in Asheron's Call is human, so you'll never be able to play as a hulking ogre or a lithe elf. You'll also never do battle with standard high-fantasy monsters; instead of fighting against dragons and ogres, you'll fight against giant insect Olthoi and catlike Drudges. Asheron's Call sounds about as unassuming as it looks. For the most part, sound is sparse in Asheron's Call; other than the odd ambient sound of a wandering creature, the gust of wind produced by a magic spell, or the shouts and grunts of combat, Asheron's Call is more or less completely silent. All of these sounds are effective if nothing else, though some monsters, like the mewling drudges, sound silly; others, like the chittering mites, sound downright annoying. This isn't to say that Asheron's Call actually sounds especially bad. What little sound there is, is usually loud, crisp, and clearly indicative of the event, creature, character, or combat exchange that caused it. And combat is one of the most important parts of Asheron's Call's gameplay. Unfortunately, it's nearly always marked by awkward pauses. Drawing your weapon, sheathing your weapon, or doing nearly anything else causes you to stop dead in your tracks - which can make pursuing fleeing monsters, doing battle with multiple enemies, or beating a hasty retreat of your own needlessly difficult. Fortunately, the monsters' artificial intelligence is lax enough to allow this; many monsters can be led to walls or other obstacles onto which they'll get stuck and can then easily be dispatched. But there's more to combat in Asheron's Call than just jarring pauses and gullible monsters. Melee combat is actually a fairly sophisticated affair: You can choose both the speed with which and the height at which you swing your weapon. As a result, combat is much more strategic than in other games of this sort, as it factors in an enemy's weak points and the amount of stamina your character expends while fighting. And the monsters themselves can be surprisingly persistent, in spite of their sometimes-flawed behavior routines. Monsters wielding ranged weapons will draw an unerring bead on you and fire away, while those not so equipped will pursue you across some distance before they give up. Yes, unlike the unrelenting monsters of EverQuest, Asheron's Call's monsters will eventually stop chasing you if you run far enough. Though it can be said that this eliminates some of the challenge of combat, it also makes solo play in Asheron's Call much more feasible than in other games, like EverQuest, whose insanely powerful and relentlessly vindictive high-level monsters more or less require you to group with other players after a certain point. Asheron's Call offers a more complete gaming experience in this regard, since it's actually possible to play productively with companions or alone, especially if you can't seem to find a group. This isn't to say that solo play is the best way to go; a good group is much more effective in slaying monsters, recovering treasure, and gaining experience points than a solo player is. To this end, Asheron's Call has two grouping systems: the fellowship and the allegiance. The fellowship is a standard adventuring party that lasts only as long as its members decide to stay together. However, the allegiance system is an innovative and completely unique means of character association. In it, characters swear fealty to other characters; these vassals provide an experience-point bonus to their lords, in whose best interests it is to help their vassals in turn, as lords receive the most bonuses from active and successful subjects. In addition, as a lord's vassal conscripts recruits of his own, that lord advances in rank and receives an even larger bonus from his subjects' activities. At worst, the allegiance system is a multilevel marketing scheme, whereby greedy, uncaring patrons enlist as many vassals as possible in order to gain large amounts of bonus experience. But at best, the allegiance system can provide a tightly knit companionship for players genuinely interested in helping others and developing an organized assembly. And should either of these social systems become confusing, unrewarding, or tiresome, you can leave them by toggling a simple on/off option buried deep within Asheron's Call's interface. Once you've generated a character, you can set out to see the world, fight monsters, and gain experience points. You can use these experience points to further develop your character by spending the points on attribute and skill increases. In contrast to other games, where character advancement is mostly vertical - that is, a character's abilities are governed almost entirely by his experience level - Asheron's Call lets characters advance both vertically and laterally. In other words, gaining experience points not only increases your character's inherent power in the form of experience levels, it also lets you strengthen and develop your character's statistics and skills in exactly the way you wish. This emphasis on creating and developing a unique and powerful character is enormously different from both EverQuest and Ultima Online, where in many cases the largely fixed path of character advancement tended to result in a single best way to create, develop, and equip a particular character class, and as such, obtaining the best weapons, armor, and loot was usually more important than actually developing a character. Of course, all this development and advancement require that your character do the two things that every online RPG character must do: explore and die. Fortunately, Asheron's Call handles both of these beautifully. Though traveling long distances overland and entering dungeons both require you to enter a portal (which whisks you away to your destination at the expense of load time), exploring the enormous isle of Dereth can theoretically be done in a single, continuous run, without any long and unavoidable transitional load times. If you do decide to strike out and head for a new part of the island, hit the road, or hop into a portal, then visit the nearest lifestone to set where you'll reappear after you die. Asheron's Call might not seem like much at first. It doesn't have the glitter and flash of other comparable games, and at first, moving about and doing battle seem awkward and unintuitive. However, it compensates for these problems with a great deal of hidden depth, especially in terms of the enormous area to explore and the impressive number of combinations of character classes that can be created and developed in almost unlimited ways. As such, Asheron's Call is a solid, well-rounded online role-playing experience that's at least as good as any other out there. -- Andrew Seyoon Park --Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot